DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - AI Is a Tool, Not a Solution (ft. Rob Bart)

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Dr. Rob Bart is the Chief Medical Information Officer at UPMC, where he is leading one of the largest EHR consolidations in the country- bringing the entire health system onto a single Epic instance. A pediatric intensivist by training, Rob has been a pioneer in the CMIO role for more than two decades, with prior leadership at Cerner and Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Rob tells Ed about growing up in Hawaii (his high school classmate happened to become President of the United States), the conversation that pulled him from research into medicine, why clinicians need to keep practicing to keep their credibility, and his case against the endless creation of new C-suite titles every time technology evolves. Plus: the trust framework he uses with his team, why recovering from a wrong decision matters more than being right the first time, and how bike rides through a cemetery near his home keep him grounded. 🔗 https://marxadvisory.com

Do you foresee changes in the next couple of years for in general for the role of the clinical position leader working with technology? AI is a tool. It is not a solution. These are just tools. And each of us needs to become very well enabled in how to leverage those tools to become solutions for what we do. They need to understand what the impact of artificial intelligence will be in the part of the business they oversee. Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marks. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thank you so much for participating with us and engaging with us.

We know you have a lot of different choices. So much great content out there. You chose some time with us. And it's going to be worth your while because we have Dr. Rob Bart with us. Rob, welcome to digital voices. Thanks for having me, Ed. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Yeah, this is going to be so much fun.

I think everyone knows you already. I was trying to think back, Rob, the first time we met, but we've engaged with one another for many, many years. Yeah, I was also trying to think of that, Ed. And I can't recall where we first met. But you're right. We've had many good conversations over the years, different conferences, some social interactions that I think we both enjoy.

So it's actually good to. spend a little extra time with you. Yeah, and I always ask, you know, what songs are in your playlist? But as I ask that, I also see that you've got a rhythm, something. I'll let you share what it is. I have case behind you. So tell us about that hobby. So it's a ukulele.

So it ties into where I grew up. I grew up in Hawaii. And in the fourth grade, when I think a lot of schools on the mainland, you might learn to play the recorder or something, some instrument, right? The whole class says. In Hawaii, when I was growing up, it was the ukulele. And I stuck with it for a little while, lost it for a good long 40 plus years. But I'm actually back taking lessons.

And so I keep it here. If I have some downtime and I need to clear my head, I pull it out and practice. But I've enjoyed actually getting back to, you know, trying to play music. That's awesome. And so I imagine you're able to sing some Hawaiian songs. I know a lot of Hawaiian songs. I will tell you that I will be an instrumentalist, not a vocalist.

That's just reserved for me and maybe my shower. I can relate to that as well. And what about life message or mantra? Are there sort of quotes or words that you live by? I think my father definitely had a big influence on me. and and I think when I think about someone who live their life with high integrity and credibility, I think about my father. And I think that is what sort of drives me. You know, at the end of the day, with all the decisions or interactions I've had, if I've been able to maintain, you know, my integrity, maintain credibility for what I need to do within the organization I currently work, UPMC,

then I generally feel pretty good about what I have accomplished or sometimes not accomplished. Well, Rob, I can tell you, you're making your dad proud because that's your reputation in the industry. You're known as one of the not just a great leader, but just a great person. And so I'm sure he'd be very proud of who you are today. So speaking of which, tell us your story. Like, we know already you grew up in Hawaii. How did that happen? Like, are your parents Hawaiian?

No, no, no. So my mom grew up in Hawaii. My dad grew up in Wisconsin. When she went to college, you know, there were a number of universities that you could get in-state tuition at that the state of Hawaii funded. So she ended up at the University of Wisconsin and met my dad there. And I think my dad was in medical school and my mom was an undergraduate. Other than maybe going duck hunting, he wasn't going to miss much about being in Wisconsin. And so moved to Hawaii with the exception of three years when he was doing some training at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland.

So that's where I grew up and how I ended up there. But I mean, my father, for growing up in the upper Midwest, adopted everything related to Hawaii as much as possible. He really lived that persona and really grew to love the state of Hawaii. Yeah, that's awesome. I love to visit there myself, so I could understand that. And like, do you surf? Like, did you pick up surfing? I grew up, I did grow up surfing, you know, always in the water. I swam competitively when I was younger. And then when I was a little bit older, just entering high school, my dad got into sailing. And so I've spent a lot of my life on sailboats. Wow, that's cool. And I know because we. We've talked, obviously, many times before, that you had some interesting classmates. So tell us about your classmates growing up in Hawaii. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, so I, you know, graduated from high school in Hawaii in 1979 at Puneho School. And I have told, I probably said this to you that it's hard to consider yourself successful when one of your high school classmates was the presidents of the United States. And so Barry or Barack Obama was my classmate in high school. and he was one of a number of memorable people. There were just over 400 people in my graduating class.

He was a remarkable person then, but still no one actually predicts that someone in your high school class came in the president of the United States. But I think that when he became a senator in Illinois, it started to become clear that his aspirations and his opportunities were going to become much greater than that. That's pretty cool.

Was there another pivotal moment in life that sort of fundamentally changed your trajectory? There was. So, you know, I actually, I was actually thinking about getting a PhD. And I was very interested in research. I knew how hard my father worked as a physician. And I just couldn't see doing that, you know. And then I was, I spent a summer actually working in a hospital laboratory. I was just washing glassware and things of that nature. But one of the pathologists who worked in that lab knew my father,

and he took me to lunch one day, and he said, you know, you can do research if you're a physician also. And I hadn't thought about that. And he said, you can do research as a physician. He said, physicians who do research tend to get paid better than PhDs doing research. and as a physician, you also then get to directly treat patients. And when he sort of framed that, I didn't realize it at the moment, but once I was maybe halfway through medical school, it made me realize, like, that was a pivotal conversation.

A gentleman's name was Dr. John Hardman, and, you know, he had been a family friend for a while. So it just, that really changed what I decided to do. I think I may know the answer now because of your fondness for your father. How did you come to choose health care as a career? We know about the research that you just share with Dr. Hardman. You know, early on, where there are early indications? Like, how old were you when you kind of decided, I kind of want to go in this way? It turns out that I did write some sort of paper, whatever you want to call it,

and in sixth grade where I sort of clearly are. articulated that I wanted to go into medicine and to health care. And then like most, when I became a teenager and in college, I sort of fought against that, which is how I, which is why I navigated to, well, I'll just do biomedical research. I won't be a fruition. And then that conversation brought me back into full on into health care. And I'm glad that happened. And so Rob, I consider you and many others do as well, sort of a pioneer in the roles that you've had as a CMIO. And it's beyond, it's more than CMIO, but for a common framework, CMIO, you've been doing it a long time. Share a little bit about your career journey to this point. Yeah. So, you know, clinically I'm trained as a pediatric

intensivist. And so, which means I work in an ICU in children's hospitals. And which means I live in a world where I'm surrounded by technology. And being surrounded by technology and being a high-end user of it, I've had a few opportunities. And one of the clear ones was when I was working at Children's Hospital Los Angeles around, you know, the late 90s, early 2000s, it was one of the first pediatric facilities in the country to contemplate implementing an enterprise electronic health record. And then, and through that experience, my division chief, Dr. Wetzel, he said, hey, you should, you should be our representative to work on this. And so I got very much into the details with that. And out of that experience grew an opportunity where I became a chief medical officer for

CERner themselves later on in the early 2000s. And but I was able to do that essentially three weeks a month and one week a month, I was still on the faculty at USC delivering care in the pediatric ICU at CHLA. And it worked very well because the things I learned at CERNOR, I could bring back and really move our EHR implementation forward. And just continuing to be in the mix clinically when I talked with other physicians about CERner gave me so much credibility because I was still a practicing physician. And you've interacted with physicians many times who are working for industry. And the fact that they're in industry or clinical practice, but not doing both,

there's sometimes this credibility gap that gets created. And by actually continuing to do both, and even today, I continue to practice clinically, which I think is very important in this role. It's odd because you could do clinical care for 30 years. You could stop today and then tomorrow walk into the same facilities with a different hat on. And the same physicians you were talking to as a colleague yesterday will look at you and say, you have no idea what we do. Right.

And so the loss of credibility is very rapid from those that continue to deliver clinical care. And so I think it's really important in this type of role to be able to not only represent the clinicians that you work with, but also to be part of that community in delivering care. Yeah, I think you're right about that. So then you eventually make this big move. You're in L.A. County. Second biggest public health system in the country. And then you went over to eventually, a UPMC.

Tell us about what was the draw for you to make that move. Yeah. So first, you know, I actually never thought I'd leave L.A. County once I started working there. I was a CMIO there. As you said, the second largest public urban health care system in the country, doing good work, you know, for underserved people. And but part of my, I'm a lifelong learner like many of us are.

And there were just new opportunities to learn about things, particularly here at UPMC. One is I hadn't really had as much contact with the payer side of the industry as I would like. UPMC has a health plan. And then UPMC also has a technology business development incubator group called UPMC, enterprises. And I had some exposure to that, both when I was at CERner and also when I was at L.A. County. But to have that more formalized and sort of readily available to me was also something I was very interested in. Yeah. And then the phenomenal growth that you came into UPMC at the right time. And now it's like leading, you know, definitely in the very, very top

echelon of health systems. That's pretty amazing. So how do you balance? You mentioned health plan, the payer side and provider side, how do you go about balancing that? Is it hard? It can be. I mean, it's very clear my primary role is with the health services, which is the delivery of care, the hospitals, the clinics, physicians, nurses, etc. But there's some unique opportunities having a payer in a delivery system under one roof that if we align them, we can really actually align. align what the patient member needs and wants and gets along with how we deliver care. And so I get the opportunity to work closely with my counterparts on the health plan and working with either development of programs or the technology to support programs that they're working through.

It's a little bit different, though, than a model, say, like Kaiser that many of people are familiar with. Kaiser being what most of us consider a closed system where all of the patients are members, depending on the region of UPMC, we have areas that are as high as 50% patient members, but we also have areas that are much lower where 10% of the patients are also members. And so creating programs actually takes a little bit of thought in how you execute them well. Yeah, yeah. And same with enterprises.

So tell us about your unique role, you know, having that, you know, innovation, hub right there. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, Enterprises was certainly had a long story history before I got here. I think one of the things I worked hard, I noticed when I got here was the enterprises was sometimes working on really good ideas and projects and incubating companies, but they weren't necessarily getting the type of success with the integration with the clinicians here. It was almost like they would throw it over the fence and expecting someone like me to catch it and run with it. And so one of the things that I worked hard on is I said, look, if we partner on these, we can help what you believe should be successful, be successful,

right? And then also working on, let's take a single thesis of if, if UPMC has this challenge in healthcare delivery, then the assumption is other healthcare systems must have it. Because we are more like other, we should be more like other healthcare systems, not that unique. And then using that thesis, let's go solve our problems, knowing that those problems exist elsewhere. And that could, we could become a launching pad for entities who, who have that same sort of thought. And so, we've matured that over the eight plus years that I've been here at UPMC. And, and certainly I'm a small component of this, but I think that it's shown in how enterprises continue to grow and continued to lead sort of the investment side

that many healthcare systems have now developed. Definitely one of the first and doing it really well. If we had more time, we go into some of the specifics, but they've done very very well. I've had an opportunity to interact with them as well as yourself in that capacity. Hey, let's brag. One last brag on UPMC. Tell us one thing that maybe not many people know about UPMC.

I think one of the more recent things, the seed funding for a bridge came from UPMC. You know, and so I think overall, I mean, UPMC has had some successful opportunities, but, you know, in the modern day, a bridge is clearly one of the more successful in the ambient listening space out in the market today. You know, and that just goes to the structure and the talent. The other thing I would add to that that sort of feeds into this is because UPMC has that history, we tend to attract clinicians, particularly physician clinicians, who have a very strong leaning towards innovation and inventiveness. And I can tell you, having to talk, having talked with many of these physicians,

it's 90% wonderful and 10% somewhat challenging because we can't go and execute on every single idea. Yeah, that's a way of the conundrum for sure. So you've been the pioneer, as I mentioned on the CMIO role. and obviously a lot of changes in the last couple years. Do you foresee changes in the next couple of years in general for the role of the clinical position leader working with technology? I think the changes have to do with how technology is going to change.

One of the things I'm not a fan of, and I think you're similar to this with me, Ed. When a new idea comes along, it seems like, okay, we need a new person in the C-suite. So let's go get a, like a decade ago. Let's get a chief digital officer, right? You know, and then, you know, a couple years after that, it's like we all need chief data officers.

And you and I know that these are just tools. And each of us needs to become very well-enabled in how to leverage those tools to become solutions for what we do. And, and, you know, now it's like, oh, you need a chief AI officer. Right. And what I tell, what I've recently tell people is, do you think that when the telephone became integral to delivering care, that health care systems had chief telephone officers, they didn't? They just learned how to integrate that into how we make appointments and how we, how we interact with patients. AI is a tool.

It is not a solution. I've told all of our CFO or CMO, you know, our chief nurse officer, all of them, they need to understand what the impact of artificial intelligence will be in the part of the business they oversee. Right. Yeah. And so, and so I think part of, I think, what we as CMIOs as well as CIOs where you came from need to do is to make sure that we're in. incorporating new tools as they become important to how we execute our job. I, 100% agree, Rob. You know, it's, it was just funny.

Like, I can't, I can't give a good example because otherwise people will trace it back to my history. But sometimes the reason we didn't progress is because we kept adding C-suite members. And we all loved each other and we're after the same mission of vision. But when you have so many people, like for a wide variety of reasons, resource intensiveness and all, like, kind of stuff. It just doesn't work. And you're right. You just need to incorporate, understand these tools, incorporate them into your daily practice, into your daily workflows, and make sure you have the right people. And you guys have been blessed. We didn't talk about, you know, your counterpart on the CIO side. Ed McAllister, a lot of your people have been there

for a long time. I am blessed. It is worth a moment. Ed McAllister, our corporate CIO, has just been amazing support, very thoughtful, very welcoming. It keeps me in in the family circle. Similarly, our chief technology officer, Chris Carmody. And he and I are engaged in a project the last couple of years, continuing probably for another couple of years, that has really allowed us to forge not just a great working partnership, but a true, true friendship. They're really high-quality people. I'm very fortunate to be able to work with them. You're obviously a great leader. What do you think are one or two things that have really helped you, Rob? So think about this in two.

terms of our people who are engaging with us right now trying to learn from you. Like, what are one or two key leadership traits that you think have really enabled your success? I think the biggest one is trust. So I sort of lifted the framework. So in the pediatric ICU, I train residents in pediatrics and fellows in pediatric critical care. And many people are familiar that as a fellow, you go through usually two or three years. And so you go from junior to seniority and you gain more trust. And you have to trust people to allow them to learn, but still create the sort of guard rails to make sure they're not going out of that boundary so that the patient is still getting the highest quality care possible. I've sort of adopted

a framework that's quite similar in working with, and let's just take the physician and informatician team that I work with. Many of them, there's a few new ones, but many of them were here when I got to UPMC eight and a half years ago and creating that framework and working with them, getting them to understand that I don't need to be involved in making every decision. And the frequent statement I said to them when I got here was, if you're making 100 decisions a week, there's somewhere between probably two and five, I need to be informed of, that I need to know about or be involved in making. But there are many that you should be unable to be able to make yourself, and I need to empower you to do that.

The counter to that was, and I said this very clarity to them, I said, if you don't adopt making decisions, then I'm going to save UPMC a lot of money because you're not actually adding value and extending the opportunity to informanticians have here. I would say that depending on the person, anywhere between six to 15 months, it took them to get comfortable and for them to realize that even if the decision was not the best decision, that I would have their back and that we would figure out a way to mitigate and recover. Yeah. Right? Because you and I both know that none of the decisions that we all make are 100% the best right decision at the time. it's how you mitigate and recover from the in-error decisions that actually is what gives you success.

And I will add humility. You're a super humble individual, and I think that draws people to you as well. Rob, you're super creative. And other than the shower singing and playing ukulele, I've taken the easy ones from you. Like when you need to be re-energized or looking for creativity, is there anything else?

What other secrets can we learn from Dr. Roghart? So I think over the last couple of years, I've reinvigorated my health and fitness quite a bit. Dropped 40 to 50 pounds in the last two years. My goal in 2026 is to drop another 10 to 20. Part of it is I used to ride bikes when I was much younger. And so two years ago, I started with the Peloton and then now have a gravel bike. and I'm spending as much time as I can, like outdoors. And the thing I like about it is I don't listen to music when I'm riding.

I just want to be sort of lost in nature. Yeah. The truth is there's a not too far from where our home is. There's a large, there's a really large cemetery that has a lot of paths and everything. And it is a really good place to go spend time and to clear your head. Yeah. You know, and I'll stop and look at some of the, you know, gravestones, et cetera, and read them. But there's just something very calming about that environment.

I know it might seem odd to some of the people who watch it. But it's just, it's a really great environment. It's got miles of trails and everything. So it's just this perfect place that's only, you know, five to ten minutes bike ride from where I live to go sort of clear my head. And it's so close that I've found even something as short as 20 minutes can be quite restorative. So I think one of the things that I've been really focusing on is just trying to manage my physical and my mental health. I think it is easy to get so attached to the job that you're doing, to forget that doing the job really well requires you to be both physically and mentally healthy. And I 100% admit that I lost that and forgot that.

That's great. Yeah, you know, the cemetery thing reminds you, you mentioned your dad was a case for a while. Near Case is a beautiful cemetery. Been around for a couple hundred years, I want to say. And I did the same thing with running in there. It just clear to the line, it was a fresh reminder, too, like the importance of life, sanctity of life, and, you know, that we're only here for stewards for a very short time. Rob, I wish we had more time.

It's so fascinating. years. This is one of the most interesting people I know. We talked a lot of, well, we talked about ukulele growing up in Hawaii, your classmates. We talked about some of your things that are important, your foundations, your life, you know, high integrity, credibility, a lot that you learn from your dad's influence. And then we, yeah, we went through your story, how you got into health care, and then how you got into tech, and then learned a lot about your journey so far in your role and how things have changed. And then we spent a lot of time on leadership. And I love that, like how to recover is as important as being the right the first time. It's we don't always, we aren't always

right the first time. So how do you recover from that? That's really good. Talking about delegation, trust, being a lifelong learner. And then also the fitness, the importance of fitness. And I'm glad you mentioned the mental health size as well, as you know, that was taboo back when we were first starting. And it's just amazing. What, what did we miss Robber? Anything you want to double down on, I'll give you the last word. People that have had the experiences and opportunities that you and I have had, we need to invest in those who are coming behind us. Love it. You know, and if there are people from your audience who want to reach out to me, they'll

know how to connect with you, Ed, and I'm happy to chat with them. I'm happy with, you know, I spend time meeting with some of the fellows as they're looking to go out and start their career, you know, and other young physicians and, and, uh, nurses and others. And I think one of the things I want to do is maybe some of the other things in my life slow down. I want to spend more time trying to help people sort of figure out, you know, a good path forward for them. It shouldn't be about having a job. It should be about creating a career. Yeah. It gives you both personal fulfillment as well as fulfilling the role that you need to for the organization you're working at. Dr. Rob Bart, you're an amazing

leader, clinician, tech, but most of all, a human. Thank you so much for being on Digital Voices. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts, so you don't miss an episode.