“I’m a poor career planner,” Geoff Patterson said — not exactly the sentence you’d expect from an executive at one of the nation’s largest health systems.
Mr. Patterson, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer of Detroit-based Henry Ford Health, started out as a respiratory therapist at 20. It was his wife, a nurse, who first pushed him to reconsider.
“I’ve always had an aptitude for engineering, technical [stuff],” he told Becker’s at its annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference last week in Chicago. “My wife was a nurse. She said, ‘Is this what you want your pathway to be?’ And I said, ‘I actually would really like to get more into a technical discipline.’ So I started off as a nine-credit freshman at 25, and started undergrad, graduate school, and such.”
The job that actually got him into IT wasn’t a plan — it was five years spent doing home respiratory care, right as his division piloted early mobile documentation for field clinicians.
“Nurses and physical therapists would bring a laptop in, they’d plug it into a modem, it would download their patient list, they’d document, and then at night they’d come in and they’d upload — way before Wi-Fi and everything,” Mr. Patterson said. “But they needed somebody who understood technology but knew healthcare.”
“I’d love to say I planned everything along the way,” he laughed.
But Mr. Patterson isn’t an outlier. Across the industry, technology leaders shaping how health systems adopt AI didn’t set out to do so at all — and several say that’s exactly the point.
Nari Gopala, chief digital officer at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, spent years at Amazon Web Services and Sony Online Entertainment before a stint at Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente brought him into healthcare. He had to unlearn the instinct from the gaming and consumer tech worlds to ship fast and iterate in public.
“One of my physician colleagues then said, ‘Look, I have a patient now sitting in that room who’s gone through a lot of things, hoping for that diagnostic pathway that would help him with this condition. 80% is not good enough,’” Mr. Gopala said during a keynote panel at the Becker’s conference, recalling an early conversation about whether to ship a tool that wasn’t fully finished. “I think restraint is one thing that I’ve learned, especially in the last five, six years — restraint on when is a solution really ready.”
Chris Gay’s path into health technology ran through car insurance. Before co-founding insurer Evry Health and its AI division, Pendral, Mr. Gay started his career as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, then founded a pay-per-mile auto insurance startup. He said that outsider’s vantage point is exactly why he’s blunt with health systems about trusting AI vendors’ promises at face value.
“Silicon Valley does not understand regulated industries,” Mr. Gay said at a panel. “I say that as someone who used to live in Silicon Valley.”
Luis Taveras, PhD, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer at Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, has spent 45 years in health IT — including several years as a consulting partner at Accenture in between hospital IT jobs. He’s also tried to leave — unsuccessfully.
“I have retired three times, and it has not worked,” Dr. Taveras said during a fireside chat reflecting on his career. “The last time I thought I definitely had it — I was out for three years, and I was busy doing things, but nothing related to healthcare IT. And then the CFO at Lehigh Valley [Health Network in Allentown, Pa.], who used to be the CFO when I was the CIO [at Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare], called me up and said, ‘You’ve got to come and help me.’ And then from there, we merged with Jefferson.”
His advice to people earlier in their careers isn’t to specialize and stay there.
“Become an expert on something, because when you get that expertise, people will reach out to you,” Dr. Taveras said. “But after a while, you’ve got to get out of that single pigeonhole area. You’ve got to become broader, because the broader you become, the more value you become to the organization.”
Albert Villarin, MD, regional vice president and chief medical informatics officer with New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health, has spent 20 years watching what the job actually requires get broader, not narrower. A few years into the role, he went back for an MBA.
“I think we have the trifecta, I call it,” Dr. Villarin said in an interview. “It’s the operational experience by being in the executive suite for all these years. The clinical background, of course, that gives you relevance and understanding of the needs from a clinical perspective, but also the financial business model understanding that healthcare ultimately is a business.”
He expects the job to keep demanding more of that range, not less.
“I believe that the position of CMIO will become a very important strategic partner … to become like a chief clinical strategy officer within the C-suite,” Dr. Villarin said.
