Newsday – Patient Volumes, Remote Work, and Big Tech in Healthcare
Episode 44520th September 2021 • This Week Health: Conference • This Week Health
00:00:00 00:39:46

Share Episode

Transcripts

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

 Today, on this week in health it, I continue to be concerned about it, direct support. And engagement with our clinical users. That is very difficult in the remote world. I think that IT organizations need to find ways to accommodate that and, and structure it and not assume that it can all be done remotely.

I.

It is Newsday. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT at channel dedicated to keeping Health IT staff current and engaged. Special thanks to Sirius Healthcare Health Lyrics and Worldwide Technology who are our new state show sponsors for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health IT leaders.

Uh, just a quick note before we get to our show. We launched a new podcast today in Health It, we look at one story every weekday morning, and we break it down from a health IT perspective. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts at Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, overcast, you name it, we're out there.

You can also go to today in health it.com and now onto today's show. Today it is Newsday and Sue Shade is in the house. Sue, welcome back to the show. Good to see you, bill. Happy to be here. I, I'm looking forward to the conversation. We've picked, uh, four stories that I think are pretty relevant. We're gonna take a look at remote work.

It's interesting because remote work is one of those things that we thought by now we'd be going back to the office, but a lot of plans have been delayed, and we'll see where that goes. We're gonna talk big tech in healthcare. That's been a hot topic over the last couple of weeks with Google's reorg and how that has gone down.

We're also gonna look at volumes and how volumes are being impacted, and a survey around that. I'm gonna let you choose, which topic would you like to start with? Oh, you know, I'm, which topic do I wanna start with? We, can you, you missed one, you said four and you only mentioned three. Oh yeah. Digital around digital health, cultural transformation.

mes reportedly moving back to:

found is they're returning to:

tient volume when compared to:

To address these challenges, more than 50% of hospital respondents said they would expand their clinic hours to increase outpatient access. Other providers. Response include hiring more physicians, increasing physician productivity expectations, hiring more clinician support staff, increasing marketing to patients, and proactively calling patients who have delayed care.

Some covid to 19 related challenges, however, remain. Including, and this is a big caveat, including shortages of nurses and clinical support staff and some patients continuing to delay care. And then they have a whole bunch of stats in there. When I read these things, it's, there's things working against each other here, right?

We have some areas where the demand is pretty high, but we still do have the shortages of nurses, the shortages of clinical staff. And when I think about those things, when they come to the CIO. When the health IT organization is engaged in these conversations, what does that conversation look like, do you think?

With the CIO? That's an interesting question because I was gonna talk about it more broadly from a, you know, healthcare. Sure, yeah. Let's start there and then we'll, we'll dive down into it. Yeah, sure, sure. So there are competing issues here, and I was happy to hear in this article. Healthcare providers trying to make proactive calls to people who have delayed care because I think the health of the country, has been impacted by the pandemic in non covid ways in terms of people putting off preventive care.

So that's a plus. Staffing is a huge factor right now. Burnout. Of staff. As the pandemic continues, we can't talk about it being over as we maybe wanted to, I think early in the summer. So staffing capacity, staffing, burnout, being able to recruit new staff, all effects how much access there is to care. So what's that balance between bringing people in for care when

There's a surge in the pandemic that we're currently going through, and you've got low staffing. So that's what, that's what organizations need to balance. You look at the bottom line, you look at your workforce. Add to that, the, and I know you don't wanna talk about vaccines, but add to that, that hospitals are requiring more and more, and now with Biden's

Ruling or executive order last week, it definitely will apply to hospitals requiring vaccines for their employees. But what does that mean in terms of even more staff churn, if you will, as people go through that process and potentially decide to leave the organization? So a lot of factors that executives need to balance right now.

And I would say in terms of the numbers, when I see the financial numbers in Boston Children's, where I'm still doing the interim CIO role, I. We're slowly coming back. We use 19 as our benchmark in terms of where we wanna get to, but we're slowly coming back. Right. One, one more thing I'll throw in there to you.

I have some clients I've been talking to and. People I've been interviewing and one of the things that's happening is the metropolitan areas are going outside and some of the places that are experiencing a surge are going outside for nurses and for clinical informatics staff and those kinds of things.

And they're throwing the. The pay scale's out of whack. So they're going to some of these rural areas which are already pretty tight with nursing shortages and, and, uh, clinician shortages. And those people are essentially walking away from their hospital jobs and they're taking jobs for traveling nurse type roles.

And right now those roles are paying like . Four to five times what they would make normally as a nurse in those markets. And they're just getting on a plane and following the money. And then my guess is their thought process is this is what I'm gonna do for the next year or two through the pandemic.

Yeah. Make three to four times my salary. And then quite frankly, when, when the pandemic does wind down or, or come to an end, I'll just go back and get my nursing job. . Yeah. Yeah. Or retire in terms of nursing and aging of the nursing workforce. Yeah. The clinical informatics staff is really interesting too, because we have larger implementations, higher.

Salary ranges going into, uh, mid tier, what I would call mid-tier markets. Right. Not huge markets, but you know, Boise or I guess St. Louis is maybe a middle market in those, but they're going into these markets where they have trained staff who understand clinical informatics and they're offering la New York, Boston salaries to people who live.

They live. Right. And that's also throwing things outta whack too. So we, we have this rework of the, the labor pool that's happening. I, I would assume that's a very big conversation that's happening at a lot of health systems. Like how. Just how are we gonna take care of our staff is probably first and foremost awesome.

Yeah. And burnout. Burnout. They're just working like crazy. Mm-Hmm. . And that's one of the things that struck me here. We're going to expand the clinic hours and we're going to drive for higher productivity within our physicians. Seems to be at odds with, with, Hey, we've working these people. Like crazy over the last two years.

Mm-Hmm. . And, uh, we need to get our financials back, therefore we're going to put the burden back on the. On the physicians. This is where I, I come back to the health IT conversation, because a lot of this will end up being things like, okay, how can we be more productive? What tools can we bring into bear?

Yeah. How can we engage the patients that have delayed care? How can we get more efficient with our scheduling to make sure there aren't open spots? And those kind, all those things that some, there, there are tools and there are things around. That we could be implementing. So I mean, how does health IT engage in those conversations, do you think?

So, I think there's two threads here in terms of. The discussion and the needs and where health it engages. One is for the clinicians. What can we do to make their lives easier, to make their work more efficient in terms of the systems that they have that they're using? And we all know that. What do people say?

No physician likes their EHR, that many complaints and, and it's a contributing factor to burnout. But you know what? Small things can we do to make it easier, um, more efficient for them. One of the things that Boston Children's Hospital, through the Innovation group and John Brownstein's leadership, um, he's the Chief Innovation Officer.

They do a twice a year call for pain points to employees. Where are the pain points in your work? And then that is summarized and worked in terms of what new things do we need to be able to do to provide for them, and what things do we need to be tweaking? If you look at the, um, patient side, patient engagement, how can we make it that journey easier for them?

And that's a lot of . Leveraging your core vendors. It's a lot of add-ons where the gaps exist and really focus on that digital front door as we talk about, and making it easier and more accessible to our patients. So those are two of the threads that I think that IT leaders and definitely get involved in in those discussions.

And the question about culture and burnouts. It is not just serving the organization, it also has a staff, right? Right. So are my people at Boston Children's burnt out? What do we need to do resume fatigue and the long days and how do we address their, their issues as workers as well? Yeah. So I'm probably gonna go to the remote work.

Story next, but as you were talking, I was thinking one of the things we did at St. Joe's back in the day was we used to mine the feedback. And so we were always looking at where, where are we getting feedback. Some is direct, some is indirect. And one of the things we used to do is we used to mine the support desk tickets, and we had an analytics person.

An analyst who essentially was going through that and they would provide us feedback as leadership and they would say, look, there's an awful lot of calls around this. There's a lot awful lot of problems around this. And they would create these really cool visuals for us. That we would say if we could solve that problem, we would really eliminate a significant burden for this group.

And some of it was just directly, it related. We had too many session resets and a session reset meant that a clinician was working, they were talking to a patient, they were actually doing something and something locked up. And so we would would look at that and say, all right, this seems to be a recurring problem.

We have to do something on our Citrix platform, and we reduce that number, almost 80% and saw those tickets sort of go away. It's that kind of stuff that you don't think directly impacts the clinician, but it does when they're in the room seeing somebody and something doesn't work the way it should, that throws them out of their

Normal workflow, their normal rhythm and, and creates, you know, angst something they need to work around. So we, we would mine those tickets. That was one thing. We did a clinician survey. And we brought in a professional firm. Now we were again, $7 billion health system. So we brought in a professional firm to help us create a, a survey that we went out to all of our clinicians.

We did that roughly every three years, and that feedback was gold. In between those surveys, obviously as the CIO, you're, you're rounding, you're talking to people, you're collecting. Information all the time. But those things are loaded with reducing the burden on staff, giving them time back in their day, taking out the nuisance factor, improving the workflows, all that stuff I think is, is so important at this point.

It every little bit helps. I think. It does. It does. And if we can just springboard off that for a minute. You've just given a good idea. We have not been . To my knowledge, mining that help desk service ticket data, and it's probably something that we should be doing. Or I can talk to my, um, our new CIO as I do the transition and recommend some things that they should take on we two other things.

You mentioned the survey. Did Arch Collaborative exist as part of class when you were CIO? It didn't and it's it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal and we . We joined and participated this year in, in the survey. We did the survey over the summer. In fact, I think one of my calls today is to review the next round on the survey results and how we're gonna present that internally to our clinical leaders.

So that's critical. That's directly clinician satisfaction, both physicians and nurses, and slice and dice out right away. So that's an important piece. One other piece that I would just mention, you talk about rounding. Rounding is harder in this . Period of time in terms of the pandemic and . We do at, uh, Boston Children's, something called Rounding to Influence, and it is a twice a month, uh, very structured kind of rounding.

I, I'm sure there's lots of other kind of rounding that happens, but this is one where there are questions posed for leaders. To take to their areas and have the discussion and solicit feedback. And I encourage my CMIO and senior director who's responsible for clinical systems to participate in some of the clinical unit rounding that's happening, to hear feedback on those questions.

And then I, along with my VP of it, uh, operations host a rounding to influence session virtually for . Staff within it. Getting that frontline feedback in all areas is absolutely critical. Yeah, that's fantastic. Uh, if people want more information on the Arch Collaborative, obviously you can go out to class and, and get that information.

We did a, an episode, so if you hit this week, health.com, and in the search, just put in Arch Collaborative, you'll get to an episode that I did with Taylor Davis, who's the EVP of analysis and Strategy for class, and all we talk about is the arch collaborative for about 40 minutes. I, I love the sophistication of that is in its simplicity.

They don't ask. They don't send out a survey with 50 questions. Yeah. It's a very simple survey. Yeah. And so I think because it's so, it's such a simple survey, it collects a lot, it gets a lot more feedback than you would normally get from a large surveys that you would generally see out there. So just one more point on that, just getting that data within your own organization from your clinicians is helpful.

But then there's the benchmarking aspect in terms of your peer groups. Alright, so let's, let's hit this Wall Street Journal article and it is behind a paywall, so I apologize to people for that. I subscribe to more things now than I ever did during the Newsday story, but. I subscribed to Modern Healthcare, subscribed to Stat News to a bunch of 'em, just 'cause they put out some good content.

So, uh, wall Street Journal article is, remote work may now last for two years, worrying some bosses, many employees develop new routines during the pandemic, swapping, commuting for exercise or blocking hours for uni uninterrupted work. These sound like good things, even staffers who once bristled at doing their job outside of an office.

Have to embrace the flexibility and productivity of at home life. Over the past 18 months, many say surveys have shown enthusiasm for remote work and has only increased as the pandemic has stretched on. And they talk about return dates being postponed by many companies. It seems like mostly they're talking large organizations here, but a lot of health systems would fall into that category.

And then the last two things I've highlighted in this article are some of the things that they note towards the end. Perceptions of remote work have shifted as the pandemic has gone on. Seems to be a recurring theme in this. What many have concluded over time is that their companies can operate largely effectively while remote executives and workers while remote.

So they're saying, Hey, they can be effective operating remotely. Can healthcare operate well remotely? Is is probably no 'cause. There's a lot of fiscal touchpoints. Points can health it operate well remotely? What are your thoughts on that?

I don't know that my thoughts have changed significantly in the last few months. I continue to be concerned about it, direct support and engagement with our clinical users. The value of our folks who support those systems having cloth and in-person relationships, rounding, we were just talking about, I think is critical and

That is very difficult in the remote world, and I think that it, organizations need to find ways to accommodate that and, and structure it and not assume that it can all be done remotely. That's the, the biggest, most targeted. I, I know that for all the infrastructure work we're doing, we're making it happen.

If we've gotta have people on site and data centers, or they can handle it remotely, we're just making that work fine. The other thing is just the relationships overall and. As I wind down at Boston Children's, our new CIO, Heather Nelson, coming from University of Chicago Medicine starts the week of October 11th and I'll do the turnover with her that week.

I connect with people that I've now worked with remotely. I. Primarily over the last six months. It's like I've told some of the leaders at the hospital on our Zoom calls, I just wish it were different. I wish that I could have been more in person and able to build those relationships that are so critical.

You do what you can in this Zoom world. There's a handful of things I always say to people. One is, you can't replace face-to-face. There's, there's something about being able to read the person. Being able to sit across the table from them sitting in a restaurant. These are . I'm talking about these things like the good old days.

But, you know, sitting in a restaurant across from a, a colleague having a conversation, another colleague walking by and having a, a short conversation. There's a, there's a lot of things that happen that are good in that, that I think we missed out on. I worry about the next generation. I get emails every now and then on this.

I know it's effective. I know you can be effective at home. I know that you can do your job at home. All those things are true, but I worry about the next generation missing out on the relational aspects of working with colleagues, and I worry about them missing out on promotions that are going to go to people.

I. That have relationships. I, I know that we're supposed to be robots now and relation that all promotions and whatever are done based on some objective criteria. But the reality is you like hiring Heather. I. As the new CIO, you're comfortable with Heather, you've interacted with Heather. Those things happen and I'm worried about the next generation thinking, well, how did I get passed over for that?

Well, you're working outta your house. People don't really know you, and you're like, well, I interviewed just like they did over that three week, four week period. But in reality, the person who's on site really developed a relationship over a two year period. So when it comes time to make that decision of should we give the promotion to this person?

Who's been in their home and we just interviewed them. I, I like 'em. They're smart, they're talented, but this other person's smart and talented, and I have a relationship with them. I just feel more comfortable with this person. I'm, I'm afraid we're gonna overlook that group. And maybe I said too much in that explanation, but I, I think there is something too, people getting overlooked for promotions and those kind of things who aren't in the office.

Yeah, I think, I think it's a valid concern. But if your whole team, like take it as primarily remote or some hybrid, then . Everybody may be in the same boat. Right? It's probably not a good example to use Heather at ACIO level where we did have the finalists come in, in person and and meet, right? But if we go from internal promotions to just the market overall and people moving around, there's a tremendous amount of people changing jobs, leaving where they are and taking other positions.

And there's just this huge increase in, if it's virtual, I can work live and work. anywhere, . Right. And you just kind of wonder how, I mean, I think this story is yet to be told, if you're changing jobs and you're virtual and you never meet your boss, you never in person, you never meet the people you're gonna work with two years from now, how does that play out?

Where do you fit in that organization? I. I don't know. It would, it would stand to reason that turnover rates are going to go up in a remote work en environment, don't you think? Mm-Hmm. ? Yes. Yes, because you have more options. If you're working virtually for a company in your town and you're not commuting anymore, why can't you work virtually for company across the country?

Country? Right. Well, I mean, there's the options. I don't know. It's like you're not gonna really miss people. I mean, if you started, let's assume you started in March of last year working where you're working and you are now a year and a half into your time there and somebody comes and offers you $3 an hour more, you're not thinking, ah, I'm really gonna miss these people.

And I really developed relationships and those kind of things. You're just doing work and $3 an hour is $3 an hour. Yeah. There's, there's still relationships. There are still relationships even in this virtual world. You're not just a cog now on some giant wheel, but it is different. It's not the same it, it is not the same kind of relationships.

I'll give you that. Well, so talk to me about managers and what do you say to managers? So clearly you don't have a one-on-one relationship as the interim CIOA one-on-one relationship with everybody in health it. And so it's always actually, even when we were. Onsite, it's always been the case that people will leave a company more based on who their direct manager is than who their leadership of the entire organization is and those kind of things.

So how are you working with your managers to ensure that they are, I don't, they're connected. They're listening. They're. Responsive to the remote worker. Great question. And to to your leave and join comment. I think what I've heard in the past is people join organization and they leave because of the manager.

Right. Have you heard that? Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, honestly, I'm not working directly with our managers. We have a manager, um, meeting once a month that I participate in all virtual. It is hard when you have that many people on a Zoom to make those connections. I'm counting on the directors to be working closely with their managers and have those relationships and helping them.

We have an upcoming managers meeting that we're gonna do breakout rooms to discuss certain topics, which I think will be important. Or just more connection, more thinking something through. I don't know that we've done the zoom breakout rooms that much, but that's a helpful tool, tool, uh, virtual world. I would say I have a pretty good at six months, one-on-one relationship with each of my direct reports in terms of knowing them, knowing what makes them tick.

Um, helping them. Supporting them, um, not speaking exclusively about that group, but a couple people have already said, would you be willing to stay connected and, and be a mentor when you're gone? So you, you do, even in this virtual world form, some of those connections that when you leave them are gonna carry on in different forms.

But . It's a co. It's a complicated thing. If I can make one plug, and I'd love you to add it to your show notes and I'll send you the link. One of my colleagues at Starbridge Advisors Respir issue wrote a blog, . On remote work called now What? Working in a post covid world and he's got kind of a list of advice and considerations for both, uh, employers and employees.

That I think is a pretty good synopsis. I'll send you the link. You can add that to your show notes. Okay. I know everybody's . Got an opinion in writing about this topic and there's still more chapters to write . Right? Alright, so 10 minute warning here, 'cause I know you have a hard stop. And let's do, is healthcare too hard for big tech?

Okay, so a couple things happened. One, David Feinberg left Google Health. They did a reorg and moved all the parts of the healthcare organization out into the various business units. Apple moved back from a thing they called Health Habit, an app called Health Habit, which was supporting their internal employees through a partnership with AC Wellness.

I didn't read too much into that because that that was like just in their campus in Cupertino, and it just never seemed like they were gonna scale that. And then some, some healthcare. Dignitaries weighed in on this. Uh, a couple former guests of the show, Sherry Dve, she had a post on LinkedIn that went viral.

If companies misunderstand evidence-based medicine, they have no business bringing technology into medicine at all. I commented on that and we could talk about that. Glen Tolman, who's, uh. Previous guest on the show as well. Livongo now with Transparent, had this to say Big Tech was struggling in healthcare because patients' problems are more about the overall experience than technology per se.

And then Dr. Nick Patel, chief Digital Officer at Prisma Health, uh, had this to say about Apple scaling back the multi. Trillion dollar healthcare industry is a hard nut to crack. There are too many complex variables to solve, and healthcare tech space is already too crowded, which is trying to solve for a tiny part of the overall tangled mess.

So that's, that's what some people are starting to weigh in here. There's more to the article. I, I might hit some of it a little later, but I'm, I'm curious as you hear those comments and, and yeah. This whole thing, what's your initial reaction to, is healthcare too hard for big tech? Yeah. Should I, should I start with who knew?

Healthcare was the complex quote? Okay. , right. Who are there Clearly, I, I mean, we had a lot of things that the previous president said that were pretty silly. That has to rank up there in the top five. Who knew healthcare was this hard? Yeah. I'll give you that. My mom knew healthcare was this hard. Yeah.

Everybody knows healthcare is this hard. Anyway, I'll give you that. And so I thought this was a really interesting article. I'm glad you mentioned what Ulman said about, uh, patients problems, . Healthcare is more about patients' problems than the experience with technology. I think that's an important point.

I wanna flag a few other ones here if I may. There's also something in the article about viewing it as a part-time job, and the fact that it's just one component for these big tech companies versus the full focus as a factor. There's also something here about . Big tech firms wanting to solve the healthcare problems by themselves, and you already quoted Nick Patel.

He offers another suggestion. If major technology companies came to the table together at the national level to solve this problem, instead of trying to get a peep of the trillion dollar pie, then maybe we will have a shot at fundamentally reducing cost and improving outcomes. I think that's an important point too.

It's like it takes a village, it's complex and it takes a village to solve. So I'm not sure the question you first posed to me, but interesting article in terms of what's happening with big tech and why they're succeeding or not succeeding and Yeah. I'm gonna throw it back to you, . Yeah. So I, I'm gonna stir the pot a little bit here.

I agree. So the, the healthcare sector gets only part-time of the CEO's at these big tech firms. That is absolutely true. We're hearing that. Initiatives are scattered across the organization, so they lack focus. They lack a cohesive enterprise strategy around healthcare. That is true as well. When I read Nick Patel's thing, I, I sort of.

I struggled with it. If major technology companies came to the table together at the national level to solve a problem, instead of trying to get a piece of the trillion dollar pie, then maybe we will have a shot of fundamentally reducing costs and improving outcomes. Um, I. That's not their job. These were publicly traded companies.

Their job isn't to reduce costs or improve outcomes of healthcare. I mean, their job is to grow revenue, and that's what each one of 'em is trying to do. They're trying to take a piece of the trillion dollar pie and do that. Now, in the process, what they're saying is healthcare, the experience for healthcare is fundamentally broken, and consumers want something different.

They're not wrong in, in doing that. Amazon has carved out a. Pretty interesting PBM type play. They're gonna do pretty well, uh, with prescription drugs and the delivery of prescription drugs probably as effective, if not more effective than many of the big players that are out there. Uh, today, Google has carved out a fairly significant.

A data business. They have a 10 year deal with Mayo. They have a long-term deal with Ascension. They just did a long-term deal with common Spirit. So they're carving off a piece and that's, that's what they do. They're carving off a piece. They're not really after, Hey, let's reduce costs and improve outcomes.

Mm-Hmm. , that's the job of healthcare. And my thing back to Nick would be if you say, Hey, these. Companies should all get in in a room and figure this out. Why doesn't healthcare get in a room and figure this out? Fair enough. Fair enough. I would go back to. Are there problems that big tech companies can solve at scale?

And if you remember back early days of the vaccine, we talked about Amazon's got this huge distribution network. How can they help with the vaccine distribution? They can do stuff at scale. So are there particular problems within the healthcare ecosystem that make more sense for the big tech firms to be tackling?

Here's, here's one of the more interesting things. Somebody asked me last, what's the, in Florida and I, I, I thought I haven't been as. Lately. So I thought, well, I'm just gonna put a Google search in here. I'll tell you what Google can do really well. They have all the stats. Mm-Hmm. . I mean, you just put a simple search in there.

You can get hospitalizations, you can get positivity rate, you can get a seven day averages, you can get cases, death count, all that information. I mean, when we went back early on, we all went to the Johns Hopkins. That was the only place really to go. And then they started sprouting up. Google now has a pretty good handle on this stuff, and that data is available to anyone who can, could, could put a search in.

So there, there are, there's any number of ways that I think Big Tech is going to participate in healthcare. I love, by the way, one of my, my favorite episodes this year was with Glenn Tolman. Because I'd love a lot of the things he said, and it was along the lines of what he said here, which is it's really about the experience.

And so he has tech as a part of his solution at Transparent, but he also has this concept of everybody wants to talk to a person. So we no longer do phone trees. And everyone who is a transparent client, we'll talk to a person within 60 seconds. He's like marrying the two and saying, what are people really after?

And they're after a better experience all around. And so he's. He is working with providers to address one of their biggest challenges and he's essentially paying for surgeries upfront, which is, which is a pretty interesting play. And then on, on the consumer side, there's just a whole host of things he's doing, getting people a, they do have a good, pretty good front end, but they also have

The phone conversations and then they offer that direction of where can they go, how can they connect with the right provider at the right time? So it's, I, I think it is too complex for big tech from that perspective. And I also think our expectations of big tech, and he closes this article. And I love Patty.

Patty's been on the show as well. I think he's, he's a great thought leader in the digital space, Uhhuh. But he closes this with saying, and why doesn't Amazon, apple, Google come in and buy one of one of the big healthcare providers like Amazon did with buying Whole Foods to get in the grocery business?

And the answer is. They don't want to be in the healthcare business. They don't want that level of regulatory oversight, which is why Google and Microsoft both dropped out of the patient health record aspect because both of them, by doing that, were opening themselves up to all sorts of government oversight and scrutiny that they just said, not worth it.

And so I, I don't anticipate Google, apple, or any of those coming in and buying, I don't know, Providence or, or Common Spirit. I, I don't even think that's on their radar. Yeah, I don't either. Not at all. So I, not to be critical. I love Patty. Oh my gosh. We spent 10 minutes on that story. I, I will touch on this.

Digital health is a cultural transformation. This is from the medical futurist. It's an article worth looking at the future of healthcare. He has an infographic in the middle. Traditional medicine versus modern medicine, and point of care has hospitals and clinics and labs. Traditional. Yeah. And modern medicine is patients a traditional population.

Modern medicine's gonna be around the individual getting to that n of. The organizing principle of traditional is hierarchy and partnership is going to be modern medicine institutions. Is data ownership. Patient ownership is the patient ownership of their own data is the future a physician's roles as authority is traditional in the, uh, future.

He has guide and then he has ivory tower of knowledge, and then he has healthcare. Really figuring out how to participate in this ecosystem of social media crowdsourcing to get our knowledge base out into the, uh, the. The, the public square where people are talking about healthcare. I guess I, I thought that was an interesting graphic.

What are your thoughts on that graphic? I love this article. Love the graphic. Absolutely. So it'll be in the show notes, and I would encourage people to look at this infographic, the very first one point of care. Is, uh, something I have, uh, real world experience with very recently and covered in my most recent blog.

You can put a link to that too. I had a bone density test portable in my home. Wow. Based on a phone call from the insurance company after my fall saying. Claims information shows you had a fall and that you need to get a bone density test and we're gonna be in your area. On September 15th, can we schedule that?

And I'm like a portable, so read my blog. I mean, I was like, okay, and we did it. And it's like, oh. So yeah, that's shifting in terms of where certain care options are available. That's fascinating. Yeah. Well, Sue, it's great to talk to you. Congratulations on the Boston Children's. You're, you're winding that down in October.

Heather Nelson taking over. That's fantastic. And so I imagine that means there's gonna be an opening in Chicago for ACIO role ? Uh, there will be. Yeah. There will be. So yeah, it's, it's, it's all good. They're fortunate to have Heather and I look forward to doing the handoff. It's been a good experience.

Always, uh, enjoyed talking with you, bill and I always learn something new and get some new ideas percolating here. So thank you. Thanks. Always great to catch up. What a great discussion. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel from these kinds of discussions, please forward them a note.

I. Perhaps your team, your staff. I know if I were ACIO today, I would have every one of my team members listening to this show. It's it's conference level value every week. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or they can go wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google. I. Overcast, which is what I use, uh, Spotify, Stitcher, you name it.

We're out there. They can find us. Go ahead, subscribe today. Send a note to someone and have them subscribe as well. We want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health IT leaders. Those are VMware, Hillrom, Starbridge advisors, Aruba and McAfee.

Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

Chapters

Video

More from YouTube