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 Welcome to this Weekend in Health It where we amplify great thinking to Propel Healthcare forward. My name is Bill Russell Healthcare, CIO, coach 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. This episode and every episode since we started the C Ovid 19 series has been sponsored by Sirius Healthcare.

Now that we're exiting this C Ovid 19 series, Sirius has stepped up to be a weekly sponsor through the end of the year, and I wanna give a special thanks to Sirius for supporting the show's efforts during the crisis and beyond. CliffNotes is live. It is available if you can't listen to every show, but you wanna know who was on the show and what was said.

Then you should sign up for clip notes. You get a one paragraph summary, key moments in bullet point format with timestamps and, uh, one to four video clips from the show. This is a great way to stay current, share insights with your team. It comes in an email format. You could easily forward it out to whoever you want, uh, and it's a great way to maintain your commitment to development during these extraordinary times.

Invitations for guests for the fall shows have gone out, and I'm looking to cover the following topics this fall. Telehealth. I want to take a look at the impact. If you have numbers, I'd love to hear some numbers. I'm looking for new modalities, impact on care and outcomes, those kinds of things. We're gonna have a whole section on 21st Century Cures.

We're gonna kick that off with, with a great interview with Anish Chopra. Who is, uh, I think one of the, one of the great evangelists around sharing the patient record with patients and with the innovative, the community of developers that are out there who are looking to innovate work from home. I wanna see how work from home evolves.

And has that shifted at all? Uh, always looking at digital initiatives, front door investments, new approaches to old problems, RPA voice, you know, a lot, a lot of digital initiatives out there. Love to, uh, talk about those things. Infrastructure and operations. We're gonna look at automation, AI, and INO, cloud, edge computing software defined.

Uh, security. Always gonna have, uh, a handful of security topics, uh, zero Trust. Identity and access management continue to be top of mind securing the cloud also. And we're always looking for if you are optimizing clinical workflows, your clinical systems, you're EHR, we're always looking for how people are doing that in innovative ways that are really impacting

The clinicians and their, their workflow and their, their quality of life, quite frankly. So we are gonna be talking about all those topics. As I said, invitations have gone out, but if you're an executive with a health system, . Not only the CIOs, uh, and you have a story to tell about these topics, please shoot me a note bill at this week in health it.com.

If you're, if you happen to be a healthcare partner, IEA company trying to sell a product to healthcare, you could still reach out to me, bill at this week in health it.com. But almost all of our vendor spots are paid spots these days. This helps us to fund the show's growth and to fulfill our mission to develop the next generation of health IT leaders.

And we love our sponsors and we appreciate them really funding this effort. this week I am on vacation. You're hearing my voice is actually an optical illusion as I recorded this intro prior to my time off Drex to Ford. Great. Isn't that a great radio name? Anyway, Drex de Ford is stepping in, uh, today to share the news with you.

Drex shares a commitment to keeping . People current and sharing his experience with the next generation. He developed a text service called three X Drex. If you haven't signed up, it's a great service. I'm signed up to it. It helps me to do research for specifically the Tuesday show. This is where you get three handpicked stories texted to you in one text three days a week.

To sign up, all you have to do is text Drex, DREX to 4 8 4 8 4 8. Okay, here we go onto today's show with Drex. Hi, I am Drex Deford. I'm substituting for Bill Russell this week for, uh, this week in health. It, this is one of those things that Bill and I have sort of talked about for a while, and today, or, or last week I guess he sort of came to me and said, Hey, uh, I'm gonna take a vacation.

And I was like, that's amazing. I. He said, do you wanna drive next week? I said, sure. Do we have insurance? And he assured me that we did. So buckle up. This should be a good, hopefully, uh, at least an okay show and I'll be a suitable substitute for Bill. Uh, while he's gone. We're gonna cover a lot of different stuff.

CHI, Franciscan and VM coming together 10 ways. Covid changed Healthcare. The telemedicine revolution deferred. According to this article, although I'll, I'll disagree a bit. The, a visual capitalist story on working remotely, which I think is a pretty fun story and, and pretty interesting. We'll talk about Zoom shirts and dude, your phone's on fire, that's all coming up right now.

Okay, so first let's talk about CHI. Franciscan. Let me flip over to my. To the tabs that I have open on my computer. Um, there was a, an announcement last week, 12 hospital, CHI, Franciscan and Virginia Mason's system would become part of Common Spirit under Medial says they're gonna work together to explore a combination and create a joint operating company that we come

Part of Common Spirit Health, an interesting situation, right, because Virginia Mason has for the longest time been a terrific standalone, smaller health system here in Seattle. Brilliant at Toyota Production System and Lean Methodologies, really one of the best in the country and a super safe place to go regularly getting a ratings from Leapfrog.

So it, it's interesting to see that there were a lot of m and a happening before Covid. Uh, a lot of things sort of locked up as we got into the covid throes of, you know, all, all the, all the work that was happening and now things are starting to loosen up again and we're starting to see some of these m and a, some of these m and a deal flows for the Pacific Northwest.

I think this is gonna be a big one. And what I really hope, I mean, my takeaway from this is that hopefully . The Toyota production system stuff that Virginia Mason has done, and they have been terrific. Again, I've been a fan for years. They've been terrific in sort of reaffirming this idea that it's people, process technology.

When you try to, uh, do new things in a health system, the people in the process parts are the hard parts. They are not the easy parts. It turns out the technology, in many cases turns out to be the easiest part. They've done a really great job of sort of putting that together and making it work. And, and, and I hope that flows over into the new entity.

And then the other thing is the patient safety. Hopefully the patient safety, the techniques, the methodologies that they've built, a lot of them using Toyota Lean production methods flows over into the new organization. So I'm excited for, for everyone involved there and think that will be a, that will be, uh.

Good merger. Continue to just keep your eyes open. 'cause I think we're gonna see more and more and more of these. Steve Shahada, a friend of mine from back in his Microsoft days, originally I was the chairman, , I was the, the chairman of the Microsoft . Healthcare users group back in the day, and Steve and I worked together when that was happening.

He is a independent consultant now doing a lot of different kinds of work and he writes a blog, uh, called Chiefly Commercial for his company, get to Market Health, and the blog that he writes last week is the top 10 ways Covid to 19 is changing the US healthcare system. And there's a lot of really good stuff in here from the greater acceptance of telehealth, and I'll talk more about that in another article.

Excuse me in just a moment, but . He also talks about more CMS mandates that are coming as a result of the work that healthcare organizations have done with Covid. There will be more state mandates. The bigger will get bigger. This ties back to the, you know, the conversation we just had about Virginia Mason.

That you will continue to see more and more m and a. And I think probably what that means is that organizations that have logically bigger checkbooks, bigger war chest are going to be the ones who are acquiring health systems and a lot of them who. Are barely making it on margins, so continue to watch for that.

He talks about increased centralized control. I think that when you see those mergers, what has happened in a lot of cases is that when a merger happens between one health system and another, I. They never really completely come together, or it takes them a really long time to come together. There's sort of this lagging process where there's a lot of decentralization that's left to the hospitals or left to the other health system that is coming together for some period of time.

You know, Steve makes the point that he thinks this will happen a lot more quickly now, and, and honestly I do too. When there's a merger, you'll probably see the increased centralized control happen, uh, fairly quickly. That's also tied to this idea, a point that he makes around increased pressure to reduce variation.

That also ties to this Toyota production conversation that I had earlier, ironically. But, you know, this is a thing that no matter what we do, this is, this is gonna be around . Controlling cost and better managing costs. The more variation we have around any process that we do in a health system, the harder it is to make adjustments to control costs or safety or timeliness or any number of control measures we might want to have on our systems.

So I think you'll continue to see, Steve says he thinks you'll continue to see increased pressure. To reduce variation. He has a lot of other great points in here, including bringing care to the patients, meaning that in our recent situation, we've had a lot of Covid patients on ventilators and trying to get them to MRIs or get them to CT scanners or get them to other monuments that we've built in the hospital has become a lot more difficult.

And so we're gonna have to rethink our whole process around how do we get care to patients. . Even when the patients are in the hospital. But it's a great article. It's pretty short, pretty easy to read. Again, it's on, uh, Steve Shah's blog, uh, called Chiefly Commercial. One of the articles that, that I'm bringing this week is from Politico, and it's, uh, titled Telemedicine Revolution Deferred.

And, you know, I think Bill talked a lot about numbers last week that were pretty, pretty insightful. The idea that we've got, we, we've taken telemedicine from sort of like a few thousand visits a week to like . Over a million visits a week. But what the article here sort of talks about is that we're starting to see those curves flex down now.

So telemedicine, fewer and fewer visits over time. And I think it's logical, right? There were a bunch of basically other care that we may have put off during the early stages of the pandemic so that we could create capacity and . Create more bed space and do other things to make sure we can take care of covid patients.

That meant we pushed more and more things either off the plate, postponed them, not gonna do them now, or we push them to telemedicine telehealth visits. So there's logic to the idea that telehealth me, telehealth visits are gonna fall off. I don't think that's really a, a big deal or a big surprise. So when you read articles like this, my point being don't be dismayed, don't be disappointed.

I think an amazing thing happened. At the beginning of the, of the pandemic and telemedicine really became medicine. And I think we're gonna continue to see telemedicine, telehealth, expand and grow in ways that we really haven't thought of up till now. Home care, home monitoring, lots of other stuff that we're just starting to kind of get our arms round.

And I think it's gonna be pretty interesting to see, uh, where this goes and, and how it continues to grow and expand. Don't be frustrated, okay? There's a lot of folks who are probably, uh, saying or thinking that we're gonna have to back off on telemedicine. It's just not gonna hold up. I think no matter where this goes, as we move into future healthcare, whether it's at risk, healthcare, value value-based healthcare, the digital front door patients and families want,

Telehealth, they want telemedicine and we're going to have to give it to them. So stay the course, keep on the path that you're on. 'cause I think it's, uh, it's really a good one. Uh, there's a, there's a really interesting article. One of the sites that I am a big fan of is visual capitalist. The reason I'm a fan is that I'm kind of a vis nerd and so, and I'm probably a vis nerd.

'cause sometimes things that are really complicated, you know, picture's worth a thousand words. So when things are really complicated, if somebody can draw a picture for me, makes it a lot easier for me. Makes it a lot easier for me to understand. So I like, uh, the visual capitalist site and one of the articles they wrote a couple of months ago, which is still sort of stuck near the top of the list of the articles that they've published recently.

Is how people in companies feel about working remotely. There's some really good stuff in here. I mean, it's a fun article. It's a really interesting article to read and it totally, there's stuff that I've published over the last few weeks on, in three X Drex about the sales of sweatpants being up 80% in the sale of, uh.

Dress pants fallen off a cliff that people love to work remotely. It gives them flexible schedules. The article talks about, you know, being able to work from any location, being able to avoid the commute, which a lot of people really hate. And then of course, spending more time with family. But the really interesting part of this that I think we saw over and over again.

Early in the pandemic was that there were challenges getting over comp company culture. There were a lot of companies and a lot of health systems who had up till then had a, there's no way people are working from home. Everybody needs to be in the hospital or in the building or whatever. That's, that's how we, that's how we run things here.

Make that, make that process occur. And we're going back and cleaning those things up now, but, but the culture changed really quickly and I think a lot of organizations are now realizing that maybe that culture that they originally had, that nobody could work from home is a little outdated, but that turns out to be the biggest obstacle.

And once you get past that, there are issues around privacy and understanding, you know, the technology requirements. There are certainly concerns over data security and privacy. I think, I think I said privacy earlier, but data security and privacy, I. So we're getting there. The, the big benefit that I see coming for many of us if, if we continue to kind of hold the fort on this work from home idea or work from anywhere idea, is that there's some really great people with really great talent who wanna live where they live, but they wanna work where you are.

Uh, so they may wanna work for your company, but they may have a hundred different reasons why they don't wanna live in the city where your company is located or where your health system is located. If we can get over that. You can probably get some topnotch talent. You might be able to get some topnotch, not topnotch talent, relatively cheaply, um, because they wanna live somewhere where costs aren't astronomical.

So think about that. Talk to your HR folks. Continue to push the button on that. I think that's a. I think that's a big win for us. It could be a big win, especially in healthcare, it finding, uh, really great staff that doesn't necessarily need to be in the same building where you are. Which leads me to my next, uh, article, which is, uh, a little bit of fun.

It's from the New York Times. It's uh, it's called, the Video Call is Starting Time to put on Your Zoom shirt. So there definitely have been times where, for me personally, I have had a shirt hanging on the back of my door and I have put that shirt on for Zoom calls, and since sometimes it's there, it's, it's a recognizable shirt.

I've had people call me out on that like, Hey, do you ever do laundry that looks like the same shirt you were wearing a couple of weeks ago? So, yeah, I do laundry. And the point being, maybe you need to think very carefully about. What you use is your Zoom shirt because I know I'm not the only person doing it.

I see you doing it too. So just hang in there and take care of your Zoom shirt. It's, it's very important. And finally, you know, dude, your phone is on fire. It's, it's kind of interesting, man, from the security perspective, there are so many things that happen that are frustrating and maddening, right? And this one has to do with hackers.

Having now figured out how to go in and do something to your USB chargers so that they will destroy your phone by giving them too much power. We've already had this other power problem with USB in that you would go to a hotel or you know, on it, on a plane or someplace else, and you would plug into USB to charge your phone.

And it turned out that that also could be a situation where bad guys were getting to your data. So organizations, businesses came up with these little adapters that allowed you to plug in, that only allowed power to flow. So that was good. Now they've figured out the bad guys have figured out how to take those high speed, high speed charger, USB uh, units.

Unfortunately, everything is a smart device these days. They figured out how to, how to hack into those overwrite the firmware and make them burn up your phone. So. The point being, man, just be careful, okay? It's a little, it's a little crazy out there. You never know what's gonna happen. Take care of your phone and be very thoughtful and careful about when and how you charge.

You know, bring your own stuff. That might be the best advice that I can give you. Hey, hopefully that worked out okay this week in Health it, bill Russell will be back next week. There aren't any other shows this week, as I understand. So, you know, take the rest of the week, hit the YouTube channel. Catch up on past episodes.

There's a lot of great stuff out there. It never goes, never goes stale. I'm drex to Ford again. Thanks very much. See you drex.io or uh, three x drex.com. Um, you can sign up for my text updates at, uh, text Drex, DREX to 4 8 4 8 4 8. I'll give you three articles a week that have a lot of the same kind of stuff in it.

Thanks, and I'll see you next time. Bill gives me the keys. That's all for this week. Thanks to Drex for stepping in. No insurance necessary, as drex is always a welcome voice in the community. Special thanks to our sponsors, VMware Starbridge Advisors, Galen Healthcare Health lyrics, Sirius Healthcare and Pro Talent Advisors for choosing to invest in developing the next generation of health leaders.

And stay tuned because we have some new channel sponsors joining us. In August. If you made it this far, you are a fan of the show. Please do me a favor and send an email to one person who you think would benefit from the show and share it with them. We will do our best to honor your support by producing great content with industry leaders to propel healthcare forward.

We're gonna be back next week with shows on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday as we kick off our fall schedule. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.