When Anika Gardenhire, RN, stepped into the newly created chief digital and information officer role at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor, Mich., in March, she joined the organization at a time of broader strategic focus on integration and technology-forward thinking.
The Ann Arbor-based academic medical center created the CDIO role as part of that shift, reflecting an organizational push to align digital innovation with enterprise strategy.
Ms. Gardenhire, formerly chief digital and transformation officer of Ardent Health Services in Nashville, Tenn., said her early priorities are focused on building a strong foundation rather than pursuing large-scale transformation initiatives.
“We ask our clinicians to provide world-class care. I believe that we should provide a world-class technology organization in order to support the world-class care that they provide,” she told Becker’s. “That includes being brilliant at the basics, and then from there, it’s how you accelerate innovation on that very strong foundation.”
Michigan Medicine is in the midst of what Ms. Gardenhire described as a “significant Epic program” and has recently undertaken a large Microsoft program aimed at further integration.
On artificial intelligence, she said she is still getting her bearings on specific opportunities for deployment. She emphasized a governance approach focused on enabling broader access to technology while maintaining safety and effectiveness.
“The goal is not to hoard or overcentralize,” she said. “The goal is to make sure that we’re able to distribute and put the tools in the hands of the people who can best make determinations about how to use them, but to ensure that we’re fundamentally doing that in a way that is safe and effective for clinicians, patients, researchers and educators.”
More broadly, she described the role of the technology organization as helping integrate a complex academic enterprise that includes clinical care, research and education.
“When I think about what technology should be as a utility, that’s really driving the integration of the enterprise,” she said. “We are seen as the trusted advisors across our departments, across our faculty, across our research, but ultimately we are able to be the types of facilitators who are really connecting dots for the enterprise.”
For now, Ms. Gardenhire said her early focus will be on listening, including meeting department chairs and learning about work underway across the organization.
Ultimately, she described the role in simple terms: a “humble facilitator.”
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