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Today on Newsday.

you can have the best technology, the best tool, the best partner, the most flexible partner, but if you don't get adoption. Within your community, it doesn't really matter. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health. where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time. Newstay discusses the breaking news in healthcare with industry experts

WeLcome to Newsday. I have the honor of being with Jason Rose, who is the CEO from ClearSense. I just have to give a little bit of background. Some of you may know Jason, but he's a CEO, obviously, and seasonally, 30 years of experience in healthcare technology. He's very well known for his strategic vision and transformative leadership style.

And also driving innovation across all the companies he has been a part of. Now that he's at ClearSense, focusing on harnessing data to empower healthcare organizations, which bridges the gap between advanced analytics and improved patient outcomes. We'll talk quite a bit about that. And of course, ClearSense pioneering healthcare data platforms that are dedicated to unlocking the full potential of healthcare data.

So Jason, welcome to Newsday.

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity, Sarah. It's a pleasure to meet you today.

Likewise, you had a chance to interview with Drexbill, now you have me, I'm like, now you get to just pick the name out of the fishbowl going forward and saying, Hey, I'm going to talk to one of the three of you about And go

wrong with either, any of the three.

And of course, you had a chance to see some of these things firsthand. I'd love to touch on the first one about a culture of change and really how The transformative potential of how we embrace change in healthcare IT, where leaders were sharing success stories of operational transformation, data integration, cultural shifts, all equally important in that trifecta.

think it was a really fantastic conference. This is my first Fall Forum I've been in the industry, as you said, for 30 years, but it's the first time I've actually been on the Fall Forum side given that I'm back into the provider side of healthcare this year. First of all, just a great event. I think that Chime is a wonderful organization. They put on a fantastic event. Obviously, San Diego. It was a wonderful environment to be in. It's one of my favorite cities on the planet. All the leadership that was there, seemed to be hungry for change.

And that was exciting to me. didn't hear COVID one time, like the term, which was awesome in terms of talking about getting out of the COVID era, et cetera. So it's, I think we're way past that. And interestingly enough and we're not going to get political because I'd never do, but I actually thought given that the week that it was in, Politics would be front and center, and it just wasn't, actually.

There was it seemed to be a really hungry thirsty audience in terms of making real changes. I've seen in the past, I'd say the last few years, it just seems like people know that they need to do certain things and they need to make changes and they just, Focus on how hard it is versus how are we actually going to do it and let's find the best practices of What's going to be coming next because changes need to happen.

We do, especially to your point in that desire to change things as rapidly as we can, knowing how many hurdles can be up against us. In fact, with your. experience with the payer side. When you think about how payers were coming at some of the changes that need to occur in partnership with the services being rendered and delivered in facilities, all of that's coming back to data and the quality that needs to occur.

It's one of the superpowers ClearSense brings to the table, but very specifically data platforms are top of mind because of so many. Optimizations, integrations, and in some cases, people still cutting over to new EMR systems. How does what you bring to the table and your perspective from years of experience help bring that change forward faster?

And starting with those basic table stakes, I think is really important. But I think one of the areas that I've always thought is important is you can have the best technology, the best tool, the best partner, the most flexible partner, but if you don't get adoption. Within your community, it doesn't really matter.

absolutely makes no difference. Always people talk about the beta max and the VHS and things like that. Maybe people not today, from our day beta was a better product and yet VHS won the day, why is that? So it's because you had adoption with VHS and for lots of different reasons.

It's all about adoption. And so for a vendor. That is a software as a service, which we are, ClearSense is a software as a service company. We're a data enablement platform company. We care deeply about adoption, of making sure that what we're building towards has adoption. And it's not just focusing on the end users.

As an example, we did a focus group at QIIME, and obviously one of the areas that we focus on is application decommissioning. Application decommissioning is leveraging the application rationalization process. And actually executing on the bloated application portfolios over the last 20 30 years.

But we'll just take application decommissioning as an example. Gartner had a study this year and they said 48% of health systems recommend or believe that application decommissioning is one of their top topics, top one or two issues in their entire health systems. But yet what happens is these legacy companies work with health systems and they focus on a project.

is still really important. How do I take the data from a technological standpoint and revitalize that data for other use cases? Having a longitudinal EHR, having the right operations, use of the ERP system that you're removing so that you're able to access it for the go forward. How do you improve workflow, so the clinicians or HIM or the operators have a nice workflow from a UI perspective or access into their existing EHR system.

Small, medium, and large, and extra large. What are the challenges you have? Number one was, we don't have expertise in actually how you can do this at scale. Taking 10, applications at a time, any given month. and you're decommissioning them. We don't have that expertise. How do you align internally with procurement, with finance, with IT, with clinical, with legal, so that you're prioritizing which applications need to be taken out and what's the cost implications of that.

So what we're hearing is. Not enough expertise. We don't have the resources to actually create a governance around this. Not enough resources to pull the data at the speed of what needs to happen to actually achieve the goals of the merger and acquisition or the enterprise rollout of Epic or Workday or what have you.

And turnkey solution. And I went into the meeting really not pitching what we're doing, but just asking, is this something of interest and came out of that with a loud and clear, yes, the answer is yes, because it's just the, it's not that organizations want to change.

They don't have the resources or the expertise in how to make the changes and they need help. So I think that as one example of that, I think that it's a the eagerness to move forward and actually move forward on hard decisions, they really need a playbook in order to actually get things off the ground.

consider the fact that how many health systems are you speaking with every single day? And when you have a playbook that you've defined, you can adapt it for your customer. You get them out of the perfect Has to be where we start. It can be progress over perfection. They get a mindset that says, start where we are.

We can help you with these components that you don't have time, expertise, or capability of doing yourself. And it all lends itself towards these advanced capabilities that can come into play, decommission enough stuff, start working with you to get their data aligned so they can jump into some of the newer spaces that allow them to be truly innovative.

The newer stuff is the shiny, exciting. Everybody else that's stuck doing the decommission and the rationalization. It holds them

It leaves them excited

about the work.

Yeah, no, and wait just to give you a use case we actually just did a Gartner vendor briefing today. It went really well.

Really focusing on our new brand. We just updated our brand and it's not just our fancy new logo and our awesome new color palette. It's actually, The essence of what we're doing as a data enablement platform company building, we have built a healthcare data lake house so that you can enable data to be revitalized for other use cases.

It's just a natural thing. smaller footprint has less risk. But if, once you have that data in house of the archive data, it's very easy to actually take the same technology and add on the current data too. So what's, you've got all scripts, Athena, CERN, not picking on those vendors. And then now you put an EPIC on top of that not as of three years ago, as of yesterday, and now you've added a longitudinal record in the point of care, but you've also created healthcare data lake house.

Where you have current data, you've got 20 years back of data, all patient match. What else can you do with that? Lots of things. You can create a tool that will allow for clinical researchers to have 20 years of data from, a dozen different EHR companies that you've worked with over the past, number of years and be able to increase their clinical trials.

You can take your AI initiatives. Now you have. These are the three, I think, most important words in data enablement is timely, complete, and accurate. If it's timely, when timely, it's the last 20 years, and also last week. Timely. Complete, it's not just one EHR, it's all the EHRs that are of importance, and all the ancillary systems too.

Patient match. So it's, complete and then accurate. Is it exactly the same as a data source as it is in this healthcare data lake house? So it's accurate and validated to be accurate. And so you have timely, accurate, and complete data. You can do a lot with that to create other initiatives.

is that, let's face it, most organizations are really lousy at managing their data. They just are. It's really messy. I've been doing this for 30 years too. It's really hard. It's messy. It's complex. It's frustrating. It's a lot of, there's standards, but there's, versions of standards. So it's really hard to do.

If you go to a partner that's expert in that, And then you just know I've got that covered in my healthcare data lake house, and that frees me up to do other things. It's just the same thing as, why would you want everything in a data center versus putting it into the cloud? It's just less software, less complexity, more dynamic opportunities to do it for other things.

Now I'm going to start with the data platform. It's due to the incremental approach you're sharing. It's keeping those programs staffed and funded appropriately. I cannot tell you how many times I've gone to the mat after the data is cleaned up. And the lineage and the quality and the warehouse and the analytics and reporting are all established.

I've had many a conversation where it's we don't need to fund it that much next year because it's there. I'm like, data is coming through your pipelines faster than your patients are coming through your doors and through some of your ancillary applications. It is fascinating, in some cases, how hard it can be to keep the data teams funded, and also the ability to position them for those new activities, because getting people used to trusting those data sources and understanding the components that go into it, that's as full time a job as your infrastructure team, wherever it is housed.

that was so spot on, Sarah. I have to comment on that. One of the most important things I think is important to do is to have tangible ROI, not fluffy, bend the trend kind of stuff. I go way back to disease management and, I lived in Nashville during the health, I wasn't at Healthways, but, in the squishy math.

And I think, in order to do exactly what you just said, Sarah is finding ways to create an agreed upon ROI methodology that the finance team The tech team, the clinical team, et cetera, all agree with, and you measure it all the time. Because otherwise, why are we doing these things? If you can't measure it, Then you shouldn't do it.

And we as a company and in the essence of everything we do is we're not just looking to build something for the sake of building it. It's actually going to have an immediate result and you've got to have quick wins too. This can't be three years off. It's gotta be months off.

Hey, start with the finance team. I bet they've got copies of copies of copies. They usually have a cube floating around somewhere. They usually have some kind of a shadow group that's pulling analytics together. And I'm like, wow, imagine when you have one source of truth. And we realized early on in multiple versions of my careers.

You start with the people who are doing that as their job every single day, and you put those tool sets in their hands that make their job so much more efficient. They're not worried about losing their job. All of a sudden, they're really excited about how quickly they can do things that used to be such an arduous task that they didn't enjoy doing.

You put the right tools in their hands, It significantly improves the business, and then the CFO can look in their own backyard and say, Wow, my team is actually benefiting potentially first and most from having clean data and having single sources of truth. It's such an amazing equation when you get it right.

And what they said, and just think back, it's a time warp 20 years ago. What they said was that the COOs of tomorrow are the CIOs of today. And meaning that the people running these companies are going to be so dependent On technology and system and process that the COOs of tomorrow have gotta be super savvy on IT systems and data and analytics and all that has actually happened.

A lot of CIOs are not experts in P& L management and finance management, and they need help in how to work and collaborate and speak spreadsheet. It got, if you don't speak spreadsheet then you have challenges getting across. So what I've learned is that it's so important to partner with the IT leadership, help them.

A friend of mine who's a CIO that everyone probably knows. I won't mention his name. But I actually asked a question over dinner and this is back in February in another area of the country, although I won't give it away. And I said, I'm new to this company.

And if you did that and you end around me. I probably never talked to you again. And I said, okay tell me more about that. I'd like to hear more. He said, the IT leader needs help and speaking to their finance team. You need to arm them with the financials and the data and the information so that they can actually go to their board and can go to their CFO and they can say, here's a real opportunity.

And I took that in as a extremely good feedback because IT leaders really need help. and communicating with spreadsheets about what, whether it be revenue improvement or cost reduction or both they need the vendors to help them do that. And because it's sometimes not necessarily how they grew up, it's not their background.

And so it's a important part of what I think vendors can play a part in supporting the IT leadership.

And I love whoever said that to you because you're right. If you go around the CIO to get into an organization, you'll alienate the team that needs to help you get it done when often they're going to get tasked with it anyway. So I would say starting at the beginning with the end in mind. Covey principle really does make a huge difference.

But here's the thing, Jason, and this is important because you're a SaaS vendor. The other thing you heard was securing healthcare and managing third party risks. If you're a CIO or a CISO or the combo of both working with legal risk, compliance, etc, let's assume you're doing quote unquote everything right.

Consider. The type of discussions that you heard, how to have the strengthening of cybersecurity fundamentals, managing these third party risks effectively, discussions about downtime preparedness, your partner vendor assessments, prioritizing continuity alongside advanced innovations. How do you come to the table in a way that allows the CIO and their teams to have some breathing room and realizing that you're not going to be the next problem they have to fix.

I think that first of all you got to have a really strong CISO and a really strong team beneath that CISO as well. Being just high trust and SOC 2 compliant or one or the other or both isn't enough. So I think having your own standard, it's a good starting block.

So I think that it's not an excuse to say such and such was high trust and yet we still had a cyber attack. How much interrogation did you do independently or did you just rely on some other? Body to a credit or certify that this organization was safe. I don't think you can rest on those laurels.

But they knew that it was a hole, but they also didn't enforce what they felt was important. So I think that, you've got to put a lot of focus in your IT security. I do that in my company, not again, not just. For my client's sake, for my sake, as a CEO of the company, people ask me, new coming in, what are the two most important things that keep you up at night?

I've always had this, my two things are cyber security and corporate culture, because those two things are critically important. And can often be overlooked. And so those things you can apply that to really any organization is you got to have a strong corporate culture who believe in what you're doing and believe in the company and the leadership and what your mission, your vision is.

I think that's paramount.

And yet, as a CIO, you're often fighting for dollars to fund your cloud strategy, your data strategy, and your cyber programs. The three areas that are essentially Foundationally most important or sometimes the hardest to get funding for. How do you help fill those gaps or what conversations are you having in the industry that we all recognize what's most important and yet it's still the areas you have to fight for funding?

And then that kind of earns the right, from, from the CFO and the rest of the board and the leadership team. You earn the right to do other initiatives and they trust you more. Taking, application decommissioning. Everyone knows that their portfolio is bloated.

They just are. Every health system has opportunity. I don't care if you're a 80 billion company or a 1 billion company, there are opportunities to decommission applications. If you set across to say, it's not sexy, but I'm going to reduce cost here and I'm going to put a program in place, you earned a right.

To go invest in things that might create growth. Such as clinical trials, such as AI efficiencies and things like that because they're building blocks towards something greater. And I think that anything that you do, you got to have, you got to start with the data, data, meaning financial data.

How are we going to evaluate success? And it can't be squishy. And I always say, be bold. Let's go improve this process. Let's reduce vendors out of our own stack, which we've done a lot. Let's focus on there's a, there's an adage. I made this up actually. So you know the old saying, which is people process technology.

I've heard that for

decades.

Yeah, I think it's wrong. I think it's not people process technology. I think it's backwards. I think it's process technology, people. And the reason why I say that is because I'm a process zealot. If you start with the process. And you document what, the current state and what the future state process ought to be.

The manpower to actually implement that process, then that's a key component. Or is it growth? Or whatever the case may be, it's got to be something that you can start with the process, add technology, implement, effectiveness, efficiencies, and least number of people as possible. to actually be successful.

We've covered some great territory today. I just wanna close with us touching on vi, which is going to be in your hometown February 16th through the 19 Nashville this year. Year. The others concentrating on business transformation of healthcare through digital innovation. That's the main focus, but again, it'll bring together c-suite execs.

Senior Digital Leaders, startups, investors, policy makers across the board. There'll be the Government Pavilion, the Non Profit Association, Interop Now, Nurses at Vive program. Really having the main stage and stages around it with leading voices in digital health and insights. It's going to be really exciting.

I would like to see everyone is starting to focus on their budgets for 2025.

16th to the 19th.

Yeah, by the time you get to February, it should be go mode, right? We, this is the time in Q4 Is that in it is all about execution.

That's a fun perspective. So you.

Your years of background, expertise of your team. We appreciate you and your partnership. Always fun to cover what's happening in HIT with you and the team. Look forward to next time. And thanks again for joining us on Newsday.

Great. Thank you very much, Sarah. I appreciate it.

And to our listeners, we appreciate you tuning into Newsday as well.

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