People

Preston Simons was most recently Chief Information Officer at Aurora Health Care, the largest healthcare provider and employer in Wisconsin, since 2015.  In that role, he led Aurora’s efforts to use data and innovative IT tools and services to deliver a person-focused, best-in-class integrated health care experience, and was responsible for every aspect of IT enterprise wide, including opportunity discovery, information strategy, applications development, infrastructure, business operations, cybersecurity, customer support, and IT investment portfolio management.

Prior to joining Aurora, Preston was CIO of Abbott Laboratories, a Fortune 100 medical device and life-sciences company.  He previously served as the IT leader in several health systems, a health insurance plan and in the pharmaceutical industry.  He also had significant responsibilities for the IT component of many acquisitions and divestitures, including the AbbVie spin-off from Abbott Laboratories in 2013.  Preston is a thought-leader in running shared services such as IT as businesses within a larger enterprises, and has pioneered systemic changes in organizational structure, culture, and resource-governance processes to develop empowered, customer-centric, entrepreneurial organizations.

Preston is a member of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society, and the Society for Information Management.  Additionally, he has had a leading role in the Chicago CIO Institute.  Preston holds a bachelor’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a master’s degree from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.  He is a member of the Board of Governers for the Opus College of Business of the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.