Hugh Lambert is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. In college he studied Business Administration and had a career in hospitality, and for a few years managed a restaurant in St. Thomas. Losing interest in the restaurant field he then became an industrial electrician and a commercial fishing captain. While running a small electrical contracting business in the mid ‘80s he was hired by a computer company to install network cables in a business. I’ve been in IT ever since. I quickly became a Novel Netware engineer (Netware 2.1 CNE) and then service manager. Moving home to the reservation I was recruited to be the tribe’s system administrator and help desk manager. During all of this I had been a volunteer firefighter and a certified EMT. I considered increasing my EMT-I certification to EMT-P but decided to stay in IT. My EMT training helped me to care for my terminally ill wife in 2008 and then to better manage myself when I underwent a craniotomy to remove a malignant brain tumor in 2010. Part of my recovery was being selected to be one of the first group of six EBCI members to join the Cherokee Nation on the 1,000 mile cross country bike ride called Remember the Removal (RTR).
In 2015 Hugh hired to be the Executive Director of Information Technology at Cherokee Indian Hospital. The previous director had mismanaged the department which led to a staff mutiny and his termination. I reorganized the department along more “humane” lines. In six years we have grown from a staff of five to fifteen. In the course of six years we have moved our data center three times (typically a once in a career event). We built a new 75K square foot new hospital and have subsequently added a 60K mental health facility. We also have taken over almost all of the tribe’s health departments including a 100 bed nursing home. We were early aggressive adopters of Telehealth starting in late 2015. We are also the first tribal “Managed Care” entity (MCO). In 2021 Hugh was promoted to be the CIO of both the hospital and the Managed Care organization.