Chatting With Chuck Christian, VP of Technology & Engagement, IHIE, Chapter 1

At Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), Chuck Christian has found what could possibly be a dream situation. Not just because he gets to catch up with the many “old friends” he made while serving as CIO at Good Samaritan for 20-plus years, but also because he’s at an organization with an outsourced data center — something he’s been looking for throughout his career. In this installment of our quarterly chat, Christian talks about what he hopes to bring to the table as VP of technology and engagement, how IHIE is working to achieve a long-term plan without losing sight of its main priority, what he thinks of the 21st Century Cures Act, and the importance of sharing best practices.

Chapter 1



* VP of Technology & Engagement

* Outsourced data center

* CIO evolution — “It’s much more than technology. It’s about the business.”

* Wading through policy — “I try to keep people informed.”

* Breaking down the 21st Century Cures Act

* “I think it was everything that people were looking for.”

* IHIE’s 5-year plan



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Bold Statements

The really interesting thing about the role of a healthcare CIO is that it’s no longer about just making sure that the computers work on the desktop and you’ve got the latest and greatest operating system, or even about protecting them from their own selves by keeping the malware and the bad actors out. It’s about how that technology is applied to make the business successful around cost savings.

What I try to do is keep people informed. Here’s what I think I’m seeing, what are you seeing? Are you seeing something different? Through that kind of Borg collective of looking at this regulation from different perspectives, you can get a better idea of what it truly means.

You just can’t read it like a novel, because it’s actually amending other regulations and replacing language. And so you have to flip back and forth to really get a full picture of it. Sometimes you have to really wait until you see someone else’s interpretation and say ‘oh, that’s what that means.’

Physicians and other clinicians want to see the information about that patient within that architecture — that infrastructure — without having to go somewhere else and look at a different user interface or log onto another system.

Gamble:  Hi Chuck, thanks again for taking some time to speak with healthsystemCIO.com.

Christian:  Not a problem. I’m more than happy to do it.

Gamble:  Great. When we spoke a few months ago, we talked about the Indiana Health Information Exchange and some of the services it provides. This time I’d like to talk about your role as a VP of technology and engagement. What are some of your key priorities in that role?

Christian:  Sure. It’s kind of like CIO, but it’s a little bit different. I’m the VP of technology, which means I’m responsible for all the infrastructure that it runs on. We’ve outsourced our data center to AT&T/IBM, and it’s actually worked out really well. Since we’ve got a hardened data center, that means I have no actual physical equipment on site. It’s somewhere else, but we still control it. And it’s basically compute and storage as a service, which is very helpful. It’s something I’ve been looking for all of my CIO career, and finally found it. And I can’t take credit for it — they had it in place before I got here, but what we’ve been able to do is fine tune it. When they stood up the service, they felt they would need it more than they actually did, and so we’ve pared it down and saved some significant cost.

The other component in my role as VP of technology and engagement is that I have oversight of the customer relationship management team — the help desk, and I’m also the one that interfaces from an efficacy st...