In this edition of “C-Suite Conversations,” Jim Venturella, SVP & CIO and President of Population Health Services at WVU Medicine, shares the leadership insights and strategies that have shaped his successful career. Jim reveals how he has unified a fast-growing, geographically dispersed IT organization into one centralized team while cultivating a culture of collaboration and career development.

WVU Medicine is West Virginia’s largest health system and the state’s largest employer, with more than 3,400 licensed beds, 4,600 providers, 35,000 employees, and $7 billion in total operating revenues. The health system is comprised of 25 hospitals.

Q & A with Jim Venturella

Judy: You started your career in consulting. How has that influenced how you approach technology and health systems?

Judy Kirby: You’ve been with two organizations that have grown substantially through acquisition. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve learned through those experiences, and any advice you have for CIOs going through mergers and acquisitions?

Jim Venturella: The number one piece of advice is to set expectations early in the process, and ideally, through due diligence. When I joined WVU Medicine, we had six hospitals that had come together through mergers, and they weren’t all aligned. One of my early jobs was to create a common vision and bring things together, which was challenging. My leadership team went through a learning curve. Now, when we go into due diligence, we make sure people are aligned on what changes are going to occur, when they are going to occur, and how fast.  Making it clear that we wouldn’t maintain separate portfolios or teams. Once those expectations are set, when the merger does occur, things go more smoothly.

Judy: How have you brought disparate teams together and gotten them to function as one?

Jim: My early days at WVU Medicine were a challenge. The org chart illustrated that we were one, but it was really five different departments that were not integrated. So, I spent a lot of time on the road, meeting with teams face to face, articulating my vision and where we were going. I’d attend executive leadership meetings at each one of the hospitals. My message was, “We’re not five teams anymore. We are one team, and that’s how we will support the system. If there are issues, I will listen, and we’ll work it out together.  It wasn’t a question of if we are going to change – just how and when we’d consolidate.”

Once the consolidation was complete, it was much easier as new hospitals came into our system. It’s about easing people’s fear of change. It’s going to be different, but they are going to be welcomed onto the team. They will have great opportunities and be part of something bigger and better.

Judy: How did you approach handling duplicate positions, as far as either letting go of people, or reassigning their seats on the bus, so to speak?

Jim: We are committed to bringing everybody into the team. We go through a process of identifying the individual’s skills, what they’ve done in the past, and where they might fit within the team. We then look at where our needs are and do our best to match them up. If there’s not an exact match, we have a conversation with the individual about the training we will give them for their new role. For the most part, people are open. We’ve certainly had some people who decided to move on to something else, but we give everybody the opportunity to be a part of the team.

Judy: You’ve succeeded in keeping your team engaged and not having huge turnover. How have you achieved success there?

Jim: I think it starts with the organization. We have a great culture at the health system – very mission-focused versus feeling like a corporate entity. We focus on developing individuals, allowing them to grow their careers. I am always telling my management team that the first thing they should be focused on is their people. Do you know where they are in their career? Are you doing things to help them move up? Are you focused on recruitment so that you have all the people you need? Who on your team needs extra help, and are you focused on that?

Our talent management process allows everybody to grow their career and move up. This helps to minimize the reasons for them to go somewhere else from a pure career opportunity standpoint.

Judy: WVU Medicine is spread out over a fairly large geographic area, so how are you handling remote and hybrid workers?

Jim: Pre-COVID, I probably had two-thirds of the team in the greater Morgantown area, and almost everybody came into the office daily. As we’ve grown and added more hospitals, new team members are located outside of Morgantown. Since COVID, we have not brought people back. Logically it wouldn’t make sense, because now we’re so dispersed. We’re in four different states, so it’s hard to justify forcing people to come into the office and sit in Teams meetings.

I do think we are losing something by being remote. I think human connection is extremely important for teams. We try to minimize the impact by getting teams together at least four times a year at a minimum.  Hybrid is here to stay, so we are figuring out ways to maximize the new model.

Judy: What do you see are the pros and cons of that, as far as the professional growth of the individuals, and how they interface with the users of your systems?

Jim: For people who’ve been here for a long time, it is less impactful to their professional growth. They know the organization well and have built many relationships. I worry more about the new people we are bringing into the organization.  How do we help them feel connected and part of the team? How will they feel that sense of contributing to our mission?  We must continue to focus on it in ways that are different from how we have in the past.

Judy: I recently saw in an article that organizations are more likely to promote somebody who is hybrid instead of fully remote. Have you seen anything like that?

Jim: A lot of it comes down to the individuals themselves, and how they’re going to manage and how they’re going to interact with their teams. I have one manager who is fully remote, and that was a struggle for me mentally to get through my old-school thinking. I think managing people when you don’t see them is a real challenge, for both sides. I think hybrid is a better option, but that could hinder the growth of talented people on your team.

Judy: Some CIOs are concerned about the division of technology within their organization. Some have data, some have AI, cyber, analytics. At some, it’s more siloed. At WVU Medicine you pretty much have it all.

Jim: I am very fortunate, and it really started when I joined. As I mentioned earlier, there was no central IT group, so I set the expectations coming in that we were going to bring everything together under one group for the whole health system and operate as one IT team. Any shadow groups would be migrated in. And when there is a merger, that IT group joins our team on day one.

For one of the shadow groups, it took some failures before we were able to fully integrate them. There were lots of issues with getting things done, too much overlap between the groups, and escalations were coming in on a regular basis. We eventually gained support to consolidate, and ever since, it’s been a huge success. People wanted control so they could decide priorities. You can still accomplish that with a centralized model. In addition, you can ensure consistency from a standards and toolset standpoint. Also, if one area has some excess capacity, or we have backlogs in another area, we can move things around for the benefit of the entire organization. When you have silos, you can’t do that.

Judy: Does AI report to you as well?

Jim: Yes.

Judy: What are you doing with AI at this point?

Jim: Like everybody else, we are involved in lots of different activities. First, there are the AI functions that come from our vendors, like Epic and Workday. We’re trying to implement their capabilities when we feel they’re good. We’re doing ambient listening and just signed a new enterprise agreement, so we’ll be getting that to every physician who is interested. We have some conversational AI in our call center. We’re building out some custom solutions around the total patient journey, bringing structured and unstructured data together into new models. This provides interesting new capabilities for clinicians and population health groups, giving them a full picture of a patient’s journey throughout the health system. We have a laundry list of other ideas, and we get many new requests on a regular basis. We have been working on more efficient ways to screen them to determine value, so we don’t get distracted by every shiny object out there.

Judy: Did you set up governance to deal with everybody coming to IT saying, “Look at this bright shiny object. I need it now?”

Jim: To handle the added AI complexity, we’re bringing more people from across the organization onto our governance committee, including legal and compliance. We’re still in the formative stage, but the increased focus on governance is critical in this new era of AI.

Judy: I was talking to a CIO recently who said that risk reports to her, because it’s so key to everything that technology does. Does it report to you?

Jim: No, risk reports up through legal at WVU Medicine, and we work closely with them. Cybersecurity is always number one or two on our risk register. AI has become one of the top risks recently, which was the trigger for expanding our governance committee.

Judy: Another thing we hear is concern about the lack of up-and-coming IT leaders to fill future healthcare CIO positions. What are your thoughts around that, and what are you doing in terms of succession planning?

Jim: I do see fewer people with their eyes on the management track. We have three different career tracks, and we’ve identified that once people reach a senior level, a larger share want to be in the technical track or the project management track versus the management track. So, we’ve put a new mentorship program in place this year. We identified high-potential candidates who we think are good candidates to move into a management role. We team them up with leaders to help clarify what the transition looks like. I think helping people understand what life looks like in the management track is going to help us. We’re just four or five months into this program.

We also have a more formal talent management process that I brought over from my consulting days. I spend two full days each year with my senior leadership team, reviewing everybody in the IT organization, where they are on their career path, and who should be up for promotion. We also focus on the leadership team, who’s next in line, and if they are getting the right training and experiences to move up. We’re constantly thinking about growing and developing leaders, and dedicate resources and our time to it.

Judy: Looking back over your journey, what career advice do you have for rising technology professionals interested in becoming a CIO one day?

Jim: One piece of advice is to get comfortable leading without being an expert. As you move up it’s very easy to lead people in an area where you’re an expert. But as you take on larger responsibilities, you must figure out how to balance between managing at a high level, versus when you need to dive down and get into the weeds. You must know which managers are solid and who may need more hands-on support. But as you move to these bigger, broader roles, you have to do that efficiently and not get stuck in the details. It’s certainly a skill that you develop over the years with experience.

Judy: If you hadn’t become an IT leader, what other career do you think you were cut out for?

Jim: I like building things and designing things, so I could have seen myself as a contractor or something in construction. I have a degree in mechanical engineering so naturally I thought I was going to be an engineer. When I got into consulting, my expectation was that I was going to be working in manufacturing. However, my first consulting project was in healthcare and thirty-some years later, I’m still in healthcare.

Judy: Thinking like a mechanical engineer, what would you design to improve healthcare?

Jim: There are concepts from manufacturing around process design that could be applied to how we get patients in the door, through the process, and back home safely. In my population health role, we’re looking at how to ensure high-quality results and great outcomes. In surgery for example, we look at the process from the initial clinic visit to the activities that occur prior to them coming in for a surgery, and then what happens post-procedure. How can we make the entire process as efficient as possible?

Judy: What do you do in your free time, when you have it?

Jim: I like to work with my hands and do things outside. At work there is a lot of time spent in front of a computer screen or in meetings, and while we do a lot of great things, it doesn’t always feel tangible. But doing a little building project or working outside is something that you can step back from and visually appreciate – something tangible you built yourself.  I get a lot of satisfaction from this.

Judy: What have you built?

Jim: Little things like tables or shelves around the house, or a fire pit outside. Nothing major at this time. That’s for retirement.