Susan Hollabaugh, Chief Information Officer, RadNet, Inc.

When Susan Hollabaugh was earning a political science degree and studying economics and public administration at James Madison University in Virginia, she aspired to one day serve as U.S. Secretary of State, like Madelaine Albright.

Fortunately for RadNet, Hollabaugh’s professional trajectory veered from politics towards Information Technology (IT). Today she helps lead the company as its Chief Information Officer (CIO).

Throughout Hollabaugh’s career growth, though, Dr. Albright has remained a trail-blazing inspiration to her, particularly with respect to learning. Albright often spoke of the necessity of lifelong learning, active listening, and the pursuit of knowledge.

“You can’t just be passionate without knowing the facts, and facts are really boring without passion,” Dr. Albright once said.

A keen desire to learn has been a passionate and necessary ingredient in Hollabaugh’s career success.

Early in her career she landed a job at the Help Desk of Health Communication Services, a subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield, a national health insurance company, by teaching herself to write batch files and learn the language of standardize claims forms—requirements for the job. In just a few short years, the internet was rapidly evolving business functions and Hollabaugh learned the rules and regulations around healthcare, IT and advocacy.

In the mid-1990s the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was adopted as a new standard for privacy and security compliance. HIPAA requirements involved creating transaction code sets for every billing transaction, ultimately changing the healthcare finance and IT landscape nationwide. Hollabaugh had already been studying the intersection of the regulatory world with IT, and this advanced her career to project management. Making sense of the standardized requirements coupled with developing myriad unique coding systems for healthcare insurance companies to build into their software, was daunting, and exciting. To this day, Hollabaugh particularly enjoys breaking down complex challenges and finding “missing pieces to the puzzle.”

While working at Professional Office Systems, a subsidiary of the National Capital Blue Cross Blue Shield offices in the late 1990s, Hollabaugh’s responsibilities included leading quality analysis and regulatory work, and the requirements gathering, and implementation teams, in addition to credentialing for electronic data interchange (EDI) in medical billing, streamlining administrative and financial processes to reduce errors and improve efficiency in the revenue cycle.

Fast forward to 2002 – Hollabaugh’s growing body of regulatory and IT skillsets landed her a director position in revenue cycle management at Radiologix, Inc., a mid-sized imaging services company that was acquired by RadNet four years later. Over the past 24 years, Hollabaugh has helped RadNet grow from approximately 150 outpatient imaging centers and 6,000 employees to more than 430 centers and roughly 11,000 employees in the U.S. Her path at RadNet evolved from National Director for Reimbursement Operations Systems to director positions in clinical interoperability, and clinical system solutions, to Vice President for Regulatory Analysis and Conformance before becoming CIO in 2025.

When asked to look back at her career and share something important she’s learned, Hollabaugh said a key learning that has been reinforced throughout her career, is that there is always another “next thing,” and it’s OK to take a chance on something new. “You may get a bloody nose occasionally, but the nimbleness of trying new things will carry you further,” she said.

Today, in addition to enjoying the people she works with directly, and throughout the company, Hollabaugh said she loves the challenges of a constantly evolving business. “Every day brings a new opportunity to learn.”