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You'll hear from leaders from New York General, UCI Health, and Seattle Children's Hospital on the latest in predictable recovery, AI, cloud, and ransomware defense. Sign up today at thisweekealth. com slash rubrik. Today in Health IT, we're going to take a look at an article from Health Leaders, and it's about Advocates Results.

Very interesting, worth taking a look at. We're going to do that with Sarah Richardson here in a minute. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system. Creator of This Week Health, set of channels and events dedicated to transform healthcare, one connection at a time. If you haven't yet, check out the check out our website, thisweekhealth.

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All right. One last thing, share this podcast with a friend or colleague. Use it as foundation for daily or weekly discussions on the topics that are relevant to you in the industry. A great way to mentor someone. They can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Sarah Richardson, welcome back to the show.

We have have an article here with a lot of stats, a lot of numbers, a lot of financials. Do you want to set this one up?

Yeah, I do. I love about this article from Advocate Health under their CEO, Jim Skogsberg, is the strategies they're using to increase patient volume, which is obviously helping their financial performance, but also shifting their market dynamics.

You think about how that organization is expanding services, optimizing care delivery, and enhancing patient experiences to attract more patients, the consumerism lens that we often talk about. But these help address challenges posed by declining inpatient volumes and some of the competitive healthcare landscape we're seeing that Hospitals need to have sustainable growth and improve their margins.

And IT has been hit to some degree the hardest by these reduced margins over periods of time. So when you see patient volumes starting up again, especially from surgeries and the ED, it gives light to the enablement technology can provide and also get IT out of cost cutting mode and really into more like cost management and the ability to deliver new services and capabilities.

That's why I picked it. Wow.

My takeaway is the same thing is that with some focused strategies. They've been able to drive volumes increase in volumes. Whenever you increase in volume in our model the numbers will follow. So they believe that there's a surge in demand for inpatient and outpatient services, along with the other things that they've done and other health systems have done around operational efficiency have allowed them to significantly increase their operating income.

I guess my question to you as we look at this, we'll get to the so what in a minute. But as we look at this, does this represent a change? Is this just an advocate is doing the right things and they're progressing? Or is this going to be an industry thing that we see that margins are returning, volumes are returning, other health systems are going to see better financial results just as an overall market trend?

Yeah, it's going to be twofold from my perspective. It's the wave of overcoming that hesitancy to potentially go into these in person settings in some cases. People are comfortable going back into hospitals and even outpatient centers again. So when you take the consumerism lens and you're actively marketing and really thinking about ways to bring people to your health system, that's going to be a win.

When you see the success, it's And offsetting some of the non labor costs and medication and supply perspectives. And you have that energy that comes from inside the organization to focus on bringing people back in. We were nervous about bringing people into the organizations because we didn't have staff to take care of them.

And we still were overloaded from some of the pandemic hangover. Now that is waning and we're seeing the ability to bring people in and give them the experiences and the quality and the outcomes they've always expected. We're actually doing that better. But it took a while for that pendulum to come back to center.

You know what's interesting about this, and I fall into this trap all the time, and I warn people from falling into this trap, and it is, I think the data does suggest that larger health systems are doing better, but I don't think it suggests that smaller health systems are doing better. And I don't think it suggests that all large health systems are doing better.

I think large health systems that get in front of the chaos of being a large health system, have the ability to leverage contracts for the rising cost of labor. They have the ability to get leverage economies of scale around the rising costs of the goods required to to run hospitals and those kinds of things.

And. Because they are large, they have negotiating power and all those other things. So scale really does matter. But scale only matters if you have control of it. If you're in front of it. I've seen so many people are like we've got to scale. We've got to buy. We've got to buy. And they keep doing M& A.

And every merger and acquisition creates more chaos. The more chaos you create, you have to get in front of it. You have to consolidate the number of needs you're going to put into your supply chain in order to do replacement. You can't have 55 of them and expect to get economies of scale. You actually have to do the hard work to get in front of it.

That's one aspect of it. The second aspect is large systems are not small health systems. And urban health systems are not rural health systems. And so the economies don't necessarily translate. And so when we read an article like this, it is promising that people are feeling more comfortable to go back into the acute care setting post the pandemic.

They are we are seeing an uptick. That is encouraging. But it doesn't necessarily translate into, the macroeconomic trend doesn't necessarily, Translate into returns for every health system. They still have to do the right things in order to attract people in. I

do, and remember that when you're part of a large health system, and I've been a part of a couple massive ones in the U.

S., is that strategy may be set at the upper level. It's still going to go down to those local facilities, divisions, markets, etc. to execute on it. So you're going to get the high level vision or air cover from, I'm just going to say the corporate environment or the decision makers. When you get down into those local hospitals, you still have to create a strategy that works for your patients as well.

But what you get is the ability to go after it knowing that you can handle what's going to be coming because some of those bigger pieces are tackled for you. And so it is really a finite, A balance between being the delivery mechanism of a strategy that's coming from a higher corporate environment.

When you have the permission, for lack of a better term, to do that, you get really creative. And it can be different within a city. I was in Los Angeles, was my most recent large city, and every single zip code to a degree had its own marketing strategy for certain types of elements that we were endeavoring to cover.

Oh, that, that was so true in Southern California. The demographic changes from market to market and the markets could be like a block apart. Like we had to really think through how are we going to reach that? Two mile block, which, by the way, had a couple hundred thousand people in it.

It's crazy stats. And by the way, when you say large health systems, you mean the largest health systems or the most physicians. You were a part of some large health systems. Let's go to the so what. We like to end these with so what. So the the health IT leader who's listening to this.

What's the practical application of the fact that one of the largest health systems in the country has posted. Really good financial returns and they're seeing an uptick in volumes.

I love this because it makes me feel like when you're a kid in class, you're like, I can fix that. I can help you with that.

Like technology could help manage rising demand and CIOs can focus on optimizing operations to handle that increased patient volume. We've got the technology, we have the systems and capabilities, but thinking about now, whether that's the AI pilot to, And automation and tools that reduce burden of the staff or patient flow or administrative tasks.

Scheduling and billing, just getting into your ED and some of these different locations. Think of some of the OR optimization projects that I don't know how many people have said to me, I really want to implement OR block scheduling. And then it's just this diatribe of conversation about, Why it may or may not work, great opportunity to do it.

You've also got the telehealth remote monitoring capabilities that many are using. When you think about how you can start to really think about those underserved populations and reducing the need for in person, it increases volume opportunities. And my favorite, which is always going to be the data analysis around it.

You can really predict patient surgeries. Help with resource allocation, decision making and more timely delivery of care. So if the volumes are coming in, use the tools you likely have already purchased as part of your EMR capabilities and, or have the add ons that are complimentary from an interoperability perspective.

As CIOs, we have all of these things lying in wait. It's a matter of someone asking for them at the right time. And if we've been diligent about planting all of those seeds, like we have since the pandemic on certain initiatives. They sprout up just like a squirrel, forgets where its nuts get planted. All of a sudden these great trees are in place.

Literally, that's how we can start to bring some of these things forward.

Love that. My, my so what on this is that the money will come in, the money will go out. Like these are just the overall macro trends. If you want to multiply your time in the future, if you want to get ahead of some of these things, you have to spend your money wisely today.

And one of the ways to multiply your time in the future is to make the right investments. In certain things now. It amazes me when we get into a downturn and people are like, I have so much tech debt, I don't know what to do with. When you're in a downturn, you don't manage, you don't address tech debt.

But when you have an excess of money when for whatever reason they're willing to give you more money in IT and you don't address tech debt, When you go down into that next downturn, don't complain about not having too much tech debt. This is when you do it. This is when you address it is when you have the intern.

And so if you feel like, Hey, I can't really control. The, these ups and downs within our organization. I think you do have more control than you think in terms of the operational efficiency. But with that being said when you have money, you've got to take care of the problems. And if you don't when you go into the next downturn, it, the, whatever problems you do have are going to be exacerbated.

So spend your money wisely while you've got it. All right, that's all for today. Don't forget, share this podcast with a friend or colleague. and use it as a foundation for mentoring. We want to thank our channel partners who are helping us to invest in the next generation of health leaders, specifically Rubrik.

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