Craig Richardville, SVP & CIO, Carolinas HealthCare System, Chapter 3

What’s the key to retaining top talent in an industry where it is at a premium? Challenge them, says Craig Richardville, who believes the brightest stars should have the loftiest goals. And there’s perhaps none loftier than his organization’s mission to usher the industry into the era of transformative, patient-centered care. In this interview, Richardville talks about why interoperability is “always a work in progress,” why he has no plans to move to a single-vendor platform, and how his team is applying the same principles used in the financial and retail worlds to revolutionize patient engagement. He also discusses what the CIO of the Year award meant to his team, his vision of healthcare in the future, and the question leaders should ask before embarking on any initiative.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Learning from finance & retail

* Talent retention: “People like a good challenge.”

* CIO of the Year — “I’m just a figurehead of the great work they’re doing.”

* Vision of a “panoramic, 100% relationship with patients”

* Key to healthcare’s transformation? Preventative and proactive care

* Patient-first philosophy



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Bold Statements

People like a good challenge. Good, strong people that you want on your team aren’t easy riders or coasters. They really want to continue to be challenged intellectually each and every day, and also be able to understand to see the impact of the changes that they’re making and the things that we’re doing.

We’ve been in the top 1 percent for several years. And for that I take great pride, because that means my people are engaged and our teammates are engaged across the whole system with all of what we’re doing, which means they really understand what our vision is. They really understand what our true north statement is.

It’s going to be so different 5 to 10 years from now. I can see it, I can feel it, I can look forward and see the things that are happening and how we move into consumerism and retail and really having more of a panoramic, 100 percent relationship with that person.

It’s really exciting, because you’re impacting family and friends and neighbors and loved ones, so it has more of an internal mission to people as opposed to whether your investments went up or down.

If you’re just looking at making decisions and criteria and developing initiatives — if you always come down to ask yourself the question what’s best for the patient, many of those answers are clear. So clear.

Gamble:  I would assume that a key part of that is having a strong team in place. We hear a lot about the need to do what it takes to hold on to good people and grow leaders, and it’s something that’s a challenge for a lot of people in this industry. I wanted to get some of your thoughts about what your organization is doing to hold on to good people and to grow leaders?

Richardville:  I’d say a couple of things. One is, we continue to be not only a teaching organization by leading the way in many of our efforts, but we’re also continuing to be a learning organization. And I think one of the clear indicators of strong leaders is one that has the ability to listen and to learn, and to apply that in their environment. So as we, within my area of responsibility, for example, continue to evolve and start leading this change, many of the things that we started learning from years ago, likely before many others, was to learn from other industries.