Salt Lake City-based University of Utah Health has formalized a new era of innovation leadership, naming James Hotaling, MD, as its inaugural chief innovation officer.
Dr. Hotaling, who stepped into the role Sept. 1, said the timing reflects a convergence of technology, leadership and necessity.
“We’re at this interesting time where AI, research and clinical care, and even what we do in the OR are all converging,” Dr. Hotaling told Becker’s. “That’s why it makes sense to formalize innovation now.”
He said the health system’s leadership alignment, including CEO Bob Carter, MD, PhD, and University President Taylor Randall, made this the right moment to elevate innovation to the executive level.
“His [Dr. Carter’s] stated goal is to have us be in the top 10 for most innovative health systems in the United States,” Dr. Hotaling said. “President Randall is to be the most entrepreneurial school in the world.”
University of Utah Health, he added, has long had the talent and infrastructure to innovate, but the new role connects those efforts under a unified vision.
“I think we have all the pieces here to drive innovation,” Dr. Hotaling said. “They just hadn’t been fully put together.”
The timing also reflects mounting pressures across healthcare.
“Academic medical centers are going to need to develop diversified forms of revenue depending on what happens, and a potential source of that is commercial partnerships,” he said.
Workforce shortages are another motivator.
“We’re going to have to figure out how to deliver care to more patients without a whole lot more physicians and advanced practice clinicians,” he said.
As chief innovation officer, Dr. Hotaling said his mission is to help connect people and ideas across the health system and create an environment where experimentation can thrive.
“Most of it’s not going to work — 90% of it’s not going to work,” he said. “But the 10% that does work often makes a 2,000% difference. So it’s figuring out how to make some big, bold bets and have some of them pay off and be transformative.”
Ultimately, he sees innovation as essential to sustaining academic medicine’s mission.
“It’s exciting to be able to put the infrastructure in place to make innovation go from being a nice to have to a have to have,” Dr. Hotaling said. “We really have an opportunity to do something exciting by empowering our people.”
