Chris Hutchins

Chris Hutchins is Chief Data Analytics Officer for New York State’s Northwell Health. A senior health care leader with over 20 years’ of experience developing analytic teams, establishing data governance, data warehousing and business intelligence implementation, he delivers solutions focused on patient experience, outcomes, cost, population health, quality, regulatory and risk based arrangements, revenue cycle and health system operations.

He has extensive experience with organisational transformation and specialises in integrating analytic, IT and Informatics teams across organisational lines to improve solution delivery and enabling data driven insight.

Hutchins has been interested in healthcare since his early days, when his mother worked in a hospital radiology department. During vacations and on weekends he gained valuable experience, learning about managing care from the ground up. "I liked the idea of being able to help people," he says, "and over the years I have had amazing opportunities to get involved in new areas."

A variety of roles followed, from working in back-end operations scheduling appointments and coding visits from physicians' notes, to learning how to build databases and integrating budgeting systems, until he was heading up reporting and analytics, which led to a role as an IT director. His duties grew till he was responsible for building out new facilities when practices expanded, and for big enterprise analytics. This eventually led to a role where he was responsible for extending an enterprise data warehouse function while integrating three different data warehouse environments, and helping to lead implementation of a new consolidated EMR. A year or two into this role he was blessed with the opportunity to join Northwell Health.

Over the course of his over 20-year career in healthcare he's seen how data and analytics have increased in importance. "It's only really been in the last decade or so that companies in the US have had a chief data officer,” he says. “It's a result of recognising the important role that data and analytics play, in helping you to make decisions and in developing effective strategies that not only support your business, but improve and grow it."

Hutchins also has an interest in leveraging New York’s diversity to evolve the organisation. "I'd like to see us continue to grow and I'm sure that we will," he says, "doing more breakthrough research and innovation, particularly for cancer prevention and treatment. I want to see us continue to attract the best minds for research, medical practice, Information Technology and data science. There's a tremendous opportunity here in the New York City area, we have an enormous population centre that's incredibly diverse, and has representation of the population across the globe.”