Q&A with Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System SVP/CIO Will Landry: “Investing in Agility is Worth the Cost”

The IT stack of the past cannot service the health system of the future. That’s one of the main sentiments that runs through the following thoughts offered by Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System (FMOLHS) SVP/CIO Will Landry. For example, legacy and on-prem technology cannot provide the business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities that a Louisiana-based health system like FMOLHS needs. Also, not being in the cloud prevents IT shops from being nimble enough to handle user-side requests for innovation. Is the cheaper? Certainly not, but today it’s just the cost of doing business for health systems. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Landry covers these issues, along with his takeaways from the Change Healthcare event, his top two priorities, and why it’s key for infrastructure and security teams to be on the same page.

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Bold Statements

There is a balance. To be totally secure, you would just turn everything off, but you obviously can’t run the business that way. If you were wide open, totally innovative, totally focused on growth and innovating, you would not be very secure, or you’re going to have some limitations in your security posture. That’s not the best position to be in either. It is a balance, and that’s why we work really well as a team together.

Now have we made some concessions when the risk is really low? Sure. Most businesses do. We have to evaluate all those individually. And we do typically have those conversations with the business to talk about what is the priority, what needs to happen first, and how fast do we really need to do it.

We know that the emails, the attacks, are going to get better and better, and smarter and smarter. Watching those trends and trying to stay ahead of those trends is extremely important to us and seeing what type of social engineering or social phishing is going to happen from these new generative AI tools, whether it’s video fakes, imaging fakes or audio fakes.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Will Landry, SVP and CIO with Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Will, thanks for joining me.

Will: Hey, Anthony, thank you for having me, looking forward to it.

Anthony: Very good, Will, can you start off by telling me a little bit about your organization and your role?

Will: Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System is a Catholic health system based on Baton Rouge, Louisiana with 10 hospitals in the Louisiana and Mississippi markets. We also have a little over 200 ambulatory locations in the two states, 18,000 employees and we cover five specific geographic regions within the state, the Greater Baton Rouge area, Acadiana, Northeast Louisiana, the North Shore, the North of New Orleans and then Central Mississippi.

Anthony: Excellent. Very good. We’re going to have a security-specific chat here. I don’t need names, but just tell me a little about the structure or the positions you have in security. I don’t think you have a CISO. Is that correct?

Will: We don’t. We have a Senior Director of Information Security and myself who operate under the CISO role. The way I like to say it is I have all the accountability and she has the responsibility (laughing).

Anthony: Very good. It’s a big health system. I would imagine most health systems of that size are going to have a CISO.