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Emphasis on talent, AI safety, achieving balance, and strategies to better inform. And protect business. So that's the summary. We're going to go over here. It's on cio.com. And they have the usual usual story to to intro it. The following 10 priorities should be top of your list. So they're telling you this should be on the top of your list.

Now in healthcare. When I read these stories as a healthcare CIO I take them as the canvas, the backdrop, the the landscape, if you will, that we are operating in from a data standpoint, from a technology standpoint. That's how I would look at it. It's important to understand that we're in a different business, it's at a different point as development, especially with regard to digital. Than other industries.

So some of these things will be applicable. Some will not. So let me go through some of them gain stronger control over data. Absolutely. This is, this has been the case in healthcare for many years. We need to have a better handle over our data, especially with regard to the operational challenges that we're having in healthcare right now, and the financial challenges we're having right now, more and more the CEOs are being asked for to turn that, that data into knowledge and. Into insights.

And I think it's interesting. This concept keeps coming up to me and it is having a conversation. With your health system. And when I'm talking to people and it's generally in this AI space and developers in the AI space. What they're telling me is eventually you're going to have a digital twin for yourself or your doctor or whatever.

And they're going to, they're going to essentially have your knowledge and expertise and be able to do some of the tasks that you would normally do, but it's going to be AI doing them for you with your knowledge and skill sets. Imagine that same thing for the health system. So the health system knowledge. Have, workflow and efficiency and number of beds, open a number of spots, number of parking spots and locations and all that stuff.

All sorts of captured into an AI large language model. And you're able to ask a questions. How many nurses did we have deployed last night at mission hospital? And it responds and it gives you an answer. How efficient were those nurses? How efficiently were they deployed within that system? Would we have been better off if those nurses were deployed in another. A way, shape or form.

I'm just using that as an example, but you're going to be able to query the health system and have a natural language conversation with the health system. I think that is the next frontier for. How we are going to have to structure our data in order to be queried in a natural language way by these large language models in return, the information. The way we used to think about, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could Google, put that search box in front of our health system. Google and ask it any question.

And I think we need to be thinking about that in terms of we've gone beyond the Google, the question, which by the way, we never got to, and now we're looking at it. How do we have a conversation with the hospital, as a persona, the hospital, the health system as a persona. That you could ask a questions to get answers anyway. One concept number two, strike a balance between innovation and operational excellence. Was there a second one? And This is absolutely the case right now, more and more CEOs are being asked to cut back.

And we talked about this last week. In one of the articles that we talked about why we're cutting it staff and this balance is going to be critical. And one of the things, I just want to point out, same thing I said last week, which is no matter how much you cut in order to In order to deliver the results that the organization is looking for, you have to maintain operational excellence period. You cannot let the data center go down.

You cannot let the system get hacked. You cannot let the network go down. That has to be maintained your job. When you sit at that table and they're asking you for cuts is to let them know if you do this, you're putting this thing at risk. Your job is to educate on risks. Now, if they choose to go through with it, then you have other decisions to make.

But at that point you are the protector of operational capabilities within the it organization. And then on the innovation side, no matter how many cuts you make, there should be at least one person left in your organization that gets up every day and thinks about the future. Thinks about. What we could do to move things down.

And it's not just a thought game, right? It has to be somebody that can take the thinking. And look at practical ideas and have conversations. With people on the front lines and then turn those things into projects that you're going to be doing at a future time. Now you're going to set as a CIO. You would be the one setting the priorities.

You'd be the one setting. The. The objectives. We want operational excellence. We want to deliver better outcomes for healthcare. We want to, whatever those happen to be. And typically there's a strategy-based. And and then their job is to delve into those things and go further. Double down on security.

I don't know what the word double-down means. To be honest with you. At the end of the day you cannot pull back from security, got to keep investing in that cat to keep moving it forward. And I would say, how do you educate the entire organization? How do you educate your team and what tools are coming out that are going to change? The need for education and how you educate right. Or should you be looking at secure browsers?

Should you be looking at different things that. Protect people from themselves essentially. Very interesting approach build a robust talent development plan. By the way, every time I read one of these, I just scratched my head, like what CIO is putting this on their list. And it has actually has the person's name.

Who's putting this on their list.

You should have a robust talent development plan, period. No matter what's happening, you have to carve out money. For developing your team and your staff. If you're not, you're just asking for them to get poached. And you're asking for them to degrade in terms of their capabilities over time. It's just a bad setup.

When we didn't have money, we set up it university within our health system and we had. People that were experts in certain areas, training, cross training people on other areas. So for instance my person who was in charge of finance for it. Again, 750 people, $250 million budget. We had a person who's dedicated to finance.

That person taught a course on budgeting within it and how to develop an it budget. And I would put our development plan against anyone's in terms of developing future leaders within healthcare, because we were doing all that cross training. And again, it was at a time where we didn't have a ton of budget money to. Put that in there. Delve deeper into AI.

Again absolutely. You should be doing this. You should have some aspect of a practical, how it can be applied today to deliver some of the results you're looking for. And look for those use cases, not necessarily just around the edges, but those that are going to deliver a proof of concept that that, that gets noticed,

that has an impact that gets noticed. And then also, you've got to put all those safety things in place. You got to put all the. The governance in place, the policies in place and all that stuff. So delving deeper into AI is putting the framework together in order to do that. And then I think from an architecture standpoint, the team. Your architecture team needs to be thinking about what do AI tools, what do AI. What does an AI foundation look like? And then your future people are interacting with the organization to see. Where AI can make a difference.

And in healthcare there's a ton. Imaging. Note-taking and ambient clinical listening. There is the quite frankly, we already have AI models. In place that can take telemetry data and move it into insights. So forth and so on. So there's a ton of different ways you could be looking at this right now, but there's a lot of different aspects of this. There is the governance.

There is the infrastructure. There is the. The pragmatic things that you're doing today, plus somebody needs to be keeping an eye on your partners. Your partners are integrating it today. And they're bringing AI into your system. Do you know what they're bringing in and do you know how their. Implementing it. Sharpen your company's digital acumen.

I'm not sure what that's about. I'm not even going to read it. Address the AI talent shortage challenge. Again, I'm not sure that's for you. To address here's the thing I will say is determine the AI talent you need. Like at least put that together, put that framework together. What AI talent do you feel you need?

And then what AI education do you feel you need to do within your organization? As a CIO? Those are probably the two plans I would be putting together for this year. I probably would have started some of that last year, but that those are two things I'd be thinking about. Strengthening data governance, always. Data is while Matthew McConaughey would tell you to hell this data is the gold. In this AI world he's doing that right now onto the salesforce.com. Ads that are out there. That's a term that's been out there for a long time.

That's number 10. I would say, make cost optimization a priority should have been number one last year and probably number one this year. And I would be telling those stories over and over again. I would be encouraging my team to find efficiencies and find cost savings. I don't care if it's a, we redesigned how we do the power distribution units. In our data center and saves $400,000.

I would be touting that from the rooftops. That we saved the organization $400,000. Everybody sees it as a cost center. If you can find ways to save money and then tell that story by all means, tell it often tell it loud.

All right. I think that's all for today. Don't forget. Share this podcast with a friend or colleague, keep the conversation going and give back to the industry by mentoring the next generation. We want to thank our chill sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

Short test artists. I parlay it's certified health, notable and service. 📍 Now check them out this week. health.com/today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.