Aaron Miri, CIO, Walnut Hill Medical Center, Chapter 3

When Walnut Hill Medical Center opened its doors in April of 2014, Forbes magazine called it “The hospital Steve Jobs would have built” — not because it was built from the ground-up to support cutting-edge technology, but because Walnut Hill is “founded on the premise that the patient is first,” a mantra that is evident in everything from the “15-5” rule to the design of the rooms. For Aaron Miri, the opportunity to serve as an enabler in improving patient care was too good to pass up. In this interview, he talks about what he’s learned from his mentors, his strategy to incorporate wearable technologies into everyday practice, and the challenge Walnut Hill faces of how to grow meaningfully without losing its core values.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* His “natural progression” from CTO to CIO

* CHIME Bootcamp

* Learning from mentors — “It’s good to know you’re not alone in the universe.”

* Chief Patient Advocate — “It’s where the CIO is going.”

* Executive leadership & buy-in

* The Steve Jobs comparison



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Bold Statements

That’s one important dimension that I can’t stress enough to people that eventually do want to land in a CIO spot and a C-suite, which is to seek out good mentors.

Everything you’re doing, whether it’s integration, whether it’s innovation, whether it’s a tech, whether it’s process improvement — it’s about the patient. And I think that the return on value equation is going to become more important than the return on investment equation in the future.

I think if you are in a very traditional environment where maybe it’s still about the dollars and cents, you start to lose focus on what the patient element is.

It wasn’t intimidating as much as it was exciting and then it was kind of like the gauntlet’s been thrown; you can’t exactly get any less than that, so how do you get better than that

Don’t sit in your office all day with the door shut. Don’t sit there and live in a tech world. We have to be part of the solution. We have to drive this thing forward.

Gamble:  It’s pretty obvious with the appeal that you saw in coming to Walnut Hill. You said it’s a bit about six months?

Miri:  Yes, it is.

Gamble:  So before this, you were Chief Technology Officer at Children’s Medical Center.  That’s an interesting transition to me. Can you just talk a little bit about what that was like and maybe what feelings you had going into that?

Miri:  Absolutely. It was an absolute honor to be the Chief Technology Officer for Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, led by a phenomenal CIO with Pamela Aurora. I had a team of 150+ individuals, a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, numerous buildings, numerous institutions, so many different service lines, and very complexed organizational partnerships with the other affiliated organizations, and it was an absolute blast. I cannot thank Children’s enough for the experiences and the mentorship and the guidance and some of the wonderful things we’re doing from a pediatric sense.

For me, with the transition though from CTO to CIO, what I didn’t realize was how much more there is at the CIO level in terms of an organizational perspective. As a CTO, my primary function was to make sure that the technology worked, that it was integrated, that it played well with what the clinicians needed to take care of those sick kids and so on. As a CIO, it’s the organizational imperative to making sure that information is leveraged strategically to help the patient,...