How did you come to this position?
I had previous tenure at OSHPD from 2001-2007 and had a feel for the programs they do here. I had a number of positions in the private sector — in software, healthcare, etc. — and ultimately returned to state government, working in a couple of different positions. I returned to OSHPD in 2014 as CIO.
What is your background in technology?
I worked for Esri as a software manager, and spent some time in marketing and software sales. Then I went on to work for Adventist Health, a faith-based nonprofit, and served as IT director, where I was in charge of the Meaningful Use program for electronic health records and responsible for Health Information Exchange programs. When I left Adventist Health, I came back and worked for state Health and Human Services’ HIE programs. Ultimately that took me to the UC Davis Health System, and I ran the state HIE program. The bulk of my service has been in health and human services.
What kind of technology does your department use that is specific to the mission?
There’s a theme around health-care IT, and that’s part of my interest at being at OSHPD: our focus on health care and health-care access in the bulk of our programs. We primarily deal with hospitals, collecting and managing a lot of health-care data. As for specific tech: We do data warehousing to manage patient data, financial and utility data, health-care workforce data that we compile from licensing boards and other sources, and finally, we do a lot of work around hospital construction. We do have a platform for that, Excela plus E-Plan software. Together, that satisfies hospital construction plan reviews and permits. Those are probably two of the highlights. Lately we have been developing a CRM platform with Microsoft Dynamics to administer health-care workforce programs, and scholarships/loan repayment to health-care professionals.
What plans do you have for your department?
OSHPD is focusing its planning in three key areas: advancing customer-centered digital services, improving our use of data and analytics, and consolidating redundant technology systems. These areas align with efforts being championed across state government — from the Government Operations Agency to the California Department of Technology and the California Health and Human Services Agency — and many of OSHPD’s projects and initiatives are focused to achieve these goals. For example, OSHPD’s Web transformation will help evolve OSHPD’s digital services offering to meet existing and emerging needs, with a commitment to customers and their digital service interactions on the Web. OSHPD’s continued advancements in BI (business intelligence), data warehousing and data management practice have been important to furthering our data maturity and unleashing the power of our data assets. Finally, we are committed to leveraging contemporary technology stacks, commodity software and cloud services to create efficiencies and reduce redundancy in our systems, which will be part of a development operations process we plan to push forward in the next year and beyond.
What advice do you have for vendors?
My general advice would be to remember that we are a smaller department, as far as state government goes. We have less than 500 staff, and our budget is only about $150 million-$160 million. My advice, then, is to know that there is a lot of good work being done in small departments and it’s worth taking a look at them. I think a lot of the vendor market focuses on major system integration projects that are in the many millions of dollars, but the fact of the matter is that there’s been a shift to agile development, and I think you’ll see less of those multimillion-dollar projects and more incremental, modular work. I think small departments represent good opportunities to do small, but meaningful, projects.
