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Solution Showcase: Smooth and Rapid Growth In the M&A Era with Glen Phares and Brent Lamm

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Drex DeFord: Hey Everyone, I'm Drex Deford, a long time recovering healthcare, CIO, and now the cybersecurity and Risk Leader of this Week Health in the 2 29 Project. I'll be your host for today's solution showcase. And first of all, to all the listeners, thank you for listening today.

We always appreciate your time. And I'll tell you today, if you're trying to figure out the right way to manage continuous growth and M and A at your health system, I have a couple of folks here. Who have spent a lot of time building teams and building best practices around that problem. So I think you're gonna get a lot out of today's solution.

Showcase thanks to our sponsor today, Experius Glen's with us today. You do continue to make this big difference to all your customers, so it's gonna be fun to talk to you. We'll talk more about all of that here in just a minute. And I'm also really lucky, today to be joined by one of, one of my really good friends and fellow member of the Yellow Shoe Club benefiting Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation and CIO at UNC Brent Lamb. Welcome to the show, fellas.

Glen Phares: Good to be here. Drex. Thanks, Brent. Thanks Drex.

And

Brent Lamm: I, I appreciate the shout out for the yellow Shoe Club.

I, I've gotten a lot of street cred from my two teenage daughters for having those fantastic Custom Air Force ones.

Drex DeFord: Air Force ones. They are the thing for sure. Yeah. Okay. So the best place for us to start really is probably with introductions. So Brent let me start with you. Tell me a little bit about yourself and the work going on at UNC.

I know you've been doing the CIO thing for a long time. It can definitely drive a lot of burnout. It can grind you down if you let it. So tell me about yourself. Where do you get the energy and the focus?

Brent Lamm: the energy and focus is pretty easy for me. It's all external. I've I have a phenomenal team of leaders that we have been very fortunate to have served at UNC Health for a long time.

But, so no. Brent Lamb, CIO, chief Information Officer here for UNC Health System. We're a 18 hospital health system. Fully contained within North Carolina. We've got hospitals from the mountains of North Carolina all the way to the coast. We're very proud of our mission to serve all North Carolinians and all communities across all 100 counties of the state.

We've got a strong focus on our rural healthcare populations and serving those populations as best we can. lot of people don't know this, but North Carolina has the second largest rural population behind the state of Texas in the country, huh so that's really important to us that we're serving the rural parts of North Carolina as well.

Total providers that are serving North Carolinians in that area, in that geographic area every day. And we're just really proud of our mission to serve the state.

Drex DeFord: It's amazing to me. Glen and I were looking at the North Carolina map and we were looking at, yeah, all the dots that are on the map that are UNC health locations.

And it, yeah, I mean, it's kind of amazing the amount of blanket that you have over the entire state.

Brent Lamm: And I and in my role, I forgot to mention, I mean, we and I'm lucky enough to serve as the Chief Information Officer, and we've been very aggressive with that map you're describing. We've been very aggressive about making sure that we have a.

Drex DeFord: Yeah. Okay. So I wanna go to Glen who has been working in healthcare. I'll let you Glen disclose how long you've been working in healthcare, but Glen's also a 2 29 project, healthcare certified sales professional solutions professional, as we were talking about beforehand, HCSP. So it's great to see you, Glen.

Tell me a little bit about your background. What's hot at Experis?

Glen Phares: Sure. No, I appreciate it. Thanks for letting me be here. Drex and Brent, good to be here with you guys. And thanks for asking. What's hot normally for me it's a cup of hot coffee uh, which I seem to have with me all the time.

And so that's what we do. At the end of the day, I love to keep business personal. Some people say it's not, I think it's ultimately personal. It's what we do in healthcare. And so really happy to be here with both of you guys and have a conversation.

Drex DeFord: So I wanna start, Brent, with the, you know, the focus on growth.

Tell me about some of the growing pains and how UNC health has kind of evolved over that time.

Brent Lamm: Yeah. No, I appreciate it, Drex. It's been a journey. It's been a, an exciting journey and one that I'm really happy to be a part of and we'll get to it. I'm hopeful probably in further conversation here, but Glen and his team have been huge partners for us.

And we started let's pull all of those facilities in the triangle together under one IT team. We set out to look for a [00:08:00] single electronic health record platform. We, like many others, we settled on Epic at the time and we brought the triangle components of UNC Health together back in 2014.

And we want that to be a part of how we're serving it, but we want it to be meaningful, you know? And so a big part of that journey has been. Making sure we implement our best practices, our IT systems, the way that we have in the triangle, and really helping to bring [00:09:00] everybody to a single enterprise footprint.

And that's a struggle, right? There's always that, well, we love that application. We've got locally, we love that, you know, technology. And that's certainly one of the growing pains was really trying to enforce that enterprise scalability and enterprise approach to it.

Drex DeFord: Hey, Glen, I know Inspirus has been a big part of this.

You've helped integrate those new hospitals and clinics into the UNC family. What are some of the biggest challenges that you and Experius have seen as you've gone through this with Brent?

Glen Phares: Sure. Yeah. I, when you're growing that fast, at that scale, you know, 14 hospitals, hundreds of clinics. When I look back at the history, I think about two things.

Workflow and then leadership, right? When you have two different organizations coming together, building those relationships. So I would say the three things, if I come down to, would be timing of some of those initiatives. Early and often communication capacity. So Brent and his team do a great job of really looking at that early to see how that's gonna work.

And then to me, I think the most critical in any success is gonna be transparency. Within both organizations within a partnership, and Brent and his team have done that exceptionally well. And I think bringing us in, thankfully early in the process to help be a part of building that playbook, to me, has been invaluable to make it repeatable and scalable as they grow.

And the ability to be able to know that we're gonna get. High quality talent to bubble up quickly through experis and Glen's team. That's been a huge advantage for us to having a lot of confidence to say, yes, we can go and bring that organization in quickly and effectively. And one of the things that, if I could comment very quickly, one of the things that Glen's team does that.

We haven't really experienced elsewhere. And I think it's one of the things that really helps them differentiate themselves in the marketplace is Glen and his team actually work hard to bring back the same resources from one UNC project to another. Over time. So we've got a lot of familiar faces when we're doing one go live or one.

You know, infrastructure migration project to another, you know, he and his team are bringing those same resources back to us. They know our environment, they're familiar with our epic build, et cetera, and that makes a big difference.

That you had used. You wanna talk about that?

Brent Lamm: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So, you know, one of the ways that our team think about our partnership and relationship with experis is similar to that sort of on the technology side. You know, we think the, one of the benefits of cloud is you can bubble up immediately and quickly as you've got more workloads that need to occur in a very short period of time.

We feel that same way about what Glenn and his team bring in terms of human talent. We know that we can bubble up. Quickly. because he's gonna bring those resources when we need 'em. They're gonna be high quality and we're gonna be able to do that bubbling and bubble back down quickly and really be cost effective as well.

How important has that been in supporting the growth speed that I think the businesses wanted to achieve along with you being able to support them to go as fast as they want to go.

Brent Lamm: Yeah, it's huge and, and I will say a couple of examples there. You know, like for example it's a big effort, big lift to consolidate all of the different legacy applications and active directory to Microsoft domains.

When we're bringing an organization into UNC Health and being able to have resources like Glen's team to be able to throw at that quickly and get that done, because we've gotta get that work done before we can unlock all the capabilities of our enterprise investments for that community that we're bringing into UNC Health.

You'll know what I

Drex DeFord: mean, if you know,

you

know.

Brent Lamm: That's right. And to be able to have sort of, you know, an at the elbow support and project management, project planning support. For that kind of implementation where we all of the different heterogeneous aspects of different payrolls, benefit plans, et cetera and being able to have talent that can help us navigate that quickly as we're rolling that out from one entity to another of UNC health, that's a huge advantage for us to be able to meet the demands and the needs of the business.

Glen Phares: I love the question Drex, Brent. Thanks for what you said. It's all of those things. It is one of those things, right, where it's, we look at it as that infrastructure is the foundation of every successful healthcare IT project that we've done and probably will continue to do. It's the whole, you know, what are you building on top of your foundation, and if that's not right, well.

We know how the story goes. So, and yeah, you're not going to see infrastructure on the billboard, but it'll be the things that power the billboard that, you know, says the ai, if that makes sense. But we look at it as, you know, technical debt within organizations can be one of the things that actually limits the M and A opportunity and the speed at which you can do that.

Of projects. Does not get talked about. It's not flashy all the time. If it goes well, hey, it's great. But if it doesn't, the franchise quarterback's in trouble. we're not winning and nobody's happy, so, perfect question.

Drex DeFord: all the, all this gets back to something else that is probably worth talking about too, and that's trust.

And it's the trust that I think the two of you have for each other, but that your two teams have for each other. But it's also just kind of the trust that winds up being built. And a lot of this is because. You do it and you do it, and you do it and you trust each other. You don't have to spend a lot of time even talking about decisions sometimes, because you know what the other team is thinking, you know where the other team is.

Talk a little bit about trust. This is for both of you.

They, the plate, we stick with the football analogy here. They. They know the playbook, right? They know, you know, what plays we're gonna run and what we need to get done. And so I think that just speaks to the trust that we've built over time, that no question who we're reaching out to.

It's just like, at this point, it's just a habit, you know? Of course we gotta call Glen and get his team roped in and hopefully pull them in quickly here to get us started down this journey.

Glen Phares: I think, you know, when I hear trust, I think for both teams it's a both and is, you know, just showing up consistently, right?

And sounds simple, but hey, if you say you're gonna do something, no matter how small actually do it is what I think has been really successful and I. I call it the 2:00 AM call. You know, it's not always when things go really well that you build trust, you don't build it on the mountaintop ringing the bell.

Drex DeFord: That's great. I had a really good boss one time who said, nobody's perfect, but the differentiator is what happens when the bad thing happens. Like how do you perform when that happens? That's the thing that really makes the difference. So I like that point. Hey Brent, what's next? What you kind of gave a, kinda gave us a hint.

Some, something new is coming into the family, but where do you go from here? What's up next?

Brent Lamm: In terms of what's next, I mean, I think for everybody right now we've gone this far without saying AI, but we've gotta bring it into the conversation. because it's, you know, certainly what's gonna be, you know, enabling a lot of what we do. We're in the process right now of sort of reorganizing our information services division that I have the privilege to lead.

Providers, employees, staff, et cetera, across UNC Health and like, how can we give them the resources and easy access through web, intranet, portals, et cetera, easy access to the tools that they can use to be the most productive in their daily work. How do I self guide my day and take advantage of all these capabilities?

AI for operations where we're trying to figure out how we can automate and streamline to try to address patient access challenges that we've got. Operational efficiencies, everybody's trying to drive down costs, we're no different.

And then, you know, AI for science, you know, we're a large academic research organization, health system, and we're very proud of that.

analyze data in different ways using AI than they could before. And I hopefully we're gonna see, you know, faster speeds to breakthrough discoveries.

Drex DeFord: Glen I kind of wanna give you the chance to ask Brent kind of a final question here. We're kind of winding down.

Glen Phares: I got it. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. I Brent, one last thing. So. If you take today, right, right. Things that were said, maybe things that weren't said that you didn't get a chance to, what would be something that you'd like the audience and maybe even us to know, you know, and share before we end today?

What would that be?

It's talked about quite a bit, but it's something that we are really focused on trying to improve experiences for our teammates, and we're working very hard to do that with. You know, ambient AI deployed now across our organization, you know, all of the epic, you know, efficiency tools, we've been aggressive in trying to deploy those.

But one of the things we don't talk about very often and I'm very proud of the work that the team has done, is we partner with an organization that's helped us to. Arm our nursing leaders with really advanced AI and some non-AI capabilities that allow them to really do a much better job to automate communications, celebrations, just general engagement with their nursing teammates and.

But I think the broader thing is we're working hard to make UNC health a place that really attracts the best nursing talent. We really want nurses to be proud of working at UNC Health and really just looking forward to, you know, working in our organization. And so we're very proud of that work.

Drex DeFord: I feel like we could just go on and on. There's so much stuff to talk about. We barely touched on ai. I thought we would make it through the whole discussion. I'm just kidding.

Glen Phares: Yeah. I'll pay my, I'll pay my donation if we need to. That's right.

Drex DeFord: There's a drinking game here somewhere.

But thanks for the, thanks to both of you for being on. I really appreciate it.

Brent Lamm: Thanks, Drex. And thank you, Glen for the continued partnership.

If you wanna know more about what we're doing and where we'll be, go to this week, health.com/subscribe. We'll keep you posted on webinars and podcasts and city tour dinners and summits, and our new city staff round table schedules as we travel through the US transforming healthcare one connection at a time.

Thanks again for listening. We'll see you around campus

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