Shownotes
November 14: Today on the Community channel, it’s an Interview in Action live from CHIME’s Fall Forum with Theresa Meadows, CIO & SVP at Cook Children's Health Care System. Bill and Theresa discuss her winning CHIME’s CIO of the Year and her upcoming panel discussion before diving into her breadth of community work. What technology does Cook Children’s Health Care System use to help alleviate anxiety for children going into MRI scans? What other exciting initiative are they currently planning to launch next month?
Transcripts
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interview in action from the:All right. Here we are at the Chime Fall forum and we are doing another interview in action and this time with Teresa Meadows Chimes CIO of the year at Cook Children's. Thanks. Welcome back to the show.
Yeah, thank you. I love the show
cIO of the year. it's pretty weighty. I was just talking with Andrea.
Do. And there's a, an image right over your, my right shoulder here, . Yeah. You're gonna do a panel discussion tomorrow. CIO of the future. Sorry, that's not you anymore. I know you are a CIO of the present. Correct. Somebody who's, been in it and doing it for a while, and then John Glasser. That's gonna be interesting.
I mean,
it is. the, The discussions that we've had in preparation are just a walk down memory lane. And then starting to think about how are we gonna build up the people in the future. Right. And Andrea's a great role model for that cuz I think she brings energy to the that we need.
And finding more people like her is really gonna really energize the future of healthcare. Cause we're not gonna be here forever as, as much as we'd like to think we are.
Yeah. , I uh, I'm not surprised that you had CIO of the year. Oh, you might be.
I am truly,
But I'm not. I mean, there is a certain aspect of it that's not only about what you're doing at Cook Children's, but it is about the community and giving back to the community.
And we joked earlier that you were standing over there. I said, Hey, can you do an interview? And you're like, I can't say no. Yeah. But that means you do a lot of volunteer work, you do a lot of investment and that kinda stuff. Talk about some of the stuff that you've done over the years.
Yeah. I mean, I think. Having a habit of not saying no, get you to do into a lot of interesting things. And so , lots of committee work. Like some of my favorite committee work is like the scholarship committee where I get to read all the applicant scholarships and talk about how do we, get more people into time?
How do we provide scholarships to maybe people who wouldn't be able to come? So that's really rewarding committee work. I was crazy enough to put my name in the hat for the Health and Human Services cyber security task force. Thought, No way. There's no way that's ever gonna happen. 200 applications, they picked 20 people
and you got on it.
And I got on it. That was all volunteer, you know, service and, I did that because I wanted to help the industry with cyber, but I also wanted to learn from really smart people. And that group had tons of smart people who wanted to solve the same problem. And so I think , just putting yourself out there sometimes into different things.
Teach at bootcamp, I do, you know, all kinds of,
Things.
Well, and that's one of the things that saying yes and getting on those, that the side benefit, you think, oh, there's added work. And there absolutely is added work. But we did a, podcast not too long ago with you. David Tang. Yeah. And
Brad Marsh.
Brad Marsh, thank you.
Yep. And the silly story is I'm sitting next to Brad Marshall on the plane ride down here, and we both look each other and go, I know you, I know you. We sit down and we finally have a conversation and he goes, I was on your. Like you were . That's the world of Zoom that we live in. And I feel kind of embarrassed that I didn't know that, but you got to hang out with those.
David King's brilliant.
He is amazing, man.
And you just, you get to sit in those discussions as you're talking about what cybersecurity could look like in the
future for healthcare.
Well, and just the really going through all the problems that we have. I mean, that was really our role is to kind of. , , problem identification and then put recommendations out that we hoped someone would pay attention to.
And it's got a lot of traction, I mean, a ton of traction. And so that's been very, very rewarding for
Well, yeah,
you just needed the, I mean, well actually what happened is the cyber threats went through the roof and everyone's like, Oh man, what do we do? And it's, Oh, hey, we've been talking about
this and thinking about this.
Yeah, very much so. I didn't know a lot about it, but I know a lot more than I did before I got there. So I probably got more out it than other people did. But you know, it's what you decide to take away from it.
, what do you wanna accomplish now between now and John Glasser?
We, we'll call it that. So, John's walking around here. He's as, he's as casual as he can be. He's just happy go lucky. It's like, but he's, had quite the career done a.
Yeah, I probably have a good 10 more years where I'm, anywhere closer, probably where he is. But like I was watching the robot interview and people were like, I would've never done that.
And I said, That was the perfect case of innovation. Oh, absolutely. , Russ could have said this didn't work and just stop. But instead he iterated on the process and that's how innovation happens. And so yeah. Was it perfect? No, but it was a. Innovation process. And then also it made me feel better that robots aren't gonna take over for us any, anytime soon.
I think there's a lot more work and, understanding that needs to happen there. But it will happen. There will be.
It was a perfect metaphor. Yes. First of all, he had a very sympathetic audience. He did. Cuz we've all been there Yes. many times. The second thing. It shows potential.
That was, it was scripted. It was, Yes. Those kind of things. We all saw that. Yeah. But we are starting to see AI wings. Have you seen this stuff on? I'm just riffing with you now. Okay. . It's just, this is how you and I usually talk. We're still doing an interview. Oh, yes, we are. But have you seen the stuff where they're using AI to create art?
Yes. I mean, it's, you give it prompts. You say, Hey, I, I want it to be inspired by this artist. Take this content and then.
Yeah, we actually had a donor give us a painting robot and it does something similar where kids can go up to it and they can say, I want a picture of outside. And the robot actually will paint the picture right in front of them.
And it's this big arm with a paintbrush on the end. And it's sort of, That's, and so I, I think we're gonna see a lot more of those kind of things. When we first received that robot, I was like, Oh crap. Big cybersecurity risk there. You know, You had to, get downloads from the internet and you have to do all this stuff, but at the end of the day, it's a really cool innovation.
And so we had to figure out how do we not create a risk, but also provide the children something that they can learn from and kind of have a different experience while they're in our organiz.
I'm kind of jealous of the children's hospitals. Yeah. Cause you guys get to work with some really neat stuff.
Really neat stuff. Anything with VR at this
point or, AI
You know,
we've done virtual reality for a long time for more for distractions. So like, if a child's gonna have a mri, that's a very scary process even for some adults, claustrophobia, closed spaces, all that kind of stuff. And so we use virtual reality in our MRIs and people can wear those.
glasses And kids are much more calm, they're less nervous. We don't have to sedate them cuz many kids, we have to sedate just to even get them through that process. And so we've seen a lot of good outcomes and faster results and test taking and those kind of things using virtual reality. Pain management's another place where we use it.
Yeah,
I've seen clinical applications of this. Because Your brain processes as if it's really happening.
That's right. And so it, distracts them 100% from the, what's really going on around them. And so it seems to be a good alternative to using medication, you know, to prevent them from having to take their tests.
The children's hospital world, is that, have you been in children's the most?
I was with Ascension Health before. I've only been in peds since I came. So that's why , the cio, children's CIO network is so important. I mean, we're very collaborative. We meet all the time. We talk all the time. We're all the time emailing each other.
How many standalone children's hospitals are.
It's around 30 and the number continues to decline just through all the acquisitions and things that you see. But about 30 still,
Anything else fun that you're working with at, Cook Children's?
Yeah, lots of stuff.
We're building a new hospital, North Dallas, Prosper Frisco, that area. And we're actually doing a digital football, but the way we chose to do it is through a mashup. So we're taking all known technology and we made our partners work together to give a seamless experience. So imagine TV on the wall where you have regular TV edutainment you have your caregiver sort.
Stock ticker. Oh, around the outside that has your caregiver, your schedule for the day. We're using R F I D to
have,
, so you just locked him in a room and said, This is what we'd like,
this is what we want and we're gonna put all this stuff together and you guys need to help us figure that out. . Cause we didn't wanna buy something new and so we really didn't buy any, We bought one new technology that we're using for in room telehealth, or virtual visits, that kind of thing.
We tried just push the envelope and some of it worked and some of people were good on their commitments and some people weren't. And there were a lot of lessons learned there.
Perfect. Perfect picture of innovation.
Yeah, a lot of lessons learned there. So the first version goes live on December 28th when the hospital opens.
Fantastic.
Six weeks.
Teresa, thank for your time.
Yeah, Bill, thanks.
Appreciate, congratulations.
Yeah, thank you. Fun as always. .
Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it is Phenomen. That they have taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community, which is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors one more time, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. They are Olive, Rubrik, trx, Mitigate, and F5. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.
