It’s become increasingly clear that most healthcare CIOs have become leaders and vendor managers. The CIO of today needs to have an understanding of technology, but the majority of their job is managing people and vendors. Hospital CIOs aren’t managing technology.
Much of what a CIO can accomplish is based on the mentality and behaviors they inspire in their people. One of the latest trends in technology thinking is around agile. Many in healthcare have pushed against the concept of agile in healthcare supposing that agile equals reckless. However, it’s been proven that just because you choose to change quickly and efficiently doesn’t mean that you’re changing recklessly in ways that will harm patients.
The move to agile has been hard for many hospital CIOs. This was highlighted recently by hospital CIO, David Chou when he shared this image and tweet:
Best quote of the day for organization's thinking about #agile. It is changing your behavior and mentality. You cannot buy it unfortunately. #ceo #cio pic.twitter.com/rjPlvEsRha
— David Chou (@dchou1107) July 30, 2018
Culture change in an organization is not really something you can buy. Plus, as the quote specifies, the change to an agile culture is really hard because it is often not the behaviors that put leaders in senior positions in the first place.
The biggest fear with any change is failure. Ironically, an agile approach embraces failure as part of the learning process and incorporates a quick recovery when something goes wrong. This is a massive change in mindset for many senior healthcare executives. It goes counter to the group decision making driven by large committees that occurs in most of healthcare. That’s why it’s scary and why most CIOs don’t do it. However, it’s exactly what’s needed to be prepared for the future.