Joey Sudomir, SVP & CIO, Texas Health Resources, Chapter 2

Most would agree that in order to be successful, CIOs need to have true partnerships with their vendors — where there is some dissent is what that actually entails. To Joey Sudomir, it means being providing constructive feedback while also being honest about what the organization can commit to. In this interview, he talks about his team’s strategy in rolling out Epic across the system, the population health partnership that could be a game-changer, and the principles that guide him in his role. Sudomir also discusses the challenge in knowing when to accelerate and when to brake — particularly when leading a large organization, and what qualities he values most in staff members.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Pop health partnership with UT Southwestern — “We’re in it for the long haul.”

* IT as “a fundamental enabling piece.”

* Role of robust analytics in pop health

* Leading a large organization & “pushing the limits.”

* The fundamentals of transparency and communication — “We can’t send mixed messages.”

* Setting realistic goals

* Key qualities of future leaders



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Bold Statements

I’m so impressed with the leadership of both organizations, because they had the long-term view of what we needed to do as an organization, and that’s allowed us to collaboratively travel down a little bit of a longer runway to figure out how we need to deliver these services in the best manner.

We’re pushing the limits with taking on the amount of organizational change we’re taking on, and we have a lot of strategies to help mitigate those risks. Ultimately I think one of my key responsibilities, to both the organization and our IT department, is to ensure we’re finding the right balance between the need to continue to progress, and what we can deliver effectively and efficiently.

Finding that balance is important, and as these initiatives spike up and down on activity, you have to vary the intensity that you monitor and manage those other aspects of delivery, because each person can only go in so many directions at one time.

We encourage them in their leadership roles to be transparent, to be data-driven, and to be collaborative. I think that’s so important, because we would not be effective if just myself or one of my leaders demonstrated those capabilities routinely; it really has to become the systemic model of how you operate.

Gamble:  I’m sure there are some other pretty significant projects, and I would imagine population health is one of them.

Sudomir:  It is. Along with the rest of the country, we’re in a multi-year journey to define what that means to us. There are obviously published definitions of what population health means and then that becomes tailored to each organization and their situation and their delivery capabilities.

In our case, that is now part of the partnership we’ve had for about a year with UT Southwestern. That partnership is called Southwestern Health Resources. One of the things we have done is create a population health services company that will eventually, as we grow our Managed Lives, service those types of population health needs. And so, we’ve spent the better part of 2016 and now into 2017 working with business leaders of that joint venture to determine what technology they need to support and enable their pop health endeavors.

Gamble:  That involves representatives from both organizations?

Sudomir:  It does. There are representatives from the non-IT side, and then we have a very strong and collaborative relationship with UT Southwestern’s IT department, who we work with now just as if we are extensions of e...