As Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare and Colorado-based SCL Health wrap up their merger, SCL Chief Information Officer Craig Richardville is becoming Intermountain’s CIO.
With the close of the merger, Intermountain Healthcare is the eleventh-largest nonprofit health system in the United States. The new Intermountain organization employs more than 59,000 caregivers, operates 33 hospitals (including one virtual hospital), and runs 385 clinics across seven states while providing health insurance to one million people in Utah and Idaho.
Intermountain is well known for its technology innovations. Ryan Smith, former vice president and chief information officer of Intermountain, recently left to become the chief operating officer for Graphite Health, a new member-led nonprofit company with the stated goal of creating a standardized, interoperable data platform to streamline the distribution of digital health solutions. (Intermountain is one of the health system members of Graphite.)
Richardville had been chief information and digital officer at Broomfield, Colo.-based SCL Health since February 2019. Before that he served as CIO at North Carolina-based Atrium Health for 20 years. In 2015 he won the John E. Gall, Jr. CIO of the Year Award issued by College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
Mike Leavitt will serve as the new board chair for the combined organization. In previous roles, he served in the Cabinet of President George W. Bush as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and Secretary of Health and Human Services and as a three-time elected governor of Utah.
“With this merger, we’ll create a model for the future of healthcare that focuses on keeping people healthy and proactively addresses causes of illness through high-quality, affordable, and accessible care to more patients," said Intermountain President and CEO Marc Harrison, M.D., in a statement. “The merger provides a model for healthcare for the rest of the country.”
Lydia Jumonville, former CEO of SCL Health, as the executive sponsor, will lead the integration of the two systems and work in partnership with Harrison and serve as a member of the new Intermountain board.
