Two years ago, responsibility for a deployed clinical model was distributed across an informatics director, a service line chief, and whoever from the vendor answered the phone. That arrangement is being consolidated into a named role, usually reporting into quality or the CMIO office.

The job descriptions we reviewed fall into two camps. The first is essentially regulatory: inventory every model in use, maintain documentation, manage the review committee, own the audit trail. The second is closer to site reliability engineering — own the monitoring, own the rollback, get paged when a model degrades.

Very few postings ask for both, which practitioners in the role say is the actual problem. "Governance without an on-call rotation is paperwork," one safety officer at a multi-state system told us. "On-call without governance means you are firefighting things that should never have been approved."

Compensation data is thin, but the recruiters we spoke with put the role between clinical informatics and platform engineering, with a strong premium for anyone who has actually decommissioned a model that was already in use. That last experience remains rare.