December 10, 2025: Leigh Williams, VP and CIO at Augusta Health, shares how a 255-bed independent community hospital is reimagining care through strategic EHR transformation. In this conversation, Leigh discusses leading a MEDITECH Expanse implementation while maintaining deep community ties through comprehensive health needs assessments and patient advisory groups. She reveals how independence enables data-driven, nimble decision-making tailored to local populations, from mobile clinic initiatives to COVID response strategies. Leigh also explores leveraging emerging technologies to scale workforce capabilities, reduce operational costs, and improve the digital workday for every team member. 

Key Points:

• 02:01 EHR Implementation and Challenges
• 04:47 Innovative Strategies for Rural Healthcare
• 12:13 Leveraging Emerging Technologies
• 16:23 Advice for Healthcare Leaders

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Executive Interview: The Importance of Community-Driven Care with Leigh Williams

Discover why healthcare organizations of all types and sizes choose Expanse to meet the challenges of the new era in healthcare. Visit EHR. MEDITECH.c Com to learn more.

Let's connect.

Sarah Richardson: Thank you for joining us on Flourish, where we spotlight healthcare leaders driving transformation, and today's conversation is with Leigh Williams from Augusta Health.

Leigh Williams: my name is Leigh Williams and I'm the CIO and Vice President at Augusta Health.

We are a 255 bed community hospital and health system with about 30 clinic locations in Central Virginia in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. We are an independent community health system, so we are of the community, for the community by the community, and very tied into providing healthcare services for Central Virginia.

So next June, first we go live on a new EHR.

Sarah Richardson: That'll be such an exciting milestone for the organization, especially with such an advanced new product from MEDITECH and really being able to harness everything that they are bringing to the table. Healthcare leaders today. Navigate so many challenges.

How do you and your team stay positive and also lead effectively during a time of not just the digital transformation, but also something like an EHR transformation?

Leigh Williams: Yeah, so I, I do a lot of organizational change management and trying to figure out how to do that very difficult thing. I think the last five years have been tough for everyone.

There are so few levers that our organization, that any healthcare organization has to be able to say. We're gonna scale that up. We're gonna do more, and we're gonna do it with the workforce we have. We're facing workforce shortages, so we want to not just throw a whole bunch of bodies at something, but be able to scale while constraining some of the, constraining the costs and that.

Gap is difficult to solve with things other than technology. So I talk to the team and we get really excited about why are we doing this

[Mic bleed]

There are so many things that we are transforming based on the technologies that we have today here in 2025. So I look at it as a gift, an opportunity to leverage technologies that simply have not existed before and be able to move us meaningfully forward in our journey to cut costs and yet provide even more and better services.

Sarah Richardson: I am so grateful you leaned into organizational change management. I actually consider that the most important aspect of how to implement the right solutions at the right time and get people to feel like they're coming along with it and understanding how it impacts, especially in rural healthcare because.

Expenses increase reimbursement changes. There's this constant growing concern about sustainability of rural healthcare today. In addition to using OCM and doing new digital transformation initiatives, what are some of the innovative strategies and funding efforts that are helping rural systems remain viable and effective?

So we do actively write grants. Continuously looking for funding sources, but they really deeply need to understand what the work is supposed to have an impact, like what is the outcome going to be. We also have the Augusta Health Foundation, which has been for many years, funding. Our health system based on the priorities of the team members who work here and the people that belong to the foundation.

So we partner with over 30 different local organizations in, supporting LGBTQIA plus communities. We support Latino communities, immigrant communities, different people that are unhoused at the moment, people that are facing behavioral health challenges. And we bring the clinic literally to the location where that community has said would work best for them.

And it's really been helping us to identify within the county, within our community, where are these services needed? Where do we have any gaps in being able to get into a clinic? So being able to pull the clinic up to a church or to a community center or homeless shelter, that enables us to bring that care out.

[Mic bleed]

metrics that we're working on to improve, and that it really is targeted towards our priorities.

Sarah Richardson: You cover so many aspects of what I see as a key. Reason why we need to have these community based healthcare organizations, because what you've described and how you're reaching your patients and your populations is a universal need.

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But so many organizations today have to reevaluate their environment.

They have to merge or affiliate with somebody else. What does that independence mean for you as a community-based and independent healthcare organization?

Leigh Williams: That is a great question. When I first, became a vice president here it was, I knew that Augusta Health had a really strong sense of independence, that it is a very important value for us.

So we are able to be nimble and respond like our COVID Vaccine campaign that we responded to. We had drive through clinics and physicians in parking lots, reaching through car doors and all of that. We were able to mobilize very rapidly because we looked at data, we're very data driven. Where do we need to have these services for the community and can make really good decisions for what's right for the people here.

It truly is reflecting our commitment to bring valuable healthcare services right here in Augusta County to this population.

Sarah Richardson: With healthcare, always being local and building that trust with your community. Sometimes you're the only game in town and you don't wanna be the health system that of last resort.

People have to go there. Right? You have built this promise and this trust within your community. How does your organization create that understanding of what they need and respond to them with the timely services and access that's so important to their wellbeing?

Leigh Williams: Yeah, so we do a lot of listening. Every three years we do a community health needs assessment, and that is a very comprehensive asking.

They have a direct influence in informing our strategic plans. Beyond that, we are a part of this community. So leaders serve on many different local organizations. We're in Chamber of Commerce and different other local groups. We partner with those community organizations that represent different communities within the larger community, and it is.

And then I would say the second component is we also do a lot of data. So we have an amazing data science program run by Penny Cooper. She is able, she and her team are able to, uh. Deeply understand from a data perspective, the health needs of the community. What the needs are from a diagnosis perspective, from different conditions, and that helps us to inform not only what we're getting feedback from the community and that input, but also what does the data tell us about our area and where does it make the most sense to bring healthcare services.

But that's also gonna be true for your team. They understand how these things are affecting patients and also clinicians. How do you leverage the emerging technologies to support your workforce, to bring all of these ideas into fruition? Oh, that

Leigh Williams: is such a great question, and it's such an exciting time right now.

[Mic bleed]

So being able to leverage emerging technologies, particularly with those patient facing. Technology so that they are able to get very good, easy access to our services, but then also internally within the organization, leveraging robotic process automation, AI tools, anything that drives efficiency within the workforce.

And right now we are, our branding for our EHR implementation is called Care Reimagined. And our tagline is, imagine if. And we have challenge everyone here to think about what we want to be in the future. And then imagine if. We could make that happen. So one thing we have now is imagine if we needed to buy 10% of the paper that we bought last year, right?

Expanse is going to be the backbone. That we deploy. So next June when we go live on Expanse, we'll have this new toolkit that we can then integrate a lot of different technologies with. We're doing a lot of partnership with other organizations, regardless of which EHR they're on, to be able to have good patient data, patient information sharing, and to be able to have the tools that we need within our own health system.

Leigh Williams: Well, I work hard at that. It's important that there's trust. I think trust is an incredibly, big piece of how CIOs are able to transform the organization because we do push people into uncomfortable spaces and to do things in ways that are not how they've done it. And we've got, we have team members who have been here for two months and team members that have been here for 40 years.

So finding that middle ground of how do we make everyone feel comfortable and adjust the workflows and really adopt what we're trying to do That is. Something that I think a lot about and put a lot of energy into, and I do think it's an amazing opportunity to step forward as a technology leader who's really here to serve those caregivers so that they can do their best work.

180 8. What the experiences like how that, how your summer unfolds and how truly amazing that journey is gonna be for you. So with all of your experience and all of the incredible things you have teed up in your organization, what would you recommend to fellow and future healthcare leaders when they see, perhaps this is a time of the most unrest, it's harder to do things than ever before, and yet more important that we do it than ever before.

What would you say to them? So

That any kind of lack of understanding of what really is most important, that can absolutely derail projects. We have to make sure that we're all in on the same efforts and that we are not only rowing in the same direction, but on the same boat that we are all together with the chosen tactics, and that when we choose places to invest, we're gonna go all in and make sure that they are well adopted.

We don't have money to waste on. We do pilot and we will fail and say no if something isn't the right thing. But once we've decided to scale that we're going all in on something. It's really important that adoption is there and that takes unified, collaborative leadership. Helping move the organization forward.

And so tracking and making sure that you get that adoption and that you do see the improvements that you want to see. So right now, I am, a lot of people are building an amazing software system. I'm pretty focused on once we go live, how are we going to measure and make sure that our priority journeys, our patient journeys, our workflows for our team members, that those really are transformed and that we've achieved the promise of care reimagined.

Sarah Richardson: [Mic bleed]

I have to ask you, in closing, what is your imagine if.

And I think that's so critical because if we can do that, then we're going to improve the ability to provide all of the services in a caring, kind, compassionate way to our patients. So I look at it as the challenge is right now to deliver an improved digital workday with more efficiency. Bringing joy back into their day because they get to focus on patient care.

So leveraging ambient AI and other technologies to be able to allow our caregivers to do their best care work, and that will translate to patients who are satisfied, they're happy, they're bringing joy to their lives and a healthier community. So that's what I would say. Imagine if we could literally improve the digital day of every team member who works here.

And so thank you so much for sharing your insights and for also your journey with MEDITECH and beyond.

Leigh Williams: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to share, and it's going to be a challenging time over the next few years. Let's step up as technologists and capture this moment to really help the world

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Sarah Richardson: Could not agree more. Thank you for joining us and for all of you listening, thanks for tuning in and keep flourishing. That's all for now.

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