The executive who ran IT for Coca Cola is coming to WellPoint to oversee and optimize technology across health plans and other, evolving businesses, including one advanced project with high expectations.
Thomas Miller, SVP and CIO at Coca Cola Refreshments, will join WellPoint in May as CIO, with responsibility for all of the company's IT initiatives -- at a time when technology is more integral than ever to the health and insurance industries, said Gloria McCarthy, WellPoint's chief administrative officer.
"It shapes the way we interact with our customers, it allows us to analyze big data in ways we never have before, and it provides us the opportunity to create innovative tools that will help our provider partners make the best health care decisions for their patients," McCarthy said in a media release.
Miller brings an "in-depth experience in multiple disciplines" that "will allow WellPoint to harness the technologies that are available today, and plan for the groundbreaking technologies of the future," McCarthy said.
Miller spent more than 30 years at Coca Cola, first working for the global beverage conglomerate as a delivery driver in Michigan during college, then working in sales before moving to IT.
During the past two decades Miller did at Coca Cola what many healthcare organizations, especially health systems, are doing now: integrating IT systems and standardizing business processes as a route to more efficient operations and as a foundation for innovation.
After working on the IT side of Coca Cola's European expansion around the turn of the century, Miller returned to the U.S. and helped deploy an internet-based software-as-a-service platform across the company's bottling operations.
Now, in his first foray into insurance and healthcare, Miller is joining a company with a presence in multiple parts of the evolving healthcare economy, with a strategy that's heavy if not dependent on technology.
WellPoint's Amerigroup company in Nevada recently became the first Medicaid plan in the nation to use a health record chip that runs on both ID cards and mobile platforms. Its CareMore Health System subsidiary is offering risk management and coordinated care services to providers, with a recent deal inked with Emory Healthcare Network.
And there are high hopes for a partnership with IBM to use the Watson intelligence system to reduce administrative burdens for WellPoint's health plans and network clinicians, while also creating a platform for better treatment decisions. So far, WellPoint has been using Watson for automated prior authorization, as well as sponsoring a Watson project at Cedars Sinai to develop evidence-based decision support systems for cancer care.
Miller will be overseeing all of those initiatives as well as routine IT operations that present their own challenges, like insurance exchange enrollment and payment systems and the ICD-10 migration.
Miller is replacing Andrew Lang, who left WellPoint 2013 to take on the role of CIO at the information services company Wolters Kluwer.