Career

Welcome to my blog, I hope the hints, tips, information, and tools that are on this site are helpful for you managing your staff, your systems, and your ability to fulfill your mission.  Here, you will find a lot of information about me and why I do what I do.

I have served in healthcare Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Director of IT roles since 1999.  In 2007, I was serving on The Joint Commission’s Health IT Advisory Panel and had the chance to work with some of the industry leaders from places like Harvard and Stanford.  However, once these organization’s found out that I didn’t have a graduate degree, offers to participate in various forums declined.  I decided that if I wanted to move my career in the proper direction, I needed to complete my MBA before I hit that magical age of 40.  I completed that goal in May 2011 from Colorado State University with a Master of Science in Leadership and Organizational Studies, and a specialization in Strategic Innovation and Change Management. I was asked to deliver the commencement address, which was an unanticipated honor.  If you’re interested, that video is available at this link to YouTube.

While pursuing my graduate degree, I accepted a contract position with the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation in Bethel, Alaska.  My task was to develop a project management office and instill project best-practice methodologies into the corporation.  This was a great opportunity for me to really put my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification to the test.  I was successful at developing and subsequently managing the PMO, and I am happy to say that projects right now are 100% on-time and on-budget, and have been that way for the past 16 months.  However, with my graduate degree complete and my contract requirements at YKHC concluded, I am beginning to explore opportunities to utilize my graduate degree back in the executive offices.  However, I’m one of the lucky ones in a position where I can remain until the right type of organization comes along requiring the skills that I can bring to the table.

Of course, that raises the question, just what is the “right kind” of organization.  My expectations for that perfect organization are lofty, and I am under no misconceptions that finding this mythical corporation is going to be tough.  For me, the perfect organization is one where the CIO is an integral member of the executive team, a partner helping to form the organization’s strategies and understanding the vision of the rest of the leadership team.  Being a part of these discussions, not just the decisions, is of ultimate importance, because often times the context of the discussion provides often overlooked guidance in how to fulfill the subsequent decisions.  These contextual clues help the CIO develop tactics with the various organizational teams, and is essential to communicating the entire story and aligning organizational culture.

As much as I enjoy being involved in creating strategy and defining tactics, I also want to be part of an organization where I can still get my hands dirty in the technology that we implement.  I know many CIOs want to stay as far away from this aspect of the job as possible, and most of the trade magazines suggest that CIOs do just that…but remember, I’m defining my “perfect” organization.  I believe that truly effective CIOs must possess a certain level of technical competence.  I am not saying that I expect the VP of Technology to be able to write an entire Cisco 6509 router configuration from scratch or be able to write a java applet.  However, I do expect the person filling this role to be able to read through a router configuration with some level of comprehension and be competent enough to question the network administrators about why the PACS traffic has a quality of service (QoS) priority of 1 and the port 80 (regular web surfing) traffic has a priority of 7 (hint: the network administrator forgot that the higher number priority traffic takes precedence over lower number traffic…yes, this really happened).  I also expect the CIO to be competent enough in the various business applications throughout the company to be able to sit down with a customer, see the problem a customer is experiencing, and have some constructive ideas to be able to collaborate with the technical team responsible for the particular application and develop some solutions.  Yes, this requires the CIO to have some level of competence not only with that multi-million dollar ERP or CRM system, but also with that legacy AS/400 iSeries application or internally developed C# front-end to a SQL database.

I have had the opportunity to work along-side and for CIOs and VPs of Technology that lacked any sort of technical competence, and in each of these situations the ability of this person to truly lead staff, teams, and other executives was greatly diminished because of their lack of technical proficiency.  Furthermore, productivity of the department suffered…in my opinion because the VP or CIO did not have a comprehensive understanding of the systems and infrastructure to be able to recognize when people were not working smart, and also because the executive was unable recognize a lack of competence in some of the staff serving within the department and the various teams.

If you look at my resume you will see that I have worked in a variety of multi-facility operations, in Integrated Delivery Systems and in hospitals ranging in size from 79 beds up to 300 beds.  What is difficult to show on a resume are the successes in leading cross-functional teams, changing organizational culture, and impacting how work teams throughout the organization interact with each other and with the supporting systems.  These team-building, leading, and eventual turn-over of the teams are achievements that I am extremely proud of and that I enjoy.  Again, that “perfect” facility doesn’t require that the entire facility’s staff be experts in team development, but my dream job will embrace new ways of bringing teams and collaboration into our business, our processes, and our leadership.

I have been asked how I have been so successful at receiving national recognition for the collaboration and change management processes that I have been honored to lead.  Reality is, I was the lucky recipient of this recognition when I was just one person that was part of a much larger team.  My perception is that collaboration across traditional lines of authority is going to be a major factor in differentiating exceptionally high-performing from mediocre performing organizations.  I experienced the power of this kind of collaborative effort when I was in the Army, and that was back during the first Gulf War.  I am amazed that twenty years later, the power of collaborative systems has not become more entrenched in western businesses.

On a different note, achieving meaningful use is a major concern of hospitals, clinics, and physician practices across the United States, and this concern is justified.  Not only do facilities have to face the realities of financial incentive possibilities, but the upcoming financial penalties for failing to fully operationalize an electronic medical record / electronic health record are significant.  Organizations need a leader that understands that the implementation of an EHR / EMR is not just a system procurement, design, implementation, and go-live exercise.   Instead, the process involves learning and understanding the entire process of patient care, the concerns of the entire workforce, and the ability to accurately facilitate discussions about the risks and benefits of the various features offered in the multitude of software products.  I have been lucky to have been involved in three different EMR / EHR solutions at different facilities in my career, giving me the insights necessary to effectively facilitate this enormous, complex, and politically sensitive undertaking.

Finally, I believe that the role of the CIO is changing, and the rate of change is only going to increase over the remainder of this decade.  For those of us that have embraced and lived the role of CIO, we must be willing to accept that our roles are evolving, and we must be not only be willing to change, but actively educating ourselves on the new requirements of our jobs if we want to remain relevant.  In the next 5 to 7 years, once all of the meaningful use funds have been distributed and the EHRs have become just another tool at organizations across the U.S., the role of the CIO is going to become more closely tied to what has traditionally been the territory of the Chief Operating Officer.  Understanding the operational considerations of the ancillary departments, the metrics, the service lines offered, and the ongoing strategies of the laboratory, radiology, respiratory, and other areas will be essential for those of us in this field to be successful.  Likewise, the traditional role of the Chief Operating Officer is changing as well.  COOs that have historically focused strictly on operational issues, creating business plans for new service lines, and overseeing departmental P&L are going to see increasing pressures to be more technically savvy, and will likely begin inheriting many of the tasks traditionally relegated to the Chief Information Officer.

I hope that this gives you a bit of a synopsis of the strengths that I can bring to your organization.  If you or your company are looking for a new Chief Information Officer or a COO with a variety of experiences including regional integrated delivery systems, for-profit, not-for-profit, rural, urban and academic institutions, and with experiences managing a distributed environment from a corporate level, please feel free to contact me.  Most important to my personal goals is working as part of a team environment where my ideas and insights are used to drive long-term success. I do not believe that a single “silver-bullet” will ever overcome mediocrity, but rather dedication and unwavering focus on employees, education, training, and process improvement leads to success.

If you are interested, you can find my resume, references, and a listing of the various articles that I have either written or been featured in by clicking on the appropriate links above.  If you have any interest, you can always contact me at spencer@itpodcast.org or by telephone at 907.543.6647.