Sutter Health confirms departure of 3 senior IT leaders

Sutter Health confirms departure of 3 senior IT leaders

Sacramento, California-based Sutter Health confirmed Wednesday that three senior IT leaders recently left the health system and a new interim chief information officer has been named.

Senior Vice President and Chief Information Services Officer Jonathan Manis, Chief Information Services Operating Officer Stuart James and Director of Information Services Finance Randy Davis are the senior IT officials who have left the organization.

A spokesperson told FierceHealthcare the organization could not discuss personnel decisions.

"We can confirm that three senior leaders at Sutter Health Information Services have left the organization," she said in an emailed statement. "We are in the process of engaging a highly qualified leader, Chris Van Pelt, to serve as interim chief information officer."

In May, Sutter suffered a critical failure of its information systems when activation of a fire suppression system of one of the health system’s data centers shut down its Epic EHR, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The Bee also reported employee concerns about how Sutter handled the outage.

The confirmation came after a shake-up of senior leadership was rumored on social media earlier in the day.

Sutter said in the statement that Van Pelt will work with a multidisciplinary team to "help accelerate our efforts to connect technology with our clinical operations as part of our ongoing commitment to deliver compassionate, high-quality patient care.”

Sutter has been in the midst of upgrading its IT system to cloud-computing capabilities and undergoing a three-year data center consolidation project, Healthcare Facilities Today reported.

The federal Health IT Advisory Committee also recently announced that Sutter Health's clinical informatics officer will co-chair a 21-member Interoperability Standards Priorities Task Force, according to Politico.

Manis has served as CIO and senior vice president at the health system since 2006. James has been at Sutter since 2015.