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 Welcome to this Week in Health It. My name is Bill Russell Healthcare, CIO, coach and creator of this Week in Health. It a set of podcast videos and collaboration events dedicated to developing the next generation of health leaders. I. This episode and every episode since we started the C Ovid 19 series has been sponsored by Sirius Healthcare.

Uh, now we're exiting in the series, and Sirius has stepped out to be a weekly sponsor of the show through the end of the year. Special thanks to Sirius for supporting the show's efforts during the crisis and beyond. I. Okay, CliffNotes is live and it's available for some of you. This is a repeat. I'm saying it and you're, you're saying, all right, I already know CliffNotes is live, but we have seen a surge in the number of listeners in the show.

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A lot of times on Tuesday we go into the business of healthcare, what's sort of shaping it and where it's going. Uh, we also talk about the technology of healthcare. I try to cover major shifts that I see coming down the line, uh, to signal to you the discussions that I believe are going to shape healthcare.

Platforms and software defined everything. Software defined networks, uh, software defined compute, storage, you name it, uh, I think are gonna drive new economics, greater business agility, and increasing business advantages for those who adopt those, uh, platforms and technologies in healthcare. Uh, today we're gonna go in depth with one of those technologies.

Software defined WANs. SD WANs are one of the hottest things that people are talking about, and it's not hot, like trendy. It's hot, like it makes so much sense that organizations are starting to head down this path. So I got a panel together of an organization that is heading down this path with one of the leading organizations that is doing this, A Velo cloud, which is, which was acquired by VMware.

So it's part of the VMware stack, and we have a great discussion. I hope you enjoy. . When Covid hit, we had a significant change in the makeup of the network. The center of gravity shifted and much of the traffic that used to be housed within the four walls of the health system moved to outside. You know, this was really accelerated during Covid, but we, we, we noticed that this trend was, was starting prior to that because home health was starting to ramp up significantly.

We had IoT devices starting to take off, and the question we wanted to answer was, does the old fixed network provide us the right architecture to remain agile and flexible in the fast moving environment? That now defines healthcare. And so today we're gonna explore the future of the healthcare network.

With these three gentlemen, we have, uh, Mike Champa, the Executive Director of Infrastructure for Steward Health. Uh, good morning, Mike. Good morning. And we have David Cher, the, a partner at, uh, tour Nova, who helped steward with their, uh, selection process. Good morning, uh, David. Good morning Bill. Craig Connor, CTO, and VP of SSD Wan Group.

Uh, the VeloCloud acquisition from VMware is on the line as well. Craig, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, bill. All right. I'm looking, looking forward to this, the future of the network in healthcare. It's a pretty lofty title, so let's see if we can start with our. Our feet firmly planted on the ground.

Mike, we'll start with you. You recently completed the bid process for Steward Health to move to a software defined network for Steward. So, you know, what precipitated the, the change for steward? What, what makes you consider, uh, sd-wan? So Bill, so as you know, we're the largest physician owned, uh, and operated healthcare system in the us.

You know, over the last 10 years we have acquired, we have gone from basically six hospitals to 35 hospitals around a little bit less than a hundred ambulatory practices. To over 500 ambulatory practices in the us We have a facility in Malta we purchased recently, and we went from one state, Massachusetts to nine states across the us.

So over the last 10 years, there's been a significant amount of acquisitions, um, with um. Within Stuart, um, causing us, uh, to look at our network and realizing that, you know, tho those acquisitions, we brought them into Stewart, but never really re-engineered the, the, the wide area network. Um, and saying that, so obviously that caused, you know, us a lot of pain in regards to the application that we're running.

We have over, over six to 800 applications running, uh, right now across latency and bandwidth issues associated. So, so Mike, so let's, actually, let's start there. So Stewart is in how many states now? Stuart is in and right now in nine states across the us nine states. How, how broad? I mean, is it mostly New England or is it all the way across the country?

It's all the way across the country. It's Texas, Arizona, Utah, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts. And I missed one. I think that's good. Wow. I mean that, yeah. So that's covers, that covers the gambit. And so how, when you acquired these originally, you just left the data centers in place and sort of connected 'em all up through, uh.

Through, uh, MPLS network, that kind of thing? Yeah, they were just plugged in. Uh, some of 'em were plugged in, uh, to, you know, you know what I mean? They were plugged in to get to our EMR and as well as our, you know, obviously our network from a, from a financial and a, and a, you know, email and email and, uh, communications perspective.

But others were, were just, were left, were left alone in their, you know, with their, with their, you know, applications and, and their own data centers and. All right, so, so you, you decide to go out and take a look at, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna bring these things together and, and try to have a coordinated architecture.

And so what, what led you in the direction of sd-wan? So, uh, a number of things, right? You know, what we, what we've what besides the, the, besides the improve, we're looking for improvement in our performance, our application performance, which is key, right? We're looking to lower the complexity, you know, simplifying the operations capability, and obviously reducing cost.

You know, over the last, you know, covid over the last covid months. Lemme say it right. There's been a significant amount of, you know, audio, audio, video capability that needs to happen. And, uh, sitting on our current network specifically out in the west, was not gonna work at all. And, uh, that drove that.

Drove that, drove this initiative. Yeah. So, so Brent, you've been, you've been along, uh, for the ride. You and you and Mike have been coordinating some of this work together. So, you know, what, what are, I mean, so lower the cost, improved agility, you know, reduced complexity, increased performance. I mean, this sounds like, uh, sort of a holy grail here.

I mean, are, are, are those the, are those the foundational elements that you were looking at and, and, and you know what? What makes SD WAN really work in the steward infrastructure? The, the other thing we need was the flexibility from, uh, the capabilities that it has up and down the size spectrum of facilities that we were on too.

So we run everything from two person practices all the way up to 300 bed. Hospitals and more so from a technology perspective, it has to scale size-wise. And when we, when we went through the decision process too, you're looking for value and value With SSD WAN comes in many different forms. Uh, value comes in when you compare technology to technology, uh, they're all built a little different.

And when you look at the value that you're getting from a . Operational perspective as well. That was a huge key for us. And one of the big things that Bellow brought to us was that capability to manage this whole network regardless of applications, regardless of the size of, uh, facility that we were running.

So, David, did I just call you Brent? I think I did call you Brent. You did. You can cut that out golly day. Can't believe. Sorry, I'm coming back from vacation. I'm, I'm just trying to get back in the saddle here. So, so David, you know, I mean, what does it look like before we go there? I mean, is it, is it what we think we are?

It's, you know, it's, is, it's a ton of segmentation. Hard hardcoded into the, uh, routers and switches that are managed by a team of people. And those tables get pretty complex and are. Relatively unforgiving. I mean it is. Is that what we're looking at? 'cause that's what I remember. And conflicting ipss . So, right.

So when you, when you look at the whole thing, it's the, I don't wanna say the only way, but almost the only way to clean this up and make it operationally effective is to run sd-wan, because you're kind of, you're, I, I hate to say this to my carrier friends, but you're, you're commoditizing the circuits.

You're making the whole operation run on the, the technology that's running those circuits, you're not tied to them anymore. So that if you, if you can manage how you run your apps on your network, it, it just leads to so many efficiencies across the organization. Yeah. And this, uh, so Craig, let's, let's talk a little bit about this.

You know, you know, for the most part, we, we, we saw this, it's pretty similar to what VMware did in the data center back in the day, right? We had a million machines. We had people walking through the halls and they had to touch the machines, pull out the keyboards, and, you know, and actually physically do upgrades and that kind of stuff.

We then virtualized all that stuff and it, it. It really changed the game. I mean, we, we now can run data centers from afar. It enabled cloud computing at, at its core, and, you know, it, it gave us the ability to be, uh, a lot more agile and flexible in terms of what we did. You know, you've been at, at VE cloud for, for a while, uh, even before the VMware uh, transition.

So give us an idea of what are some of the, the core actually probably start here. What is sd-wan? Why are we even talking about it and how is it fundamentally different from what we're doing today? Yeah, bill, I, I think, you know, David mentioned there's a lot of different SD-WAN vendors. A lot of different definitions of the terminology these days.

Uh, but I think at its core there's a couple of different principles we're applying. The first is . Converting from a hardware based processing of packets to a software based processing of packets, decoupling the hardware and the software to give us the flexibility to run on commodity hardware, on VMs in the cloud and in the places where the edges of the network are moving.

It also gives us the ability to simplify network management by bringing a single consolidated view of the network, often managed through the cloud itself. And third. It offers some quality benefits by integrating both QOS as well as some intelligence around application identification and link steering so that you get not only you use commodity circuits, but you also use them better than a traditional round robin load balancing kind of solution would've done.

It's, it's interesting because I think SD-wan you just rattled off the components and much like when VMware sort of came into the game when, when we looked at the hypervisor for the first time, uh, we didn't really grasp all the things that were gonna be possible, how we could redo, you know, disaster recovery, how it would be really change the game in terms of the amount of.

Of resources it took to manage these things. The amount of visibility, the amount of, uh, uh, new technology you could layer on top of this. For instance, you know, the smaller it gets, the more we can overlay AI and those kind of things so that it, it can become much more dynamic. How is, you know, how do you think this has played out during Covid in terms of, so we, we sent everybody home.

We sent everybody to their homes, at least most of the administrative staff within hospitals, even within outside of healthcare, and, you know, a lot of these people went to their homes. How would a SSD wan, how would that have transition have gone a little easier? Craig, I'll, I'll, I'll start with you and then I'll, I'll come back to Mike and David with some other questions.

Yeah, I think SD-Wan, VMware, SD-Wan in particular, um, we saw this facilitate the transition to work from home for a lot of users. I think there's, there's a few big challenges that people run into. The first is just, I. Scaling the solution. So everybody has some sort of remote access VPN solution, even pre covid, but it wasn't designed for every single employee to be connected to it simultaneously.

And so it's not necessarily very easy to to scale up a hardware based firewall in your data center that's terminating remote access connections from everywhere. So you have this scalability problem where if you've got SD-WAN and it's. It's running in software, uh, and it can be clustered across multiple VMs.

It's much more easy to scale up, especially if you're using a cloud-based solution like VeloCloud, where we take care of the auto-scaling for you. So that's one thing. The second thing is, is obviously the quality of connectivity. You know, the shift to telemedicine, the shift to Zoom calls, like we're on right now.

Quality becomes really important. Uh, and I always say there's, there's two different aspects of quality and one is. Just making the video work. But the other is balancing that against everything else that's happening in the home because you have, your family is home working, your kids are home on online schooling, and you know, there's, there's two things I always bring up.

One is if. One other user in the house can affect a doctor trying to do a telemedicine appointment. You know, that's one disruption for the patient, but also just if my child's online schooling isn't working because the internet's not working well enough and they need my help, then that's another distraction that happens.

Right. So there's, there's almost a, a psychological aspect to it as well as the network quality aspect where. We need to make the network work well for everyone so that those distractions don't happen. Uh, and that's what we've seen SD-WAN actually provide to home users. So the, the, what we were looking at, but before was quality of service, right?

We were going to be able to tag quality of service, but we really lost that ability over the, the public internet. And so how does SD WAN do that? How does it ensure. The best, the best route, the highest performance on a dynamic basis. So every sd-wan vendor is gonna have a, a little bit different answer to that question.

Uh, in the case of VMware sd-wan, we've built a proprietary, a proprietary technology we call dynamic multi-path optimization. So one or more WAN links connected to the sd-wan device. We continuously monitor the quality of the underlay connection. Using either the user traffic that's traversing the network already, or generating artificial probes if there is no user traffic.

We take that measurement of the network, we identify the applications automatically that are coming into the system, and we map those applications to their service level objectives. So is it voice, is it video, is it a transactional application? Based on those two things. We can choose dynamically the best path to send the traffic on.

And we can also choose dynamically if we need to apply error correction methodologies like Ford error correction, jitter, buffering in real time to resolve issues that are happening with the transport. Yeah, that, that's, that's fascinating. It's so important in, in healthcare. 'cause we're gonna have, we're gonna have PAC solutions, we're gonna have radiology reads being done at home.

We're gonna have. IoT devices, potentially we're gonna have, uh, significant, uh, build outs of home care that get more and more sophisticated over time. And, uh, that's, that's really fascinating. Mike, I, I wanted to come back to you. What, what does a rollout of this technology look like in health, in a healthcare environment?

Is this, uh, is it a forklift? Is it. Is it di disruptive in any way? You know, how, how do you anticipate your end users will experience the transition? Okay. We're, we're at the, we're actually implementing as we speak, so we're rolling it out as in Arizona this month and, and, and turning that up. Uh, and then we'll follow that to, to Utah and Texas.

Uh, then, then it'll head back here to the, to the, I would call it the east of the Mississippi. But what it really, so.

Is, you know, so, you know, it's, it has been for me is some significant, some significant planning on our part to understand what our infrastructure looks like before we get our vendors to help us with the implementation. Right. You know, we've got, we've got, we're using a couple of partners to help us with the implementation.

Uh, they seem to be experts. They've done this thing in numerous times out in the industry, so I've.

To help me drive this program and this project across the US and the coordination in between us and, and the application folks has not been that difficult. So, up to date, I think the, you know, I think the, the, it's been, it's stayed internally to the network space primarily. You know, I think once we begin to do testing this before we do the turn up, uh, we'll we, we definitely will be involving the application folks for coordination of that.

So it hasn't been a lot of pain, but once we got the design, um, criteria in, in the requirements for our underlay complete, yeah, that's interesting. So essentially. It's a pretty sophisticated market. I think some people listening to this might think, I SD wan, it's too far out there. It's too cutting edge.

But you're not having trouble finding partners who have experience rolling this out for you. Nope. Not at all. Nope. And, uh, you know, they've, they've, they've been extremely helpful with us because they've done this before. Uh, they ask, they have the expertise behind them. You know, there's, there's always a learning curve between, you know, between the provider and, you know, in, in the, in the customer, right.

And figuring out how to get this thing, you know, get this thing with some momentum and acceleration. But certainly without them, I think it would've been, it would've been a significantly longer time to, to turn this thing up and we would've learned through. David, you know, really wanna talk about this from two perspectives.

One is the, you know, what do you anticipate the end users, how they will experience this, if at all? I mean, it might just be a negligible, uh, improvement for them, but you, you get so much flexibility and, and cost savings on the backend that you . You know, that's, that's worth it in and of itself. So talk about the end users, but also talk about the team that has to manage this.

What, what does it look like for them to move from the existing environment to this new environment and, and how do you transition that team? So your first question about the the end users, I think they're gonna see better. Faster applications on the network, but it's really the business that has the impact.

So, you know, steward's a little different. We're national, we're using technologies where we can re-use a lot of remote doctors, for example, in ICUs. So when you talk about, you know, that kind of application for the business, it just gets. Experts to the field quicker, faster. So it's better for the, the user, the patient, the business, uh, everything just runs better at that point.

It gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of when the business says, I wanna turn this up in September. Now we can do that. Once this SD WAN is running before it's months of just making sure everything works and the data centers are lined up, et cetera, from the operations perspective, the team that's running the network, it gives them tools that they've had before, but they're.

Technically easier to use and, and get a global view of what's happening. And with some of the analytics that are gonna be driven by the cloud orchestrator that we're gonna be using, we're gonna get some really valuable information for the, the business and the end users to see what apps they're really using, what the performance really is, and how we can make that better, quicker, faster for everybody.

Yeah, I'll sort of put you on the spot. I mean, when, when, when I moved our health system to the cloud, there was a huge amount of fear, like, oh my gosh, where are you going? What are you doing? What does this mean for my job? That kind of stuff. Was, was there some of that or did they look at the solution and just go, I.

Oh, no, that makes sense. That's what's next. Yeah. It's a, it's a hard question, right? And you get to the heart of the, the, the team question and, and where the team wants to go with this. The, it's one of those technologies that, you know, technically it makes it a lot easier, and you definitely need, you need less.

People running the technology, but it becomes more critical for the business. And, you know, in the, in the environment that we're all in, it's really hard to find really good people and bring them into the team. And with this kind of technology, it just makes it actually easier for everybody to do that. So I think everybody jumped on board with it and knew that we had to do it because of all the things that the business was trying to do.

And this is gonna make it in the end just a great thing for them to have the experience in. Yeah. So actually I, I want to, I wanna stay with YouTube real quick. You know, you, you put together the RFP, you went out and you looked at the various vendors. What were some of the criteria that you put forward to evaluate the, the various solutions?

'cause as, as Craig was saying, there, there are still some different definitions and different approaches to this. You know, what, what, what were you guys, you know, what criteria did you use? Yeah, I can I, I, yeah, go ahead, Mike. Okay. No, I, I, you know, we can go, we can piggyback, right? I mean, I, because, you know, we, we actually took a very methodical approach.

Uh, we had, we had about 12 attributes that. Umalthough we identified and we evaluated across, you know, I, I think it was across four, four vendors and it was statistically, and we, you know, we created statistical, you know, data that represented the decision. And we came down to, it was, it was almost a tie.

Came down to, uh, two vendors, to both vendors were strategic partners of ours. And I would say they've been, they've been with us for quite some, some time and, and we, you know, when we made a decision. Uh, based upon that. So based upon one, the best fit and, you know, obviously pricing was, was there, it wasn't the top, but attributes around supportability cloud capability and, and the likes of, you know, and, you know, and, you know, ease of use and the likes of that really was, gave us, gave us the data that represented, you know, us and to support the decision to the CIO.

Yeah, that's great. David, anything to add on that? No, Mike did a good job. I mean, we did take a really detailed look. We didn't look at every possible option, but you know, when you're enterprise size, uh, I think we looked at, I. All the vendors that we needed to look at. And it was really, you know, there were 12 attributes and it's really, it, it was value and flexibility, you know, in long-term view.

Yeah. For the, probably the three big things and, and integration with the tools you're already using. And, and Craig, that's where I'm gonna come back to. It's interesting, you know, I, I, we could do a whole show just on a selection process because I see some people, it's like we evaluated all 15 vendors. I'm like,

Why, why did, why did you evaluate 15 vendors? I mean, I, we could just write half of those off without, just by using common sense. But no, they, they put 'em all through the process and I, I think sometimes it's smart to look at, you know, who's in the upper right hand quadrant. Who's the one disruptor you wanna look at?

And that's probably enough. And it sounds like you guys did something to that effect. That's exactly what we did. Is it? And you just, you don't have time to look at 15 vendors and you don't wanna put your team through that. Anyway, that's a, that's a tangent on my part. Craig VeloCloud acquisition, you have security acquisitions from VMware.

You have, you have the VMware tools, you have the end user computing tools. How integrated, how far along in the integration process are you? 'cause I think one of the promises for healthcare is we're gonna get to a single pane of glass. And I know that's the sort of the nirvana that's out there, but, but we'd like to get there, right?

We're already used to using those VMware tools to manage all the, all the components within the data center. We'd like the network to be brought into that. We'd like security to be brought into that. How far along are we in that journey? Yeah, I think, you know, we've, we've defined this new market space called SS E, which is really the convergence of, of four separate technologies.

Zero Trust, network access, SD wan, secure Web Gateway, which now includes CASB functionality and then cloud firewalling, and. We are just starting that process at VMware. I mean, you know, we have obviously built a, a big ecosystem of partners. We call it our network of clouds because we have our cloud gateway footprint.

You know, we are able to connect to a huge variety of vendors and all of those different spaces outside of SD wan. Uh, but we're also. VMware executing on the SASS e Vision ourselves, and so recently we announced our Zero Trust service along with Workspace One, where you can use the Workspace one tunnel app to connect directly into your SDN network.

Obviously there's a recent acquisition of Last line anti-malware technology, so we're looking at how we can integrate that and bring that cloud firewall piece and also looking at at options for bringing in secure. Secure web gateway functionality. So I'd say we're, you know, we're in the middle of the process.

The pieces are coming together. We're, you know, a bit advantaged I think in that, if you look at the definition of SS e, this thin branch. The cloud model. That's the approach we took with SD-WAN from the beginning. And that's not the approach that our competitors took from the beginning. And so whereas we have this worldwide network of pops that we've already built out to host these services, most of our competitors are still trying to, to get there.

And then being part of VMware. Uh, you said it yourself, you know, we have, we have Workspace one, we have NSX security. We have a lot of different components that will allow us to. Build this single pane of glass solution much more easily than, than a vendor that doesn't have those other components in-house.

That's interesting. So I, so if I understand you correctly, it, it requires a, uh, a velo cloud device at a lot of different points within the network. And what you're, what I hear you saying is you've, that's how you originated the, the deployment of this. So you have those devices and all those. Point of presence and all those places that we need them within the network already.

Yeah. I mean, SASE is really about the compute for modern security. Those demands are getting higher and higher and higher. Right? Things like TLS termination, sandboxing browser isolation. These are very CPU intensive security operations, and it's not practical to do them. On prem and build this giant rack of servers, right?

This is why the cloud is fantastic because we have cloud scale compute for doing these intensive security things. But in order to do it practically in the network, it also has to be close to the user because we can't send everything all the way back to some centralized location. And so what sassy promises is that.

We will distribute this in points of presence, close to the users, better cloud scale, and we will give them high quality access to those security services, either with SD-WAN, or with A-Z-T-N-A solution. And so what we've done is we've already built that network. We already give you a high quality connectivity to a regionalized set of data centers.

Using our cloud gateways. We already give you access with workspace one now, and so all we have to do is put the security surfaces on top. We don't have to build the whole network from scratch. So Mike's network is far flung. I mean, are you, you're covering 'em from Boston to to Phoenix. Yeah, that's right.

I, I mean, we've got, you know, hundreds of pops worldwide where we have our gateways deployed. We've got 11 just in the United States, so we're able to cover with sub 10 milliseconds latency everywhere in the United States that, that they're deployed. Interesting. David, Mike, I, I want, I, I give you guys the last word, but I, I wanna focus in on the financials.

You know, COVID has hit healthcare pretty hard from a financial standpoint. Uh, give us some idea of where you're looking to find financial benefits from, from an sd-wan. Implement. Yeah. So, so, so I mean, I think there's two, there's, you know, there's, there's a couple of places and I, and I'm gonna flip it back over to David, 'cause David was instrumental, which is to us in, in Stewart specifically for me and the CIO in regards to helping me with some initiatives around cost cutting.

But, you know, it's gonna be instrumental from a management's perspective, right, from a people, people perspective. And you know, you know, you know, although it might, it will need less hands on to manage it. You know, I've told my folks that we will reallocate our resources to focus, focus on the inside of our network, more on the land side, and more of, uh, in, in closer to the applications.

So where we really want to play now is in, in the, you know, at close, as close as possible to the applications. So our resources can be more. You know, you know, more supportive to the, to the business community and the clinical community from a, from a cost perspective. Uh, David has helped me in, and I'm flip that over him and let him speak a little bit about the financial piece.

Yeah, from a cost perspective, every customer is completely different 'cause they all start in a different place. So you could start with someone that has, you know, has not looked at, um, the network in a while, or like Steward. They've grown by acquisition. So you're working with what the acquired company.

Was using and you just, I go through a process where I figure out what they have and then try to optimize it as much as we can with the SD-WAN technology. But what SD-Wan really lets you do is it lets you buy what you need and build as much resiliency and redundancy as close to the customer as you need to have.

So in Stewart's case, we have a lot more bandwidth. We've got a lot more resiliency in our large facilities. We, we've been able to do the same thing at the smaller sites, at a smaller scale, obviously, but you can really drive, um, cost out of the straight. It piece of the business, you know, maybe like you said, it'd be great to have a whole nother call, but you can talk about all the infrastructure that this eliminates the requirement for too.

And it's, it's on and on and on into the closets, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And, and David, you, I, Mike talked last week a little bit and uh, you know, the word I keep throwing out on when we think in terms of platforms and software defined is agility. And you guys drove that home, it's, you know, now there's options not only on the, on the IT side, but on the business side.

And, you know, ac acquisitions take a lot of resources, a lot of manpower, and when you have the right set of tools, you can layer them in and, uh, make those transitions a lot cleaner, just a lot easier. They're, they're gonna be complex no matter what. In healthcare, they're, they're always complex. I mean, different pacs, I mean, 900 applications, you're gonna have complexity.

But if you can take that core level of, you know, network storage, system compute. Just, you know, you just take that whole layer and say, look, we can, we can put this fundamentally underneath and our team can manage it like we normally do. It. Make, it makes those transitions a a lot better. And Mike, that's what you were driving home to me last week on the call.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, hey gentlemen, thanks. I think I, I think we did a good job of, uh, laying out the future of the network. If anyone has any questions, feel free to shoot me a note. I'd love to, uh, facilitate conversations with these gentlemen. I And guys, thank you. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

That's all for this week. If you want more information on, uh, VeloCloud, VMware, any of these, uh, technologies, if you want to connect potentially with the guys from, uh, Stewart, uh, feel free to shoot me a note Bill at this week in health it.com and I will facilitate, uh, the conversation. Uh, special thanks to our sponsors, VMware Starbridge Advisors, Galen Healthcare Health lyrics.

Serious healthcare, pro talent advisors, and health Next for choosing to invest in developing the next generation of health leaders. If you made it this far in the show, please do me a favor. You're a fan, you've listened to the entire episode, and the best way you can continue to support the show is to share it with a peer sign up for clip notes.

Share it that way. You could also just, uh, shoot 'em a note saying, Hey, I'm listening to this podcast. I'm getting a lot out of it. And, and that is helpful as well. We're gonna continue to be back every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Just a reminder, and we have now kicked off our fall schedule and I am excited.

We have so many great shows. Lined up for you that I, I'm just looking forward to, uh, the conversations myself and sharing 'em with you. Thanks for listening. That's all for.