David Lehr’s career story highlights the value of curiosity, hard work, and a willingness to take on new challenges. After pivoting away from his education as a physicist, David worked his way up to become a healthcare CIO, and he is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at Meritus Health and Chief Operating Officer of the Meritus School of Osteopathic Medicine. In this edition of “C-suite conversations”, David shares the many lessons he has learned along the way, his approach to talent development, and his thoughts on the future of healthcare and technology.

Meritus Health is Western Maryland’s largest healthcare provider with over 4,000 employees, 500 medical staff members and 250 volunteers. Meritus Medical Center, the flagship facility, has more than 327 beds. Meritus Medical Center is a teaching hospital serving as a clinical training site for the Meritus Family Medicine Residency Program and more than 1,000 nursing and allied health students annually. Meritus Health also includes the Meritus School of Osteopathic Medicine.

Key Takeaways

• If you want to be seen as a strategic leader and earn larger roles, don’t stay in your lane. Engage with the broader goals of the organization, volunteer your ideas and offer to take on responsibilities that overlap with other departments.
• To be viewed as a trusted leader, CIOs must focus on building strong relationships, especially with physicians, and treat them as customers.
• Give your team members assignments that stretch their skills and push them outside their comfort zones. Provide guidance and support but let them solve problems on their own.

Q & A with David

Judy Kirby: When did you realize that technology leadership was of interest to you, and why?

That’s kind of been my philosophy on career and life. There’s something interesting about just about everything. Just keep moving until you find something interesting, but once you find that thing, work your butt off and be awesome at it, and eventually new opportunities will come up. Then work your butt off on the next thing, which will result in yet another better opportunity.

That’s how I ended up where I am now. But I never sat down when I was 18 or 25 years old and thought, “I really want to be a technology leader.”

JK: Tell me about your first CIO role.

DL: Eight years ago, I started my own consulting firm and I was working with a client in Annapolis, Maryland. After a while they told me they were very happy with my work and invited me to become their full-time CIO. I wasn’t sure I wanted to accept the offer. But I thought it through and realized that my consulting business would be better and more lucrative if I had CIO experience on my resume. So I decided to try it for a year or two, and as they say, the rest is history.

We were able to achieve some really great things while I was CIO and eventually I was offered opportunities in other areas. The leaders of the company came to me and said, “You’re really good at managing big projects in IT. Managing a construction project can’t be that different. Why don’t you try that? You turned around IT so why don’t you try taking on the lab? Or pharmacies?” And, before I knew it, I had operational responsibilities for the health system and continued to grow my role from there.

Eventually, the president of that hospital left to join Meritus as CEO. He and I had worked really well together. In fact, he was my mentor. He asked me to join him at Meritus, and here I am.

JK: Your current title is Chief Strategy Officer, Meritus Health & Chief Operating Officer, Meritus School of Osteopathic Medicine. What are your responsibilities?

DL: We have organized the company into hospital related, and non-hospital. The non-hospital stuff rolls up to me – ambulatory practices, the home health agency, and IT. So, the CIO reports to me, as does facilities, construction, marketing, all of our non-hospital businesses, ancillary services, and the medical school.

JK: Can you talk a little bit about how having IT leadership in your background helps you with your operations and strategy responsibilities?

DL: I’ll give you an example that I think illustrates the value of having IT and operations rolled into one. Here at Meritus, we started thinking about how to make the experience of accessing care more seamless. What could we do to eliminate the friction and make it fast and easy to get a telehealth appointment. We came up with MeritusNow, and our promise to the community was that it would take less than five minutes to get scheduled for a telehealth appointment, and 20 minutes to an hour till you are done with that appointment.

Okay, so what does IT need to do? Also, operations and physician services need to work together, but physician services starts saying, “My docs don’t like this, and my docs won’t like that.” And IT says, “I can’t configure it. It doesn’t integrate like it ought to.”

JK: Are you meeting your goals of five minutes to schedule and under 60 minutes to be seen?

DL: We are. I think the median time to get through scheduling is just below two minutes, and the average time until the actual telehealth appointment is about 35 or 40 minutes.

JK: For IT executives who want to move into other areas, like operations, what advice do you have for them?

DL: Good question. I talked to someone about this recently. He is interested in taking on some operational responsibility and was also considering other opportunities. So, I said, “What if you go back to your boss and say, ‘I’ve got this other opportunity, but I’d be willing to stay here if you agree to cross-train me and let me take on some operational responsibility. Let me be the manager for a project on both the operations side and the IT side.’” That’s one way to go about it.

But I still hear CIOs say, “I am not a true member of the C-suite,” or “I don’t really have a seat at the table.” Well, you know, that’s a two-way street. It’s rare for an organization to think, “That CIO with all the great ideas and awesome input on everything, and a full understanding of our business – let’s keep him out of the inner circle!” Most organizations I know would embrace that individual and they are desperately looking for that level of talent. So, my advice to those CIOs is, “Don’t stay in your lane.”

JK: As a former CIO, and now that you have a CIO reporting to you, how do you see that role evolving over the next three to five years? What might some new responsibilities and job qualifications be?

DL: That’s a really good question. I encourage CIOs I work with directly to focus on building strong relationships, especially with the physicians. You don’t have to spend a lot of time in any healthcare setting to see that there’s frustration with the way that technology guides people through their workflows.

If you can help your users understand the best ways to get through the day, how to use AI features, and give them the support they need to get their work done, you’re going to be much more successful.

I encourage IT leaders to focus a lot more on the people side and treat them like they are your customers. If they’re not satisfied, that’s a problem. I think the people side is something that hasn’t been focused on quite enough in this profession.

JK: There are lots of conversations about the CIO position and what it should be titled. Should it now be called the Chief Digital Officer? And then there are all the other titles: CHIO, Chief Data Officer, CMIO, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief AI Officer. What are your thoughts on siloed roles versus an all-encompassing technology officer?

DL: I think that at the end of the day, whatever the title, it really comes down to the work and making sure that you’re contributing to the community, contributing to the organization, and getting the work done. If a new job title helps you explain a change in the way that the IT organization is structured, then that can be a good thing. I think that’s why people have started to test out different titles like CDIO, to indicate to the team that we’re going to start doing things a little differently.

JK: Succession planning is the responsibility of all senior executives. Can you talk a little bit about the status of your organization’s succession plan and the approach you’ve taken?

DL: That is an area, admittedly, where I have work to do. I’ve been talking about an idea I have for creating a chief of staff position that would basically help me with all the things we have going on. We’ve got mergers and acquisitions going on. We always have new projects, new construction, expansion. It’s a lot of balls to juggle and it’s hard to keep it all straight. So having somebody help manage that body of work would be extremely helpful. But more importantly, they would learn all the ins and outs of getting that work accomplished and eventually be part of the succession plan. This is something we need to think about for my role and a couple of others across our organization.

JK: A big concern I hear about is the lack of up-and-coming IT leadership talent. Do you share that concern?

DL: I don’t believe that there is a lack of talent. I see so much talent in so many people that I’ve been lucky enough to work with. I think the bigger problem comes when you have five superstars and just one vacancy to promote one of them into. How do you do that without disengaging the four who get passed over this time?

I can’t imagine working in a place where you can’t find talent. I do know that the workforce, in general, is constricted, but the caliber of people, especially if we are developing those people, has not disappointed me at any point in my career. Maybe I’ve been super lucky. Or maybe the leaders who are saying there isn’t enough rising talent are not developing their people appropriately.

JK: How do you develop your people?

DL: By giving them opportunities. When I was running an analytics shop, I used to sit down with everybody on their very first day and say, “Here’s how it’s going to work. For six months, you’re going to need a lot of help. You’re going to lean on me, on your colleagues, you’re going have questions. Don’t be embarrassed about that. That’s the expectation. In the second six months, you’ll be expected to be more independent. For every question you ask, you should answer a question or two as well. And then after the first year, I’m going to hire someone new, and that person is going to lean on you, and you have to be ready for that responsibility.”

Without fail, people have been able to follow that progression because you’re pushing them to their limits. You’re getting them outside of their comfort zone every step of the way. When you say, “I’m not going to tell you how I would do it, but here’s the goal,” people will exceed your expectations.

JK: With continued financial pressure on healthcare, how do you meet the rising demands and costs of technology, and how can you track true ROI?

DL: I’m a little bipolar on this particular question because, on the one hand, nothing is becoming cheaper and no costs are going away. Now, suddenly, you have these AI companies coming in and saying, “Here’s how much it’s going to cost you to add additional technology on top of what you have.”

On the other hand. You keep hearing, “Our margins are too thin, we don’t have enough money in healthcare.” I have to remind those people that one out of every six dollars spent in the United States is spent on healthcare. That’s a lot of money! I bet we can figure out how to find some money to cover what we need to do.

JK: Speaking of generative AI, What type of work are you leading in this area, and is gen AI bringing changes to your IT org chart?

DL: It hasn’t changed our IT org chart yet and I don’t know that it will change the way IT is delivered, but it’s obviously changing the way that people work. There are different rates at which people are adopting and embracing the change. I talked to one physician who said if she had to choose between the AI and her husband, her husband would be out of luck. But not everybody is as enthusiastic.

A patient is going to come in not feeling very well, and they’re going to need to leave with a remedy of some sort, whether that’s a medication, some sort of an intervention, like physical therapy, a surgical intervention, and some sort of a plan. Nothing really changes about that per se. But then there’s all that stuff in the middle, like the paperwork, the decision-making, which can be improved by GenAI.

We don’t have any more answers than anyone else. When I talk to people in private, they all say basically the same thing. We’re all in the same boat, and we’re all figuring it out at the same rate. When I listen to experts and podcasts, people have a lot fancier answers, but to be honest, we’re just about where every other organization is.

JK: Many organizations are touting sustainability. As the Chief Strategy Officer, are you involved in initiatives around sustainability?

DL: Since all of our facilities, plant management, and construction rolls up to me, I’m very involved in sustainability. This year, we did a project that reduces our carbon footprint by 30 percent. On our main medical campus, we installed a microgrid that adds resiliency to our power plant. If the grid goes down, most hospitals in the country will kick on their emergency generators, and those generators will produce around 30 percent of the power that they normally consume. So, OR lights will stay on, your ventilators and life safety stuff, will keep going. but otherwise 70 percent of your stuff has to be diverted to other processes. With the implementation of this microgrid, we are able to keep going at 100 percent at all times. And that’s through our own power generation, through a combination of solar energy, combined heat and power.

The solar obviously helps reduce our carbon footprint. Our combined heat and power, that is through on-site generation of electricity using more conventional methods. But we take the heat off that results from the power generation and pump it into the buildings, and that provides our heat. It also provides air conditioning, believe it or not, through a contraption called an absorption chiller. All those things reduces our carbon footprint by 30 percent compared to pre-project, and we also don’t lose any outlets during a grid failure.

JK: Dave, if you hadn’t become an IT leader and then a chief strategy officer, what other career do you think you were cut out for?