I am retiring from my position at Chief Medical Information Officer at UCHealth. I am NOT retiring from this blog!
A copy of the letter I sent to my UCHealth – Colorado colleagues this past week.
Dear Epic IT colleagues and leaders
After 31 years of practicing medicine at UCHealth and 25 years of being an informaticist and CMIO and living at the conjunction of patient care and health information technology, I am retiring from UCHealth effective June 30, 2026, the end of this month.
My heart fills with gratitude for all of you. The physician-IT partnership that makes UCHealth work happens in urgent hallway meetings, in on-the-fly Teams calls, in war rooms and during major hospital and clinic go-lives.
Some of you go back with me to the early years: courier delivery of paper records, non-carbon paper duplicates, dictaphone cassettes, the initial deployment of 3M Clinical Workstation in 1998, the transition from 3M CW to Allscripts in 2002, the near-miss with McKesson CPOE in 2004, the “bet the farm” decision to remove over 100 clinical systems and go with Epic in 2009 with a brand-new CEO and CIO.
We made national news together. Our first trials of information transparency with patients with our original SPPARO project in 2001, then creating Open Results in 2007, joining Open Notes in 2016, Information Blocking / sharing in 2021 with immediate release of information to patients, all firsts in Colorado and many cases, the nation. We pioneered APSO notes for readability, we built a Sprint team with Dr. Sieja’s leadership and Steve Hess’s unflagging support, and we are a national model for how EHR optimization just works.
Our Go Lives are stressful, hilarious and great team building exercises for our Epic IT and training teams, our physician and clinical informatics groups and for our affiliate partners. These events build strong relationships for UCHealth and our affiliates to grow into the future.
And now, predictive and generative AI. Our Abridge AI scribe rollout is a model that Abridge announces to all their other customers: we grew from 250 licenses to over 4000 users in the space of a few months. This is OUR shared success, trainers, analysts, managers and directors pulling together with our informatics physicians.
And then, the clinical and IT governance work, the EHR burden reduction efforts, the quarterly upgrades, catching all the unexpected consequences of how IT and clinical medicine clash and collaborate. I am proud of how this team handles the psycho-socio-political complexity of a large health system, and with grace.
I know that you are in excellent hands with Dr. Patrick Guffey and our senior medical directors Jennifer Simpson, Heather Holmstrom, Jonathan Pell, Amber Sieja and Kelly Bookman, and our team of 20 other physician/APP informaticists. The relationships, skills, and experience of this team will serve UCHealth well into the future.
My last day as CMIO is June 30. I’ll wind down clinical practice through August, seeing patients at Lowry. After that, I’ll be taking some time off. And then thinking about writing, teaching and consulting. I will continue to be curious about the same questions that started my career: how do we use technology to serve the relationship between clinicians and patients?
I just published a book on exactly that topic called *It’s Not About the Tech: From Potholes to Piglets, Real Life Lessons in Health IT* (now available as a Kindle download and soon as a printed book) and I will continue to write weekly at https://ctlin.blog as I have for the last decade. Please stay in touch.
It has been a privilege to walk this path with you.
Last CMIO Haiku:
Farewell from CT
Bygone dodo bird? Not yet.
Thanks for all the fish.
(Ref: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
With gratitude,
CT Lin MD, FACP FAMIA
CMIO UCHealth
Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine
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