Valleywise Health CIO Stephanie Hines explains why IT lays out cost, risk and trade-offs while the operators accountable for results make the call. Watch below or on YouTube.

Stephanie Hines manages all of Valleywise Health’s IT investments from one central budget. Yet she leaves the decision on how to spend it with the operators who will have to make the technology work. Hines is senior vice president and chief information officer at the Phoenix safety-net system. In her view, the leader accountable for an operation has to own the decision, its risk and its results, because adoption and outcomes depend on that ownership. IT’s role is to lay out the costs, risks and trade-offs of each option so the operator chooses with informed consent. Hines described the approach on a recent episode of the healthsystemCIO Show. She will also moderate the panel “What Should We Stop Scaling in Next-Generation Care?” at the CHIME Fall Forum on Nov. 13.

Hines often hears colleagues describe the technology budget as hers, though in fact she sees herself only as its steward. Software, hardware and other IT investments sit in a budget she manages, but the money belongs to the organization. The operators, in turn, decide how to spend it. “I am a firm believer that the business needs to own the decisions. They need to own the risk, and they need to own the accountability,” Hines said. That ownership also keeps a deployment from feeling like an IT project.

Today’s CIO is a strategic business partner who typically reports to the CEO, Hines said.

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