Clinical Application Director

Emerus Holdings, Inc.; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Emerus Holdings, Inc. seeks a Clinical Application Director to own the roadmap and lifecycle for clinical systems outside the EHR, including radiology, pharmacy, laboratory, and clinical operations applications and their integrations.

This executive role partners with joint venture health system counterparts, the EHR team, and vendor partners to ensure safe, efficient, and financially sound care across markets while establishing standards, governance, training, and go-live support across markets.

Qualifications

• Active clinical license or credential with patient care experience.
• 10+ years in healthcare IT with at least 5 years leading teams.
• Ownership of clinical application build, configuration, testing, and release.
• Experience with at least one EHR implementation through go-live.
• Understanding of clinical workflows across ED, inpatient, pharmacy, and lab.
• Master's degree or equivalent and familiarity with interoperability standards.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap for clinical applications surrounding the EHR, including radiology, pharmacy, laboratory, and clinical operations apps and integrations.
• Establish standards for application design, configuration, validation, and release.
• Develop and communicate a strategic direction for the clinical application portfolio.
• Translate technology strategy into actionable plans for clinical and operational leaders.
• Serve as the senior contact for health system partners regarding clinical systems operated by Emerus.
• Align clinical applications with partner clinical standards and governance.
• Coordinate with partner teams responsible for the EHR.
• Establish and maintain configuration standards, change control, downtime procedures, and support boundaries.
• Maintain effective partnerships throughout hospital construction, opening, and steady-state operations.
• Lead the clinical application workstream for new neighborhood hospitals.
• Support partner design sessions, configuration, integrated testing, training, go-live command centers, and post-live stabilization.
• Develop repeatable configuration and validation processes that improve efficiency across successive hospital openings.
• Ensure clinical applications are prepared to support fixed construction and licensure-driven activation timelines.
• Build, coach, and develop clinical application analysts and informatics resources.
• Assess team capabilities and close gaps through hiring, certification, mentoring, and structured development.
• Establish clear performance expectations and provide direct feedback.
• Develop analysts into leads and leads into managers.
• Establish consistent standards across radiology, pharmacy, laboratory, clinical operations applications, integrations, and clinical application support.
• Clinical Quality, Safety, and Optimization
• Partner with clinical leadership on application and workflow design.
• Reduce unnecessary variation and clinician burden while maintaining patient safety.
• Own intake and prioritization of clinical change requests.
• Measure optimization outcomes and discontinue changes that do not produce desired results.
• Partner with interoperability, business intelligence, revenue cycle IT, infrastructure, security, and project management.
• Ensure clinical application changes align with interfaces, charge capture, reporting, access management, and broader technology initiatives.
• Escalate risks early and communicate them clearly.
• Maintain shared accountability for cross-functional outcomes.
• Maintain change control, validation evidence, and documentation required for regulatory, accreditation, and partner audits.
• Ensure compliance with HIPAA and applicable state hospital licensure standards.
• Manage clinical application vendors and consulting partners against defined scope, service levels, and budgets.
• Hold vendors and consultants to established internal performance standards.

Skills

Healthcare IT leadership

EHR lifecycle ownership

Vendor management

Interoperability HL7/FHIR

Executive communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in nursing/health informatics/info systems

Master's degree or equivalent + certifications

Tools

Epic certification

Cerner certification

Job description

Emerus builds and operates neighborhood hospitals in joint venture partnership with leading health systems. Each partnership carries its own clinical standards and its own expectations for how care is documented and measured, which makes the clinical application function central to how quickly a new hospital opens and how well it performs once it does. The Clinical Application Director owns that function for the clinical systems that sit outside the electronic health record: the design, configuration, optimization, and ongoing support of the radiology, pharmacy, laboratory, and clinical operations applications and integrations our physicians, nurses, and ancillary staff rely on at the bedside. This includes managing contracts for these applications, managing budgeting for upgrades, etc for each application. Manages communication with executives regarding production issues or outages. The director manages relationships with each of the vendors that support the applications. This is a leadership role for a clinician-turned-technologist. We are looking for someone who has practiced or worked at the point of care, who understands why a poorly designed system or workflow drives clinician burnout, and who has since spent a decade leading and developing the teams that fix those problems. The director partners closely with our joint venture health system counterparts, with the partner teams that own the electronic health record, with Emerus clinical operations, and with revenue cycle and interoperability leadership so the application portfolio supports safe, efficient, and financially sound care across every market we serve. The director submits SBARs to the partner for projects that are requested from operation leadership to interface/extract data from the EHR and coordinated the correct internal Emerus team on the technical specs for these projects.

Basic Qualifications

• Direct clinical experience, evidenced by an active or previously held clinical license or credential such as RN, pharmacist, respiratory therapist, laboratory or imaging professional, or physician, with time spent delivering patient care.
• Ten or more years of progressive experience in healthcare information technology, including at least five years leading teams, with a clear record of raising the capability of the people and teams inherited.
• Demonstrated ownership of clinical application build, configuration, testing, and release in a hospital or health system environment.
• Experience leading or materially supporting at least one EHR implementation, activation, or major upgrade through go-live and stabilization.
• Working knowledge of clinical workflow across emergency, inpatient, pharmacy, laboratory, and imaging settings, and of how those workflows drive documentation, orders, and charge capture.
• Bachelor's degree in nursing, clinical discipline, health informatics, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience in a joint venture, managed services, or multi-owner hospital environment where clinical systems are shared with a partner organization.
• Certification or practical depth in both Epic and Cerner, or experience migrating a facility from one platform to the other.
• Emergency department or freestanding hospital experience, where small teams cover a broad clinical scope.
• Master's degree in nursing, health informatics, business, or a related field, or a credential such as RN-BC informatics certification, CPHIMS, or CHCIO.
• Familiarity with interoperability standards including HL7 and FHIR, and with how clinical data flows into reporting, quality measures, and the revenue cycle.

Essential Job Functions

• Own the roadmap for clinical applications surrounding the EHR, including radiology, pharmacy, laboratory, clinical operations applications, and integrations.
• Establish standards for application design, configuration, validation, and release.
• Develop and communicate a strategic direction for the clinical application portfolio.
• Translate technology strategy into actionable plans for clinical and operational leaders.
• Serve as the senior contact for health system partners regarding clinical systems operated by Emerus.
• Align clinical applications with partner clinical standards and governance.
• Coordinate with partner teams responsible for the EHR.
• Establish and maintain configuration standards, change control, downtime procedures, and support boundaries.
• Maintain effective partnerships throughout hospital construction, opening, and steady-state operations.
• Lead the clinical application workstream for new neighborhood hospitals.
• Support partner design sessions, configuration, integrated testing, training, go-live command centers, and post-live stabilization.
• Develop repeatable configuration and validation processes that improve efficiency across successive hospital openings.
• Ensure clinical applications are prepared to support fixed construction and licensure-driven activation timelines.
• Build, coach, and develop clinical application analysts and informatics resources.
• Assess team capabilities and close gaps through hiring, certification, mentoring, and structured development.
• Establish clear performance expectations and provide direct feedback.
• Develop analysts into leads and leads into managers.
• Establish consistent standards across radiology, pharmacy, laboratory, clinical operations applications, integrations, and clinical application support.
• Clinical Quality, Safety, and Optimization
• Partner with clinical leadership on application and workflow design.
• Reduce unnecessary variation and clinician burden while maintaining patient safety.
• Own intake and prioritization of clinical change requests.
• Measure optimization outcomes and discontinue changes that do not produce desired results.
• Partner with interoperability, business intelligence, revenue cycle IT, infrastructure, security, and project management.
• Ensure clinical application changes align with interfaces, charge capture, reporting, access management, and broader technology initiatives.
• Escalate risks early and communicate them clearly.
• Maintain shared accountability for cross-functional outcomes.
• Maintain change control, validation evidence, and documentation required for regulatory, accreditation, and partner audits.
• Ensure compliance with HIPAA and applicable state hospital licensure standards.
• Manage clinical application vendors and consulting partners against defined scope, service levels, and budgets.
• Hold vendors and consultants to established internal performance standards.

Other Job Functions

• Active Epic certification in one or more clinical applications, such as ClinDoc, ASAP, Orders, Willow, Radiant, or Beaker, with demonstrated production build and optimization experience.
• Oracle Health/Cerner certification or equivalent formal credential in Cerner Millennium clinical applications, with willingness to obtain Epic certification within the first year.
• Hands-on Epic build experience without formal certification, with the ability to demonstrate personally configured, tested, and released builds.
• Provides all application systems support after hours as an escalation resource to department staff
• Travel to all facility locations as required.