Tech Leadership in State Hospitals: Insights from Andrew Hinkle

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Narrator

We're in an era of rapid change where resilience is vital. The Davood for Thought podcast dives into the most important topics in government and technology today. Our host, Davood Ghods, sits down with his vast network of colleagues to dish on the tech challenges that affect us all. Follow this podcast on your favorite platform and join the conversation by sharing it on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

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Davood Ghods

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Direct Technologies, the Davood for Thought podcast. I'm Davood Ghods and I will be your host today. The way I stay up with the pressing topics of tech and government of today is to tap into the panel of experts I've had the honor of connecting with over the years. Today we have Andrew Hinkle on the podcast.

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Davood Ghods

Drew is currently the chief information officer for the California Department of State Hospitals. He has held this position since September of 2019, but he has been with the department since 29 before becoming CIO. Drew was the chief information officer at DSH for about four years, where he managed the enterprise server and networking team as well as the client and field services team.

00;01;23;01 - 00;01;53;06

Davood Ghods

Before DSH, Drew was a consultant in the private sector and prior to that he held technology positions at the California Highway Patrol and the California Secretary of state. Drew has a bachelor of Arts degree from California State University, Sacramento, Go Hornets, and he is a graduate of the estate I.T. leadership Academy. Drew from one I.T. graduate to another.

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Davood Ghods

Thank you for accepting my invitation to be on our podcast. We would like to learn more about your background. And for someone who doesn't know about your area of expertise, please tell us about yourself. Department of State Hospitals and what are some of the things you're currently working on? Welcome.  

00;02;19;02 - 00;02;44;27

Andrew Hinkle

Hi, Davood. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to have a chat. Drew Hinkle I'm the CIO at the Department of State Hospitals. I've worked for the state of California in a couple of different stints for about 23 years total. I graduated from SAC State in the mid-nineties, so quite a while back and was lucky enough to get a job out of college for the Secretary of State. I'd been a student there for a couple of years and landed a permanent position a few months after graduation.

00;02;44;29 - 00;03;16;11

Andrew Hinkle

At Secretary of State, I worked on some pretty cool projects. I was part of a team that modernized their election management systems. The first piece was moving their voter registration system from like an old mainframe to a client server centralized system, which was like state of the art in the late mid to late nineties. The first piece was moving that the voter registration system into a power build or Oracle application phase two was to deploy kind of a candidate and election night reporting system and swap that out from another mainframe.

00;03;16;11 - 00;03;39;12

Andrew Hinkle

And that was Oracle and Java. And like I said at the time, this is all pretty cool stuff and it was fun technology to learn. On that team, I did a number of roles. I was a system administrator. I managed the backend servers, I wrote code, and that was sort of the advantage of being at a really small department for me is that I got to wear lots of hats and I learned so much in that role.

00;03;39;14 - 00;04;08;21

Andrew Hinkle

You know, I could be a security administrator one day, a system administrator another day, and a coder another day, and it was really almost for me, like a crash course into being a DevOps engineer, probably like 20 years before people actually start calling themselves dev ops engineer. So it was kind of neat at the time. From there I went to work for the Highway Patrol and I worked there in kind of a similar role, managing some infrastructure, writing code, building out public facing and some internal web applications for them.

00;04;08;24 - 00;04;25;15

Andrew Hinkle  

And I was only there for about two years, a little less than two years. For the next three, I did I.T. consulting and I did that with some friends. And I'd say that was like my ideal job at the time where I had a bunch of people that I really liked. And I we worked together well and we went from different kind of state.

00;04;25;15 - 00;05;00;18

Andrew Hinkle

The business we did on contracts when we, you know, spend nine months developing an application, a year developing an application and did a I did a lot of C-sharp, a lot of VB dot net. There were good times I learned it and grew a ton as an engineer. And then the economy crashed in 2009 and I joked that I think I had like $12 in my checking account by the end and needed My old boss at CHP was at the department of Mental Health and he said, You need to come back in and apply for a job with the state.

00;05;00;20 - 00;05;21;27

Andrew Hinkle

So I started at Mental Health, which is the predecessor for state hospitals in Twin Falls 2009, and I've been there ever since I came in thinking I was going to be be here for a couple of years and then I'd move. And it's been 12 plus years and I really enjoy every step of the way. I started as a developer and that was a great job.

00;05;21;27 - 00;05;57;10

Andrew Hinkle

There was tons of work to do, a lot of older systems that needed just basically replacing. That was just a good opportunity to dive in and really work. I enjoyed the folks that I worked with. I'd like all of our user community of nurses. It was a good group of folks. In 2012, Governor Brown was doing that realignment of state government and the group I was working on was getting realigned to a different department, and my CIO at the time came to me and said, Hey, do you want it used to be a like a system admin, Do you want to be a sysadmin again and stick around?

00;05;57;12 - 00;06;23;11

Andrew Hinkle

And I said, Yeah, that'd be awesome. So I kind of took a job as a full time sysadmin, you know, all the kind of Active Directory exchange backups, VMware security, all that kind of stuff. And then a couple of years after that, I had another CIO at the time who had moved in, gave me an opportunity to manage and be the director for what at the time was our largest I.T. project.

00;06;23;11 - 00;06;55;06

Andrew Hinkle

So it was our personal duress alarm system, which is basically like a security system that staff on the campuses where in case they have what we would call some kind of like the rest of them, but that could be like a patient, an unstable patient, like being physically aggressive with you. It could also be somebody you know, falls and breaks your leg or has a heart attack or something falls on you and you activate basically an RFID tag that tells the hospital, police and emergency responders where somebody is within if it's inside, it's within three meters.

00;06;55;06 - 00;07;21;17

Andrew Hinkle

If it's outside, that's within ten meters. So it's fairly accurate. And that was just I learned how to do projects at that point. It was a it was a good, good, good opportunities for me. And as I was finishing that, my my CIO retired and my CTO got his job and I applied for her job. And so I did four years as chief technology officer at state hospitals.

00;07;21;17 - 00;07;46;22

Andrew Hinkle

And that's honestly probably my favorite job that I've had, although I like my current job quite a bit too. But I just really enjoyed being in that kind of the technical, you know, being with the technical team, building out solutions. It was just a super fun experience and about, you know, two, two and a half years ago, my my boss decided to retire in about half that amount of time.

00;07;46;24 - 00;08;05;28

Andrew Hinkle

She kind of stuck around as sort of an advisor to me. So she'd come in a day or two week, she'd help me with some items, and then she'd do some projects that she wanted to finish before retirement. And it was actually kind of fun The day that my that I became acting CIO, I was in Tahoe getting married the next day.

00;08;05;28 - 00;08;30;17

Andrew Hinkle

So I had like a really good weekend. I got, I got like a little promotion on Friday and got married on Saturday and was this fun? So then about two years ago, almost exactly, I was appointed CIO and I've been in that position since in terms of DSH and we're a medical organization. We're the biggest State Department that nobody has heard of.

00;08;30;19 - 00;08;58;02

Andrew Hinkle

We've got 12,000 users. We serve about 6000 patients at a time and about 12,000 a year. So we're really about like clinical solutions. So the last couple of years we've been about COVID covered response, but a lot of medical and psychiatric psychological solutions. So right now, if I had to name a couple of big, big projects on our board, one is our pharmacy modernization.

00;08;58;04 - 00;09;25;17

Andrew Hinkle

This is going to standardize our pharmacy solutions from five nine, a standalone separate solutions into one one vendor, one version of the product, one way of doing everything. And so that for us, that's a big one as we kind of try and consolidate and have have more and more like one solution across 12,000 users as opposed to five solutions each across, you know, 2200 users.

00;09;25;19 - 00;09;53;29

Andrew HInkle

And then the second big project that's kind of on our radar and we've been working on this for a few years is our electronic medical records. So for this the we're in the were in power. We're in stage three of the project approval lifecycle right now. We have a rough schedule of getting into stage four, doing the solicitation sometime this spring and we're hoping that the contract is awarded by the spring of 23.

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Andrew Hinkle

The overall project itself is to buy kind of an off the shelf electronic medical record system and then build some pieces around the edges. Right? So the pieces would be kind of some custom scheduling components. It's going to include a forensic behavioral health module that's probably a little bit different than what we see in off the shelf Yamaha's we're going to have I mean, those are probably some of the some of the big components that we're going to be doing, but we'll do some integration with dental systems. We're going to have a tie into like court hearings, like electronic court hearings for the patient. So it's going to be a big project.

00;10;25;29 - 00;11;15;22

Davood Ghods

Excellent. Wow. Thank you, Drew, for going all the way back to your time as secretary of state, CHP and then Department of State Hospitals or what it was called the personal mental health, from DevOps to SysAdmin to CTO to CIO, and for giving us a snapshot of what DSH does and touching on the business of DSH grew in your ten plus years at DSH and your other experiences, what emerging trends are you seeing in the I.T. and business fields that we should all be paying more attention to these days technology wise?

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Andrew Hinkle

I'll bring up a couple and then I'll finish with kind of a non non tech area. So first of all, these are definitely not new and emerging, but these are super, super critical to me and my organization and especially with respect to the last couple of years and, and that's security and data. And honestly, COVID has been brutal on both of those for us.

00;11;39;17 - 00;12;09;21

Andrew Hinkle

We pushed thousands of folks remote in March of 2020. Our edge all of a sudden went from this kind of protected data center to people's home offices. And when I say thousands, I mean we probably pushed the ability for 6000 people to work remote. Now, we didn't have 6000 people at any given time working remote, but through VDI and deploying laptops, we probably have roughly about 6000 people that during during COVID have worked remote.

00;12;09;21 - 00;12;33;13

Andrew Hinkle

So I mean, to think about that, that's a that's a number bigger than most departments, right? That's a huge amount of remote staff. When we did this, we started noticing such an uptick in in what I would generally call like a bad guy intrusion attempts ever since. And it could be as simple as phishing. Somebody is trying to get credentials and we've got kind of a decent program on that.

00;12;33;15 - 00;13;01;15

Andrew Hinkle

But we saw unauthorized folks trying to get access to systems and they ranged from kind of like a generic knucklehead living in their parents basement to organizations that seem like they were a fairly sophisticated organization. And I'm really lucky we're lucky that our we have a mature information security office. When I started at Damage, the ISO was one person and that person basically did policy.

00;13;01;18 - 00;13;39;18

Andrew Hinkle

And that person, you know, recommended some things here. And let's try this to try that, but really had no kind of operational authority. The team now is ten folks, including some really high level technical staff, and they're responsible for security implementation, their policy, operational security processes. So I'm feeling like we have a fairly mature team in place right now, which is which is just necessary because we have seen such like I said, an increase in kind of malicious behavior definitely over the last two years.

00;13;39;21 - 00;14;01;17

Andrew Hinkle

But it's paid off. Right. My team, my my app team and my infrastructure team kind of work together with the security team. So in the older days, it was sort of let's not talk to the information security team, let's do our own thing. And then security became kind of a bolt on after the fact. Now it's kind of built in and integrated, but I think that's super important no matter what you're doing.

00;14;01;20 - 00;14;24;01

Andrew Hinkle

But we've got to build with security in mind. And then my my second technical piece I'd bring up is around data. COVID taught me that you have to have like a single source of truth should be one source of truth, not like for and it was actually amazingly difficult to do some things during COVID, like just how many vaccinations that we administer.

00;14;24;03 - 00;14;46;20

Andrew Hinkle

And it was for a couple of reasons. One, we had instances of folks having different systems to collect the same data. So when my boss or my director would come and say, Hey, can we build this in Tableau or publish this data, we would pull a set of information out of it. And then maybe my pharmacist would pull something that my hospital administration would pull something and none of us would match.

00;14;46;22 - 00;15;27;08

Andrew Hinkle

We would be we would be close. Like me, we're talking like fractions of a percent off maybe. But when you're dealing with thousands and thousands, it's noticeable. And what we found oftentimes is that we either had different systems or we had different business rules about how we interpret the data. And so that kind of showed the need. And I'd been kind of banging the drum of we need to have like a mature data organization, we need to put effort into this, we need to be data driven, we need to spend our time building these, you know, these systems of record and using data to make the right decisions as opposed to using, you know, a

00;15;27;08 - 00;15;46;11

Andrew Hinkle

gut instinct or a feeling. The feels great when you have a lot of experience. But in general, I think I'd rather have kind of the the data than make these decisions. The last thing I would say on kind of sort of a non technology front is I'm focusing on building out my workforce. So building out a hybrid workforce.

00;15;46;13 - 00;16;11;13

Andrew Hinkle

And I think people have to focus their leadership on that. How do you build out your organization? How do you develop a culture that they care about the mission, they care about the success of the organization, especially when they're probably 80 to 90 and right now 100% remote, like I have people that I haven't been into. We opened a new building in July and I haven't I have people that haven't been in there since July.

00;16;11;15 - 00;16;31;15

Andrew Hinkle

And so how do you how do you do that? Right. You've got to be mindful in in how you how you bring people into your culture, how you onboard folks, how you recruit, you know, how I mean, I can't I can't just throw out there all positions on on jobs at that gov and think I'm going to get like 100 good candidates.

00;16;31;20 - 00;16;56;11

Andrew Hinkle

Right? Right. Because like five years ago you could, but you can't anymore. Right? So so I think I am focusing and my leaders, my i.t. Leadership team, we're focusing a ton of time in trying to figure out how we make ourselves like a good destination employer. Somebody that other like technology, good technologists want to come and work for.

00;16;56;14 - 00;17;23;23

Andrew Hinkle

And that's just a huge take away with covid. It's it's how do we recruit, how do we keep people from not wanting to jump for the next thing? How do we make them like ingrained and engaged in the organization? Thank you. You're talking what we practice at direct technology. You know, we call ourselves the human side of token by finding the right workforce, the hybrid workforce. You're trying to fill that gap, the human side of tech.

00;17;23;26 - 00;17;51;27

Davood Ghods

Thank you, Drew. I think you would agree that adjusting to the pandemic was challenging for many organizations, and now everyone is thinking what the next major disruption is going to be and how can we better be prepared for it. So resiliency is a big topic of conversation these days, and I'm sure it's important to your organization. What are some examples of resilience you have seen in the past year and what is the one thing organizations should be doing to improve resilience?

00;17;51;29 - 00;18;21;07

Andrew Hinkle

I think we should automate and and write code to do things, and that's what we're kind of focusing on infrastructure, automation, code, automation and automation, automating simple tasks. We've purchased tools that allow us to do these things, and I call that toil right.

00;18;21;07 - 00;18;35;29

Andrew Hinkle

It's doing the same thing over and over again. I want to figure out how to write code. To do that, I want my guys to write something that if they do it twice, I want them to figure out how to write code to keep doing that. Right? And it helps me in a number of ways and I'll get to the resiliency.

00;18;36;01 - 00;19;01;16

Andrew Hinkle

But it helps, first of all, because it's a repeatable process I always have. I have a piece of software that always says the same thing the same way. And when I have a problem, it makes it so much easier to diagnose that problem and troubleshoot that problem. The second thing that it really does for me is that it allows me to take those people that are doing something right, like, was this as simple as creating an Active Directory account or resetting a password?

00;19;01;18 - 00;19;35;06

Andrew Hinkle

And it allows me to to now use them to deliver some other service. You know, a server administrator who used to build VMware servers and patch those now starts working on some other other project. Right. Because we have that automated and and even on a program side person that that is dealing with commitment packets from a local county jail and they their process is to take a PDF and slice it into five different ways and upload it to five different systems.

00;19;35;11 - 00;19;54;25

Andrew Hinkle

We can put some RPA tool there to help with that. Right. And then that person now, you know, that's a force multiplier for that group and that person can now focus on other tasks and what it really does for me in this gets back to the resiliency is it allows me to quickly react when there's some kind of disruption in the environment.

00;19;54;28 - 00;20;13;27

Andrew Hinkle

So when I have these automated processes in my tool kit and I have, let's just say, like a server outage at one of my sites, right? So I have five hospitals and each one has some kind of flavor of a server room with, you know, a course switch and some compute, right. That that allows to have local services.

00;20;13;27 - 00;20;38;05

Andrew Hinkle

But if there's an outage there, I have the ability to to basically bring up a system in kind of a dark mode at another location and have some automation in there that changes the IP addresses, you know, sets the right DNS entries, firewallrules, all that kind of stuff. And all of a sudden I can get a system back up and running in in minutes and not like hours or a day or two, right? It makes it so much more resilient for me.

00;20;38;08 - 00;21;09;15

Davood Ghods

Excellent. I'm glad to hear that organizations within the state are ready for some type of a natural disaster, like a flooding, earthquake, fires, some kind of disruption. It could be a technology disruption like a widespread computer virus or a cyber attack, or it could be a disruption similar to what we experienced last January, a civil unrest that you need to be prepared for.

00;21;09;17 - 00;21;32;21

Davood Ghods

That's great. What a switch a little bit on you and talk a little about it's about motivation, but the technology, we always talk about how we're going to get the project done, but we also ask ourselves, why are we doing what we are doing? What is your why, Drew, what motivates you in your work?  

00;21;32;21 - 00;21;52;18

Andrew Hinkle

I have a few ways. I would say the first of all, I mean, at the core of Health and Human Services, we take care of people. So it's a super easy team to be on, right? You feel good at the end of the day about helping human beings out? State hospice is a little different because we take care of folks who are a lot of times are criminally committed to us and can be violent in some instances.

00;21;52;24 - 00;22;20;03

Andrew Hinkle

But still we want to take care of that. We want to rehabilitate those folks. But I also kind of get get excited about providing systems that take care of our staff and keep them safe, providing the right levels of security, safe environment. That means something to us for me. Secondly, I've been here so long that a lot of these folks on my team have been coworkers and some are even friends for a number of years.

00;22;20;05 - 00;22;38;21

Andrew Hinkle

So I want to see the folks on my team grow. I want to see them continue to move up in their careers like I moved up in mine. So I'm really focused on putting my team in positions that they can stretch and grow and ultimately succeed. And that gives me a ton of motivation when we're trying to kind of plan out what we're doing.

00;22;38;21 - 00;23;00;15

Andrew Hinkle

And then honestly, the last thing is probably just at my core, I'm somewhat competitive, so I want to try to do things a little better and quicker than others, and I want to implement sustainable systems. And I've been lucky that I've had multiple really, really good CIOs that have taught me over the years and the competitive person to me wants to be better than them.

00;23;00;17 - 00;23;21;14

Andrew Hinkle

I want to do things and say, Oh, this is great when he was here, but it been improve tenfold here now. And you know, that's just part of who I am. And I want whoever takes over for me when I retire or move on to something else. I want that person to build on what I've done and just keep building up as well.

00;23;21;17 - 00;23;56;01

Davood Ghods

That's great. Living it better than you found. It was fantastic. Taking care of the people and doing succession planning right here. So that's good. That's excellent. Let's talk about the innovation, but only just innovation. But what inspires innovation on your team? You've had teams at different organizations and small, large. What inspires innovation on your team?  

00;23;56;01 - 00;24;31;00

Andrew Hinkle

I think first of all, people need to believe in the mission of the department and being brought into that mission that drives the desire to excel and then that desire. A lot of times it's going to breed innovation. So someone might be doing the same thing over and over again, but if they have that desire to really fine tune their craft and get better and better, that's going to lead to and lead to innovate. And I think autonomy is going to drive it as well. I think having the ability not to be siloed into I'm just a coder or I just manage DNS or I manage servers or something like that, but I have the ability to move across multiple domains and really like spec out and build solutions.

00;24;31;00 - 00;24;53;06

Andrew Hinkle

I think is is really good at state hospitals. I mean, I was saying earlier we were a large organization, but our I.T. department is not that large, right? So we have 12,000 staff and I only have a little over 200 employee I.T. employees. So I have to have a bunch of people that are like integrators. And these are guys that can do five or six things really well.

00;24;53;08 - 00;25;15;10

Andrew Hinkle

And when they and when you give them that ability, I found a lot of times they come up with some of the best solutions, right? Because they they geek out on something and they say, Oh, I'm going to try this, I've tried this. And it you know, that ability not to be siloed allows individuals to kind of think outside the box and innovate.

00;25;15;13 - 00;25;38;19

Andrew Hinkle

And then probably the other thing too, is making sure you hire the right mindset, you know, people with the right mindset. So we talk on our leadership team about growth minded individuals, right? People that want to excel, people that want to kind of go from A to B to C, they want to get better and look at new ways of doing something that's that'll bring innovation to that screw.

00;25;38;22 - 00;26;02;04

Davood Ghods

That's true. All of those things bring innovation and inspires the staff to be innovative. Know a little about your background and what your interests are. What what is something that would surprise people about your background or interests? Yeah, I don't know if it's surprise ing or not, but I don't have a computer science degree. I have a political science degree.

00;26;02;06 - 00;26;20;12

Andrew Hinkle

When I was working as a student secretary of State, I thought for sure I was going to go to law school and then get a job working in the Capitol. That was what was really interesting to me up until maybe the end of my senior year. And then I was really interested in being done with college. And then I sort of just got into computers on my own.

00;26;20;12 - 00;26;39;18

Andrew Hinkle

I built my own. I in the mid late nineties, I started running Linux on my home computer. I'm fact, I still run it on my laptop at home, but I always felt like having that poli sci degree was like a not embarrassing but like a like a step down. Like, I wish like every time I went up, I would have gone back to school.

00;26;39;18 - 00;27;02;26

Andrew Hinkle

I did a computer science degree, but then finally I got into my current role and I'm like, Oh, that political science degree actually helps me out now, right? I can. Right. Okay. I know how government works. I know how the budget works. So I feel good about having that as a foundation at this point. And then if you want a real fun fact, I have an identical twin brother, but he doesn't work in.

00;27;02;27 - 00;27;28;14

Andrew Hinkle

I did not know that they don't get thinner than I am to that. So yeah, well, on that first one, you know, not having a computer science degree, but you've been in the trenches in I.T., so you've gotten it from experience and actually doing it in order to be a successful government. CIO These days, you have to be a little bit of a technocrat also.

00;27;28;17 - 00;27;59;01

Andrew Hinkle

And that I'm sure that political science degree has come handy at times. Yeah, definitely true. Where can people find you and keep tabs on what you're working on? How can people support your work? Yeah, or are bigger projects are reportable so you could definitely find information about them at CDC. Right. And I would also say people that that work well with us also typically look at what's released in the governor's budget, for example.

00;27;59;01 - 00;28;36;28

Andrew Hinkle

So look on Jan ten to see what's coming up. There's definitely going to be a number of initiatives that have its components to them. I would say also when when the state like we've done a big workgroup statewide around folks who are incompetent to stand trial and they're remanded in custody so that they can regain competency and go to the court, our director led that group and I had a couple of partners that reached out and said, Hey, I've been listening into what Stephanie's been saying and and I've got some suggestions like, that's a super great way to get in the mix, right?

00;28;36;28 - 00;28;56;14

Andrew Hinkle

Like a suit. Like, Hey, I've heard your problem. I think I've got some some ways to help with that. And then in general, I'd say partners or vendors or, you know, whoever they really want to do work with us. So the most successful ones, they spend their time building interest from from my team and not coming to me.

00;28;56;14 - 00;29;23;15

Andrew Hinkle

So they don't come and say, Hey, Drew, I want you to buy this for your team. They go to my, you know, server administrator or security engineer or something and say, Hey, we think you have this is a need. We've gotten to know you. We know that this is your these are some of your pain points. And then that person, you know, talks to their boss or talks to their boss, who talks to like my CTO, who talks to me about some new cool technology or solution that that that that we should implement it.

00;29;23;15 - 00;29;41;26

Andrew Hinkle

And I just I really like having it that way as opposed to, you know, somebody that knows me or doesn't even know me. But comes right to me and says, Hey, I think you should buy whatever for your organization. And I always tell them, like, don't sell to the CIO, sell to the the for the network team or the team.

00;29;41;26 - 00;30;13;24

Davood Ghods

Don't they sell it to me? You like you sell to them and they'll sell to me and then I'll find the money for it. That's right. Thank you. Thank you for sharing all those insights. And thank you so much for joining us today. Drew. Thank you to all the listeners out there for joining us as well. We will see you in the next episode of Davood for Thought, where we will shed more light on the human side of tech.

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