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CIO Profiles: Keith J. Figlioli Of Premier

Don't waste this healthcare alliance CIO's time with overhyped marketing promises.

Career Track



Keith J. Figlioli

Keith J. Figlioli
Senior VP of healthcare informatics, Premier

How long at Premier: More than three years at this alliance of hospitals, health systems, and other healthcare organizations.

Career accomplishment I'm most proud of: Launching PremierConnect, our integrated performance platform that connects data and people in ways that support evolving delivery models for healthcare. The virtual community lets our alliance member providers share data and strategies based on thousands of patient outcomes.

Biggest career influencer: Dr. Paul Gertman, a mentor, whom I met while at Eclipsys (now All-scripts). He is truly a futurist and thinks about how the world will play out way before the mainstream has thought about these trends.

Decision I wish I could do over: I decided early in my technology career to get out of healthcare IT for a number of years to focus more on mainstream industries. After coming back to healthcare, I realized that I should have never left the industry.

On The Job


IT budget: $100 million.

Size of IT team: 650 full-time employees.

Top initiatives:

  • Accelerating PremierConnect's capabilities.
  • Creating a partner network for the PremierConnect system.
  • Expanding the footprint of the co-developed payer and provider data model with our partner, IBM.

Vision


How I give my team room to innovate: We think about our business in three buckets: manage and run the core, build adjacent business and innovate for future opportunities. We let our teams play around in each of these areas. Teams get to have focused time to think through how our business will change and what we need to do in order to change with it.

One thing I'm looking to do better: With the launch of our integrated platform, we're shortening the release cycle. We've switched from long development cycles to much quicker turns. This is a major focus for us this year.

The problem with overrated IT movements: The IT industry tends to come up with a big, sexy term to try and get the mainstream to adopt all the things that term can solve, when it usually can't.The industry needs to walk a fine line on overmarketing IT compared with what we're actually trying to accomplish.

Personal


Title: Senior VP of healthcare informatics at this healthcare alliance

Tech vendor CEO I respect the most: Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who is great at pivoting business models in many directions

First job: Waiting tables at a restaurant, where I learned all about multitasking

Best book read recently: Destiny Of The Republic, by Candice Millard; it's a great book about President Garfield and the intersection of the medical sepsis protocol after his assassination

Ranked No. 30 in the 2012 InformationWeek 500



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