Providence St. Joseph Health hires Microsoft exec as CIO

Providence St. Joseph Health has hired Microsoft executive B.J. Moore as CIO. He'll start at the health system, the nation's third largest, on January 28, 2019.

As CIO, Moore wants to push some of the health system's operations into the cloud, he told Modern Healthcare. "This will allow us to focus more resources on innovation and core differentiating technologies, such as AI and machine learning, as well as big data projects," he said.

Moore will also help the company work with technology companies as it goes through a digital transformation effort, according to Dr. Rod Hochman, president and CEO of Providence St. Joseph Health, which generated $23 billion in revenue in 2017, according to Modern Healthcare Metrics.

That desire to team up with outside tech companies drove the health system to seek out a CIO with plenty of technology experience. Moore spent more than 25 years at Microsoft, most recently as vice president of enterprise commerce and compliance for the company's cloud and AI division. Microsoft itself has been pushing change in healthcare. It joined with Google, Amazon, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce in August 2018 to call for greater interoperability to enable cloud- and A.I.-based tools.

Moore is not the only one at the Providence St. Joseph Health to come from a consumer technology company. Chief digital officer Aaron Martin, hired in 2014, came to Providence St. Joseph Health from Amazon, and chief financial officer Venkat Bhamidipati came to the health system from Microsoft, in 2017.

Among the health system's digital efforts are a telemedicine network, launched earlier in 2018, and work to make patients' digital transaction experience 10 times better than the analog version in order to get people to engage with the health system online.

The health system is also employing apps to engage patients. One of those, Xealth, spun out of Providence St. Joseph Health's startup incubator. The app lets providers prescribe non-pharmaceutical content and services through the electronic health record.

Moore looks forward to continuing Providence St. Joseph's digital transformation. Since he admittedly is not "yet a healthcare industry expert," he said, "the key will be to immerse myself into the business."