Albany Medical Center encompasses the 631-bed Albany Medical Center Hospital, Albany Medical College and the Albany Medical Center Foundation, Inc. At the helm of this academic health sciences center is Senior Vice President and CIO George “Buddy” Hickman, who was recently named CHIME/HIMSS John E. Gall, Jr. CIO of the Year Award. HCI Associate Editor Kate Huvane, who was in attendance at HIMSS when Hickman delivered a presentation during a workshop entitled, “Introduction to Healthcare and IT Enabling Technologies,” recently had a chance to catch up with Hickman and chat about his work.
KH: In February, you were named CIO of the year. Obviously that’s a big honor. Were you surprised to win what is considered a lifetime achievement award for CIOs?
BH: I was most surprised. The first surprise came when a notable colleague in the industry phoned and suggested that he was intending to nominate me, as long as I consented. I know a lot of the cast of 18 that preceded me in receiving the award, and I’ve heard the legends about those I don’t know personally. So I pretty much discounted myself, and then there was a subsequent conversation where he garnered me in and my CEO also agreed that he wanted to support my nomination, so we said ‘let’s give it a go.’ I’d gotten the calls from both Steve Lieber (president and CEO, HIMSS) and Rich Correll (president and CEO, CHIME) in December telling me I’d received the award, and yes, I was surprised, and then I had to sit on the good news until February.
KH: It must’ve been difficult to keep that under wraps for two months.
BH: It was, but I had to. I was afraid they’d disqualify me if I told anyone (laughs).
KH: How long have you served as CIO at Albany Medical Center?
BH: I’ve been at Albany Medical for about four and a half years as senior vice president and CIO. Just to give you a little more background on that, I did a consulting job here as an interim chief administrative officer for most of calendar year of 1995 when I was still with Ernst & Young. Over the course of time, I’ve kept in contact with Jim Barba, the president and CEO (at Albany Medical Center), and eventually made the right decision to come back to work here on a permanent basis after talking about that with him a few times along the way.
KH: So he was a good person to keep in touch with.
BH: Absolutely. I was on my way elsewhere. I thought I was going to be taking a job at Florida. But then one thing led to another as Jim and I were talking about it from a referencing standpoint. And now here we are. In the wintertime I find myself weighing Albany versus Florida (laughs), but I’m sure I made the right decision.
KH: This is your third academic health system CIO role. Where did you previously serve as CIO?
BH: I was the CIO at the West Virginia United Health System, which is the system for the West Virginia University family of affiliated hospitals and organizations, for a few years. I cut my teeth as a CIO at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh which was then the flagship for the former Allegheny Health Services organization, where I went in to do an IS turnaround job and also built a system-wide supporting data center back in the late 80s-early 90s.
I started my career at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Knoxville, Tenn., which is my hometown. I spent about a dozen years in big-firm consulting, first with Pricewaterhouse, now PricewaterhouseCoopers, then more so with Ernst & Young, being eventually admitted to the partnership at Albany Medical. My whole career has been health industry-focused, although I’ve held both operational and IT roles, which I think has been important to my own development and how I generally approach some of the problem-solving in the CIO role.
KH: Going a little further back, you were 29 years old when you were first hired as CIO at Allegheny. That seems pretty young for such an important role. How did you handle that?
BH: Yeah, I try not to let that get out of the bag too often. But it explains why I’m so youthful now, years later (laughs). It was an unusual situation. It was an organization where I had done some brief client work and I had a mentor within the firm that I was working for who actually went to work for the parent organization, so that was a clear pull into the organization.
I think as far as organizations of that size go, it’s probably an early time in the career to give something like that a go, but on the other hand, I had been given a lot of opportunities along the way to stretch and learn a lot of things prior to that, so it worked.
KH: You’ve had experience in both operational and IT roles. How does this bleed into your leadership style as a CIO?
BH: That’s a tough question. I’m not sure I can describe my leadership style and philosophies, but I have a whole bunch of people who work with me who I bet would be glad to tell you the good and the bad of all of that.
But seriously, I tend to be very results-oriented and I’m fairly hands-on, meaning I don’t like to get to the point where I can see the smoke but I can’t feel the fire. I like to individually coach people who show the talent and potential that demonstrates that they’re going to be doing remarkable things over time. I also like to build a better practices organization in a sense of how you put the building blocks together. I’ll also offer that the older I get, the more I understand that everything about what we do in the business of leadership and management of IT is really about evolution as well competency and investment, and a whole lot to do with culture. I enjoy learning from smart people, and I always like to acknowledge that that includes a whole lot of my peers in this industry.
KH: You mentioned during your talk at HIMSS that it is important to “lead change and grow change leaders” within a staff. How is this best accomplished?
BH: I believe that most of what we do in IT is about change. And yes, while change has to be sustained, if you don’t understand how to motivate it and catalyze it, there’s not going to be anything to be sustained. So a CIO must naturally be willing to be out front and communicate messages that are sometimes about giving others the faith, the courage, or even the permission to exercise their abilities to make things different.
Growing change leaders is perpetuating the cycle of what I just said I think a CIO is supposed to be about. We need a lot of people that can lead change in our industry, and so that becomes a function of talent spotting and a whole lot of mentoring exercises with your staff and your colleagues. It’s also about being able to identify the real change-brokers who get IT amongst the executive staff, as they are obviously key influencers, and those understandings are spread across the spectrum as well.
KH: From what you said before, it seems like you have a great working relationship with your CEO. What else can you tell me about the environment at AMC that has allowed you to be successful?
BH: I think there’s clearly an executive commitment to what I would call an IT change agenda. If you look at what we have going on here right now, it’s most remarkable in the sense that it’s not that we have one large effort and a whole bunch of things going on at a rapid pace. We’ve got several large programs going on, and sometimes it’s mind-boggling just keeping all the balls in the air. But that shows that the organization wants to see some things done, and they’ve made the decision to so invest. There seems to be a willingness on the part of a number of folks to take on a full plate, because this isn’t all just about IT for sure. This is about organizational change; it’s about process change that a lot of executives need to be on point to lead and be accountable and responsible for. They need to know what occurs in their business units, and bring a lot of people through the change process. So that is also something about the environment here.
