A former health system CIO recently joined a healthcare artificial intelligence startup.
Bill Hudson, the ex-CIO of Oklahoma City-based Integris Health, is AI executive strategist at Aidoc, a company that offers an AI-powered operating system that analyzes and aggregates healthcare data.
"One way we can improve healthcare is making sure we're taking the computer and moving it into the background so that physicians can be more focused on the patient," Mr. Hudson told Becker's. "I saw an opportunity to really help be part of this paradigm shift."
Mr. Hudson started with Aidoc in April after spending two years as the IT chief at Integris Health, a 16-hospital system. He has also served as CIO of Walnut Creek, Calif.-based John Muir Health and chief technology officer of Kettering (Ohio) Health and worked for cloud computing company VMware and EHR vendor Cerner.
Aidoc's health system clients include Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic and New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health.
Mr. Hudson brings the perspective of a former C-suite leader who has encountered numerous pitches from IT vendors.
"I've seen literally a thousand solutions in search of a problem," he said. "This is reductive, but at the end of the day, you've got to boil it back to say, 'What problem are we trying to solve?'"
"'And is it a problem that's worth solving in the organization now?'" he added. "You might have a really good solution that really solves a problem, but it's not a problem that I'm dealing with now or it's not a problem that I can deal with because I have a finite amount of resources. IT is by definition a scarce resource."
Mr. Hudson got three calls the other day from vendors thinking he was still a health system CIO. "They just started into their pitch, trying to tell me what they've got before they even tried to understand if it's something I really need," he said.
In his former jobs, he heard the IT concerns and questions from health system boards and other executives like the COO and CFO.
"The CIO role has changed so much even in 10 years, and the CIO role is so much now about orchestration and getting things done within an organization and enabling the rest of the organization to do their work," he said. "And understanding that it's not about the technology — the technology just has to work; that's the expectation — but understanding how organizations are going to get value from that and help to translate that.
"That is the difference between being successful and not being successful. Those are the challenges those personas are dealing with, and I think it's hard to understand them unless you've been in a meeting with them and you see the pressure and understand that."