When Clinical Knowledge Meets Code with Dr. Lee Milligan

Most CIOs come up through IT. Lee Milligan came up through the ER. After training at UCLA and working as an attending emergency physician, Lee taught himself to program, got pulled into his hospital’s EHR selection process, and eventually became Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Asante Health System in Oregon, a role he held for 22 years. He later joined SimonMed Imaging, one of the largest outpatient imaging providers in the United States, as CIO. In this episode, Lee walks through the decisions and frameworks that shaped his career at the intersection of clinical care and healthcare technology. Topics include:

• CodeRunner: a single-page resuscitation tool he built inside Epic that is now part of the system’s foundation, and why having a clinician build it changed what the tool was capable of
• IT project prioritization: why the most important conversation is not inside the IT department, but with the CEO and CFO about the gap between organizational ambition and execution capacity
• AI in radiology: how Lee reduced X-ray turnaround times at SimonMed by 36 hours in two weeks by asking radiologists one question about which modality they hated reading most
• Operational bottlenecks: how a fax machine was quietly throttling order volume at SimonMed, and how he fixed it
• The CIO role reframed: why the job is not about managing technology, but about motivating people to do the right things at the right times within the right constraints

Lee now runs Asbury Health Tech Partners, where he advises hospitals, imaging centers, and investors on healthcare technology decisions.