Today in health.
Speaker:It, the story is top of mind things for healthcare CEOs.
Speaker:And this is a top five list based on my recent interviews today.
Speaker:Number four automation.
Speaker:My name is bill Russell.
Speaker:I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system.
Speaker:And creator of this week in health, it a channel dedicated to keeping
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Speaker:five top of mind issues for CEOs.
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Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Top five.
Speaker:Top of mind issues for CIO is based on the interviews that I did at the health
Speaker:conference, the chime fall forum and at the healthcare to healthcare event.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:Just phone conversations and the various zoom calls that I do
Speaker:with CEO's throughout the week.
Speaker:Number one was labor staffing.
Speaker:Number one, issue going into 2022, number two, cybersecurity, number
Speaker:three, all things, digital, digital innovation, and all the cool things
Speaker:they're doing in digital today.
Speaker:We're going to talk about automation.
Speaker:And tomorrow, Friday, we're going to talk about care venues.
Speaker:So let's start automation.
Speaker:Let's start with what is driving automation?
Speaker:Number one is that competition for labor in it?
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So we have an it labor challenge right now.
Speaker:Number two, the need to move up the stack.
Speaker:We want our staff to be working on higher level problems, and
Speaker:we're trying to offload some of those mundane, repetitive tasks.
Speaker:And I'm still talking about it in this case, but that could also be
Speaker:applied to the clinical setting.
Speaker:Number three thing, that's driving automation, labor, shortages, and
Speaker:burnout in the clinical world.
Speaker:So we're looking at clinical automation as well.
Speaker:A number for the advancement of technology, right?
Speaker:Computer, vision, machine learning, AI is driving it.
Speaker:And if I had to think about it,
Speaker:And this isn't really on my list, but was probably a financial pressure.
Speaker:That's pushing automation as well.
Speaker:More with less.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So let's take a look at three areas that are seeing automation.
Speaker:Number one, it automation to administrative automation
Speaker:within healthcare and number three, clinical automation.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Let's start with the area.
Speaker:We're all familiar with it.
Speaker:Automation.
Speaker:This is a new it's been around for quite some time.
Speaker:Most are using VMware and Microsoft in this capacity.
Speaker:And it's had some automation capabilities built into them for awhile.
Speaker:You know, but things like a puppet get lab red hat and chef
Speaker:are also prevalent in this space.
Speaker:We've done it on site.
Speaker:But where we see this more often as in the cloud and the cloud infrastructure plays
Speaker:that are out there, it's built in, spin up a cluster for load balancing, click done.
Speaker:So it's pretty cool that way.
Speaker:And now we're applying it to our in-house.
Speaker:Data centers as well.
Speaker:We're even doing it in a multi-cloud environment and doing it across clouds.
Speaker:Very very interesting concepts.
Speaker:Let's see.
Speaker:Here are the concepts.
Speaker:The concepts are like infrastructures code, task, orchestration,
Speaker:and event driven workflow.
Speaker:These are things that are entering the vernacular.
Speaker:If you will.
Speaker:If it hasn't entered yours, here's a quick primer on them.
Speaker:So infrastructure is code.
Speaker:I just, I discussed this on the show with with several CTOs over the past year.
Speaker:Imagine knowing that in the event of a ransomware event, You could execute code
Speaker:that can rebuild the infrastructure in minutes instead of days or even weeks.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:The code holds the key to rebuilding servers and the proper
Speaker:configurations and the software.
Speaker:Yes, you have to manage it like code with release schedules and
Speaker:repositories, but in the end, this is an amazingly powerful tool.
Speaker:And we talked to one CTO that talked about the fact that they could spin up
Speaker:their entire epic environment in minutes.
Speaker:With a click of a button.
Speaker:And that again.
Speaker:An incredibly powerful tool, especially in the Dr.
Speaker:The disaster recovery business continuity world.
Speaker:Task orchestration is just what it sounds like within many it
Speaker:organizations, there are hundreds of repetitive tasks being done every day.
Speaker:With the crunch on labor, imagine being able to automate a bunch
Speaker:of someone or even a team's job.
Speaker:So that you can free them up for some of the work that's going on done.
Speaker:Plus the added benefit that we have to talk about is giving
Speaker:them more rewarding work.
Speaker:It's a significant retention when.
Speaker:And then finally event driven workflow utilizes things like API APIs.
Speaker:That are built into much of modern infrastructure to create sophisticated
Speaker:workflows based on triggers.
Speaker:Let's see.
Speaker:I imagine if your container, I love this actually, now that I
Speaker:think about this, imagine if your container could detect an attack.
Speaker:And trigger a process that destroyed the container and rebuilt it and move
Speaker:the workloads over to the new container.
Speaker:Leaving the attacker, always having to adjust and refactor.
Speaker:You know what they're going to do.
Speaker:They're going to go somewhere else.
Speaker:They're going to go somewhere else.
Speaker:That's a lot easier.
Speaker:It's pretty cool.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So event driven workflow.
Speaker:So there's where those were the three.
Speaker:Primary things I would think about in this area.
Speaker:Infrastructure is code TAC.
Speaker:Task orchestration and event driven workflow.
Speaker:Like I said, this is just a primer.
Speaker:Not going into big detail.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Let's talk about administrative automation.
Speaker:Robotic process automation is the word.
Speaker:It's the terminology that gets used in this area.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:The application of this is really as broad as the imagination
Speaker:here are the core components.
Speaker:The computer watches, the screen listens to the conversation, or just
Speaker:plain old watches for events to happen.
Speaker:In any number of administrative or clinical settings, and then it fires off
Speaker:events, more code that makes something happen without human intervention.
Speaker:And without human error.
Speaker:At least once the process has been baked correctly.
Speaker:You know, the old adage does apply here.
Speaker:Nothing can mess things up quite as quickly or broadly
Speaker:as a computer with bad code.
Speaker:But if you bake it right.
Speaker:You just relieved a burden of the clinician or the clinical team with a
Speaker:process that may have taken days and may now be done in seconds and the
Speaker:results passed on so that the next step in the process can fire off.
Speaker:You know, this level of automation is being used extensively in billing
Speaker:and administrative processes.
Speaker:But it can really be applied to any administrative process in the hospital.
Speaker:Take a high level event, like a patient schedules, an appointment.
Speaker:Perhaps, there are things that need to happen before that appointment
Speaker:around insurance check or information request back to the patient.
Speaker:And many applications try to build that into the software,
Speaker:but that was fairly rigid.
Speaker:RPA sits alongside the applications and connects them in, in, in the best cases.
Speaker:It connects them with API APIs, but in other cases with some
Speaker:rudimentary processes to fire off additional processes, right?
Speaker:So because it sits outside, it can be refactored many
Speaker:times for different workflows.
Speaker:Taken at the end of the process, the appointment is finished and
Speaker:the claim needs to be created and submitted for payment.
Speaker:It turns out that there are a ton of repetitive tasks.
Speaker:That get done in the process and RPA is a natural fit.
Speaker:To offload a lot of that burden.
Speaker:With really high accuracy.
Speaker:Rates, if not higher accuracy rates than than humans doing it.
Speaker:Finally, let me talk about clinical automation for a second.
Speaker:I recently interviewed the CEO for artist site, which is a startup
Speaker:with a focus on clinical automation.
Speaker:Here's what I learned.
Speaker:The data in the EHR is not as clean as we would like.
Speaker:And it's not always as real time as we would like in a clinical setting.
Speaker:So they set out to solve the front end problem, which is
Speaker:getting a set of clean data.
Speaker:To act on and the simple solution is inexpensive camera in each room.
Speaker:What can you do with a steady stream of data?
Speaker:From a clinical room, whatever the various rooms in the hospital happened to be.
Speaker:Well, you can look for fall risk, hand washing.
Speaker:You can look at a pressure wound, patients being turned or moved,
Speaker:and then you can send alerts to a nurse to move the patient.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:But the reality is the sky's the limit because the backend
Speaker:software can be trained to look for anything and fire off a process,
Speaker:as simple as an alert to the nurse.
Speaker:Or even more sophisticated with the use of API APIs and modern systems.
Speaker:But, clearly the first thing that pops into your head is wait, how do clinicians
Speaker:feel about being watched all the time?
Speaker:And I'm glad you asked that question.
Speaker:They aren't being watched all the time.
Speaker:The code is trained to black out the identifying components
Speaker:of the clinician, and just look for what is trained to look for.
Speaker:So when you actually see the screen of what the computer is,
Speaker:seeing it, blacks out those people.
Speaker:So you don't really know who they are.
Speaker:You might say, wait, I can probably correlate the data and the video feed
Speaker:and figure out who was in the room.
Speaker:You would, if the video feed actually existed, the system processes the
Speaker:feed through AI and then forgets it.
Speaker:Destroys the video feed and no longer needs it.
Speaker:So it no longer exists quickly after the information is processed, it's gone
Speaker:and the AI engine has done its work.
Speaker:It is identified the things it needs to identify pretty interesting, right.
Speaker:I was talking to one CIO.
Speaker:Who's using this solution.
Speaker:And their legal team came back and said, Hey, we need the
Speaker:video feed from this room.
Speaker:And I said, well, it doesn't exist.
Speaker:And they said, oh, well, it has to exist.
Speaker:There's a camera in the room.
Speaker:So there's this underlying assumption that if there's a camera in the
Speaker:room, there's a video feed somewhere.
Speaker:So you have to educate people on what's actually happening.
Speaker:But at the end of the day, the CIO was able to look at the legal team and say,
Speaker:The video feed does not exist.
Speaker:It does not exist anywhere.
Speaker:It is gone.
Speaker:It's not processed in that way.
Speaker:It's not stored in that way.
Speaker:So that's interesting.
Speaker:It addresses that.
Speaker:That that concern that big, brother's going to be looking over the shoulder
Speaker:while adding an awful lot of value.
Speaker:And even value to the clinicians in terms of alerts and those kinds of things.
Speaker:And then, yeah, the obvious things like, Hey rooms empty, it needs to be clean.
Speaker:You can get a quick feed into that room to see if the work has been
Speaker:done and those kinds of things.
Speaker:So awful.
Speaker:Lot of value being created in that space.
Speaker:Well, that's the world of automation.
Speaker:It is big now and only going to get bigger in 2022.
Speaker:So stay up to date on this one.
Speaker:That's all for today.
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