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The 229 Podcast: Inside the 229 CMIO Summit and Patient Access Innovation with Jennifer Goldman

Jennifer Goldman: I think that where access innovation can fail is when operations teams are not engaged from the start and physician leaders are not engaged from the start

Bill Russell: My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former health system, CIO, and creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare one connection at a time. Welcome to the 2 29 Podcast where we continue the conversations happening at our events with the leaders who are shaping healthcare.

Let's jump into today's conversation.

Welcome.

Jennifer Goldman: Thanks, bill. Great to see you again as well.

Bill Russell: so patient access is a topic that every CMIO I talked to is wrestling with, and that was obvious in that room. What's the complexity that people outside your role might underestimate?

Jennifer Goldman: So access is complicated because. It's influenced by so many people across the organization, and I think as, CMIOs CIOs I think we get focused on how technology can enhance access, for example, by enhancing patient experience with calls or using AI agents to do outbound or inbound calls.

To be visible for online access, as well as pair down decision trees to make it easier for patients to choose the right physician and make an appointment.

Bill Russell: there was a couple interesting things to me about the conversation. One is, invariably it goes to technology, but technology shouldn't be the leader. It should be. following in this case you mentioned template complexity, that, that came up a fair amount. It seems like there's a whole bunch of things like the many specialties, you know, require pre-visit work, prior authorizations, lab results, imaging questionnaire.

It would appear,

Jennifer Goldman: Absolutely, and I think one of the ways that. We tried to reconcile that was creating this bi-directional communication forum in a governance over access, which in includes it from a build perspective, but also the call center leadership, as well as the leadership over the physician group, and spoke about some of the challenges that currently exist.

And that's really the caveat. That would be a significant contributor to toward a world where specialty practices can open up access and trust that call centers are able to put the right patient in the right slot. Because call center staff are traditionally non-clinical, that can be a very difficult thing to do on the front end.

And decision trees don't take into account every clinical situation. And so trying to embed clinical escalation. Centrally with a combination of humans as well as AI tools, I think is is something for sure that we're leaning into. But again, it's all about that continuous governance and collaboration across the board.

And in some ways it's context too, right? How it works at Memorial Healthcare System as opposed to just generically. I mean, it has to be very specific to, to your practices.

Jennifer Goldman: Yeah, exactly. And that's why we're, you know, we're exploring it, but we're not hanging the hat on that as the strategy. We can't, not yet.

Bill Russell: So what are you learning as you work through this? What's shifted in how maybe how you think about the problem.

Jennifer Goldman: I think for me what I've learned is I think it really goes back to leadership and the role of the CMIO at an organization and how. You know, sitting at that intersection of technology and clinical workflow is great to say, but how does that manifest in practice? And so much of where I see it manifest is in problems like this large organizational problems that really require an understanding of clinical workflows because we do that.

That leader needs a seat at the table. And then really understanding the technology, understanding what's. Hype, what can, what's real and what can really lend itself to the challenges I think is important. And then ultimately the ownership being with operations. But with that leadership translator functionality, I think is truly what I've learned in this role and with this particular problem that I think I can leverage with other problems across the organization.

Bill Russell: where are we seeing. Real traction things that are actually changing potentially how? How patients experience the health system.

I think that's a success story that can really. Be leveraged across the organization, but with a caveat that primary care is not specialty care. Specialty care works differently. Access works differently at specialty and [00:08:00] subspecialty levels. And I think that's where, again, that governance comes into play so that we can hear directly from.

Service line leadership and understand what, what drives access, what are we complicating more for them potentially in decision tree build versus how are we making it easier for them, either through the use of technology build or really discussions on process between online sch, scheduling, call center and operations.

So So a lot.

Bill Russell: you know, as I was thinking about this past week, there was a couple of really good conversations. Is there any other discussion that really jumped out at you or conversation, that we had?

On it, but really helping everyone at the front line bring forward good ideas for workflow or innovation, and then having a way to bring that back to the operational leadership of those areas, whether it's on a unit in inpatient, whether it's an ambulatory, whether it's in the emergency department.

And again, really ensuring that there's that communication between operations and IT leadership and using some tools to facilitate that, that I think really jumped out as an opportunity that we all have across the board.

Well, we've gotta build this different. I mean, that's part of the conversation, but it was really about, okay, how are we gonna operationalize this? How are we going to make these things happen? How are we going to go from 10,000 more visits last year to another 10,000 this year? I mean, these are really core strategic leadership kinds of questions for a health system.

And the role to me feels like it's significantly changed.

In so many cases, trying to roll out technology without those conversations and without that role can be destined for failure because it's not. It's the people and process as we know, and I know it sounds cliche, but it's that people process that really dictates how successful it's going to be. But it needs a facilitator and I think that the CMIO role is well positioned to be that.

Bill Russell: was great. Uh, Great to see you there and to see you at the city tour dinner as well. That's a different meeting because it's, it was were you the only CMIO at the table for

Bill Russell: it was interesting and there was four or five CIOs at the table. And it was interesting to see those conversations and where that goes. It was a little different different direction it goes. I mean, that was very technical. This that night.

Jennifer Goldman: Yeah.

Bill Russell: So very interesting.

Jennifer, thank you for uh, for extending the conversation and being a part of the show. I appreciate it. I.

Jennifer Goldman: Thanks so much, bill. I really enjoyed it.

Bill Russell: Thanks for listening to the 2 29 podcast. The best conversations don't end when the event does. They continue here with our community of healthcare leaders. Join us by subscribing at this week health.com/subscribe.