Director of IT Innovation

Encompass Health•Birmingham, AL

About The Position

Encompass Health is the leader in the inpatient rehabilitation industry, you’ll feel the Encompass Health difference as soon as you join. We collaborate and provide high-quality, compassionate, individualized care for our patients, allowing us time to get to know them and help them achieve their goals during their rehabilitation journey. Position Purpose The Director of IT Innovation is the senior-most leadership role responsible for the strategic pursuit of AI innovation and value creation in the enterprise. It is a transformative role that merges business acumen, strategic insight, innovation, and technological expertise to realize the full potential of AI beyond including and beyond automation and productivity improvement. The role is focused on driving AI transformation, improving enterprise AI literacy, creating AI strategies and evolving AI capabilities, implementing participative operating models, and codifying governance practices that reduce risk and increase differentiating business value. The Director of IT Innovation reports to the VP of Corporate Systems and BI and leads the strategic design and implementation of innovative IT solutions. This includes leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Generative AI (GenAI) to transform healthcare delivery, improve patient outcomes, and optimize operational efficiency.

Requirements

Minimum 10 years of HIT experience with proven experience in AI/ML deployment.
Preferably a bachelor’s or master’s degree in business administration, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); computer science; artificial intelligence; data science; information systems or related field; or equivalent work experience. Academic qualification or professional training and experience in legal and regulatory areas are also desirable.
Periodic travel required, cadence will determined by project need.
Oral communication, written communication, active listening. Must be able to speak and understand English.
Information ordering, deductive reasoning, social perceptiveness, time management, critical thinking.
Ability to coordinate, analyze, observe, make decisions, and meet deadlines in a detail-oriented manner.
Ability to work independently without continuous supervision.
The Director of IT Innovation understands business objectives and goals; has industry domain expertise and knowledge of AI concepts, methods, and techniques; and exhibits exceptional interpersonal and leadership skills, including:
Business and financial acumen: Understand business concepts, practices, and business-domain language deeply enough to engage in problem-solving sessions and discuss business issues in stakeholder language. Align AI initiatives with the organization's overarching vision, strategic goals, current market circumstances, and competitor activities. This includes understanding how AI will impact business objectives beyond financial metrics.
AI-driven business transformation: Understand how decision intelligence, agentic AI, and other AI practices/approaches/application areas can transform decision making and work practices. Articulate AI's transformative impact on current and future business objectives, including its potential to drive new business models, regenerate existing workflows, optimize operations, and deliver measurable value based on key performance indicators (KPIs).
AI industry knowledge: Leverage a comprehensive understanding of industry dynamics and the organization's core mission to pinpoint where AI can yield the most significant impact and competitive advantage, while also identifying relevant business risks and opportunities, including how AI can disrupt or extend existing business models.
Communication and influence: Bridge communication gaps and foster cross-functional synergy to align AI initiatives seamlessly across diverse business units and functions, ensuring maximum value realization, minimizing conflicting implementations, and effectively communicating complex AI topics to various stakeholders.
Regulatory and compliance: Familiar with regulatory requirements and relevant data protection laws and regulations, such as the EU AI Act, GDPR, and CCPA, and industry-specific standards.
Leadership: Proven track record of applying and orchestrating AI throughout an organization, leading complex, multidisciplinary talent teams in new endeavors and delivering solutions. Ability to balance team and individual responsibilities, build teams and consensus, get things done through others not directly under their supervision, and work ethically and with integrity. Be a self-starter with an entrepreneurial spirit that thrives in dynamic environments, able to build teams, execute influence strategies, and advance ideas.

Responsibilities

Accelerates AI-driven innovation and transformation by building and maintaining a vision for how AI will drive value aligned with strategic objectives by working with the Senior VP of Financial Operations, the SVP of Finance, the CIO, and other executives.
Fosters collaboration and bridges departmental gaps to develop cross-organizational and functional alignment in accordance with the enterprise AI vision. Establishes an internal and external AI ecosystem, building working relationships with vendors, partners, research institutes, regulators, industry associations, and other external stakeholders.
Establishes a world-class AI strategy and organization that aligns with the company’s overarching enterprise vision, including goal setting and measuring AI initiatives.
Defines the operating model and delivery capabilities to engineer and operationalize AI initiatives, overseeing the development and execution of advanced AI products and solutions, ensuring their scalable and seamless integration across the organization.
Participates Innovation governance board. Evolves responsible AI policies and governance programs to address AI’s unique regulatory and compliance requirements — especially data usage, model explainability, fairness, and privacy — while ensuring appropriate audit controls and adherence to ethical mandates. Establishes effective collaboration between security, risk, compliance, legal, ethics, safety, and other stakeholders to rapidly adapt practices as necessary.
Manages the AI portfolio and budget for AI initiatives, overseeing the allocation of resources for both current AI portfolios and long-term AI foundational capabilities. Establishes transparent AI portfolio evaluation and management practices to estimate, measure, and foster accountability for business value and ROI of AI initiatives.
Fosters and cultivates AI literacy across the enterprise, leading transformation efforts and developing change management programs.
Leads the strategy and creation of heuristics for build, buy, and blend
Key activities include ensuring AI solutions are integrated into the organization's architecture and managing the lifecycle of AI solution development
Ensure ethical and responsible AI use, including bias mitigation, explainability, and adherence to HIPAA, CMS regulations, and other applicable state and federal regulations.
Build and maintain strategic relationships with external partners to accelerate innovation

Benefits

Affordable medical, dental and vision plans for full-time and part-time employees and their families.
Generous paid time off that accrues over time.
Tuition reimbursement and continuing education opportunities.
Company-matching 401(k) and employee stock purchase plans.
Flexible spending and health savings accounts.
A community of people who love what they do. Yes, we see that as a benefit.

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