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Executive Interview: DCH's Quality Turnaround Journey With Faith Burkett and Billy Helmandollar

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I'm Bill Russell, creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare, one connection at a time. This is an executive interview

quick powerful Conversations with Leaders Driving Change. So let's get started.

Faith Burkett: to be here.

Bill Russell: we were just joking.

I mean, so DCH your flagship hospital's in Tuscaloosa, so you're in the heart of Alabama. And faith you're a visitor in the heart of Alabama, and I hope I don't give it away here. I, it sounds like everybody does know that you're an Auburn grad. Who uh, lives in Tuscaloosa?

Faith Burkett: Yes, unfortunately.

But I'm proud to be here. I'm not a Alabama hater. So my husband's an Alabama fan, so you know, I'm in good company here.

Bill Russell: what's your background? How'd you get there?

I get to combine my nursing background with technology and I really love that I'm able to make an impact on patient safety and quality of care.

Yeah. My master's is from the University of Alabama. And you're wearing

Billy Helmandollar: the right colors. My oldest daughter actually graduated from UA as well. Wow.

Bill Russell: And you're wearing the colors as well.

Billy Helmandollar: That's especially for this day.

Bill Russell: Fantastic. tell us your story. Tell us how, how you got to DCH in Tuscaloosa,

Billy Helmandollar: no problem.

I was a programmer by trade back in the early nineties, late eighties, early nineties. Switched over to healthcare in around 93, and I've been in healthcare it ever since with a variety of roles, from anything from system administrator to network administrator, all the way up from director to CIO. Our journey has been throughout four different states.

Bill Russell: Yeah you and I are contemporaries. I came up in the eighties and nineties. I also started as a programmer. I'm curious, what was your first computer that you were programming on? Commodore 64. Me too. Wow. We really are contemporaries. We're telling our age bill. I know, I know. It is. It is.

It is like, carbon dating. You say what computer you started on and people know exactly where you're from. So, You guys have invested a great deal of effort in really building up the organization and improving the healthcare that's provided for the community.

so let's discuss a couple of things. You know, Billy I'd love to start with you. You guys were recently recognized for achieving CHIMEs most wired level nine. Tell me a little bit about that journey of doing that, and tell me a little bit about the importance of the recognition to the community.

So throughout the next year, we worked hard to get the improvements up and understand what the survey is really focusing on and trying to guide our roadmap for our organization to align more with what other organizations were doing. The second year, we hit level seven. So we really made a lot of strides.

We really did a lot of the automation they were looking for. And then as we progressed each year, I used that survey to help determine what our roadmap items are for the next year. It doesn't fully do the roadmap, but it helps us. Prepare to understand where the industry's going, where others are going, what they see is beneficial to the patients and the clinicians.

So. As far as the survey goes, we scored extremely high on several of the domains, scored really well on the remaining ones. We did see a gap on one of the domains that was new in the last couple years, and that's around patient experience. So we've been reaching out with external vendors, looking at what we can do to enhance our market share into that side of things.

And then this year when we took the survey, it focused a lot more on patient experience and then started digging into the AI realm. So it gives us a little hint of where they're going in the future.

Faith I'd love to talk to you a little bit about, you know, the I know that you have, that your system has improved their leapfrog hospital safety grade from a D in 2021 to a B in 2024. That's significant. Progress as well. DCH is you know, best in western Alabama for quality and patient safety.

Huge strides. Tell me a little bit about your work and the work of the organization that went into achieving these improvements. And you know, what has the, I guess the perspective is what's the impact been on the system and for the patients in the community?

And honestly, through this journey, the impact has been tremendous. Really from a nursing standpoint. Our staff retention has greatly improved over the past two years. And, you know, our nurses, physicians and staff, they really just wanna be part of an organizations where patients and patient safety comes first.

So our in our community, it's also very important. So, to your point, you know, back in 22, 2 of our hospitals, both regional and Northport, were rated as a D. that was a really, it was a turning point for us, and it really reflected the challenges that we were facing at the time.

We started with a multidisciplinary team that focused on some targeted initiatives. We included pharmacy, nursing, lab, [00:08:00] quality IT And really evaluated areas where we didn't perform well in the past. So one of the early gaps we identified was barcode scanning.

We did a deep dive in like how scanning across the organization was being used, and we noticed there were some gaps. One of the first changes, which was an easy change with help of Billy, was standardizing our scanners throughout the organization.

Another thing we did with nursing is we met with nurses. We listened to the staff regarding what barriers they were having with barcode scanning, and some of those were simple as wifi deadzones or barcode readability.

And so fixing some of those. Smaller issues really made a huge impact. And we were able to move our scanning compliance from about 85% to consistently being over 95%. And that was a huge leap in terms of patient safety.

Faith Burkett: Yeah. I think it's had a huge impact. And I think that's reflected in our retention over the last two years. And so as I referred to earlier as, I think clinicians at heart, they just wanna know they're taking the best care of their patients.

And when an organization has that at their core and that's their goals, and they're on a continuous improvement mission, I think that speaks volumes to changing the culture.

Bill Russell: Yeah, absolutely. So I understand another goal for DCH is to really build out the business. And I'm sure your improved industry scores help in that effort.

Give me a little bit more about what you're offering to the community in that effort. And Billy Faith has just talked for a little bit, so, we'll turn it over to you talk a little bit about the technical side of that.

So when we did some market analysis and some market studies we discussed with some internal staff what the possibility would be of hosting Expanse ambulatory for these local clinics and what benefits it could provide. So what we ended up finding out in our analysis was. Some of our local clinicians were paying well into almost $10,000 a month for an EMR.

Wow. Which is extremely expensive and hard on their operational side. We also found the lack of support for clinics in this area. People did not want take on healthcare 'cause of the reasoning of payments, things like that, that really affect this industry. Partnered and I built a contract out to talk about how we could service the ambulatory EMR and sustain local clinicians.

So we can provide their office equipment, do all the maintenance support network, build up the infrastructure, everything, all they're responsible for as a connection back to us. And we help them maintain that and help them tell what that is to carry the traffic load. So technically we go in and we become a one-stop shop for this.

Practice to have their EMR integrated directly into our expand system, so they're getting much more seamless view of the patient continuum of care. They see everything that happens, real time interfaces, all integrated, and then we also come behind that and offer them the office support that they need to keep the computers running, keep them safe, make sure we're monitoring everything, and then make sure they have the best platform possible to run their offices effectively

they can.

Billy Helmandollar: Most of the time they're having to go outside of the state of Tuscaloosa to get it. For example, the clinic. We actually provided the services for was having to contract with a company out of Birmingham, which is a little over an hour away. So when they would place a technical call, they had a minimum of an hour travel an hour back that they're paying for that there's no service being rendered.

Right. We're less than 10 minutes away. So, you know, when they call us we have a help desk that's available 24 7 365. We can dispatch a technician on demand and then we go take care of their services real time for them.

Bill Russell: So faith, give us an idea. I mean, we just heard about the technical side.

Give us an idea on the clinical side what this looks like.

So once we establish their workflows during the go live, we provide at the elbow support for around two weeks, depending on the clinic size. So that means we're right there with the staff. We're right there with the providers making adjustments on this. And then after that, we set up a dedicated support line for them.

And we also round in that clinic regularly from an informatics standpoint. So they know there's always help close by and that they're supported. And then one of the things we do, you know, some of the workflows that we put in place for these clinics are, you know, MEDITECH standard practices, but others are more customized, tailored by their specialty or even by the individual practice.

So they have those answers real time. So for them, I think it's made the experience much more efficient for their staff and they feel more connected to their patients.

Bill Russell: I guess I'll throw this question out right in the middle of the two of you. One of you can handle it, but what's next for DCH?

Billy Helmandollar: That's a loaded question, bill. We, We are growing by leaps and bounds, and when I say growing, you know, one point, Tuscaloosa was an oddity out there in the market today that most of the providers in the area were independent. Were seeing. Switch a little bit that our new administration that came in two years ago has more of a appetite to start taking on this business line.

So this is gonna. More of a global view of what our patients are doing once we get the exchange. Install so we can see other HIEs. And I think it's all about that continuum of care for the patient. I know from a clinic standpoint, we just had two clinics still live the first couple weeks, August, a large cardiology practice, and a then a new care line of business for us for primary care.

So this area is really underserved for primary care. So we've stepped up and started filling the clinic to help address that. And then I'll let Faith talk about our other venture that we have going on with our LTAC unit.

Faith Burkett: Yeah. So, we have an LTAC that is housed in here. I guess it's a different business.

So I think that's gonna be really monumental for them. Then one other project that we're working on is we have partnered with MEDITECH to be an early adopter for expanse pathology. And I also think this is gonna be really important for our providers and they're really excited about it. So from a pathology standpoint, it's gonna really streamline all of their.

And

Billy Helmandollar: that's a couple of other items as well. I know we haven't gotten too far into the project. We got a lot on our plates right now. Also starting vendor assessments for AMB and AI to try to get into that model to see how we can help improve clinicians' workflow and reduce burnout. The things everybody commonly hears and we're also

from a technology standpoint, we host everything internally from the hardware standpoint, but that technology and infrastructure is aging. It's time for us to do a reassessment, so we're actually looking at this point to see if going cloud-based with the hardware could be less intensive on staff internally and give us a better model going forward, more effective and more effective.

Faith Burkett: Yes. I'm always hopeful for Auburn, but we have struggled the last several years, so I think I'm more optimistic that Alabama may be there than

Bill Russell: Auburn.

Hope, hope, hope springs eternal at the beginning of a season for sure. So,

Faith Burkett: yeah.

Bill Russell: Yeah, it's it's amazing and whoever wins the SEC is likely gonna win the national championship, so should be fun. Hey, thank you for, coming on the show and sharing the great progress that is going on at DCH.

Faith Burkett: Thank you for having us, bill.

Billy Helmandollar: Yeah, appreciate it, bill. It's been a, been an excellent journey for us.

Thanks for joining us for this executive interview with me, bill Russell. Every healthcare leader needs a community they can lean on and learn from. Subscribe at this week, health.com/subscribe and share this conversation with your team. Together we're transforming healthcare.

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