Jim Noga, CIO, Partners HealthCare, Chapter 3

“Change is hard. It’s always hard.”

One of the most important lessons Jim Noga has learned during his 17 years in health IT leadership is that no matter how much education and planning go into a project, there will be a period of adjustment — and there’s no way leaders can avoid it. What they can do, however, is take steps to ease the burden. When Partners embarked on a five-year initiative to implement Epic across the system, Noga made sure that various stakeholders were at the table, providing input. The goal was to have a system that didn’t just meet the needs of clinicians, but all users — including patients.

In this interview, he talks how Partners viewed the Epic project as a “foundation” on which to build future functionalities, why innovation can never take a backseat, and why data governance is “necessary for the sustainability of the entire organization.” He also speaks about the key challenges in transitioning from Mass General CIO to Partners CIO, why it’s time to stop viewing IT as a component of the organization’s strategy, and how something as simple as wayfinding can have a huge impact on patient care.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* From Mass General to Partners CIO

* Bringing “empathy” to the role

* Planning for change management

* “Cloud is not a strategy. It’s an opportunity for anything that you do.”

* First IS budget decrease in 20 years

* Evolving CIO role — “You need to be able to express the return on value of capital investments.”

* Patient engagement & showing value



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Bold Statements

The key to the transition was probably bringing a slightly different perspective and having empathy for what may be simple from a decision perspective at Partners, isn’t necessarily so simple to execute at the sites.

We’ve come to the conclusion that cloud is not a strategy. It’s really an opportunity for anything that you do. Sometimes the cloud makes sense and sometimes, honestly, it doesn’t make sense.

Any time that you can have an application or an infrastructure managed by an outside provider at equal or lower cost, that potentially frees up valuable resources that can focus on innovation.

Five to six years ago, people talked about IT being an enabler of an enterprise strategy. Now I think IT actually is a component of the strategy. Especially when you talk about digital health in terms of competitors and being best in class in a region.

It’s something that seems fairly simple, but if you think of the stress of going to a clinical appointment, especially when it is in an urban area, it’s a lot. And so we want to focus on what we can do to reduce that.

Gamble:  You’ve been in your current role for about six years now, right?

Noga:  Correct.

Gamble:  And before that you were CIO at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Noga:  Yes.

Gamble:  Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to make that move, and how you approached that different role?

Noga:  Yeah, so I’ve been CIO at Mass General for 17 years, and part of the Partners IS senior leadership team. I think the key to the transition was probably bringing a slightly different perspective and having empathy for what may be simple from a decision perspective at Partners, isn’t necessarily so simple to execute at the sites. Even in my role today, when I think of our rollout of Office 365 and Exchange Online, it sounds simple,