Q&A with CIO John Henderson, Part 1: “Everything We’re Doing is to Deliver a Digital Experience.”

“You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”

It’s a saying that’s been quoted and revised so many times that it’s not attributable anymore. It is, however, applicable, particularly in healthcare.

For John Henderson, it wasn’t a particular individual, but rather an entire department that drew criticism from him until he achieved a better understanding of what they did. “I was tough on infrastructure teams when I didn’t have responsibility for them,” he said during a recent interview. Once he had the opportunity to run the team, Henderson developed “a completely different appreciation for what they do and how challenging and difficult it is.”

That humility and awareness has served Henderson well during his career, particularly since he assumed the CIO role at CHOC Children’s more than three years ago. In this interview, he talks about how his team is working to deliver the “Disneyland experience” across the enterprise, how they’ve adjusted to the challenges stemming from Covid-19, what he learned from Myra Davis, and the question leaders should constantly be asking.

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Key Takeaways



* Although CHOC Children’s had no prior experience with remote work prior to the pandemic, the organization was able to transition 1,100 workers because of the work that had been done to modernize the data center.

* To accommodate the large number of individuals working remotely for the first time, leadership has held virtual learning sessions and provided ongoing support.

* For the past few years, IT has been working on modernizing the data center and refreshing equipment as part of an effort to improve user experience.

* Providing a digital experience has become an essential part of the CHOC Children’s strategy. “It’s how everyone wants to interact with us, and so we’re trying to make sure we have the right capabilities for that engagement.





Q&A with John Henderson 

Gamble:  Let’s start with some background information. Can you provide an overview of CHOC Children’s?

Henderson:  We’re a two-hospital system. One main campus which is our CHOC Orange Campus, but we’re a two-hospital health system with more than 25 primary care locations and another 30-plus specialty clinics.

We serve the entire Orange County region, and a little bit beyond. If you think about it from a population perspective, we have a reach of around 4 million.

 

Gamble:  In terms of the pandemic and how it impacted your strategy, where you with remote work versus onsite?

Henderson:  In IT, we’re about 90 percent fully remote. The only folks on site are field support and some of our network engineers who have been on projects, and then our communication center. We have about 1,300 people across CHOC who have been remote since the pandemic. We were not a remote work organization prior to the pandemic; there was a big cultural issue around remote work.

 

Gamble:  That’s a common thread we’ve heard. Can you talk about how your team was able to make that adjustment?

Henderson:  I think we were in a really good position to make the switch. I’ve been at CHOC for three and a half years; one things we’ve been focused on in the past three years is modernizing our data center. We had completed phase 2 of that right before the pandemic, meaning we had moved everything off premise to a co-located facility with a brand new infrastructure and architecture. We had migrated all of our applications and we had begun moving everyone from Skype for Business over to Team...