Profiles in IT: Health Sciences Technology's Colby Reese
In the health sciences, technology is woven into patient care, research, and training the next generation of healthcare providers. We interviewed Senior Director of Health Sciences Technology (HST) Colby Reese to get a view into the specialized world of technology in the health sciences.
About Colby
As senior director, Colby provides strategic direction for the IT services supporting the unique academic, administrative, clinical, and research needs of the Health Sciences schools institutes and centers.
Colby has served in various IT roles at the University of Minnesota since 1998, specializing in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA)-compliant services and advancing clinical research and care through technology. He holds a Master of Science in Managing Information Technologies from the University of Minnesota.
Interview
Interviewer: In higher education, IT is often viewed as a utility—like electricity—that people only notice when it stops working. How do you work to shift that mindset within Health Sciences, positioning your team as strategic partners rather than just a support desk?
Colby: Academic medicine operates as a complex ecosystem—integrating University systems, hospital partners, and clinical practice plans—where the tripart mission is expressed through diverse strategic goals. Within Health Sciences Technology (HST), our strategy is to capitalize on the University's robust central IT resources, such as Office of Information Technology (OIT) enterprise services and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) high-performance computing, while providing the connective tissue and "last mile" service delivery. This approach is deeply rooted in the collaborative culture we have across IT@UMN.
Our organizational structure employs a shared services model, featuring specialized teams with expertise in areas such as data engineering, application development, project management, compliance, HIPAA infrastructure & operations, solutions architecture, clinical applications, and an OIT user support team that specializes in supporting students, faculty and staff who interact with Protected Health Information (PHI) and/or federal HIPAA regulations. Members of these teams are organizationally connected to the UMN IT ecosystem in how they work, but embedded into the unit or project they work on. By maintaining close proximity to the mission, we ensure that our technical functions are directly aligned with the strategic outcomes prioritized by the various colleges, centers, and institutes we serve.
Interviewer: Can you share a specific moment where you saw your team’s work directly impact a researcher's discovery or a student's clinical experience?
Colby: Like many at the University of Minnesota, I am driven by our mission, and I find the most meaning in the measurable ways we improve the health of our community. Our collaboration with the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB) is a prime example of this impact. In these initiatives, our primary focus is on gathering, refining, and standardizing diverse data sets, including phenotype and imaging data, to facilitate interventional research that supports children with neurodivergent conditions. These complex projects require coordination across numerous sites nationally to manage both structured and unstructured information.
Such work is inherently collaborative; we partner with the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) for informatics and computational power, Ed Tech & Innovation (ETI) for specialized development, and a broad range of Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts and tools. Beyond advancing our institutional cloud transformation, these projects expand diagnostic and treatment access to underserved and rural regions, ensuring critical early intervention for youth with neurodivergent conditions.
Interviewer: From your vantage point, what is something the broader IT@UMN community can learn from the unique pressures of Health Sciences, and conversely, what has your team adopted from central or other collegiate IT units that made you better?
Colby: Supporting the health sciences mission requires navigating the inherent tension between strict, HIPAA-regulated data management and the diverse, distributed nature of our work in research and clinical operations. For the broader IT@UMN community, there may be value in seeing the processes by which we maintain this extra rigor without compromising the agility required for technology-intensive efforts, given the general cybersecurity landscape and trends.
Conversely, our dual role, HST functioning as a collegiate-focused unit while being integrated with OIT, has provided a deeper understanding of how enterprise-level decisions are made, funded, and supported. By leaning into enterprise services like hosting, storage, and—increasingly—cloud enablement, we are able to reduce local expenditures and dedicate more of our capacity to the unique, specialized needs of the health sciences. I also find immense value in our cross-collegiate partnerships, whether navigating cloud transformation with the Carlson School or exploring AI initiatives with the Graduate School and the College of Science and Engineering.
Ultimately, I hope our institutional IT providers see their own contributions reflected in the mission objectives we serve, as advancing academic health and research truly relies on the collective capabilities of the entire institution.
Interviewer: What are some of the projects you and your team are excited about for the upcoming year?
Colby: In collaboration with Microsoft and AWS, we are launching a Proof of Concept designed to modernize our data orchestration and research pipelines. This cloud transformation project aims to accelerate the pace of clinical research, decrease the workload for data brokers, and optimize our infrastructure support. As we potentially seek broader health system partnerships throughout the state, these foundational improvements will allow us to expand our clinical data acquisition and collaborative efforts.
We are also prioritizing the modernization and consolidation of the clinical portfolio at Boynton Health. By adopting an Electronic Health Record (EHR)-managed services strategy, we aim to mitigate risk, simplify the current portfolio, and significantly improve the experience for both patients and providers. Furthermore, as modern EHR platforms increasingly integrate research functionalities, this initiative will provide valuable returns in the areas of clinical simulation and teaching. This is the first step towards a unified patient record for university run clinics.
Lastly, our team is maturing compliance and governance across the health sciences by enhancing SaaS management, inventory tracking, and regulatory adherence. By establishing a robust compliance baseline, we aim to implement a more flexible, trust-based model for roles that have a lower risk of interacting with Protected Health Information (PHI).