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  Today in Health it this story is my interview with Scott Becker. My name's Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. My company is Health Lyrics. I provide executive coaching and advisory services for health leaders around technology and it.

If you wanna learn more, check out health lyrics.com. A quick note, we will not have a show on Monday as we celebrate our country. With the rest of you, hopefully we will be back on. Tuesday. All right. Here's today's story. This month we have a great lineup on this week in Health it we interview Scott Becker.

In today's episode, John Halamka of the Mayo Clinic platform. Next week, following week, Rob Dhe, former CFO for UPMC on the financial health of the industry. Dale Sanders stops by, he's a health data expert, formerly with Health Catalyst, and now with IMO. And Cletus Earl closes out the month from Penn State Health, and that is a phenomenal lineup.

We talk about a lot of really great things. You know how I know that? Because they're already all recorded. I met with Dale Sanders yesterday. I. And recorded that episode. We're actually a little bit ahead of where we normally are, trying to give the staff a little bit of a break this summer by only doing a summer workload, which is uh, two shows.

We do the Monday Newsday show and we do the Friday interviews. So today's episode, we . Interview Scott Becker. Scott Becker is partner with Mcri Woods and publisher and founder of Becker's Healthcare, and Scott is one of the truly nice guys in the industry and was a wonderful guest. Had a lot of great insights.

One of the things I've learned about doing a podcast is that you talk to people and you ask questions. You know, there's that age old thing of, are we good listeners? Well, if you're, if you're doing a podcast, you have to be a good listener because . All you get to do is ask questions and response questions, so you do a lot of listening, and I have the great fortune of having a wonderful network of people that continues to connect me with even more wonderful people like Scott Becker, which gives me the op opportunity to ask questions.

Well, Scott's doing the same thing. Scott has done far more interviews. They drop at least 10 every week on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast, their 10 to 15 minute episodes. And he has interviewed a ton of people. So what happens is we've got two people together who are interviewing a lot of people who are listening to the industry, and we had a discussion, and it was a fun discussion.

Some of the things we talked about are highlights from the Becker's podcast, obviously, which presidents have the best grasp on healthcare issues? That was fun because he's had several presidents up on stage during the Becker's healthcare conferences, and I, I was just curious. You've had President Bush, president Clinton, you've had Hillary Clinton up on the, uh, stage and I, I wanted to find out who had the best grasp of healthcare issues, and you'll have to listen to find that out.

These were just some of the questions we threw out there, and I close with the question of what do highly successful CIOs and CEOs do that others don't do? It was a really phenomenal interview. I'm gonna give you a couple of the highlights from the conversation, but for the most part, I'm just gonna focus in on two of the topics.

I highly encourage you to listen to this episode and the rest of 'em in July. 'cause we have some really great insights. I am pretty excited about what we've put together for this month. So Scott and I were talking about the biggest problem facing healthcare right now, and here's a quote from Scott.

From that conversation, the big looming problem we have is not coverage, because coverage is solvable. The great problem we have is access. Access is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge with 330 million people. And an aging population. And that is so true, and we've talked about that several times on the show.

Different solutions for expanding access. Uh, I, I would go on, uh, I'd go one step further. Again, I'm doing the interview, so I, I didn't really comment too much on this, but I'd go one step further, I think. The fact that we are still a sick care system and not a well care system is one of the biggest problems facing healthcare, and we're starting to figure that out.

We have a a lot of efforts going on around social determinants and some are better than others, quite frankly, from where I sit and what I'm reading. But that is going to be an important aspect of this. As we all know that what we do in healthcare only impacts about 20% of health. The other 80% are factors.

And greater factors in terms of how people live their lives and how healthy they live and those kind of things. But Scott and I got into this conversation about access, and access is actually one of the biggest challenges that we face. We have rural healthcare, we have an aging population that may not be as good with technology, although we cover that in a podcast coming up, and it turns out that the aging population is getting better.

At, at using the technology and really understanding it, and I think the technology is getting better, quite frankly, for the aging population to use. So access. So how are we going to get care to those that are disconnected from our normal? Care models, if you will, and rural healthcare is one of the ones that I'm gonna take probably a full week and start to dissect and look at and see what the problem is and what we can do around that.

But I think it's a different model. I don't think we're gonna be popping hospitals into rural locations and standing up new hospitals and those kinds of things. I'm not sure that that model makes much sense. And Scott and I. Don't talk about that specifically, but we do talk about how hospitals are trying to figure out how to compete against the rest of the world.

That's moved towards an asset light model, and I think the asset light model becomes key. I. We have health systems moving to the home, we are adopting more of the telehealth models and more of the Care Anywhere kind of models, which don't require the large building and the large ed and those kinds of things.

So I think there's gonna be a mix. I think there's gonna be a new model that starts to emerge within rural healthcare. And then we have some of the areas, areas within our urban population where people don't have access to quality care. And we have to look at that as well. And I think we are gonna look at that through an asset light model also.

So access and I believe figuring out a way to incorporate more aspects of social determinants and other aspects of overall health, moving from sick care to healthcare is something that I think we're gonna see a lot of progress in over the next five years. If you haven't figured it out, I'm incorporating the so what and the conversation all in one.

One of the other things that Scott shared, and this is a direct quote as well, one of the great . Things about healthcare is that every single one of us, aside from whether we're involved in the healthcare industry or not, is a consumer. So we can't really fool anybody about the healthcare system. And you know, one of the things I've seen over the years is that we equate our experience with the.

Patient experience, and it's true, we are a patient, but a lot of us, if we work in the healthcare industry and work for healthcare systems, we represent a portion of the people that are seen in our health systems. You know, I, I went to our health system in Southern California, but it did not give me a. Any type of perspective with regards to some of the lower income populations that struggle to get healthcare that were sitting in our waiting rooms.

And so I, I would just caution us as we go into creating new apps, creating new workflows and those kind of things, taking our experience and saying, this is the experience of that people have. In healthcare, generally, if we work for the health system, we have a better experience with healthcare than anyone else who's going to come to our hospital, and you have to figure out a way to get to voice of the consumer.

I've talked to a lot of CIOs that are now participating in the consumer conversations, in bringing the consumers in, or sitting in on the conversations that another department within the . Hospital organization is conducting with consumers to get a better feel for what are the things that people struggle with.

We did a bunch of focus groups and it was really eye-opening. We thought we had created this app that was so easy to use and we used an external firm to sort of pressure test it and we, we brought in some focus groups to work with the app and a lot of times it was individuals working with somebody alongside them.

Really looking at how they were using it, how they were clicking on things, how even their eye movement across the screen and those kind of things. It was pretty sophisticated stuff. I was pretty impressed with what they did and what we found is a lot of the things we thought of how they were going to use the app and the things that were gonna be easy and the things that were gonna be hard were not what turned out to be easy or hard.

Or the way that they were thinking about using the app. So it really fundamentally changed how we put that app together. And I think if we talk to our consumers and we engage with our consumers, we're gonna find out that some of our workflows don't work real well for the consumers. Some of our telehealth solutions don't work real well for our consumers, so we have to engage.

Don't assume that your experience is the healthcare experience. We have to get out there and have the conversation. So I, I use that . As a backdrop to say phenomenal podcast today. If I do say so myself, Scott Becker is a great guest. He's talked to a lot of people. I've talked to a lot of people, and I, I believe you're gonna get a lot of value outta that podcast.

So head on over to this weekend, health it, and download that one today. Have a listen and let me know what you think. Love to hear about it, bill at this week in health it.com. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen to Podcast Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher.

You get the picture. We are everywhere. Don't forget no show on Monday. We'll be back on Tuesday. We wanna thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, VMware Hillrom, Starburst Advisors, McAfee and Aruba Networks. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.