Healthcare and its intrinsic need for timely, accurate information often puts the CIO in a prime position to be the champion or the goat. Increasingly, healthcare CIOs are being made responsible for more than just managing information. They are called on to be change agents and organizational drivers that make or break the numbers.
Patrick Moroney is a CIO with a knack for being a professional change agent as well as a world-class networker, which is a winning combination by any measure. He is president of the Barnier Group, performing CIO advisory services at New Mountain Capital and advising Houston-based Intermarine. He’s also the driving force behind the 6,000+ members of the Technology Leadership Association, which he founded in 2002. He has been the CIO at National Medical Health Care Services, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), ServiceMaster, and the Food & Nutrition division at Monsanto. He has held a variety of roles on six continents and is a member of the Society for Information Management.
Patrick received the 2004 CIO of the Year award from the Executives’ Club of Chicago. While he was the CIO of HCSC, he took the #21 spot in Computerworld’s top 100 best IT workplaces of 2005. And in 2006, he was was included in Computerworld’s Top 100 CIOs list.
Here’s my conversation with Patrick about the relationship of IT to healthcare and the changing role of the healthcare executive.
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1. Jeff: How has the CIO role changed over the time you’ve been in the healthcare industry?
Patrick: Looking back over the last six or seven years, the primary changes have been ones that affected CIOs across the board, including healthcare. The main trend has been that the CIO role has become more strategic while not becoming any less focused on technology and operational excellence.
CIOs have become increasingly responsible for driving transformation and process in their organizations, because at a very tangible level, CIOs cannot get their job done without being primary change agents.