Ali Olia was placed as chief information officer (CIO) at Mercyhealth in Rockford, Illinois, and Janesville, Wisconsin. Mercyhealth is a regional integrated health system of seven hospitals, 85 primary and specialty care locations in 50 communities across southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, a home health/hospice division, and a wholly owned and operated insurance company, served by over 700 employed primary and specialty care physicians who provide over 2.4 million patient visits each year. Mercyhealth has been named to Becker’s Healthcare’s “150 Top Places to Work in Healthcare” list, and has received a variety of awards for innovation. As CIO, Ali will provide strategic and tactical planning, development, evaluation, and coordination of information systems and technologies for Mercyhealth, ensuring that IT solutions bring evidence-based care to the patient and support continuous quality improvement.
Ali was most recently engaged in independent consulting work with Pinpoint Solutions LLC, a firm he founded in January of 2020. In this capacity, he helped a startup in Chicago conceptualize and build out three platforms – data, user experience, and digital – to go to market in the mid-market healthcare sector; collaborated with the CIO of one of the largest private healthcare systems in the U.S. on a transformation focused on reorganizing and rearchitecting the IT organization as it moved toward leveraging external partners; and guided the chief technology officer (CTO) of an academic healthcare system in the western U.S. as he embarked on a digital transformation journey.
Previously, Ali served as CTO and vice president for IT strategy and enterprise architecture at BJC Healthcare in St. Louis; as vice president for application and platform service delivery at Catholic Health Initiatives in Denver; and as senior director of technology strategy and corporate systems at Neustar in Sterling, Virginia. He began his technology career as a PeopleSoft engineer with Unified Business Technologies following a short tenure in finance.
Originally from Bombay, India, Ali holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Colorado, a master’s degree in economics from Utah State University, and a master’s degree in information systems technology from George Washington University. He is a member of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (and is a CHIME-certified healthcare CIO), the Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Applications, and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. Ali and his wife are the parents of two grown daughters.
QLK’s Jamie Cassedy led the search to recruit Ali to Mercyhealth, where his duties will begin on November 1, 2021.
