Sometimes, you need a CTO

March 20, 2025

leadership, operations, people, consulting, coaching

I once did a consultation with a national healthcare company. 

• The disease was a chronic, debilitating condition

• There were multiple modalities of treatment as the disease progressed (self-care, home-care, in-patient, etc.)

• Each treatment was an individual business unit within the company and was optimized for care efficiency and profit

• If a patient crossed modalities or crashed into a new stage of care, they often had to re-register from scratch

The tech setup:

• Servers were located on each individual site, often in a closet of the healthcare office

• Maintaining and backing up individual servers in offices across the country was a considerable challenge

• Data was transferred nightly via FTP to the headquarters

• The CIO and IT were against moving to cloud for security reasons

• They were afraid that could providers could not provide HIPAA compliance or data security

• This was an old-school IT department talking to CIO

While they expected us to choose a software product for them, we ultimately advised them to hire a Chief Technology Officer.