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Solution Showcase: Innovating Data Centers to Data-Driven Care with Brian Jones and Jason Jones

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Drex DeFord: hey everyone, I'm Drex. I'm a long time recovering healthcare, CIO. Now I'm the cybersecurity and risk leader at this Week Health and the 2 29 Project.

I'll be your host today for the Solution Showcase. We're gonna talk a lot today about a lot of cool stuff. And first of all, thank you for listening today. We always appreciate your time and this episode definitely promises to be a good one. Thanks to our sponsor today, Rackspace. Jason Jones is with us today.

You all have made incredible headway and built really great trust with a lot of top healthcare leaders across the country. I was just in San Antonio this week to talk to some members of the team, and I'm happy to do this with you today. We'll talk more about all of that cool stuff here in just a minute, and I'm also feeling really lucky today to be joined by a former comrade in arms and longtime friend Brian Jones.

Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Jones: Ah, thanks Drex for having me. I look forward to the conversation today. Yeah,

Drex DeFord: Jason, welcome to the show too.

Drex DeFord: Yeah. Thanks to both of you for being here. Best place to start is always introductions. Brian, tell me a little bit about yourself and the work going on at Valley Med and you've been doing the CIO thing for a long time now, and you have one of the toughest jobs in healthcare.

So like, tell me a little bit about you, but tell me a little bit too about how you keep it fresh.

Brian Jones: That's a very good question, and I think the term fresh is relative, but yeah direct. Thanks for having me on. You know, I've been doing this healthcare CIO gig now for about 25 years, and prior to that I was in the financial role as a CFO.

We have two data centers and how can we reduce our footprint so we can turn some of that space into revenue generating [00:03:00] space. So when you say keeping it fresh, I think every organization has a different strategy that enables the CIO to kind of come in and look at stuff. And I guess we could keep it fresh that way, but we're just trying to deliver what the administrative team.

This case our community wants.

Drex DeFord: Yeah, that's a great setup for the rest of the conversation today. But before I get into that, there's another Jones on the channel here today. They are not related, if anybody is wondering about that. Jason's a long time friend. , He's also been around the block a couple of times.

Love hanging out with him. We always have a great chat. It's good to see you. Tell me a little bit about your background, Jason, and the, you know, what's happening at Rackspace right now?

Jason Jones: Yeah, so 25 years just like Brian, right? The Y 2K project was was my first entrance into healthcare.

Oh gosh. Right? And yeah, that was that was kind of a big deal all the way back at group Health Drex. You probably remember that locally here. I remember

Drex DeFord: that. Yeah. And,

Health it. And I think Brian hit it on the head. Are we doing it like we did it in the nineties or are we gonna look through the future and actually look forward? Right? And that's where we're really trying to lean in and step in and help take some of that burden off and allow CIOs to, to run free and not think about the past.

Brian Jones: I like the run free comment. That's

Jason Jones: good.

Drex DeFord: Thanks for the setup. Brian, we were all able to hang out a little bit in person before we. Got around to recording this. And during that time you told me about the story of kind of like you were in Washington state, you left us, and then you came back.

The issue of change. So replay some of that conversation for me. What were some of the issues? What did you, how did you think about those problems as you got into it?

Brian Jones: You know, directs we learn as we get older, right? And when I had that conversation with my boss and I got her directives and her strategy for the next 18 months, I knew I needed talent outside of myself and for many years, you know.

The previous health systems I've been a part of, I have been able to navigate modernization, digital transformation, data center consolidation. Mm-hmm. You put your own paradigm on that. Our own spin on that, but regardless of what I did in the past, we always found out that we left something on the table or we wish we could have done this a little bit better or different.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Brian Jones: And I needed a partner. So when I came in I looked at things a little bit differently. at the time, Rackspace to the table and Jason, that's when I met Jason for the first time. And we started talking about the issue of. How can we reduce our footprint? and that just kind of turned on to a bigger collaboration and that bigger collaboration.

Yeah. It started off with my staff and it was, the question I kept posing to them is healthcare IT infrastructure, a strategy anymore. Or is it a commodity?

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Brian Jones: And that drove a conversation.

Drex DeFord: that idea of you had some initial goals and then you, those kind of rolled into more, the more you talked about it, the more you realized there were other things you could do together.

Tell me more about that.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Brian Jones: And now, you know, they've got some very large health systems under their belts. They have well, zaffer up in Seattle Children's, they've had extreme success.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Brian Jones: And as we started looking at our environment and we had to look at how we program monies between operational and capital and your staff capital, human capital.

It became a very compelling story and once the value system between our two organizations got aligned, it allowed us to dig a little bit deeper and during that Digger Deep, we started looking at incremental changes, whether it's with our finances, whether it's with our software vendors, and the conversation quickly moved from some support, you know, how do we get outta this building?

Mm-hmm. Where we're at today, and that is we're getting outta the infrastructure business. And, but it was a long collaboration.

How's this all look from your side of the

Jason Jones: table? Yeah. You know, it, it was an interesting journey for what was going on with Barnett Valley. And I, I do have a very unique perspective with Valley is it's my personal hospital, so I live in the district, right? Mm-hmm. So I have some fiduciary responsibility to the organization.

'Cause my taxes flow straight into that, right? My levees, all of those things. So it w it, and not only that, because I do live in the area, I work really closely with, you know, healthcare's small, right? So I've known a lot of the individuals at Brian's organization. 20 plus years, you know, that they've been there.

So the conversation actually started with, Hey, Jason, I have some space. I need to move out of it and get a colo. Because some of the, you know, not everybody had a full understanding of what Brian's plan truly was. But then trying to peel that back and why do you need this space?

And then. What is that? Move forward, right? What does success look like from Brian's level, from all levels of the organization, right? Because success at an administrator, manager, director, and Brian, all of those look very different, right? So making sure that we are aligned to that success and understanding it is a commodity, right?

We do this for a living. This is all we do as data centers. You guys deliver care. Why don't you deliver care? Let us deliver IT. And together an SLA with, you know, financial back penalties gets you in a much better place. Right. So as we started looking to that, why, because moving to just a colo doesn't really solve a problem.

Drex DeFord: It's more of a symptom than solving the problem. Yeah. Yep.

Absolutely. Our data between our payers, our care, the government oversights, et cetera. So we really start looking at the cycles that we're spending in infrastructure on a limited budget and the cycles where we need to be spinning inside the data. We had a disconnect there, so it was an eye-opening conversation with my own team and

it is a change, you know, as Jason mentioned, some of these guys have been here 15 to 20 years, and all of a sudden, who's this new guy making a change like this? There was some pushback there, there was naturally.

Drex DeFord: So let's talk about the re-imagination part of this. 'cause you're coming in, you're working together.

How big of a leap was it for both of you to kind of work through this process? Brian, start with you, like looking at your team and having those conversations. Well, how'd you get there? How'd you start?

Brian Jones: It was a leap. And I, you know, honestly Drex it was, I think it was a two-prong approach. A, we had to be disruptive in how we tackle this issue.

We couldn't keep doing the same stuff expecting a different result. So we put everything that's on the table, let's just throw it out there and let's just start having the dialogue. It was a difficult dialogue. I had my, my management team on one side of the table, and I felt like I was on the other side of the table.

Speaker 5: And,

Brian Jones: slowly we kind of came together, but we, we started with a value set of what, what's the value? How are we valued in the organization? What does our community need? Not what we wanna do.

And Then figure out how can we meet our objective, but also build that response around our community. And where we came out at and we got a hundred percent agreeance on this, was we need a partner. We need a partner for this commodity we call infrastructure and they can do it better. Once we understood what they were doing and then as a trusted entity for our taxpayers, we became that data enabling force going forward so we can make sure we make.

Quicker, wiser decisions faster. And it was a challenge. It took a lot of leadership, it took a lot of coffee, it took a lot of donuts, but we got there. But you had to open up and be disruptive.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Brian Jones: And I think what was easier for me, Drex, and I heard Jason talk about this in the past, it's easy for me being the new person to come in and find a 30% savings, right.

And I think we might have been on the verge of being this really stagnant.

Drex DeFord: we go around the country and talk to CIOs and CISOs and others, CXOs around the country, we often find that sometimes the thing that they've built, that's what good looks like and they become kind of personally.

It's an affront to them personally. When you start to talk about things like, maybe you need to disrupt this whole thing, throw this whole thing out and start over again. Whether it's infrastructure, whatever it is. And Jason, you see these kind of challenges across Rackspace clients. How do you deal with that kind of stuff?

How do you help people rethink or reimagine what it is that they're doing?

Right. And so, but as understanding where his vision was taking him That's where we could lean in even to those relationships. Right. show them, here's what good can look like. Like you, you have good, awesome, you've done a great job, but what is great and what does exceptional look like?

Right. Let's build those visions in, and then how do we get there from where you're at? Buying. One of everything is the little shiny lights and the squirrels that you run to. That's not the right way, right when you can get rid of essentially Patch Tuesday and really start to innovate and dig into, like Brian said, the data, right?

What it, what do we need to do to make delivery better Right across the board? What does that look like? So painting that vision for them, really helping them to understand, here's how we can get there. And It is work, right? You gotta roll your sleeves up, you've gotta dig in. It's not just, hey here's the magic wand, and tomorrow we're gonna be off to the races.

Yeah, there's gonna be some naysayers. You're gonna drag them along. Arguably, I think the guys are in a much better place. You would talk to them today and they see it. They're running to it. They're not running from it. They're running to it, and now we're getting the calls that vision is there. They understand it.

Hey, can you help with this? Can you help with this? Can you help with this? Sometimes the answer's no. I have a partner, I have a relationship or I know Drex, we can call Drex and Drex can connect this to six other people. Right? But it's, but now it's them themselves. Instead of running to Brian with the problem, it's, Hey maybe this.

Brian Jones: Jason, you just said something that just resonated with me, and you always say, something resonates with me, by the way.

I appreciate

Speaker 5: that.

Brian Jones: But the team has just taken off, you know, instead of coming to me for everything they have. They just expanded their partnerships, their collaborations their business partners by threefold, by having Rackspace to the right of us and collaborating on different solutions. So, so now they're bringing to us, we have this issue, Brian, but here's our potential solutions and here's who we vetted it through and here's our cost structure and here's our implementation timeline.

The way the staff has transformed in 18 months has been a, actually, it's, it is been kind of really heartwarming to see it. It's been really good. Drex. I do

Jason Jones: wanna mention though, that takes leadership, right, and empowerment. Right? Because unless Brian empowered those individuals to do that, they'd still bring every single challenge to Brian.

Drex DeFord: And there are so many battles. Yeah. There are so many things that are out there. I love that. I mean, just that as a success story alone would be a really great story.

Let me ask about, as the project has proceeded, okay. Kind of here we are. What metrics or indicators are you using to kind of measure. That you're being successful. I love the leadership metric. Yeah. The ingrained kind of culture change that happened as a part of this, but what else? From a business clinical research perspective how are you metricizing this project?

Brian Jones: You know, so there's two phases. When you sign a contract with Rackspace, there's what we call a continuous mode of operations where we still take care of our infrastructure. They bring in all the engineers, staff experts to get our environment ready for that shift and lift to one of the data centers that they have.

Different thought process and how you can tackle the same issue with the same staff. One of the metrics we saw is our un our unplanned downtimes have went down.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. Our

Brian Jones: passion successes went down. I mean, we, they haven't even taken over yet, and we're seeing a better, I'm getting feedback from my customers, IE the our clinicians that are using our system to deliver care, how much more stable an environment is.

So you have your metrics, but you also have those verbal responses back. Like, Brian, I don't know what you're doing, but just keep doing it. That moves our organization a long ways, and once we transition and transform, I think we will be even a better spot. And I'll stop there. I, there's a bunch of metrics we look at, but it's the verbal ones.

Drex DeFord: It's unplanned downtime creates a lot of trust. I mean, Jason, would you, when you do these kind of projects across the country what kind of metrics are you looking at? What's the ROI? How are you guys building that out?

Jason Jones: So the start for us was really helping put that business case together for Brian, right?

It is how do we make sense of all of this? Right? And getting very closely to his business partnership finance and in that legal, really digging in just basically three parts of any IT operation, right? You got hardware, software, and services. Mm-hmm. Right? So breaking those down into incremental blocks and levels of effort to deliver across the board.

To kind of evaluate what that looks like, but then come back with, okay, here's the best path forward for everybody. Public cloud, private cloud, right? Work, workload dependent cost structures. Delivering that back right now, that's the business case we built it on. Let's march towards that. Make sure that we're continuously finding that value and you know, that's part of it, right?

To make sure that we drive that continuous success. But the other piece is. we need Brian to be successful in this situation, right? If Brian's successful, the organization's successful. And again, like I have this weird, unique relationship with Valley Medical. When I booked an appointment with my primary care provider, she actually double blocks me.

It's a major metric for us, right? So that feed back loop that Brian continuously gets, we wanna continuously get that as well and drive success.

Drex DeFord: I love that. Hey, Brian, as you look look into the future now, what's next? You're here, you've made, you know, you've made great progress. You have some other, some additional great progress that's obviously, clearly on the near, near term horizon.

Brian Jones: you know what? That's a good question. So. You know, with all the cost savings that we're getting by making this transition, we're able to reinvest into our providers and direct's ai.

It's here and we're standing up our own governance approach to it, and we're going through the process and how do we take this savings? How do we reinvest? And the whole transformation loop that keeps that one going. I don't know where we're gonna go with AI yet. Probably I just got back from Chime and there's an AI solution for everything that we can possibly think about out there, right?

So we're gonna figure out what's the best, what's the best pathway forward for the biggest impact. But I I think, you know, you're gonna see some AI being rolled out at Valley in the next 12 months hopefully in the provider side and the nursing side. Looking at the support functions, how we can better utilize some of the AI configurations that we're already doing.

It was almost like I have to go for a walk just to get away. We're all struggling with this whole paradigm shift of

Yeah. We have to do more with less. Mm-hmm. And how do we go about it? And, okay. Brian, it's a great presentation. Tell me the truth, what's really going on behind the scenes and we're, valley Medical Center is not in a bucket by themselves, and this is a one-off solution.

This can probably be applied across the board and. You live out here in the Pacific Northwest. Mm-hmm. We look up what the cost structures are at for personnel, and then you got your software vendors and their cost structures and the equipment going up. I asked Jason if I could talk about this, but you know, we, he, he mentioned we signed a 10 year contract.

we had a lot of collaboration on this next point, but I was like, okay, that's great for 10 years. Thank you Jason. You guys are wonderful, but we're gonna reduce our footprint on site 10 years from now, what are you gonna charge me? Right? And we wrote into the contract, we restricted to no more than a 15% increase.

So think about that. 20 years in the Seattle market, my cost, whether it's software infrastructure or personnel costs, we're only gonna go up 15% in 20 years. It's a compelling story. And I told that story and a lot of people are really wanting to know more. I think that's a part that Rackspace should tell a little bit more about.

But I being a public hospital district, we look at, we look at opportunities like that. So, that's where our, we're going next. I believe ai. I had to throw in the contract piece there a little bit. I think we have to share that information.

Jason Jones: The contracting, right. I think the best way to put it and this is such a great quote. We're small enough to care, but we're large enough to deliver. Right? And I think that's key, right? And Brian's interacted with our CEO all the way down to engineering staff, right? And so being small enough to step in and understand the mission, right?

The heart and mind are completely aligned to the mission of healthcare. It's not just ano another revenue generation machine for us, right? It, there's wood behind the arrow, right? We're completely aligned to that now, where we're going. I'd be remiss if I didn't also jump on the AI train. Right. And everybody else.

And having a full hybrid, you know, AWS Azure relationship, GCP, with our private cloud, you know, building that capability of that AI and real time with some of these other utilities, but then being able to bring that into a private data center on your data and inference locally, right? So build it in public, pull it in private.

That's a unique capability that not a lot of people have. Right. And a lot of organizations. Sure. Some of the data, I don't care if it's in the public cloud, but some of the other data, research data, we, you know, mentioned Seattle Children's. I don't necessarily want that data to get free.

And that a lot aligned with ai 'cause it's part of the data machine, right? That's the direction that Rackspace is enabling clients to run as fast as they wanna run or as slow and risk adverse

Brian Jones: as they need to walk through. You just made an interesting statement. I'll, and I'll put this out there for the listeners.

Brian Jones saying is that we move at the speed of safety. So when you talk about as fast as we wanna run, yeah. I've been here 18 months, but we didn't sign the contract with Rackspace. We went through all the due diligence, but we didn't sign the contract with Rackspace until February of this year. And we're already shifting our volumes over to a future month.

So inside of 12 months, just under 12 months, we went from a current state to a future state. All the industry best practices and got probably 95% of our infrastructure into a cloud compliant state in 10 to 11 months. So that's, it's pretty remarkable. And we're moving it to speed of safety.

Probably one of the fastest transformations I've seen in my 30 years. So.

Drex DeFord: I like this concept, Brian. I'm a, you know, plagiarism is the most sincere form of flattery, so you can expect somewhere in a future podcast I'm gonna be talking about moving at the speed of safety. Yeah, I think that's really good.

I, and I also thank you for that and I love really good advice and guidance too. So, what advice, Brian, would you give. To other organizations that are looking to innovate and transform and disrupt and do a lot of the same kinds of work that you've done at Valley,

Brian Jones: Good question.

Be okay to say, Hey, I need to bring in some support and how we can re-look at this situation from a different lens. I call it disruption. Be okay to be disruptive on yourself. Yeah. You're the CIO. Yeah. You have that title. Yeah. They expect you to be the 30,000 pound brain. But there's a lot smarter people in our organization than Brian Jones and I recognize that.

So, don't be afraid to challenge the status quo. Don't be afraid to bring in people. I always said I, I'd never wanna be the smartest person in the room. I wanna be the biggest sponge in the room. And we use that tactic about 18 months ago when I got here, and we're seeing where we're at now. So that's my advice and that's how I keep it fresh.

Drex DeFord: Yeah, I love that. Hey, Jason one of the things I'm always looking for Brian and I have talked about this. For years now, even back in our Air Force days, one of the things I look for is a culture of innovation and collaboration when I'm looking to partners.

Jason Jones: We continue to ingrain in every single individual in our healthcare vertical. Your heart and mind has to be aligned to the mission that is driving these individuals, right? And if it's not now, all of a sudden you've stepped outside of Rackspace healthcare right now you're not prioritizing.

It could be your family member, it could be you, right? It could be somebody laying in a bed somewhere that is a loved one and a cared one. Put that forth, right? And that individual thought process will, you know, put you in the right mindset to continue to drive value forward, right? Because it's all about incremental value.

And it's partnership right. With that. Without Brian leaning in, not everything's perfect. I mean, literally over, you know, a cocktail. He could probably tell you it's not. Absolutely 100% and I'm not gonna be here and tell you. It's all rainbows and unicorns. There's been some challenges. Absolutely. But all in all, we're better off today than we were yesterday and we'll be better off tomorrow than we are today.

And that's the goal.

Drex DeFord: Yeah, I love that. Perfect. The enemy of good. Brian, final word.

Brian Jones: You know, I, what I would say, and I don't know if we talked about it here, we gotta bring in the human piece. So of all my infrastructure team that moved over to Rackspace, they were not happy with that move upfront. They were not at first.

I'm a human person first. That was the most reassuring thing of the last 18 months is our folks are saying this was probably the smartest move for me and my family, so thank you. And I, we didn't touch on that, but I wanted to throw that in there as well. So that's it for my final word.

Jason Jones: Drex, the one thing I would say is prioritize your own disruption for your own success.

Right? That's the final word, right? And that sums it all up. And we're here to help.

Drex DeFord: Thanks to both of you again for joining us today and thanks to Rackspace for sponsoring the Solution Showcase. I'm Drex de Ford from this Week Health and the 2 29 Project. And as always, we say thank you for being here and listening.

Thanks again for being here. It's cybersecurity and healthcare and infrastructure. As I always say, stay a little paranoid. We'll see you around campus

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