Q&A: How One Novant Health Leader Is Applying Digital Transformation Lessons in 2025

HEALTHTECH: What are some of your 2025 healthcare IT priorities? What are the top three focus areas for you and your team?

NCHEGE: It's all about delivering remarkable care in every interaction. That’s always going to be a priority for Novant Health. My team will support this work by focusing on three things: One, we’re going to establish a mindset of continual improvement to optimize our IT resources and the use of those resources. Second, we’re going to strengthen our cyber hygiene practices and mature and enhance our cyber posture. And third, we’ll foster a collaborative culture and refine our strategy for team development. That includes everything around team engagement: How do we keep the right mix within our environment? How do we ensure that we continue to grow and develop our team members and fight burnout? We want to take care of our team members.

HEALTHTECH: Looking back at Novant Health’s digital transformation so far, where would you say the organization is succeeding? What challenges remain?

NCHEGE: We’ve put a lot of effort into moving our systems and capabilities forward. We’ve implemented an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that recently went live. This initiative focused on our nonclinical processes and has touched every part of our business, from HR to supply chain, finance and foundational IT capabilities.

From an IT perspective, one of our most important resources is time, and we’re enhancing how we think and work through a portfolio of projects that are focused on tools and technologies that support our teams. We want to make sure that we put the right technologies in the right hands.

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While it’s still in its early phases, our new ERP system will have a tremendous impact on streamlining our daily workflows and realizing efficiencies. It moves us forward from a modern system perspective and also provides the capabilities that our team members are going to need, from how staff can request paid time off to how we order supplies. When we improve our foundational processes, that will only move us forward to future successes.

Our award-winning digital presence includes our website and mobile app, MyNovant, which allows patients to access their medical records, chat with providers, schedule appointments, request refills and much more, all in the palm of their hand. We believe that we should provide technologies and capabilities that people are familiar with in their daily lives.

We have done a lot of good work in resiliency and cybersecurity, but we can always improve to make sure that we stay a step ahead. Also, we continue to explore the implementation of AI to reduce repetitive transactional processes, both clinical and nonclinical. We see those as great opportunities for us to continue to move the needle forward.

HEALTHTECH: How has collaboration among IT, clinical, finance and other departments improved when it comes to adopting new technologies or workflows? How do you ensure user buy-in?

NCHEGE: We’ve come a long way in collaboration and bringing various departments together. There’s always ongoing work with capabilities adoption, which is largely an opportunity for education. We work hard to help our colleagues understand the why behind the capabilities and the technologies that we’re introducing. We put a big emphasis on education even before an initiative starts, and also during the project and following the implementation. We put tons of training in place. Proper training and education, I think, fuels collaborative efforts across clinical and nonclinical departments.

HEALTHTECH: What security lessons did you learn in 2024 that will inform strategies moving forward?

NCHEGE: People are the key. It’s all about having the right leadership within the organization and having the right resources assigned to your cybersecurity efforts. In 2024, we added a new CISO to our team who has been really pivotal in expanding our strategies. He has just been a tremendous asset to our organization. We have some very talented team members who are part of our cybersecurity team, who are protecting the house, and we are investing in them through professional development and certifications, making sure that they have all of the tools that they need. This is something that we'll continue to lean into for all of our teams; we see that as the difference-maker.

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HEALTHTECH: How has Novant Health approached AI and machine learning? What advice can you share with other healthcare organizations?

NCHEGE: Novant Health began investing in AI and machine learning in 2019 with the establishment of our data science team and the launch of our Institute of Innovation and AI, making us early adopters in healthcare. Our institute is championed by executives across our organization, alongside an operational team that is responsible for governance structure and reviewing data cases. The institute vets projects before bringing them forward for proposed implementation.

We put a governance process in place first. Having this organizational structure is key to moving our AI and machine learning programs forward in a thoughtful manner.

Having teams dedicated to innovation allows the organization to be experimental without tying up core resources. We think of experimentation as a service, where we have an opportunity to do pilots and look at use cases and proofs of concept before bringing it to broader use, knowing that there’s a core business to run that can’t have its resources tied up.

Education here is also critical across our organization, from the very basics to how AI and machine learning can be applied. This knowledge base is foundational to implementing any successful program. We spend a lot of time educating about what AI is and potential use cases.