Christian Lindmark. CTO of Stanford Health Care (Palo Alto, Calif.): The chief technology officer and their team play a key role in helping healthcare organizations achieve their overall strategic goals. Typically reporting to the CIO (as it is at Stanford Health Care), the primary role of a CTO is to ensure reliability, resiliency and security of all information systems, data and devices across the organization. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of applications in use across a health system, and the CTO is responsible for creating an infrastructure stack — both on-premise and in the cloud — that is quick to deploy, secure, fast to access and cost-effective for all these applications. The CTO needs to build strong and collaborative teams in infrastructure, engineering, networking, data center, identity/access management and end-user devices to accomplish this.
Secondly, CTOs are innovators, creating and implementing transformative technology offerings to improve the experience of our clinicians, staff and patients. Clinicians continue to rely more and more on technology in their clinical workflows, yet these technologies can often be cumbersome and frustrating if they’re not easy to use and not always available. The CTO needs to innovate, simplify and secure the technology environment and user experience while working hard to ensure these systems never go offline.
Lastly, but just as important as the other two, CTOs need to develop relationships with clinical leaders, hospital administration and other stakeholders throughout the organization. Having firsthand knowledge of the goals, challenges and vision of these individuals and departments is critical. The CTO role has typically been less clinically focused; however, partnerships with key clinical leaders across the organization are vital, especially as the CTO role in many organizations, such as Stanford Health Care, has expanded to include clinically facing systems such as biomedical engineering and clinical communication technologies.
The CTO role is different from the CIO or chief digital information officer role in that a significant focus for the CTO is on managing and driving technology in support of clinical operations, as opposed to technology that is directly clinical-facing or clinical by nature. The CIO role is the leader of the healthcare IT organization, responsible for ensuring all the IT teams are working closely together and aligned around the organization’s strategic goals. They are not only responsible for the scope under the CTO, but also the clinical/business applications, analytics and security teams, and ensuring the relationships between these teams and key clinical and hospital stakeholders is collaborative and driving toward the organizational strategic goals.
The CIO role has a seat at the executive leadership table within the healthcare organization and directly provides input and feedback into the organization’s strategic goals, while the CTO usually does not. The CIO provides the framework for success and removes obstacles to allow IT teams to succeed. There is no question that CIO and CTO have a mutually dependent relationship, as do the CIO and other IT leaders, but a great CIO makes all teams within IT successful, as well as ensures the organization sees IT not just as a cost center but as a partner in its success.
Christian Lindmark 