healthsystemCIO – Strategies for Hospital IT Leaders

Ryan Cameron, EVP, Chief Information & Innovation Officer, Children's Nebraska; Ryan Curl, PhD, AI Governance Lead, SUNY Upstate Medical University; Pete D'Addio, VP of Technology, LCMC Health; and Brian Dilcher, MD, Associate CMIO & Director of Emergency Medicine Clinical Informatics, WVU Medicine, discuss how health systems control AI token costs without asking physicians to count tokens. They cover flat-fee AI pricing that can shift to tokens, contract milestones and budget limits.

Ryan Smith, SVP, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Intermountain Health, discusses the AI triage agents his team began building weeks before Epic go-live. Within about a week, the agents began outperforming a 40-person informatics team in seven or eight application areas, freeing most of the team for at-the-elbow support. Smith explains why clean ticket history, clear ownership and demonstrated performance matter before agents enter production.

Kory Hudson, MBA, CHCIO, CIO of Baptist Health Care, discusses the Pensacola, Fla., system's move from Sunrise to Epic, approved in June with go-live planned for 2028. Hudson explains why a late start lets Baptist build on Epic's standard content and go live on the newest release, how patient-centered guiding principles will decide which specialty systems stay outside Epic, and why he expects to staff the implementation without consultants.

Chuck Christian, VP of Technology/CTO at Franciscan Health, discusses why the cost controls health systems built for the cloud do not extend to AI. He describes the Cloud Cost Analyst role he created in 2023, the weekly report it produces, and a workload move projected to save about $50,000 a month. He also covers chargeback, token metering, and what happens when outside agents start querying health system APIs at volume.

Matthew Kull, EVP, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Inova Health, discusses why walling scheduling data off from large language models costs health systems appointments. He reports API calls from ChatGPT into Inova's Epic environment have skyrocketed, warns peers to expect a 10X jump in API fees, and explains the autonomy line separating Inova's agentic call center, now handling 400,000 calls a month, from its human-in-the-loop clinical AI.