L.A. Care Health Plan is proud to announce that its Chief Information and Technology Officer, Tom MacDougall, is a finalist for a 2021 SoCal CIO of the Year ORBIE Award. The ORBIE awards are given out by the Inspire CIO Leadership Network, a national professional organization for CIOs with 18 chapters across the country. This is the inaugural ORBIE Awards for the Southern California chapter.
MacDougall was nominated by Alex Hesterberg, the Chief Customer Officer at Delphix, a data platform that L.A. Care uses. In his nomination letter, Hesterberg said MacDougall deserved the award for his stand out work during the COVID-19 pandemic in supporting L.A. Care’s mission of providing access to quality health care for low-income and vulnerable residents in Los Angeles County.
Hesterberg wrote, “The speed at which L.A. Care was able to adapt to a digital future that came overnight, became the core of resiliency for an entire community. In less than one week, L.A. Care’s 2,000 employees shifted to a work-from-home model. The swift and coherent shift to digital WFH enabled employees to continue to serve the community and the acceleration of claims processing helped alleviate strain on a healthcare system that was stretched to its limit. The pandemic revealed the vital importance of digital agility for continuity and accelerated delivery of care and services.”
Since joining L.A. Care in 2019, MacDougall and his team have worked on a three-year technology roadmap that aligned with the health plan’s goals to be high-performing and more tactically efficient. This work was critical as health plan membership increased significantly during the pandemic and the team needed to make sure there was no delay in the delivery or services to the membership.
MacDougall is nominated in the Large Enterprise category, which includes companies with more than $4 billion in annual revenue. The other CIO nominees in this category include:
- Joanthan Behnke, City of San Diego
- Joel Golub, Orange County
- Ben Gordon, Sempra Energy
- Todd lander, Southern California Edison
While this is the first ORBIE Awards for Southern California, the Inspire CIO Leadership Network has honored more than 1,200 CIO’s across the country over the past 23 years.
The SoCal CIO of the Year ORBIE awards will be announced Friday, November 12.