Erik Gerard

Erik has deep background in high-availability and large-scale healthcare IT, and for more than 25 years, he has helped healthcare organizations optimize technology investments and provide innovative and enhanced business capabilities.

It is important that we build strong relationships that align business strategies with people, processes, and technology to provide a competitive advantage.”

About Erik

Erik brings more than 25 years of technology solutions experience as he helps healthcare institutions design technical strategy and implement technical modernization and improvement initiatives. He collaborates with clients to create technical road maps, optimize technology investments, and provide innovative and enhanced methods of delivering business capabilities.

Erik leads large, complex client engagements to identify, design, and implement creative business and technology solutions. He identifies key client business issues, determining client needs by supplementing the standard assessment techniques and tools with innovative approaches, and evaluating and validating analyses and developing recommendations for the client in the context of the overall engagement.

Among Erik’s expertise is advising chief information officers and chief technology officers, electronic health record (EHR) hosting options analysis, EHR deployments, Epic technical reviews, and Epic Hyperdrive transition planning, interim leadership, and cloud computing.

Throughout his career, Erik has:

• Implemented a cloud and utility computing model for a managed care consortium, generating $8.6 million and 160 kilowatts of savings in the first eight months and achieving significant improvements to system uptime, including the turnaround of a Citrix environment to secure 99.99% availability. He also supported 40% growth while realizing a 47% reduction in downtime for 2,700 Citrix servers running 75,000 concurrent sessions across 200,000 endpoints in 600 locations.
• Worked with over a dozen clients to help them determine the optimal hosting solution for their Epic EHR (on premises, vendor hosted, private cloud, or public cloud). In the process, he has amassed a significant selection of key decision criteria that are used to augment each client's top considerations and concerns, ensuring they can make as informed a decision as possible.
• Driven technical research, engineering, design, and corporate standards for a nonprofit academic medical center in Ohio. As chief architect, he designed, tested, and implemented enterprise migration strategies and played key leadership and technical roles in multiple enterprisewide projects aligning IT operations with industry best practices.
• Served as interim chief technology officer for a 12-hospital, 200-site healthcare system and health plan, providing technology strategy and operational leadership, including design, delivery, and support of all IT services, the management of complex infrastructure, relationship management, systems engineering, and budget development, as well as successfully guiding the technology teams through an audit by the U.S. Inspector General’s office. He designed a new organizational structure for 250 enterprise architects, engineers, business analysts, and project managers and successfully managed $82 million of capital and operational budget.
• Served as interim director of enterprise architecture for an eight-hospital, 100-clinic healthcare system and health plan, successfully leading three disaster recovery exercises (Epic, Lawson, Facets) and refining the intake and prioritization processes to optimize resources and increase throughput.

Before joining Huron, Erik served as the senior manager (director) of enterprise engineering at Kaiser Permanente, a senior system engineer at the Cleveland Clinic, a manager of emerging solutions and health information technology services (HITS) at Deloitte, and a principal at Impact Advisors. He also has held the role of healthcare strategist at Dimension Data and business partnership director at Avery Dennison, a materials science manufacturer and distributor.