Ty Barnett had big plans for his future in health care. He’d go to medical school and become a physician.
Two decades later, he’s still in health care, having the time of his life — just not as a doctor.
Barnett, who was born and raised on the Camas Prairie of north-central Idaho, is a C-suite leader at Norco Inc. Founded in Boise in 1948 in the auto parts space, the company evolved to become a leading supplier of medical oxygen and equipment, and has flourished for the past 60 years under three generations of the Larry Kissler family; it now serves eight states across the Northwest and Intermountain West.
Norco is known as an enviable employer; it is employee-owned, and the Kissler family and the company have supported Boise State, the College of Health Sciences, hospitals and healthcare systems and many other area institutions and organizations for decades, with financial support, equipment, expertise — and employment of Broncos. Many, many Broncos.
Barnett is now Norco’s first chief information officer, a position created in 2023. He has come up through the ranks; he started with the company as a Boise State undergrad and works with dozens of Bronco colleagues — many of whom came to Norco through the respiratory care program — among Norco’s approximately 1,500 employees across about 100 properties including branches, offices, fill plants and air separation units.
The respiratory care connection is how Barnett got his start, in 2005, when he went looking for a summer job so he could also do research with Lonny Ashworth, as legendary a Boise State respiratory care figure as Norco is in the business world. Ashworth made a call, and in very short order, Barnett had a summer job that made the summer lab research project — and, as it turned out, a career — possible.
“I wanted to serve people,” Barnett recalls of his early thinking about a medical career. “I wanted to take care of people, and I really, really enjoyed health care and helping people.”
He graduated with a bachelor’s of science in respiratory care from Boise State in 2006 and kept working for Norco. For four years, he worked as a respiratory therapist in Bend, Ore.; the company employs several-dozen clinicians who work with hospitals, patients and caregivers as patients return to home settings and to ensure quality care and the proper functioning of equipment.
Barnett has, over time, worked in sales and billing, clinical management, compliance and education and served as director of medical operations. He earned his MBA during nights and weekends from Northwest Nazarene University in 2013 with Norco’s support.
In 2017, he was asked to head up enterprise resource planning that would bring together Norco’s medical and industrial areas for improved operations. The design challenges, the trouble-shooting … He loved it.
The systems thinking he learned at Boise State positioned him well for the assignment — and his ongoing success, including delivery of the enterprise resource planning project, has landed him where he is today, in health care, not a physician, and pleased with the course his life has taken. The company, Barnett said, has allowed him opportunities to grow in ways and areas he has been interested in.
“I never envisioned me being a CIO, a vice president of information systems, none of that,” he said. “I think the opportunities just presented themselves, and you take a leap of faith.
“I love my job. I love what I get to do. I love it. You won’t find me having a bad day. Ever.”
Barnett and his team manage a portfolio of work that includes cybersecurity, networking, development, project management and operations. He knows that many newly minted graduates envision working in quick succession for multiple companies; he also knows he’s a successful example of what happens when you sign on with a flexible, mission-driven organization that supports its team members in growing according to their interests and in teaching them as much as they want to learn.
“By staying in the company a much longer period, you get deeper relationships and you get to go deep into the organization,” he said. “And you are learning something new every day, twenty years later. That can be more satisfying than jumping from job to job. To me, it’s a matter of how you want to measure your life at the end.”
Norco and the Kisslers, he said, are dedicated “to better mankind. That’s one of the main things …
“I love this company, I love our mission.”
And Barnett is very clear how he got there.
“The foundation of teaching that Boise State gave me still holds true to this day.”