Health systems hire industry outsiders to drive digital, consumer change

When B.J. Moore joined Providence as chief information officer in 2019, he faced a common refrain from his colleagues: “That’s not the way we do it in healthcare.”

Moore came aboard the Renton, Washington-based not-for-profit after 27 years at Microsoft. From his time in Big Tech, he had a clear picture of what the future could look like for Providence’s technology.

But he still encountered pushback when introducing ideas that at the time weren’t commonplace in healthcare, such as implementing two-factor authentication or altering passwords on a regular cadence. Moore heard concerns that doctors and other staff would be frustrated by the changes and would face difficulty logging into IT systems. Other executives—Moore’s peers—told him “25 or 30 times” that he was going to be fired, he said.

More than three years later, many of those skeptics are his friends.

“The whole reason I was brought in is to do things different,” Moore said. “I didn’t come to healthcare to do what people had done for the previous number of years.”

Stories like Moore’s are becoming more common, as health systems tap executive talent from the tech, retail and entertainment spheres to lead their digital efforts. Such executives have experience integrating virtual services and facilitating customer interactions online, strategies healthcare organizations are homing in on today.

Success requires acclimating the new executives to healthcare—a sometimes massive culture shift for those coming from other industries and who may be used to experimenting and deploying innovations more quickly. In doing so, health system leaders must set a clear scope for the executives’ roles; foster partnerships between the hires and care delivery staff; and empower the employees to take time to learn the organization’s ins and outs.

Forced to compete with digital-savvy entrants like Amazon, CVS Health, Walgreens and primary-care startups, health systems have put resources toward programs that engage patients through virtual care, mobile apps and other technologies.

When it comes to leading such initiatives, some organizations hire personnel from within the health industry, while others seek outside talent. Employees with backgrounds in careers that have traditionally put a higher priority on customer experience, such as hospitality and retail, can be well-suited for the roles.

The candidates have “fresh eyes, experience with different technology solutions and insight into new ways of doing things,” said Diane Comer, Kaiser Permanente’s chief information and technology officer.

Some systems could also run into a supply-and-demand issue.

One-third of healthcare executives cited attracting and retaining talent as one of the greatest challenges they face when implementing digital strategies, according to a survey from consulting firm West Monroe.

Until the industry develops a pipeline of staffers who have digital technology experience and can move into leadership, some health systems will have to recruit—and then train—industry outsiders on the “particularities of healthcare,” said Erik Gordon, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

The executives, often called chief digital officers, need to learn to manage a complex set of government regulations, including state-by-state medical licensure, the industry’s unique data privacy protections and requirements for Medicaid, Medicare and commercial insurance. They must familiarize themselves with the language itself: acute care versus chronic care, primary care versus specialty care, fee-for-service versus value-based care, and more. And they’ll need to adjust their strategic thinking: Concerns such as consumers’ health climb to the top of the priority list, sometimes at the expense of being able to quickly roll out or experiment with new programs.

“It’s a major shift to bring someone from another industry into healthcare,” said Hillary Ross, managing partner and information technology practice leader at WittKieffer, an executive search firm. “There has to be an appreciation for that.”

It’s helpful for health systems to have a clear sense of how digital technology fits into their strategic vision, so executives know how their responsibilities intersect with the rest of the organization’s work and feel empowered to make decisions.

Leadership can’t expect to bring in an outsider to solve digital challenges for the entire organization without providing such guidance, said Matt Johnson, a managing director in West Monroe’s product experience and engineering lab.

“The healthcare organizations that are getting the best talent do a good job of that,” he said.

Executives at Coral Gables-based Baptist Health South Florida 
realized they needed a chief digital officer roughly three years ago, after developing a digital transformation roadmap. In doing so, they sought input from a multidisciplinary steering committee of physicians and executive leaders, as well as recommendations from consultants at KPMG, on how technology could improve consumer experience and provide physicians with access to useful data.

The health system wanted a leader who could meaningfully contribute to its digital strategy, said Joe Natoli, executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Baptist Health.

“We were looking for someone who would not simply be an executor of the technology that we determined, but someone who could really help us create a clear vision for digital transformation,” Natoli said.

After interviewing about a dozen candidates, the leadership team in 2020 landed on Tony Ambrozie, then a senior vice president who led technology and digital at Walt Disney Company. Before his nearly seven-year career at Disney, he spent more than a decade at American Express, where he worked on digital technology initiatives like getting the company’s credit and debit cards into the first version of Apple Pay.

Ambrozie has also brought other technology leaders to Baptist Health; the health system’s chief technology officer is one of his former Disney colleagues.

As chief digital and information officer, Ambrozie said his focus has been on helping the health system catch up to digital experiences consumers have in other industries.

“Healthcare, in general, has been somewhat behind the curve compared with other industries in terms of technology adoption,” he said.

For Ambrozie, much of the transition seems familiar. He said integrating virtual care and apps into healthcare feels reminiscent of the shift to online banking, for example.

His first order of business was improving the health system’s cybersecurity foundation, followed by improving consumer experience and access—a task Natoli said Ambrozie was well-suited for, given his background at Disney.

Last year, Ambrozie led the relaunch of Baptist Health’s mobile app. Previously, the app had mainly housed links to other websites and didn’t have features of its own, according to Ambrozie. Patients can now use it to find doctors, schedule visits and check in for appointments virtually.

“Sure, people don’t come to hospitals just to have an excuse to use an app,” he said—but it’s a competitive differentiator if patients find it easier to access care through Baptist Health’s system.

Having a mentor on the clinical care side helped smooth Rita Khan’s 2020 transition into the role of Mayo Clinic’s first chief digital officer.

Khan wasn’t entirely new to healthcare; she had spent the previous three years as an executive vice president of consumer digital at UnitedHealthcare. Before that, she held vice president titles at Digital River, an e-commerce and payments software company, and worked for nearly 10 years at Best Buy.

But Khan’s position at the Rochester, Minnesota-based health system was her first at a care delivery organization. Her partnership with Dr. Bradley Leibovich, a urologist and medical director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Digital Health, gave her a clearer idea of how digital technology fit into clinical workflows and affected patient care.

Khan implemented a similar program for others joining the digital team. All employees at the director-level and above in the digital health center are matched with a “culture mentor,” such as a physician, nurse or other staffer relevant to their work.

The partnership, Khan said, “grounds us in how we’re supposed to do digital solutions, which is understanding user needs”—in other words, the needs of patients or clinicians.

Khan noted that she needed to adjust her thinking to focus on how digital tools can improve health outcomes or patient satisfaction. At a health system, care ultimately underpins discussions about strategy and goals.

She was able to bring ways of measuring digital initiatives from retail, such as assessing “user effort,” meaning how much effort it takes a user to complete a task. In healthcare, that could involve changes to how patients enter a telehealth visit or making it easier to schedule appointments.

Identifying the return on such investments, though, takes patience. In retail, a company might change their website or app and see immediate results. When deploying a digital tool at a hospital, the team may need to measure success by tracking patients’ health outcomes over time—sometimes years, depending on the health condition that’s being targeted.

“How you measure—what you measure—can be extremely different,” Khan said. “I can’t underscore how differently it permeates all aspects of how work gets done.”

New executives of large, multistate health systems can get a broad idea of how tech is used throughout the organization by touring facilities and speaking with employees from different sites.

When Prat Vemana joined Oakland, California-based Kaiser Permanente as its first chief digital officer in 2019, his boss, then-chief information officer Dick Daniels, gave him a directive: For his first 90 days, just take time to learn the organization and don’t make any decisions.

Vemana spent those 90 days traveling to Kaiser’s sites in various regions and meeting with clinicians and other staff. One day, he shadowed a case nurse to understand the workflow. On another, he visited a pharmacy fulfillment center to learn how it used robotics and automation. He visited call centers that field questions on clinical care, insurance and other support.

The 90-day period grounded him in what day-to-day operations looked like across the organization and helped him understand healthcare’s complexity from the onset, he said.

Vemana had joined Kaiser after holding multiple leadership roles at retail giants, most recently as chief product and experience officer at Home Depot. His background in consumer-focused digital experience was one of the reasons Kaiser executives cited for hiring him when the organization announced his appointment.

“I came into it knowing that I have so much to learn,” Vemana said. “And at the same time, I bring so much with me as well.”

Providence’s Moore said he’d recommend a “listening tour” approach to others making the move into healthcare.

To get insight into the state of the health system, he spent his first six months visiting its hospitals and clinics—asking administrators, clinicians and other staff where they thought IT could improve to inform his first steps.

“I even did a mock ‘robotic surgery’” to try out the equipment, he said.

The tour was a productive way to see how care delivery works firsthand and build relationships with others in the organization, so Moore would know whom to call in the future with questions. It also helped him to contextualize issues he encountered in his role, such as how long it took for new Providence employees to get access to the right equipment and IT systems.

Speaking with employees helped Moore understand that the problem couldn’t entirely be chalked up to inefficiency: Health systems must ensure that only the appropriate people have access to certain systems and data, which slows onboarding. Moore ultimately streamlined the process by creating a mobile app that walks employees through steps like setting up a password and getting the equipment they need for their job.

“That’s why you’re brought in from another industry—to have a diverse perspective,” Moore said.

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