Cristina Thomas
VP & CIO
Mercy Medical Center

Cristina Thomas is Vice President and Chief Information Officer for the Mercy Integrated Health Delivery System in Des Moines Iowa. She is responsible for planning, organizing and directing the Information Technology operations and strategy for Mercy which includes Mercy Medical Center, Mercy Capitol, and Mercy Centerville Hospital. In addition Mercy includes over 35 ambulatory standalone clinics and subsidiary corporations which consist of Assisted Living facilities, the Mercy College, the House of Mercy, Home Health and Mercy Franklin, an inpatient psychiatric treatment facility. In addition she provides general IT support and direction for 14 rural network hospitals throughout Iowa.

As Mercy’s CIO, Ms. Thomas has focused the Information Technology strategy around a core set of principles - Mercy will implement appropriate new technologies that:

• complement and/or improve systems and processes to sustain a cost effective integrated care delivery system
• promote timely clinical decision-making that results in positive patient care outcomes and ensures patient safety
• assure data integration across all systems and provides information exchange throughout all Mercy entities
• enable staff, patients, and community to electronically access accurate information that assists providers and consumers with timely decision making, coordinated care delivery and improving health status.

During her time at Mercy she has led teams that have successfully implemented a large scale Electronic Medical Record throughout Mercy, digitized imaging capabilities and other major clinical initiatives that have transformed Mercy’s healthcare operations.

Prior to her position at Mercy, she was the CIO at St. Joseph Healthcare in Augusta Georgia for 5 years and previously spent over 15 years in management positions with Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) and Sharp Healthcare both in San Diego California and The Compuware Company headquartered in Reston Virginia. Her areas of expertise during these roles focused on IT system implementation, application development, data center management and management of a worldwide IT support center supporting over 500 Department of Defense facilities around the globe. Cristina holds an MBA from Drake University in Des Moines Iowa, a partially completed Masters in Management Information Systems from West Coast University in San Diego California and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Radford University in Radford Virginia.