Russell Branzell, President & CEO, CHIME, Chapter 2

Forget everything you ever learned about plagiarism. Not only is it no longer being condemned; it’s being encouraged by Russell Branzell, president and CEO of CHIME, who believes sharing and stealing ideas “as quickly as we can” is essential to the survival of CIOs. In this interview, Branzell speaks candidly about a number of topics affecting CIOs, including the midpoint of Meaningful Use, which he believes is the perfect opportunity to look at the program in its entirety. He also talks about the work CHIME is doing to make sure its offerings meet the evolving needs of its membership; what the CIO 3.0 might look like; his thoughts on the direction of the industry; and what CIOs will be buzzing about at HIMSS15.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Redesigning & minimizing — “We moved to more of a social media platform.”

* CHIME/HIMSS Forum: CIO 3.0

* Charting a course for “becoming a better leader.”

* “We’re in the era of blatant plagiarism.”

* The evolving role of the CIO

* Innovation over new gadgets — “Change the world with what you already have.”

* Time for collaboration



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Bold Statements

The traditional world of the CIO that I spent so many years in has really changed. Most CIOs are involved much more in a strategic environment. They’re trying to spend time developing their next level.

We’re entering into the era of what I like to refer to as ‘blatant plagiarism,’ where our goal is to share as fast as we can and steal from each other as quickly as we can, instead of always innovating locally. Our goal is to try to get that out to the members.

It’s so different than it was even three or four years ago, never mind 10 years ago, which means given the shrinking of the process of change and how fast it happens, our members in the industry have to be ready for something totally new in five years.

There’s going to be mergers and acquisitions. There’s going to be changes in process. There’s going to be consolidated services. There are some trends that are occurring that seem to come in waves and are not just constantly pegged up in growth. Our members are looking how to deal with this; how to work in this environment.

Gamble:  I wanted to talk now about some of the things that CHIME is doing. As far as myCHIME and some of the new features or changes to that, can you just talk a little bit about it to our readers about how they can be using this tool?

Branzell:  One of the things we’re trying to do right now is create an opportunity to refresh everything we do. We exist for one reason and that’s to serve our members, both our HIT professionals, as well as our foundation members. We serve to make their life a little bit easier. Or, as I have been saying most of the time with the CIOs, a little less difficult, because I don’t know if there’s any part of being a CIO or being a foundation member at this point in our industry that is easy, so maybe a little less difficult.

Part of that is just refreshing the world in which they get to work in and interact with each other and interact with our organization. Part of that was a ground-up redesign of our website and actually minimizing our website, because how many of us really go to websites that much anymore? What we wanted to do was create a website that serves as a conduit to more of what most of us deal with in our life, and that is the mobility and social environment we work in.

So we’ve done a pretty significant refresh of both our social environment. We partner with NextWave Connect on myCHIME, which we used to be a web-based platform, and we moved to more of a social media platform, and we’ve just recently updated that again to provide a lot more opportunity for interaction, networking with peers,