When Stephanie Hines took the chief information officer role at Valleywise Health roughly 18 months ago, she walked into an organization with real assets. She had a talented staff, strong clinical programs and a clear mission serving Maricopa County’s most vulnerable patients. What was missing was execution discipline.
Ms. Hines, senior vice president and CIO at the Phoenix-based public safety net system, chose not to mark her arrival with a flagship platform launch or a high-profile AI initiative. She went back to basics.
The philosophy she drew on came from college basketball. Growing up in Arkansas, Ms. Hines watched coach Nolan Richardson’s Razorbacks win a national championship in 1994 on the back of a practice regimen he called “40 minutes of hell.” Mr. Richardson ran conditioning-heavy, repetition-intensive sessions — not always fun, but built to produce teams that won when the game was on the line.
“When he would bring his team into practice, what he relentlessly focused on was fundamentals, conditioning, simplicity over complexity, really drilling things so that execution was flawless,” she said.
Conditioning determined outcomes in the final minutes when other teams were fading.
“He would say that games were won in the last ten minutes, and that conditioning was a strategic advantage for the team,” Ms. Hines said.
She applied that logic to her IT organization. Valleywise operates acute and ambulatory care services, 10 federally qualified health centers, a behavioral health service line and a level-one trauma center that includes the nationally recognized Arizona Burn Center. In a system that broad, a technology team cannot afford to execute well on only one initiative at a time.
“Coming into this organization, we had tremendous talent, tremendous opportunity for the patients that we’re taking care of,” she said. “We have amazing clinicians, we have wonderful teachers. So all of the right things, all of the right elements in the mix, what we weren’t necessarily moving on was the execution of how we moved some of these initiatives together.”
The work she prioritized was not tied to any specific application. How the IT team builds relationships with business partners, how quality standards apply across every project, how strategic orientation holds when competing demands pile up were the fundamentals she drilled.
The results have been concrete. For safety net systems, achieving Epic honor roll status has long been considered a stretch goal. But that made Ms. Hines more committed to achieving it.
“Coming into the organization, the idea of being an honor roll organization as a safety net was pretty much dismissed,” Ms. Hines said. “It’s too difficult for safety nets because of financial constraints and other priorities to be effective there. We had our first honor roll designation this last year. We’ve doubled our gold stars. We’re finishing out with a configuration of eight and a usage of five, and we’re still climbing.”
The same foundation is now supporting Valleywise’s cybersecurity hardening program and positioning the organization for two major upcoming investments: a Workday ERP transformation and a significant expansion of consumer digital tools.
“While it’s not one big project, it is the way of working and it is the foundation that is going to position us to execute on a really large program that we have upcoming this next year with an ERP Workday transformation and a pretty significant investment in growth of our consumer digital tools,” Ms. Hines said.
For a team conditioned to grind through unglamorous work, the payoff has been more than operational. Ms. Hines said the hardest stretches of a transformation are also where a team’s confidence is built.
“Once you get to that point of working through challenges and you realize, I am creative, I am dedicated, I’m smart, I have all the skills and tools and resources I need to get over the hurdle that is facing me. There’s tremendous empowerment in that,” she said. “When you get into that zone, it’s like being in a basketball game. You get momentum and that’s really important.”
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