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 Welcome to this Weekend Health It. It's Tuesday News Day where we take a look at the news, which will impact health it. Today we're gonna take a look at the Stark Law Changes. We're gonna take a look at Vaccine State Public Health Technology, and a couple o uh, other, uh, stories that are going on. My name is Bill Russell, former Healthcare, C-I-O-C-I-O, coach, consultant, and creator of this week in Health.

It a set of podcast videos and collaboration events dedicated to developing the next generation of health leaders. I wanna thank Sirius Healthcare for supporting the mission of our show to develop the next generation of health leaders. Their weekly support of the show this year has enabled us to expand and develop our services to the community.

And for that, we are extremely thankful. Uh, just wanna mention three x extracts. Once again, Drex to Ford, frequent contributor to the show has a service where he will text you three texts three times a week with three stories vetted by him to help you to stay current. To receive those texts, you can text Drex, DREX to 4 8 4 8 4 8.

Drex is gonna continue to do it, and we're gonna, we're gonna set up a round robin of about six people. Right now. We have three people committed. Drex is gonna continue. Ann Weiler, former CEO of well, pepper, who has been on the show. Brilliant, wonderful. Really understands the, uh, startup space. Uh, and she's going to be coming on every six weeks.

Che, principal of Starbridge Advisors has agreed to come on as well. And, uh, former CIO of the year, we have a ton to talk about, and she's been on the show several times. Uh, so I'm looking forward to having those three on. We have some other invites out and people are checking their schedules to make sure that they can make that kind of, uh, commitment.

But the, uh, six week rotation I think will be fun. We have, we've had a lot of good feedback and quite frankly, it's, it's a little easier for me to go back and forth with somebody than to just talk about the news, uh, myself, for those of you who are saying. But I like when Bill talks about the news, it really helps me to stay current.

For you. We're launching a new channel and starting in January we are going to have today in health it, which is gonna be five to seven minute episodes. So five to seven minute podcasts that we produce. Every weekday, five days a week, we are gonna be dropping a single show that discusses one new story.

You can subscribe, listen to five to seven minutes a day, and you and your team can stay current on what's going on in the news around health. It. The, and actually I'm excited about that. That's a pretty big commitment for us going to a, a daily show like that. We did it during the Covid series, gave us a little experience with it.

This is gonna be a little different 'cause it's gonna be current. We're gonna be doing something every day of the week, so it's gonna be, it's gonna be fun. VMware and Sirius have already stepped up to be show sponsors for today in Health it, we're still looking for three more show sponsors for that. And we're excited to have them on board.

So we are looking forward to that some exciting times. Alright, let's get to the news. So what we usually do, . As we go over to LinkedIn, we post a bunch of stories. . We get a little back and forth going with you guys. Uh, to be honest with you, I think I only posted three times last week. Well, that would make sense.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we posted our Thanksgiving. Thanks for all of you in our community and we are thankful for all of you in our community. And then I dropped about four, four, uh, posts this morning 'cause I had a lot of pent up stuff to talk about. Uh, so we really only have . Three things out on LinkedIn.

So let's, let's take a look at, uh, the back and forth on that. Uh, the first is, did you ever wonder what your information is worth on the dark web and will it change your behavior if, and this is from a, from an article in Privacy Affairs and the Post had a, uh, couple of, uh, prices, which I thought were interesting.

Cloned credit cards with a pin. This is a credit card with a pin so you can make a purchase, uh, goes for 15 to 35 bucks. Which shocked me. I, I thought it would be much higher. Uh, stolen online banking details, 35 to $65 depends on the balance. isn't that interesting? PayPal credentials are $200. Uh, transfer from a stolen PayPal account is 150 to $320, so you can have the PayPal credentials.

And then you could have somebody else actually transfer, uh, money out of that account and that costs you a little bit more money to do that. Uh, a forged driver's license, 800, or I'm sorry, 80 to $550. That's kind of pricey. Not what I remember in high school when we were trying to. Get a forged driver's licenses so we could drink.

I was at a dinner last night where I was talking to somebody and we were talking about medical records being stolen. . Yes, I know. It's not that interesting. I'm meeting new people and they ask me what I do, and then we talk about things, and then they ask me questions. They'll ask me questions like, people are steering medical records.

What, what do they want my medical record for? And the reality is, uh, a medical record is loaded with great financial information. I mean, you can think about it. It has like the, maybe the two or three most recent places that you lived. It has your mother's maiden name, has medical history as it's just a ton of information that we use every day to, to validate financial information for starters, let alone the, the potential medical ramifications for having that information.

But most of it is, is really, it's a great base to steal someone's identity. And so they're saying 250 bucks is, uh, what those were being sell, uh, sold for. And I just posed the question, I'm wondering if it matters what I do. I, I, if I wonder if it matters what I do to protect my information if my health system can't protect my medical record.

And I made the note that I have four credit notices in the past five years. Two of them are from healthcare providers, one's from a credit bureau, and the other's from a retailer. And, and I just asked a question, have you received a credit protection notice? And who, who was the cause of that? We had the, uh, large financial credit.

Gosh, was that Equifax? It was Equifax. We had the Equifax breach. That was huge. We had the, uh, huge payer breach as well. And, and that was a lot of information as well. Not a ton of comments on this, but generally somebody, somebody, let's see, Matthew Swan said, Hey, you know it well. Let's just take that as a starting point.

250 times the, the lives managed under contract should be the minimum security budget. And . I, I, I just did the math quickly in my head for the health system that I was a part of and I said we had about a million lives under , under, uh, contracts. So 250 times a million would be $250 million for our security budget.

That was not gonna fly. Our security budget was not small, but it wasn't anywhere. Uh, wouldn't remotely close to 250 million if I remember the last security budget for the year. . When I left was probably between five and $6 million, which included labor. And my guess is that is only going up and only increasing as I'm hearing from uh, other CIOs in the industry.

So I thought I'd share that. The numbers I think are interesting. The value of the information that we're holding I think is interesting and the comments around that. Didn't have a lot of comments around that, but, uh, I think it's an interesting conversation to have of . What should the starting point be for a good security budget for a health system?

Alright, on uh, Tuesday, Amazon pharmacy pricing was compared by Eric Bricker, Dr. Eric Bricker, who was on the show, and he does a thing called a healthcare z and I just found this interesting. So Amazon announced their pharmacy and he compared the, the pricing of a bunch of drugs. Off of the Amazon price list and price list, the Amazon site and uh, GoodRx pricing.

And I thought that was a really interesting way to go. and I started this by saying, which do you think is lower? I mean, just think about it right now without even knowing what's going on. Which do you think is lower? Uh, the GoodRx pricing or the Amazon pricing? And, and I, I pose the, the concept of this could be like a, a Myers-Briggs or a disc test for your, for the.

Digital leaders. A lot of digital leaders think that their, their heroes can do no wrong. Right? So, and Amazon obviously is gonna be better, whereas digital pragmatists are, are, are people who are always looking at the facts. Alright, so let's see. Did this digital solution actually, I. Deliver on the results, the business outcomes that we are looking to.

So I call those digital pragmatists and, and I really respect digital pragmatists. Not everything that Apple does is perfect. Not everything Amazon does is right. Not everything Google does is right. And so we have to step back and say, is this delivering on what we need regardless? Uh, si That's a tangent and I'm very tangential today.

I guess it's, it's taking four days off in a row. My mind hasn't really . Focused yet, so we'll see what happens. The facts would indicate that Amazon's using basically a lost leader approach. They have lower prices on the most common generics, but they have significantly higher prices on psycho tro psychotropic drugs.

In this review, you would expect that Amazon's buying power is going to catch up, but, but realize, I mean, you're talking about Amazon's buying power against. CV. S, Walgreens, Walmart, I mean, these are organizations with significant buying power. I'm not sure when you get to a certain point, I'm not sure that Amazon's buying power is.

That much better. Their, their distribution engine is that much better, and that's where they can, they can make up some of the things. So we would expect that their pricing could come down in some of these areas as they, as they step into it. I mean, they're just stepping into it and their pricing on a large swath of drugs is not dramatically lower, but lower, lower enough for you to consider doing it.

You might. Consider doing it for all drugs, thinking that the price is lower, and that's what this, this information really, really shows. I think the, the Amazon introduction into the market is going to have a significant impact. . There's no doubt about that. Actually, in my mind, the, and what I, what I think is you look at gas stations at Costco and Walmart, and I think it's that same sort of approach.

We're all prime members, or a significant number of us are prime members. There's value in there. There's value in the loyalty program. People are already going to Amazon on a daily basis. I mean, our things are showing up at our door from Amazon, literally on a daily basis. So. So if that's a story that you visit more frequently than you visit ACVS or a Walgreens and you start to realize, Hey, I can just get these, these drugs delivered to my house.

I think they're, they're banking on loyalty and convenience, and I don't think that's a bad bet. I. To be honest with you, uh, a couple of comments on this. Dre McQueen. I think that Amazon's approach will be interesting to monitor over time. I think it would be naive of us to think that they're doing this just to improve access, to make money on medication sales.

A former colleague of mine, I. Who is also a pharmacist pointed out the huge opportunity that we'll bring to Amazon to suggest supplemental over-the-counter products to consumers that are on the site to fill prescriptions. Just imagine how many great deals on vitamins, diet supplements, low sugar foods, fitness goods might appear.

For diabetic patients or soup and, and cozy PJs for someone filling a script for antibiotics. You don't have to be, you don't have that kind of targeted suggested marketing in a traditional pharmacy or even with some of the current online distributors. Absolutely true. Great point. Yeah, it's just there's a lot of ways for Amazon to make money.

Uh, the last article, I'll just hit on this real quick. The CMS Interoperability and Patient Access, final Rule compliance is right around the corner. What do you think the impact will be and how, how goes the work on compliance? I used an article InterSystems updates, health share to with expanded fire capabilities, and I found this interesting.

InterSystems is one of those things, if you are not gonna go with these straight up . EHR Solution. InterSystems is one of those third parties that you can funnel the information out of the EHR and other systems into the InterSystems platform and then utilize them for your compliance. So here's what the article said.

Intersystem says, health Share's Data Model Maps to fire Profiles from Karen Alliance's Blue Button 2.0, implementation guide and supports the United States core data for interoperability. Uh, U-S-C-D-I, version one standards and Da Vinci Patient data exchange plan net standards for search and retrieval.

In addition, the new release has been tailored. To meet the needs of health systems during the pandemic, including covid to 19 analytics dashboards, while its clinical viewer adds cvid 19 specific test sta status icons and chart options to help care teams better track and monitor covid 19 patients. Uh, obviously and, and I talked about.

This is one piece of the puzzle. But here's the thing. I will say, this is an interesting strategy. It's the strategy we took at the health system I was at because we had multiple EHRs and there was no way to really consolidate them based on how the foundation model works in Southern California. So we had to go with the third party.

We chose the InterSystems model, we funneled all the data into that, and we utilized it for interoperability. Uh, across these disparate systems. I actually like this approach better than the EHR only. Obviously, if you're a small system, small budget, if your EHR does 90% of it, you're just going to go ahead and end that route.

But if you're a larger system, this kind of approach, I think makes a lot more sense. And part of the reason is because all your information isn't in the EHR for starters. And second of all, you're always gonna have partners. And those partners aren't all gonna be on Epic, and they're not all gonna be on Cerner, and you're gonna have to figure out a way to bring it in.

So. When somebody says, my interoperability strategy is my EHRI scratch my head because it, it's interoperability has to be bigger than that. It has to reach across a larger segment of your population or of your, your application mix. Uh, and so I, I sort of like these, uh, things. I brought that new story up, not a lot of back and forth that went out on Wednesday.

I would assume all of you went home for Thanksgiving and had a, uh, good Thanksgiving. All right. That's, that's all we did on LinkedIn. I posted about four this morning. It's Monday, Mon, I'm recording this on Monday for this morning. If you want to comment on those, that'd be great. We only have two more Newsday episodes scheduled.

One for next Tuesday. I'll do that. And then the final one for the year, I'm gonna do with Drex. I, I'm not sure you could really call that a Christmas episode since that'll be the 15th of December. But we will . We, we will start, start the festivities. And if you're wondering over the holidays, we take a two week break, but over those two weeks we release our best of shows.

So we're gonna release a best of Covid series. We're gonna, that was a series we did over the course of three months where we interviewed people on the front lines. And we've pulled out some segments from that that we wanna share with you. And it's best of series. Uh, we have the, the best of the news station, uh, show.

So we have . From this show, we have a bunch of new stories which sort of defined the year. Obviously Covid was a big story this year, but a bunch of stories from that. So we have a best of that. And then we have the, the countdown, the top 10, uh, shows from this year, top 10 most list two shows for this year.

And, uh, we're gonna do that countdown. We'll do it on social media as well. So that's what we're gonna do over the last three. . Three our last two weeks of the year be as we go into the new year, we, we take a little break and then we come back, but we don't take a break from the content. We'll keep dropping stuff out there for you.

All right, so let's hit a couple of these stories. I'm, I'm using a new setup here, so I have a monitor over here that's working, a monitor over here. But since this is also a, this is also a, a video podcast, I don't wanna be looking in another direction. And, uh, lose you guys. So, all right, so the Stark law changes.

So there's, there's a bunch of different articles. Let's see. Here's one. This one is a conversation between Secretary Azar. I. And Hargan, who's hargan, I wish I knew, but they're talking about anti-kickback changes, uh, that's gonna boost value-based care from the article. Azar says, uh, these well-meaning rules talking about the stark laws and the anti-kickback, uh, laws.

These well-meaning rules are therefore reason to protect against fraud and self-dealing. And unfortunately, they've frozen place a disaggregated care model. When we know that what we need is a coordinated care built around the patient, and so these reforms will in a sensible way enable value-based

Arrangements that let providers coordinate them and share risk, let them help patients to improve outcomes. Inadvertently, the Stark Laws and anti-kickback statutes, inad, again inadvertently created a an incentive to for consolidation and enhanced provider market power in localized areas. And so we believe that this ancillary benefit of these rule changes is to enable virtual collaboration,

That is built around the patient without essentially requiring consolidation and common ownership. So I'm gonna hit a story here. There's another story. MedCity News has a story on this. So one of the, when they talk about inadvertently, what it, what it had done is because you couldn't create these value-based care models and these networks to deliver, uh, coordinated care, a lot of times what these small providers, independent providers, uh, and others that were a part of that value chain had to do was they had to become a part of the health system.

Or they had to become a part of what, what whoever the largest entity was that was, that was delivering. And so there was a, a. Indirect drive to consolidation within the industry that wasn't consider considered good. The so what for us though, is gonna be around technology as you the, the stark law most often came up when we were talking about technology, our, what can we actually give these independent providers?

Because you didn't want to encourage any fraud or any kind of self-dealing self. It's, and, and it was really around referrals and, and locking in referrals and those kind of things, right? So we can't give them technology in exchange for them giving us all the referrals. Uh, and so they loosened some of these laws around the EHR that really came up around cybersecurity, came up around analytics that came up.

Anytime we were giving out things of value to those, to those independent providers, we had to be careful that we, uh, followed the law to the letter. Otherwise, I mean, I mean there were significant, serious ramifications to violating this law. Obviously, if you're trying to avoid fraud, it's, uh. It's, it's, it's pretty important.

Alright, so let's hit the Med City news article CMS Changes to Circ Law appear largely positive. Experts say CMS has finalized changes to the physician's self-referral law, also known as Circ Law. Healthcare law experts say that these changes will generally. Make it easier for hospitals and physicians to remain in compliance with the statute.

You know, if we are giving them equipment for free, cybersecurity for free, uh, advanced analytics for free, that was considered a financial arrangement, and the government has recognized. And so those independent providers had to pay for all that stuff themselves up to a certain percentage. I think it was 75%.

I, I don't remember the exact number. Uh, the government has recognized that the need to update the stark regulations that were originally developed at a time when unnecessary volume of services was . Of primary importance. Phil Sprinkle a healthcare partner at Ackerman, LLP said an email, the concepts of value added services, cost savings, systematic systemic efficiencies, and overall quality outcomes were just.

In their nascent, according to CMS, the changes finalized November 20th aimed to alleviate the administrative burden of complying with the law. The reforms will modernize the regulations that interpret the Stark law while uh, continuing to protect the Medicare program and patients from bad actors. Makes perfect sense.

Tina Fry. . A healthcare associate at McGuire Woods LLP said in a phone call that the changes updated stark regulations in three primary ways. Here we go. Number one, CMS has adopted new exceptions for value-based enterprises and goals. If a healthcare provider has a value-based or care coordination goal.

And there are certain hallmarks in place such as governing board and contracts. They can share revenue in novel ways, in ways that are not based off of fair market value for fee for service model. Fry said the exception will allow physicians and other healthcare providers to design and enter into value-based arrangements without fear of legitimate activities.

To coordinate and improve the quality of care for patients and lower costs would violate the stark laws. The second thing. The changes include new exceptions to protect non-abusive beneficial arrangements between physicians and other healthcare providers. These include exceptions. For sharing technology, providing cybersecurity for, I said, for example, a hospital would be permitted to help provide cybersecurity provisions to physician groups they share EMRs with.

They may not have enough resources to protect against cyber crime on their own. That is absolutely true in a . Huge win. ACMS has also provided helpful clarifications and guidance on various parts of the law, many of which have led to providers in the past to think they violated the statute. Fry said this includes guidance on how to determine if the compensation being given to physicians is at fair market value, and that's also part of the CMS fact sheet.

Uh, you can also hit the CMS fact sheet if you want, uh, more information on this. This is generally a, a. Uh, significant positive, something. We want to, uh, determine what that means for the clinically integrated networks that we're building out, the partnerships that we're building out. What kind of, what kind of things can we now do that we couldn't do before?

Specifically I would focus in on a cybersecurity. I would focus in on maybe some, the advanced tools that we have, some of the analytics, uh, that are, are built into the workflow and being able to do . I don't know, some really neat things across that coordinated continuum of care. And so this is, this is good.

This was a, a long time coming. It seems to hit the mark of what people were saying. Is, is the, the downside of this, I have two stories here. On, well, actually, I'm just, I'll just focus on one just for time's sake. Ohio lab tech issues delay. C Ovid 19 data virus spread dramatically affects health system's ability to care for patients.

The Ohio Department of Health's c Ovid 19 data has been skewed by technical issues related to lab reporting. Although Ohio Governor Mike DeWine noted that the virus is spreading quickly across the state according to local AB, C news affiliate. Only reason I brought this story up, to be honest with you, is to have a conversation around

What, what does the, the data infrastructure and technology infrastructure look like at the state level around public health? I have, I've off the air, been having conversations 'cause no one wants to speak about these things. On the air with CIOs. How challenging was it, uh, to connect to your local state?

Were they able to receive the data that you were sending them? How was it to interact with them? How advanced is their technology? How much of the work was pushed down on you? and generally speaking, as you would imagine, it's, it's different depending on the state. Some states are more advanced than others, but advanced is the wrong word.

Some states are adequate. And some states are really behind the times. And so my hope is that, that we as a health system community and health healthcare providers, and even payers for that matter, can look into what we need, uh, from a public health infrastructure moving forward. I hear people. Shouting from the treetops.

We need to do this and we need to do this. Uh, I, a lot of those things are probably right. We just need to step back a little bit and say, all right, what does it look like to respond to the next pandemic? I know we're not out of this one yet, but keeping an eye on the, on the future. And based on the experience that we've had as a result of this pandemic, we know that data is important.

We know that tracking is important. We know that PPE, that quantities of PPE vaccine distribution, there's a whole bunch of stuff that we have solutions, but they're not national. Uh, the ones that are state-based are supported by maybe lackluster technology and programs. And so, so there's a lot of work to do here and, and the, so what is, there's a lot of work to do here.

I think we could weigh in and I think we can knit some things together. One, one of the challenges in healthcare is we have a lot of interested parties. Let's just say that A lot of interested parties, uh, and to a certain extent, they're all gonna want to have a say in how, how this goes. AWS resumes, operations after outage and AAWS had an outage right around the Thanksgiving holiday.

and, you know, it didn't last that long. They, they took the, uh, code out of production that caused the issue. So just something to keep an eye on as we continue to move to the cloud. Novant Health, UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine announced agreement to partner across North Carolina. So. You had, uh, atrium try to step in there with UNC that did not work out and now you have a partnership with Novant.

This is worth a read. It's pretty interesting. Novant's gonna get some school capabilities in Charlotte, so gives them the, some academic medical center credentials by partnering with with UNC and so. Novans a player in that space and, and we'll see. And obviously UN C's a player. So we'll see how that, uh, transpires.

Again, I'm just focusing on the headline at this point. Uh, COVID Ovid 19 Vaccine Distribution. So there's a couple stories on this. I. The, the first is healthcare finance. Healthcare finance news. Covid to 19 vaccine distribution will begin within 24 hours of an emergency youth use authorization. So we are, this is December 1st.

This is airing. We are being told that, uh, a lot of vaccine doses will be going out in December to start. And so I have seen some health systems start to talk about what they are doing. So let me hit that story. We have, uh, Providence and Intermountain. how Providence and Intermountain CIOs are preparing for covid to 19 vaccines.

25 states have immunization data systems in place, but most aren't prepared to track covid to 19 vaccinations or report data to the federal government. According to the report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, health systems are stepping up to coordinate vaccine distribution in the future. Okay. That go goes to the public health thing I just talked about.

Our IT organizations have responsibility to provide the technology. And data. By the way, this is Becker's story, uh, and data needed to track virtually all aspects of distribution and administration of the Covid 19 vaccine said Ryan Smith, newly minted Vice President and CIO of Salt Lake City. Uh, Utah based Intermountain Healthcare.

This entails a significant amount of collaboration and coordination with many different functions within the external, within and external to Intermountain to ensure our response scales. Intermountain coordinates with Utah's immunization registry to ensure clinical systems have updated immunization data.

From the state in near real time. The health system also developed an interface between the state and Intermountain's EHR to coordinate between doses. Both parties can see which vaccine the patient received for the first dose and make sure that the correct second dose is administered, is administered.

This type of interoperability will be essential throughout the vaccine distribution process next year. All right, so that's uh . That's what One Health System is doing, which is fantastic. Providence, executive Vice President, C-I-O-B-J Moore told Becker's the The Renton Washington based health system also is taking steps to prepare for the vaccine.

Our information security works closely with our clinical teams to ensure that EHR tools. Are ready to go and our caregivers are supported so they can support our patients. He said we stood up teams to focus on multiple vaccine distribution work streams. Uh, looking ahead, Providence is considering acquiring additional iPads and laptops to make the documentation process more efficient.

The vaccine distribution will require many aspects of I services, including tracking, documentation, reporting, and supporting multiple methods of delivery. Uh, delivery. Providence is also working closely with federal agencies to track and share data. Mr. Moore said in addition to his IT role, Mr. Moore oversees real estate and operations for the health system areas that are integral to the vaccine storage and distribution.

The health system may buy more freezers and build, uh, traditional and alternative vaccine delivery sites. I actually, I think the most interesting thing about that sentence is that PJ Moore, the CIO, oversees real estate and operations for the health system. Something to, something to consider. But anyway, the vaccine is coming.

It's coming, uh, fast and Furious. Just had this conversation with a couple of CIOs. You're gonna hear it, uh, this week with actually tomorrow with Trusted Springman. Uh, we talked a little bit about the, uh, vaccine distribution. It's coming. It's fast and furious and. We have a role to play. We have a role to play, not only in, uh, tracking, updating the registries and making sure that people are getting the, the right vaccine, but as, as we talked about before on the show, the Pfizer storage requires, uh, cold storage.

So we're gonna have to make sure that that's coordinated. I'm sure there's technology aspects to that. The Moderna vaccine does not require that kind of cold storage. But again, it's, it's a, as BJ Moore was talking about, it's a logistics . We, we have to have the registries, we have to have the reporting, we have to have the information into the workflow at the point of care, which is, which is important.

Uh, there's also a lot of other stuff going on around the vaccine. There's a conversation going on around, uh, mandatory vaccines and I. Are employers going to require vaccines, uh, the vaccine being taken before people come back to work and those kind of things. In, in healthcare, we don't really consider this a problem because we had to do

We had to do the flu shot and vaccine every year and, and . It would be updated on our vaccines to work in healthcare. And it didn't matter, at least where I was, it didn't matter if you were in administration or not, if you were related to the hospital in any way, you had to, uh, have these things. So I, I would imagine our frontline workers will be some of the first people to get vaccinated.

Our pro sports teams will probably be second, our third will be probably our administrative staff. I know that shows our whacked out priorities, but, but for the most part. This is coming. That will be an interesting, uh, debate. Right now. One of the challenges is that only 47 some odd percent occurred according to a Reuters poll, say they, uh, intend to take the vaccine, which means that we have, we have work to do, we have to build up trust in our communities, and we are one of the trusted providers of information.

And so the so what on this is what are we doing with our marketing departments? What are we doing on social media? What are we doing to promote. The use of vaccines. I thought we were late to the game on masks. Uh, the mask up thing was great, and I appreciate the health systems that started hitting social media in the beginning.

We just used the shaming protocols in order to, to try to get people to wear masks. I like the Mask Up program. I think it's positive. I think it makes sense. I think we need to do the same thing around vaccine some way, shape, or form. Hey, marketing works. Uh, it just flat out works and when trusted people tell you that the vaccine is safe.

Like your doctor, your family doctor, someone who you've been going to for years that has value and that has the ability to, to change behavior. And so I think the health systems do have a role to play here with regard to getting the word out, getting our physicians front and center on social media, promoting the, the, the vaccine.

There's no way for us to get to the, uh, percentage that the epidemiologists are talking about. Uh, to really control the spread of covid. It's upwards of, I, I'm gonna get this wrong, and I'm not a physician, but, uh, it's, it's high. It's like 80%, 70, 70 to 90% are either vaccinated or with antibodies in order to really slow, uh, the spread of this virus because of its nature, because of, of how it spreads and, and those kind of things.

So, yeah. So I think we have a, we have a role to play. There's a couple other great stories. I'll save some of these to next week. . There's a, a, a whole home health, really acute care home health going on right now. And we see, uh, Avera Health doing some stuff there. We see obviously Mayo's doing some stuff there, and there's, there's, uh, a lot of really cool stories around that.

So, uh, Mayo's doing it. Intermountain's doing it. Vera's doing it. Uh, so we'll, we'll talk about that next week. I think that's an interesting thing. All right, that's all for this week. Hey, to participate in the conversation, just go out to LinkedIn, follow me, bill j Russell on LinkedIn, and uh, go ahead and start commenting on those stories and we'll share some of your comments on the show.

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Please check back every week as we drop three more episodes, a news day. A solution showcase when we have 'em. If not, we just drop a second influence show. So over the next couple weeks we have a bunch of influence shows. We have Tressa Springman. This week we have Darren Dworkin on, uh, Friday the fourth, and that'll be a, that'll be a good episode.

Next week we have Amy Coton Phillips and Diana Noel from, uh, nuance, talking about the partnership between Providence and Nuance. We have Marty . Lic, who is the CIO for HCA on December 11th? So we've got a lot of great shows coming up in December. Hope, hopefully you'll get a chance to, uh, drop in in as, as many of 'em as you can.

Thanks for listening. That's all for now.