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In February 2022, City of Hope announced the completion of its acquisition of Cancer Treatment Centers of America. This ballooned City of Hope’s oncological footprint to 575 physicians across California, Arizona, Illinois, and Georgia. That, in turn, upped VP and chief technology officer Jim Thomas’s purview to contractors and partners across forty-four states and countries.
The goal? To democratize cutting-edge cancer treatment and research.
“That acquisition moves us from being a regional player to a nationwide system,” Thomas says. “Not just for the sake of competing in those markets, but to ensure that your treatment doesn’t depend on your ZIP code or ability to afford care. We want to make certain that everyone has access to the same level of care.”
Thomas came to City of Hope, a cancer treatment center and graduate school, in 2017 as an executive director before his promotion in 2019. In his role, he focuses on building value, while also managing the company’s cybersecurity. As healthcare and technology constantly evolve, Thomas and his team are working to fight cyberthreats that arise.
Sponsorship, Communication, and Innovation
Communication, relationship-building, and sponsorship-building are big parts of what makes Thomas such a strong addition to City of Hope’s C-suite and a master of organizational change management.
“I think gaining sponsorship can be attributed to most of the success I’ve enjoyed in my career,” Thomas says. “Gaining sponsorship with leaders in my organization, with my peers, and with my outside partners is so important for me to be successful. I don’t mean to downplay the role of technology, but it’s a means to an end. I think our board would tell you that technology is at the center of serving our patients. But that wasn’t necessarily the case six or seven years ago. It’s about making the case for innovation and assembling the kind of consensus to make it happen.”
Thomas says the cultivation of outside partnerships is essential in making sure his team has the time to devote to the work that matters most. As his organization works toward retiring legacy systems, he knows he can improve the security posture of his organization by finding the right partner. The CTO is constantly looking for potential cloud integration, and he’s not ready to settle for the first off-the-shelf big provider he encounters.
“I look for boutique integrators and groundbreaking platforms that we can take advantage of that will accelerate our own growth,” Thomas says. “It just makes more sense than trying to go out and hire 300 people to do the same thing. That’s just not good business.”
In the Thick of IT
Given City of Hope’s massive expansion over the last two years, as well as a new Orange County hospital coming online in the next eighteen months, there is so much to do. His organization redeployed Epic for the second time in his tenure in October 2023 across its enlarged organization. Thomas’s team is working toward cyber parity, helped City of Hope’s acquisitions move to a not-for-profit model, and is in the next phase of app rationalization, data center consolidation, cloud adoption, and overall acceleration of IT efforts.
“There is a lot of anticipation of what we’re going to be able to provide in this next chapter,” Thomas says. “We’re right in the thick while our physicians continue to treat people and make incredible breakthroughs for the future of cancer treatment.”
The innovation, partnership, and future Thomas is driving at City of Hope certainly owes a debt of gratitude to the CTO’s military experience. The Marine Corps veteran has a family lineage of service that literally dates to the Revolutionary War and the Virginia militia. Thomas says he emerged from the Marines with technology skills that were immediately transferable to the private sector.
As Thomas has amassed titles and accommodations in his field, he’s had to recalibrate what he wants out of his future. As he said, technology is merely the means to an end, and that end has come to mean something larger in leadership and life. The CTO loves working with startups, serving on advisory boards, and is seeking his first full board position when the time is right. So as his role at City of Hope continues to evolve, he’ll be seeking the same challenges outside of his day job as within: How can technology enable growth? Where is the competitive advantage? And how far can we push innovation? Thomas doesn’t know yet, but he plans on helping find the answer.
