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(Intro) I think it's all about solving problems creatively pushing your limits, not accepting what those limits are, and then leveraging the resources as best as you can.

And I think just that's just how we operate.

My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time. Our keynote show is designed to share conference level value with you every week.

Now, let's jump right into the episode.

Operational efficiency and health equity in underserved communities. Under her leadership, MLK has implemented cutting edge solutions, including AI driven virtual assistance and data driven strategies to improve access and care delivery. Tracy's deep expertise in leveraging technology to drive systematic change.

Makes her a thought leader in healthcare, I. T., innovation, and the future of digital health. Tracy, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Sarah. It's such a pleasure and an honor to be

here. And I would agree. And just for those listening, Tracy and I have had a friendship that's almost a decade. Almost a decade. At this point.

And I am always so grateful to spend time with you. I always learn from you and love being able to do this. So again, thank you for being on the show today.

You're welcome.

We have to start with your professional background. Can you please share your professional journey and what led you to your current position as Chief Information Innovation Officer at MLK?

And in the beginning, when I was younger, I always thought healthcare was, a industry that. had a lot of women in it because most of my mother's colleagues were ex nuns. So I just felt that if I went into that industry, I knew how to handle them that I would be in good shape.

I went to KPMG consulting and worked there for several years, and there I learned that, networking is so important in consulting. It's what you make of it. So your success is completely dependent on you. And networking was a huge part of it. And that allowed me to get into several different segments of the industry, doing different.

Knowing I love a challenge I went straight to that and it was there when I heard about the hospital being built from the ground up and it was an old dear mentor of mine, Brad Armstrong, you know him. And he had mentioned he was building this hospital from scratch, and I thought, that's crazy.

It's zigzag. Taking two steps back allows you to take two huge steps forward and always being the lookout of, these opportunities you'd never imagine would come your way. Take advantage of 'em.

And your background is so fantastic in our summits and at our dinners because you have the consulting and the accounting lens, and I have not met a person yet who comes across a conversation with you and doesn't dig in a bit deeper on how to really manage their.

What were some of the challenges and successes in designing and implementing the hospital? Because you helped with a 70 million dollar IT infrastructure and application portfolio.

Yeah, like I said, opportunity and lifetime. The challenges were varied and unusual things that you wouldn't normally run into, but Perhaps a startup would.

I think the big challenge in summary was around the staffing and the financial constraints. When you're in a startup, you can't hire the entire team all at once. You have to wait till you're close to opening, such that you've got the revenue to offset the cost of the added staff. So we're constantly dealing with.

For a week long design session where we're complete strangers and designing an EHR that they'll never use. And the other kind of cool, interesting part of it was trying to negotiate with vendors and finding that negotiation position when you have no income stream and no guarantee of a future. Those are really interesting challenges.

So it's quite an interesting feat. And we were very ambitious with the technology.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't even know where the bar is set. You set your own bar and you go after it and you've continued. To push the envelope for digital innovation and patient engagement, you've implemented a virtual assistant named Mia.

How has she, for lack of a better term, been able to impact patient engagement and operational efficiency?

Getting onto the chat bot, going onto the website, calling our call center. And when COVID came around and, information was disseminated, in the world, and it wasn't quite accurate, it wasn't reliable. It wasn't an educational level or accessible to our community. We felt that our chat [00:08:00] bot would be perfect.

So we implemented it right away. It only took a few weeks to implement it. Then we had some issues around capacity and we felt that implementing a symptom checker and allowing our community members to see a physician on demand through Mia after their symptom checker would allow them to, stay home safe and would preserve capacity in our Emergency department, which for us was the most important thing because at that time we had no idea the amount of volume that was going to come through our doors.

So it was really helpful

and you still have to navigate ongoing financial challenges. You have faced significant financial hurdles, including potential closure threats. And so how have you address these challenges? And what role has technology played in ensuring financial sustainability?

With the technology.

They've come up during as we were building up the hospital and at times through our existence and we use the opportunity to really advance policy change, we don't want to operate within their constraints. And the only way that we feel like we can move forward and help our sustainability is through policy

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and the other.

And you're so committed to the community impact and health equity because you serve a medically underserved area. How are you also leveraging a lot of these ideas to address health disparities in South Los Angeles?

[Mic bleed]

do with this? We've come up with some really cool programs, community based programs that I've heard.

And that would be an interesting topic to have an episode on and I could get you some folks there. And then we've recently opening up an empath unit sort of like a treatment center for our psychiatric patients in our emergency department.

Once they're medically cleared, they have nowhere to go. And since inpatient psychiatric beds are so scarce in our area. or in L. A county in general, that we really need a place for them to stay when they're cleared from a behavioral health standpoint. And the emergency department, just not the space for them.

And to me, that's the most exciting thing that we're doing. We're actually starting with our center for health policy where we're using data backed research to understand the impact of social determinants of health on health disparity. And then using that data to really understand what kind of innovation we need to help the community.

So we're building a philanthropic fund to fund Later seed organizations to come and test their concepts, thereby having a proven solution. And then we're also funding those successful businesses if they come into the area and practice and grow their business there, thereby allowing extra jobs and really influencing more economic activity and growth in our service area.

Obviously, you have the data behind it. What are the solutions or the ideas that excite you the most?

I know that we're building this ecosystem to impact community, the community. But internally, we really have to start with those folks delivering and they're on the front lines of care.

And that is all the innovation around clinician efficiency and reducing the administrative burnout. And that comes from the ambient scribe, but also smart each ours that curate information and data and help the physician get to information quicker and in context to actually what they're doing.

and your team is so connected to your physician base or your provider base.

How does your team continue to foster innovation and really endeavor to meet? The clinicians where they are, and this has a lot to do with The way that your teams and programs have had exposure to various health care segments.

Yeah, I'm, it's, I have to be honest, it's such a challenge for us. We're moving so quickly and to really foster innovation,

And that is It's definitely a struggle, but we do also try to foster innovation outside of our team, and we do that through partnership. We don't stifle the innovation. And the ask the technology as of our team outside of our I. T. Team. For example, we have a new C. N.

And I feel like that is a partnership we're trying to lay the groundwork for them to build up. Really what their dream practice

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future.

And by you taking that extra time to invest in their education and learning how the systems are functioning effectively at MLK, you're also going to build that trust factor, which allows you to have the conversations that elevate all of the things around you that are important and I love that approach.

Taking the time to really dig in to the leadership team, especially so that they know you have their best interest in mind first. It's a win, by the way, in the sort of blueprint and how you show up with others too, because you always endeavor to include people so they feel like they matter.

Of where big things are happening from a health care perspective. What were some of the things that worked that still work and that you have continued to adapt in terms of an approach to health care delivery that not only serves your populations, but also is helpful with the adoption of technology and new ideas.

I think in our case, it's always about solving challenges other people may think are insurmountable. Our biggest thing and our biggest, secret sauce, I would say, is just our sheer scrappiness. And that's inside and outside IT. During the pandemic, there wasn't a choice about, how can I solve a problem?

So it wasn't about just in time. It was like just in case. And then we work backwards. And this is how we dealt with making sure we had enough supplies. And we had the adequate space To care for our patients. And then, other than leveraging our vendors for our solutions. The other I think cool thing that we did was that we took the mindset of a startup and we just eliminated.

And I think just that's just how we operate.

When you create a new relationship, either with a potential partner or a group in the community, how are you thinking about That partnership or that collaboration and enhancing the services for MLK because I imagine there's a lot of people who want to do business with you and you say, Look, this is us.

This is how we functions is how we operate. How many of those partnerships or collaborations take the bait like realize what they're getting themselves into because people don't realize you only have 130 beds. But the constituency you serve. You were always over capacity. in your hospital. And I've heard you talk about, and the chapel is a couple of patient rooms this week.

It's ongoing for you all of the time. What makes a partnership successful for MLK?

And their staff, many of them want a sense of purpose. And I think that really is what drives our most successful partners. And when we think of partners, we really entrench them in our business, like our outsourced staff, we treat them like staff, and we grow them. And we mentor them. And I think that is really the most important thing is having The vendor really buy into your mission and really work with you to achieve and to solve problems.

I think what really drives my passion is solving problems that you see what the impact is going to be. on patients lives and improving their overall health and well being. We do that with people we love and are friends. We want them to succeed. And I think using innovation and solving those problems, it's to me, it's really real boils down to the people that we're working with, as well as the people that we're helping.

Community health systems to do the same but at the end of the day I really want to see a community in Health LA that is booming economically, they're healthy, they're vibrant, and we want to make them proud of us.

I would say that for community health systems that are struggling with how to figure out how to do things well.

They need to talk to you because initiatives you bring forward and you share and talk about are not common for community health care systems. And yet you are doing it all of the time, whether that's the relationships, the partners, the collaboration, the community involvement. Heck, I've been to one of your big fundraisers.

At one of the large event centers in Los Angeles and was floored by the celebrity level of people showing up to make sure that MLK is an integral part of the community.

Think it's our leadership team that I admired there. They drive the innovation, and I've learned so much from them. They're just an amazing, very intelligent group of people, and I love working with them.

It's also a testament to what can happen when a group of people stay together for a long period of time with the same mission in mind.

Because honestly, the lack of continuity and cohesive leadership teams is a conversation that comes up often in a lot of the things that we share here at This Week Health because we hear, hey, every two years we're changing out the leadership team. It's really hard to get traction and momentum when that's constantly happening.

With you having been there a long time along with several of your peers. It makes a difference in how things get done.

Yeah. Yeah.

True. Very

true.

I love podcasts 'cause I got a long drive to work. In fact, the other day I drove my husband to work and as we were driving outta the garage, he said, do you wanna turn on 2 2 9 This Week Health really enjoy non-healthcare podcasts too. Andrew Huberman, which is a neuroscientist.

Do you listen to him too? You got me

into him. And now, oh, I did because two and a half hours I have to sometimes just go sit in my car. Because I won't listen to a podcast at the house, so I literally will take like an extra drive just to listen to his podcast because you recommended it to me, and I love it.

Their laughter is just contagious.

I will check that one out as well. If you could have dinner, any historical figure who's going to be at the table with you?

Gosh, I was thinking about this. There's so many women in our history alive or have passed away that have made such an impact on us. But honestly, having lost my mother in the past couple years, I just want to bring her back and have dinner with her.

She has been my mentor. She's the person I try to emulate during, in my career and outside of my career.

I think you and I would both pick our moms at this point in our lives for sure. So for those of you listening, if your mom is still alive, go have dinner with her because it's rough after they are gone for sure.

Oh, the first thing I do. Is I play with my two dogs, Chloe and Cosmo, and they're a lot of fun to train and to grow and to teach, so I play a lot with them, and I also love VR headsets I play, I'm like Expert Plus and Beat Saber, so I'm really, like a gamer, a closet gamer and that's what I just love to do, I love games, I love the dogs,

And I'm going to go back to Chloe and Cosmo.

So your robot dogs, you recently brought Chloe to the Long Beach city to her dinner, and she was the hit of the evening. Like everybody wanted to play with Chloe and it's so great. Cause you can bring her anywhere. She's a robot dog. She's allowed in any environment. That was so much fun. Thank you for bringing her.

You'll have to bring them both to Napa for our summit this June.

We are going to have a robot dog birthday party in Napa. I'm already, I'm on it. I promise you, we'll have something for him. So Tracy, if you weren't in healthcare, I'm going to say, and separate from accounting, what career path might you have chosen? And I'm going to say you probably should have just been like a runway expert because your fashion sense is off the charts as well.

But what would you be doing if it wasn't healthcare?

Or younger then I would definitely do that.

I wouldn't discount it. You already are an expert at your VR game. And when you consider the aging population over the next 20 years, and what that's going to mean, you may very well become a huge advocate for the generation that is just ahead of us.

Yeah, I'm really excited. I love the age we're at right now. I think it's the perfect age.

It's a good place to be for sure.

Yeah.

Thank you for spending time with us today. Thank you most of all for your continued commitment to the community that you serve. Having been in Los Angeles for six and a half years at a period of my career, which is how we first connected.

So thank you for being on keynote today as well.

Thank you, Sarah.

for all of our listeners, I hope you have enjoyed this time with Tracy Donegan as much as I have. That's all for keynote. Thanks for listening.

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