Intermountain Health CIO Craig Richardville Departs

Richardville was a CIO for more than 30 years at health systems including Intermountain, Atrium and ProMedica.

Craig Richardville, MBA, CHCIO, Intermountain Health’s award-winning Chief Information and Analytics Officer, has left the health system to pursure other opportunities in healthcare.

Richardville announced Tuesday night on LinkedIn that “it was the right time to find the next challenge."

“These are exciting times for all of us in healthcare IT,” he wrote in his social media post. “I want to thank the many partners who work in this space that are so valuable to the successes we've had but mostly to the people, the caregivers who commit and contribute to the mission each and every day.”

Richardville was a familiar presence on social media and at innovation conferences and a strong supporter of digital health innovation.

Craig Richardville.

He joined Intermountain as its Chief Digital and Information Officer in 2022, after more than three years as SVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Denver-based SCL Health (which merged with Intermountain). Prior to that, he’d been CIO and chief analytics officer at Atrium Health in North Carolina for more than 20 years and vice president of information services at ProMedica for 11 years. His many honors include the 2015 John E. Gall Jr. National CIO of the Year Award, from HIMSS and CHIME; the 2021 National CIO of the Year Healthcare ORBIE Award, the 2020 Colorado CIO of the Year Award, and the 2017 Carolinas CIO of the Year Award.

Richardville had a busy tenure at Intermountain, and listed several accomplishments on his social media post, including consolidating nine EHR platforms across the enterprise into one Epic platform; helping the health system develop and launch several AI programs; developing digital health programs to improve patient care; transitioning the health system’s Microsoft and Google cloud environments into one Microsoft Azure platform; and transitioning multiple ETP systems into one with Workday.

[Also read: Intermountain Health adds AI, Interoperability to CDS Platform.]

Richardville took part in a HealthLeaders Healthcare Workforce of the Future forum in 2022, shortly after joining Intermountain. During that roundtable he spoke of the challenges of keeping a talented workforce together and his pride in developing staff who could move on to bigger roles.

"I've got 12 CIOs or CDOs in the industry that used to work for me, and I'm just privileged that those people have grown," he said. "It's really [about saying] 'I'll give you the challenge, I'll grow your résumé, I'll make you more valuable to the market, and if I'm able to keep you I'll just continue that. But if there are other opportunities somewhere else, I'm here to help you capture those as well so you can fulfill your life goals.'"

He was also a familiar presence at innovation events like ViVE. At last year’s conference in Nashville, he spoke of the collaborative nature of healthcare innovation at a time when health systems and hospitals were struggling to be competitive.

"I might see something really interesting and tell (another healthcare executive) about it, or someone will tell me, 'You should check this company out,'" he said. "It's the chance to meet up and talk with people."

He also signed on this past March to support the Match IT Act of 2024, a bill now before Congress that would create a federal definition of ‘patient match rate’ that providers would address as they would a clinical quality measurement.

“[T]his legislation will address our nation’s current inability to consistently and accurately identify patients to their health records,” he said in a press release. “Improved standardization of patient demographic data will lead to more accurate patient matching, which in turn will produce advances in patient safety, more complete information for clinical care, and cost savings from reducing the need for repeated medical care, among other benefits.”