Few digital leaders in healthcare have seen their scope expand as quickly as Michael Ricci’s.
As vice president of digital operations and technology at Mass General Brigham, Ricci helps lead enterprise technology across the system’s academic medical centers (AMCs)—Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital—as well as specialty institutions including Mass Eye and Ear, in addition to systemwide engineering, platforms, endpoint services and custom development. His impact has increased exponentially since the last time he spoke with American Healthcare Leader, and there’s a lot to cover.
When Mass General Brigham (then Partners HealthCare) acquired Mass Eye and Ear, Ricci suddenly had the chance to scale his work from a single specialty institution into a leading academic health system. Over the past several years, his responsibilities have steadily expanded: first to the specialty hospitals, then to the flagship academic medical centers and beyond.
Today, he sits on the Mass General Brigham digital leadership team charged with building cross-entity institutes and breaking down silos.
“We’re trying to heal people. We’re saving lives. The only way we can do that is if everyone believes in what we’re doing and that we move forward together.”
Michael Ricci
That shift has required him to think less like a hospital chief information officer and more like an enterprise operator, tasked with harmonizing technology and process across organizations that historically behaved as independent brands.
One of Ricci’s most visible achievements has been helping the organization move from an entity-centric mindset toward a unified system. Today, there’s a single digital department regardless of physical location, with CIOs at each institution operating as part of a shared leadership team rather than as isolated site executives.
To make that real for staff, Ricci restructured his specialty-hospital CIO group around functions rather than buildings, decoupling people management from service lines. A team member might sit at McLean Hospital or Spaulding Rehabilitation, for example, but lead behavioral health or rehabilitation medicine that spans multiple hospitals, with a local HR manager and an enterprise-facing functional leader, an intentional matrix model designed for a system with more than eighty thousand employees.
Standardizing Security, Healthcare at Home, and AI-Enabled Care
As his remit grew, Ricci also took on police and security technology across the enterprise, an area he freely admits was new territory. But he found it fit well with his engineering background. He inherited a patchwork of roughly fifteen different badge-access systems, then helped the organization chart a multiyear path toward a single, standardized platform that will cover academic medical centers and community hospitals alike.
“We’ve been able to standardize our approach to safety while also minimizing cost and complexity,” Ricci says. “When you create a more unified approach, you can use your size to drive savings. We just had to rally around that unified mindset.”
In parallel, he continues to champion AI and machine learning as levers for access, quality, and efficiency, extending the work he began at Mass Eye and Ear, where his teams supported tools like OtoDX, a smartphone-based otoscope solution that can detect pediatric ear infections with greater accuracy than traditional visual exams.
At Mass General Brigham, AI applications now include research models that support genomics and Alzheimer’s work and direct clinical tools such as ambient listening systems that generate visit notes in the background, helping thousands of physicians reduce burnout and win back face-to-face time with patients.
More Than a Moonshot
Ricci is no stranger to success in healthcare. Long before he joined Mass Eye and Ear, he had already spent decades proving that he could build and run a technology business from the ground up.
He launched his first consulting company at sixteen while putting himself through Northeastern University’s electrical engineering program, grew it mostly through word of mouth, and led complex projects across healthcare, shipping, and even the Department of Defense, where his work with MITRE earned a Project of the Year award and a later system redesign engagement.
After an amicable split from his original partner, he founded Sabertech Systems as a solo S Corporation and continued to expand a largely healthcare-focused client base across New England. By immersing himself in each customer’s business, he became a go‑to fixer for hospital leaders, which is why Mass Eye and Ear, after years of looking to him for reporting and systems work, asked him to come inside as CIO following a major data-breach shake-up, a move he made only after selling his company at his asking price.
The leader holds the mission of his organization close, even though he’s not treating patients himself. Ricci tells the story of the janitor that President John F. Kennedy spoke to while on a tour of NASA. The janitor told the president, after being asked what his job was, that he helped get astronauts to the moon.
“I love that mindset, and I consider what we do here tougher than making it to the moon,” Ricci says. “We’re trying to heal people. We’re saving lives. The only way we can do that is if everyone believes in what we’re doing and that we move forward together.”
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