Stuart McGuigan took on his role as CIO of industry behemoth Johnson & Johnson in 2012. That was around the same time that Alex Gorsky joined the company as CEO. Since then, part of Gorsky’s mission has been to help J&J focus on technology, McGuigan said in an interview at HIMSS this week.

That decision has propelled J&J forward, and last fall it was selected for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s digital health pre-certification pilot program. The other eight companies in the program are Apple, Fitbit, Pear Therapeutics, Phosphorus, Roche, Samsung, Tidepool and Verily. The pilot’s purpose is to help the FDA define its approach to digital health regulation and assist the businesses in introducing new products approved by the FDA.

“It’s a huge opportunity,” McGuigan said.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that he has recently been focusing more of his time on digital health.

One priority within that realm is the consumer experience. J&J developed and released its Official 7 Minute Workout app.

“It established us as a company that could build user-friendly applications,” McGuigan noted. “Our philosophy is that people are at the center of everything that we do.”

He added that J&J is working with hospitals through its Health Partner platform. Though the company used to work on understanding surgeons and surgery, it’s moving toward examining provider organizations. “We have a lot of opportunities to more clearly align objectives with hospitals,” McGuigan said.

As CIO, he’s also spending time looking at applications of artificial intelligence. J&J has utilized AI and machine learning to pinpoint certain groups of individuals — for example, which group of doctors would be most interested in new pharmaceuticals or which consumers would be interested in a certain product.

“Anytime there’s an opportunity to support innovation in R&D and machine learning, we have teams,” McGuigan said.

Speaking of innovation, he said technology isn’t the only area Johnson & Johnson is rethinking its strategy. In its businesses, the company has made room for various self-contained teams. The stakeholders in each of those groups have the ability to make their own decisions about the direction of a given project.

“They’re empowered by being given a clear charter and then a metric to optimize,” McGuigan said. “We’re getting away from telling them what to build and giving them the authority to pick something important.”

For instance, one team may be told to increase registration rates at a certain site. The employees have the authority to go about fulfilling that goal in a unique way as they see fit.

“My job and leadership’s job becomes removing boundaries,” he added.