Inside Healthcare Computing, April 16, 2007 GALVESTON -- A consulting firm's financially-driven scrutiny of a hospital's IT department has derailed quite a few CIO careers. The last thing IT leadership needs is to have peers formally informed that the IT department is massively overstaffed, fiscally indifferent, and unable to produce even rudimentary documentation of strategic planning. Surprisingly, a consultant's harsh assessment with precisely those observations didn't trigger the dismissal of one academic medical center's IT executive. In fact, it gave him the ammunition to build a better department and raise his own executive level. The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, Texas, is the oldest of four health sciences universities in the UT system. Its campus complex, located on a barrier island on the gulf of Mexico, houses six hospitals, four academic schools, and 12,000 employees, with 41,000 patient admissions per year and an annual budget of $1.4 billion. But the breezes weren't always balmy in Galveston last year. Faced with a $20 million budget shortfall after government cutbacks and freshly armed with a goal of slashing $130 million in annual spending, UTMB brought in consulting firm Navigant to devise a financial turnaround.