Peter High
09-03-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Group Health Cooperative offers care system, care delivery and insurance coverage in order to achieve one goal: affordable, quality health care for all. Founded in 1947, the company now consists of 25 medical centers within Washington and northern Idaho. The company’s focus is on preventive care, combined with medical education, a charitable foundation and a nationally recognized research institute.
Don Lewis is the vice president and CTO at Group Health, and as he discusses with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, technology plays a significant role in ensuring that the company serves its customers while maintaining efficiencies.
CIO Insight: You have focused on turning IT from a cost center to a profit center at Group Health. How have you done so?
Don Lewis: We are working to improve the visibility that other business units have into what is going on within the entire IT environment. The goal is that IT serves as the caretaker for IT systems and applications, and as an advisor and expert collaborator on how technology can help grow the overall business.
While it’s true there are expenses associated with IT, there’s also value. However, that value does not always accrue within IT, which means there isn’t a true revenue side within IT. The value instead is what accrues across the entire business. So we work closely with the other business units to put in place strong business cases that clearly call out where that value accrues. If it’s in the health plan part of our business, the cost may all be within IT, but the value accrues with the health plan, that’s fine because from an overall organization standpoint, that’s what we’re looking for.
We focus on having those conversations with the business leaders and demonstrating the value technology delivers to the entire organization. We know technologies we implement generally have significant business value, but we haven’t always been good at capturing that. Now we have a more formalized process to do just that.
CIO Insight: You have also focused on more tightly aligning IT strategy to business strategy. What methods have you employed to do so?
Lewis: One example is how we rolled out an enterprisewide service management platform, in this case a service made possible through a vendor relationship with ServiceNow. We started the implementation with IT about a year ago, and we’ve led its rollout to other parts of the business including HR and purchasing. Serving as a model for how to implement and use technology to improve business processes is not a new role for IT here, but we are being more deliberate and collaborating more closely with our business partners. We’re showing first-hand how we use technologies, and educating our colleagues on how their areas of the business can realize similar benefits.
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