HIStalk Interviews Russell Branzell, CEO, CHIME
Russell Branzell, MS is president and CEO of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives of Ann Arbor, MI.
Tell me about yourself and the organization.
I have been president and CEO of CHIME since 2013. I have held chief executive positions at UC Health and Poudre Valley Health System and some CIO positions before that, including at one of my favorite places I started after I got out of the military, which was Mercy Health System in St. Louis. Before that, I was in the military and did medical administration and some other stuff that, like everybody in the military, you don’t talk about.
CHIME is a great organization. It has been around since 1992. I joined as a member in 1997 or 1998. It serves the purpose of supporting CIOs, digital health leaders, and the new titles in this space. We have over 5,000 members across the globe. We have members in 58 countries and chapters in 11. We have other associations that are part of our organization to include security and application technology officers. But in the end, we focus on one thing. One member at a time, we want to make sure they are exceptional leaders positioned to transform health and care. That’s what we do every single day. Everything we do revolves around our members and our industry, and we try to make it a little bit better every day.
How do those new titles and new roles such as chief digital officer fit into what has traditionally been a CIO world, and how does CHIME meet their needs?
I experienced some of that in my professional career, as the role of CIO changed fairly dramatically from the tech purveyor to a leader in the C-suite and transformation.This is just the next level of maturation.
It takes a lot of people to manage a digital enterprise. Eventually, you’re going to start hearing about the digital skills that are necessary for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and so many others. Some CIOs, as they progress up the ranks, are positioned and ready to help lead an organization to that digital challenge and the digital journey they are going on. Some aren’t. People come and go depending on how their skills progress in the industry. The most important part for us is that we will do everything we can to help people move through that.
Our industry is in massive disruption. You’re also going to see that reflected in titles, skill requirements, and positions. Not just in the C-suite, but across the entire healthcare enterprise and ecosystem. We’re going to feel that every single day. We do everything we can, through a vetting process through membership, to identify those people that fit in that digital health ecosystem bubble. That’s who we want to serve.
What education and support does CHIME offer to technology leaders who are coming into healthcare from other industries?
It’s great that we are seeing more of them entering in the industry, mainly because more opportunities are available than ever for those leaders to transition into healthcare. It is a steep learning curve, although not insurmountable. We’ve always had some of them attending our CHIME Healthcare IT Leadership Academy, our ViVE event that is coming up soon in Miami Beach, and our Fall Forum. We’ve always tried to focus on building everyone’s skills up, and they plug right in.
The primary one for experienced people transitioning into healthcare, even though they may have 20 years of IT leadership or digital leadership in another industry, is our Healthcare CIO Boot Camp program, where we spend a lot of time working on and understanding the role of leadership inside healthcare. Part of that is digital health. Part of that is IT applications. But the primary thing is that you need to be a healthcare leader first to be able to apply those.
Then we help along with other things like mentorship programs, connecting them with a friend or a buddy along the way and trying to get them involved in the community. CHIME is a relational organization. We want to plug them into a support group and an environment where they feel like they can lean on people when they have those questions that maybe are a little bit too difficult to answer right there in a boardroom some days.
Has connecting people with peer support or networking changed now that in-person conferences aren’t the only option, or maybe at times aren’t an option at all?
COVID is a horrific thing that has been tragic and difficult for so many people, but it accelerated things that we thought would take five and 10 years, which is the acceleration of digital connections and digital thought. Part of that is exactly what you described. People have come to rely on feeds of information from a digital format. Your site is one of those.
But we sometimes live in a world of isolation, because so many people work in a remote environment. We count on those connections digitally to accelerate as a relationship. That’s the part that is still a little bit hard. We are human beings. We are relational beings who still need to see and talk to each other. Sometimes Zoom and our cell phones don’t meet that need. There still is a need to come back together, and we are experiencing that across the entire human race as we speak. We’ve seen that isolation maybe is not a great thing.
Healthcare is also different in that even multi-billion dollar organizations often compete only locally or regionally, which allows people to share information freely with people outside that area.
Most healthcare is still local. That has been a cliché for so long, but it’s true. You get most of your healthcare locally, where you live. With healthcare at a macro level, it has been — maybe “inspiring” is too strong of a word — at least motivating that I’ve never met any of our peers or any CHIME members who said, “I’m never going to talk to my peers about IT. It’s my true competitive advantage.“ It’s an enabler, and people are always willing to openly and freely share that. Even those who are on the cutting and bleeding edge are more than willing to share their lessons learned. That’s what’s great about our industry — people will tell you everything they’re doing just because they want to share and improve healthcare.
What led to CHIME launching a graduate degree program under CHIME University?
This has been a journey. We launched CHIME University initially as the umbrella for all of our education and development programs, which includes certification and long-time programs. We started getting feedback from people that there were no programs that met their needs on a realistic basis of “this is the way I work, this is where I think my career is going.” We got that feedback in multiple forums.
We started the journey of considering it, going out and asking questions. Some of the questions we asked were simple, such as, “What did you really love about the graduate programs you were in, whether that was a master’s or doctorate?” We were amazed that there was almost nothing they really enjoyed about their graduate and doctoral process, with a couple of exceptions. One was engaging with professors and lecturers from the real world who had been there, done this, lived this, or are living it currently as part of the curriculum. The other was that it’s real-world applicable and current, not a textbook from five years ago. It was applicable to me now and in my near future.
When we asked them what they didn’t like, the list was long. They hated synchronous learning, that they had to be there at a specific time. I’m a professional — who knows what my life is going to be like tomorrow? They hated the fact that it was almost always a structured environment that had to start and stop on a specific date. They said, that’s not how we work, it’s not how you work, and it’s not how our digital lives are.
Just as importantly, they wanted something that was going to be tailored towards their life, not towards a purely academic mindset, even though this will be extremely academic as we go through this. We boiled it down to a simple program that was a true, self-paced, convenient way to operate. If you need to take a month off, take a month off. If you want to go really fast in some part of the program, go really fast. We made sure this was applicable to our industry’s digital leaders.
But most importantly, the thing we heard the most was, why the heck is education so expensive? I’ve got a dear friend who is six years and $200,000 into a doctorate program. We said, we’re going to offer this at a reasonable cost. We’re going to use our leaders and real experts. We can offer this at an affordable cost so participants can keep their career going and and truly advance their education.
What led to developing the ViVE conference with HLTH?
We’re in a disruptive period of time. We are in a place where we need to do things differently and bring the right thought leaders in. What CHIME has always done really well is bring serious thought leaders together who want to collaborate and find ways to do things differently, to create something in a unique way.
We’ve been working with HLTH for a few years. We worked around innovation and collaboration skills and did some different things with them at their events. It was a symbiotic relationship, one of those rarities in life where one plus one equals a much higher number than two. We really felt good about that, but what we still felt was truly missing was a place where executives, leaders, innovators, disruptors, investors, and startups can come together and work an environment that tries to advance the industry at a much faster pace, questions the status quo, and finds something that we can all agree upon in different little increments all over the place to work in a different way.
HLTH has done an amazing job at reinventing what an event looks like. CHIME has done a good job of focusing on what leaders need to improve their skills. This isn’t intended to be a giant trade show floor. It will bring digital health leaders together who want to work collaboratively, exchange thought leadership, and do things in a meaningful way. We feel good about where we are with that.
How do you walk the line between wanting to grow as an organization but making sure that vendors aren’t driving the agenda or that membership becomes so diverse that people don’t have much in common?
The great part about this, and the direction of our board with our strategies and direction of CHIME, is that CHIME will still be CHIME. CHIME is still the entity for the senior digital health leaders. We will still have our CHIME Spring Forum, which is exclusive for those members and our small number of vendor or foundation partners. There will be a larger conference called the ViVE conference that wraps around that, which will have a lot of speakers and a lot of other opportunities. That’s for those leaders who need that level.
But the CHIME part stays CHIME. For lack of better term or analogy here, it’s the nucleus that sits in the middle that we will always hold sacred and always make sure we’re supporting. We can get bigger. We can support the industry. We can look at the whole ecosystem. But we also need to be true to our roots and true to what we do well for our CHIME membership. We think we can balance both well and in a meaningful way, and at the same time, look at a larger ecosystem that needs support and leadership, because there’s a lot of people out there who need to continue to advance, improve their skills, come together, and collaborate.
How did the ViVE conference end up being so close to the HIMSS conference in both timing and geography?
I’s always been a hallmark that we think we’re doing the right thing for our members, the right thing for our leaders in the industry. This was the right location, the right timing.
If you put it in perspective, the last two major events in the industry since the easing of COVID — I don’t in any way want to suggest that it’s over — was our Fall Forum last fall and now this event in collaboration with HLTH, ViVE. We want to continue to make sure we’re supporting the industry, and this was the right location and the right timing for us. There are places for everybody in the industry who wants to make sure they are doing the right thing and supporting the industry as a whole, but this is what we are going to focus on. We are really, truly not going to worry about other people.
Are you seeing increased membership from those folks with those new digital health job titles or those who work outside of provider organizations, say for health plans or drug chains?
We’ve always had some members who work in non-traditional roles outside of acute care, ambulatory care, and large medical groups. Our primary membership for years has been the provider sector, which was mostly the acute and the ambulatory environment. But we’ve always had some members in things like long-term care, nursing facilities, rehab facilities, and payers. As we see that ecosystem continuum come together and there’s so many pieces — some through acquisitions, some through relationships and partnerships — we see more and more of those come in.
Now we have not gone out and said, “we’re going to go out and try to get every payer into CHIME.” No. What we say is, we have programs and activities for leaders regardless of where they are and where they want to fit in. But even today, we have members such as the CIO of Walgreens Boots clinic structure, payers, and long-term care. It really comes down to whether it’s a vendor foundation partner and they fit in our foundation model, or they are a deliverer of care of some type and they fit in our CHIME model.
What developments will most affect CHIME and its members over the next few years?
Our board spent a majority of the 2019 strategic retreat discussing this for multiple days. No offense to any of our previous retreats, but it was by far the most productive, forward-looking retreat we’ve ever seen, where we talked about where the industry is going. They shaped a model of our 3.0 strategy, some parts of which you’ve already addressed, such as absolutely doing everything we can to help people advance in their skills, whether that’s small training and certifications and support, or if they need an advanced degree to move forward and continue to advance their whole educational aptitude. That was part of that strategy.
The other is that we have a higher responsibility to more than just the CHIME membership. Absolutely, we’ll never take our eye off our CHIME membership and do everything we can, but there’s a lot of up-and-coming digital leaders, a lot of people who will need support and need that vision that CHIME provides to them. We will look to the larger digital health ecosystem to make sure we’re doing that along the way.
The third leg of that stool is that not everybody’s going to connect in an in-person event. As a matter of fact, a vast majority will not connect in an in-person event. We need to provide everything from a digital connection engagement perspective, where they can do those things just as much as in-person in a digital format around the globe.That’s one of the things we can do in an easy way. We can leverage all the things that we’re doing to connect the entire ecosystem to raise all the boats while actually putting the same effort toward those.
We feel good about addressing the large ecosystem, staying true to what we are, but also advancing the whole industry to a place that will look dramatically different in five years. Healthcare will be almost unrecognizable, with the amount of technology and opportunities to improve care in the next three to five years, and then the next three to five years after that. We are in the revolutionary stage of healthcare delivery.
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