Brandon Gockley, the new chief information officer at the Iowa Clinic, serves as a change agent who brings a specific creative process to his role.

Get out of the office. 

“Sitting there doing emails is not a place to be creative,” he said. “You need to be somewhere outside of your environment. That could be while reading a book in the evenings or workouts, going on walks, I typically think of a lot of things on my walks, and just something pops in my head.”

In his new role, announced in April 2025, Gockley, 46, leads a team of 30 IT professionals working on technology strategy, drives modernization and supports operations for the multispecialty health care clinic with locations around Central Iowa.

Gockley was most recently CIO of the Lexington Clinic in Lexington, Ky.

He recently sat down with the Business Record to talk about innovation, changing culture and new tech tools in the workplace. 

Tell me about your role as chief information officer. What does that entail?

I started at the Iowa Clinic in April of ’25. I was brought in here to help modernize it. Traditionally, IT has been the legacy of the break and fix type of departments or you call someone about your computer being broken. That really doesn’t align with what organizations need in the future. They really need IT as a business partner to help solve complex problems. So my role as CIO is really a matter of being that strategic partner and collaborative partner. Bringing IT into conversations about these big, strategic initiatives, complex problems. … Sometimes it’s just little things such as manual processes. Is there a better way of doing things? Those are just quick and easy wins that you can gain right away from things. And there’s also the piece of adopting data and analytics and having those broader conversations around cybersecurity. I think [the] CIO is a collaborative partner that … specializes in IT, but really has that forefront on how the business will be functioning, not only current day, but the next three to five years. 

What is your technology strategy?

What we’re doing is a matter of getting rid of technical debt. That is just older systems, legacy applications, that type of stuff that really you just had along for a while. You keep things running because it runs. When you come in here and do the analysis on how things are operating, you come with a list of things that drain, either IT resources or energy of not accomplishing bigger strategies. The first year or two, that’s really what new CIOs come in and do, look at that [and] say, ‘Here’s what really just drains organization from an IT standpoint, or just drains the organization altogether.’ After that, you start lining up your strategy along with that. I tend to be a cloud-first person, meaning I don’t want to have a data center here. What I’d like to do is adopt newer technologies. That means we can run systems anywhere we want, and not rely upon one little room here in Des Moines, Iowa, to run primary applications. … And also just going back to data, just leveraging data and some newer technologies out there to help make educated or data-driven decisions, and then bringing the whole AI component — what are we doing with AI? That’s really an interesting conversation around AI, we see a lot of organizations adapting AI. Some organizations are not. Some are kind of putting a toe in there … so [I’m] really trying to guide that strategy here at the Iowa Clinic, what we want to do with AI.

How do you define innovation? 

[It’s] really just you have a problem and coming up with a creative way of solving the problem. … My history is in software engineering. We always joke in software and you’re writing code, there’s hundreds of ways to solve the problem. One is maybe a little bit better than others, but really, there’s still 100 ways of doing so. What is the right way of solving a problem? … When we have a problem, one of my skill sets is bringing a bunch of smart people into a room and talk about how we solve a problem. Typically I call these whiteboard sessions, and we just say, ‘Here’s a problem.’ If we currently are doing one thing, one way, understand the history. But then you erase all that. On a clean whiteboard, you say, ‘How do we want this to function?’ For me, it’s about not being the smartest person in the room. As I always joke, if I’m the smartest person in the room, I feel we’re losing the game.

How is innovation relevant in the medical setting?

Medical is interesting because traditionally, health care lags behind adopting newer technology. It’s just been that way for so long. AI is one of them. AI has been used in so many other fields for over a decade. Health care is coming in, utilizing it more and more. In fact, it’s on an accelerated pace. It’s more than just the typical AI. We’re using … some analytic apps, applications, cybersecurity, but really looking forward to what health care will do in the future. Radiology is one that is really interesting right now. It has capabilities of doing over-reads and identifying areas for radiologists to focus on key components. So as you watch some of the bigger players out there that are investing millions and millions in creating their own AI solutions, that will really be that turning point on health care. [An over-read is] let’s say you go to the emergency room and you get an X-ray. The emergency doctor can review it … but you wait for a radiologist to do the final report. So right now what happens is AI will over-read and do that first glance at it and make recommendations, but radiologists are doing the final report on it. At some point … you’re going to see it reverse where AI is doing a lot of the easy ones and allowing radiologists to focus on the complex items. 

Tell me your opinion on the Internet of Medical Things, having devices on your body, monitoring yourself and then giving that data back to the doctor. 

I see it as just additional data points that physicians don’t have at their fingertips right now to help make educated decisions. It could be an iWatch, an Oura ring or something like that. But the ability to wear those types of things and monitor your body during different times brings in things that may not be happening when you go see your doctor. Your body is doing something that’s keeping you up, but it’s not going to be doing it at 10 in the morning because you’re up and functioning. Trying to explain and tell your doctor what’s going on is one thing. But if you can actually see the data …  then that’s additional information that [doctors] don’t have readily available right now to understand what is truly happening in your body. I think that’s a big turning point of being able to use data to understand and make the right decisions on it. … We need to standardize the data and understand the privacy concerns regarding this, and people understanding what they’re signing up for and what information they’re willing to give. It’s like the ones that sign up for 23andMe, where they sign up to give their DNA to go look at all the stuff, and then when you see the financial issues that 23andMe ran into, and now who is going to own the data? Whoever buys them now has access to your data. And people may not have been thinking down the road what this is really going to do.

Is the Iowa Clinic using AI to record physician-patient interactions and write up reports, also known as ambient listening?

That’s actually something that I talked to several physicians about, trying to help them be champions so we can adopt it more here. My previous organization, we had great results on it. It’s a matter of reducing the number of hours they’re working per day. It’s really about reducing physician burnout. And I would also say it brings in the quality of the note as well, because you’re getting real-time documentation on it, you’re not having to think about that visit four or five hours later and trying to capture everything. AI, as I always tell people, probably depends on the accuracy of what you’re trying to do, but it can run upwards of 90%, 95% accurate on things, so you still need to go through and review your note and add the missing components or misspellings and whatnot, but really ambient AI is something that’s been around for a while. We’re on the third version of it, but the fact that cost factors came down so much is really helping the adoption rate.

So, it’s on a smaller scale here; where is it being used?

It’s kind of all over the place. It’s really an opt-in option right now at the Iowa Clinic for providers. I want to help shift that a little bit and just talk about … it more in terms of opportunities for physicians to really focus on the value of it instead of worrying about things they can’t do. But let’s talk about physicians that are really champions, that understand the value of it. This is where, before I got here, IT ran it and said, ‘Hey, doctors, you should really be doing this.’ So IT is telling physicians, ‘Hey, this is a great thing.’ … I want to shift this and have physician champions talk to their peers about the value-adds and then IT is there to help ensure that we can get it up and running for them.

How do you balance privacy with technology use in a medical setting?

As more and more vendors are hosting their solutions, truly understanding how and what they’re doing with our data is such a big item. In the event they’re going to use it in another way, we need to make sure our patients understand how they’re leveraging that data, because that comes into play with data breaches as well too. It may be a third party that has a data breach, however, where the customers [are] leveraging the system, it still comes back as a direct representation of the Iowa Clinic, and that’s hard for patients to understand the difference between the two. 

With ambient listening, are you comfortable that the third-party vendor is protecting health care data?

Yes, we have a whole process to evaluate vendors, how they store the data, their retention policies, if they’re doing any types of de-identification. [De-identification refers to the removal of personally identifiable information.]

How would you describe your leadership style? 

Collaboration was such a critical thing. We have an outstanding executive team here that really collaborates very well with one another. Outside of that, I wish that we say [that], to be a CIO, you need to be a change agent and you have to drive change. You can’t just sit back there and say, ‘We hope things change.’ You have to really drive it, sometimes, getting in the weeds with your team, and helping make sure things are going to be done, and understanding that there’s going to be some resistance. There’s always some sort of resistance, but it just helps driving that and making sure they have cover, like we are going this direction, we’re going to be fine. It’s going to be messy. Next thing, any change is messy, but that’s just a risk you’re willing to take as a CIO. It [has] to be done because it’s not about thinking about what we’re doing today or tomorrow. It’s what are we [going to] be doing in six months to 12 months? So it’s very messy at the beginning, but as things stabilize we’re able to adapt new technologies. Things get much better.

What’s the biggest thing you’re trying to change right now?

The biggest thing is the IT culture. But when you get into the traditional IT – break, fix and changing it over to business partner –  that is a huge uplift, and that typically takes a year to two years to get done. I’m coming into this where we had one way of IT running for 20, 25 years and shifting. It’s like we’re doing a complete 180 and we’re going to change everything we’re doing; that doesn’t happen overnight. So it’s a matter of making sure we have the right people with the right thought process on how we’re going to be running IT.

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At a glance

Education: Bachelor of science in computer science, University of Nebraska at Kearney; master of business administration, Northwest Missouri State University

Hobbies: Spending time with family. Hiking, camping, fishing, spending time outdoors. 

Family: Wife and four kids: three daughters, ages 14, 10 and 8, and a son, 12

Hometown: Sterling, Colo.

Resides: Urbandale 

Email: bgockley@iowaclinic.com