2020 Top 10 Recap - COVID-19 Series
Episode 34529th December 2020 • This Week Health: Conference • This Week Health
00:00:00 00:39:12

Share Episode

Transcripts

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the most intelligent robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

 Welcome to this Week in Health It. This is the second last episode of the year. This is our Covid series recap. If you weren't around for this early on in the Surge, we went to daily episodes where we were talking to health system and hospital leaders about what they were doing in preparation, how they were handling the work from home, telehealth surge, how they were handling

The deployment of new technologies. Just so many different things happening all at once. And we stepped into the gap to share best practices across the industry as best as we could. And this is a highlight of just some of the, some of the more interesting things that were said. It's not really in order of most listened to or those kind of things.

We pulled out 10 clips that were indicative of the kind of wisdom that we were hearing from these, uh, from these leaders. My name is Bill Russell, former Healthcare, C-I-O-C-I-O, coach, consultant, and creator of this week in Health. it. I wanna thank Sirius Healthcare who stepped in right around the start of the Covid series and said, Hey, we'd like to support your show and your mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

And it was their weekly support that allowed us to really . Do those daily shows and then to grow throughout the rest of the year and to add staff and to add services for you. If you don't know, this is episode like 350 over our three year period, so we've been doing this for a while. And the sponsors really make this possible.

nt to be a sponsor going into:

If you don't know, we, we actually end all of our sponsorships on the, on the year. So we prorate 'em throughout the year. If somebody comes in in June, they get a six month sponsorship. If they come in, in the beginning of the year, they get a 12 month sponsorship. So we're going into the new year with, uh, with a new set of sponsors.

Although a fair number of these organizations have stepped up to be sponsors again next year, uh, to support our mission. So, so we're excited about that. Couple of things that my marketing team have asked me to make you aware of. We're doing some new things next year with the show we have today in Health It, it's gonna be a daily new podcast that we are launching, and we look at one new story, five to seven minutes in length, and that's it.

Just one story so you can, . Every day of the week, we'll be dropping a new show you can listen to every day and stay up to date on what's going on, or you can batch 'em and listen to 'em on the weekend and be up to date on five stories that, uh, I will talk about. And that's gonna be my show. I'm gonna be talking about that.

We're taking it a Tuesday News Day show, and I'm inviting guests in. We are gonna have six revolving guests throughout the year who come in to talk about the news with me. Director Ford is gonna continue to do that. Su Shade has stepped up to do that. We have. Who else do we have? Let me take a look at this.

Gosh. Well, we have one that we cannot announce yet, which is . But we should know soon. And we have Ann Weiler, who is a, who has been a guest on the show before. She's with, she was with, well, pepper, the, well Pepper has been sold and I'd like to get her perspective on startups and what's going on in that community.

Uh, and then we have one other guest which we will be announcing a little later. So we're gonna be doing that back and forth with, uh, a couple of people. And then we're gonna continue to do the, the interviews of, uh, industry influencers, uh, on Fridays. Uh, we're also gonna be going to Monday. . Wednesday and Friday.

If so, Monday is gonna be our Newsday episode. Wednesday is gonna be our solution showcase. Friday will be our influencer episode. So we hope that you'll continue to join us and continue to to tell your friends about our show. All right, let's get to the clips. The first clip comes from the CIO for UCLA Health in la obviously we have Dr.

Michael Peffer and Michael. I posed this question to a lot of the CIOs during the Covid series, and the question was around. Preparation for a second surge, which, uh, we, we thought was coming and has now materialized. And the question was really around what are you doing to prepare? And the thing I like about Michael is he's, he's so articulate, he, it's well thought out.

It's very logical and very, again, clearly communicated. So I love this, I love this cliff from Michael here. Wanted any technologies that will help you. Quicker if there happens to be late a surge ? Yeah, so I'll break it into three areas. So one is analytics. So we built out an incredible amount of analytics on c Ovid 19 patient flow, all the things that we need to very closely track how things are going on in our health system and the community as we do all of our testing.

So we can see all this information. In fact, uh, UCLA Health COVID testing, uh, is actually, we have a dashboard that's public off the UCLA health website. So you can see how many tests we've done. We actually had that in pretty much in the very beginning, but you can see how many patients are currently hospitalized at our facilities.

And positive and negative in total testing. So it's actually really interesting. So really robust analytics that are helping us, uh, determine where we're going and being able to predict. The second is our, uh, structural kind of design of our electronic health record to enable what we're, what we call shadow beds so we can quickly expand the amount of beds we have in our facilities to, if we need to.

So that a lot of work went into building out that infrastructure beyond what we already had. We had some of it in place, but we went really beyond that. And then the third thing is, is, is really about continuing to ramp up our telehealth capabilities. One thing we've done, which I think is really amazing for our patients is we have impatient iPads for basically every patient.

On those are not only access to the electronic health record, but also they have, uh, a Zoom platform and an account assigned to the room so they can actually a video with. Their families as well as providers. So providers can actually video into the rooms and allows us to check in much more frequently as needed.

So all of those technologies in terms of, uh, telehealth and expanding our digital patient experience is, is what, uh, we're doing to ensure we're ready for any, uh, future search. Alright, we go from one academic medical center to another. We go to, uh, Michigan Medicine with Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, and I love having Andrew on.

The show as well. 'cause Andrew is a teacher and because he's a teacher, he, uh, really has thought through a lot of the challenges that we have and he, he actually causes me to think, it causes me. He actually asks me questions back as the interviewer, which is a lot of fun. And I poses this question about evaluating priorities coming out of a, a post covid, uh, world, and he immediately turns it to, uh, really a new set of priorities, thinking through a new set of priorities that are aligned with our core and our core mission as a health system.

h. We're recording this show,:

Went through governance, a lot of people talked about, and now you have a, a, maybe not a whole new set of priorities, but you have some things that have popped up as a result of the pandemic. How are you going to prioritize the work? How are you going to, uh, evaluate all the things that are coming at you at this point?

Well, I laughed at that because I think like most people, one of the, one of the tough parts of Covid is that we're all going through . Cost cutting. And I'm as much trying to shift that as much as I can to cost optimization type discussions, not just cost cutting. Those tend to be one time, they tend to be disruptive.

We tend to get over it, and then yet we haven't really dealt with the underlying issue. So my, my laugh at your question was that all my priorities before Covid essentially got just completely wiped clean and during covid and now coming out of it. Our priorities are focusing on what really is core to the mission.

And it's a tough conversation because most institutions have a lot of trouble really prioritizing all the what must be done, what's core versus what's nice to have. It's a, we're we're probably as as good and as bad as many other good institutions. But from my point of view, what it has done is it's helping me articulate what really is core to our mission just a little bit more, and I've mentioned a few of the examples already.

Where we're duplicating. Where we have three telehealth video platforms, things like that. I'm hoping that this will give us a little bit more clarity to point out what really is core and what we have to focus in on. New York City experienced the really, the brunt of the initial surge. More, more so than any other city in the country.

And H-H-H-S-S, which is a hospital for special surgery, is in the heart of New York City and probably no organization went through as much transformation as they did early on. They are an orthopedic hospital. They that is, that is what they do. That is predominantly, pretty much all that they do. And during the surge, they made the transition to be a covid hospital.

Right. So they had to redo their Epic implementation. They had to redo their workflows and a whole bunch of other things, and they did that in this, in this clip, I talked to Jamie Nelson, the CIO for H-S-S-H-S-S, uh, about I. about that transformation and what it looked like at their hospital. So here's Jamie to talk about that.

Holding the EHR is pretty significant. You're, you're implementing all new workflows and whatnot. Can you give us some idea of how you sort of triaged and managed all those builds and all that work? Well, I'll tell you, we just looked at the amount of hours that our staff have put on Covid projects in the month of March, and it's 6,000 hours.

And we only have 180 people in our IT department. We're, we're a $2 billion organization. We have a fairly slim IT function, so that's, that's an amazing amount of hours. And I will tell you what we learned is to be agile and flexible. And a lot of the old processes are gone. So for instance, I was in the hospital this past Sunday doing rounds and one of our lead physicians looked at me and said, Jamie, we need an epic to have covid positive, pending and negative coded in the hr.

So if we see red, we know what that means. Yellow, we know what that means, green, what that means. That's a Sunday afternoon, Monday afternoon that was. Gone through our epic team, gone through our clinical content board, all the necessary. So within 24 hours, those changes were in normally our, my CMIO said that would take two, three weeks.

So when I think of the, I think that's just an excellent example of the rapid speed that we're working at, because. These, these truly are life and death things that we're doing. Again, not something that we're used to in an orthopedic hospital. Certainly our colleagues in, in the general hospitals, especially those with large ICUs, are, are used to this.

But I don't think anybody's used to this, even in those hospitals, they're not used to the pace of, of change. 'cause this virus is different than any clinician has seen at any time. So. You know, it's, it's just a whole different paradigm. And Bill, I'm hoping that some of the changes we're making now in terms of our processes will stick after we're back to our, our new normal, because I think there's a lot of good we can take out of this very.

Very difficult situation. During the pandemic, we saw a lot of technology get used differently than it was maybe intended or used for the first time maybe at certain health systems. We had Dr. Ben Cantor, the CMIO for Vice on, and I wanted to really identify with him. What, what we were doing around these technologies, especially around the communication platforms.

We have a lot of different ways we communicate. We communicate via text, fax, uh, we communicate via email. We communicate a lot of different ways we communicate, and I was wondering what we were doing to stay ahead of that curve from a policy standpoint to say, this is the single point of truth for communication within our health system.

So I, I posed that question to, uh. Ben md, the CMI for Here you go. There will be a to.

Hands-free communication will, will probably become the norm. There's no reason for it not to become the norm throughout the entire health system, right? Yes. Uh, and I, I do believe that things are moving that way. There's a time and a place to where you have access to your hands, uh, where you have access to a smartphone.

There's a time and a place where you need to be hands free, whether that's in an isolation room under PPE or it's in the or, or you're doing a procedure. So hands-free and using the voice interfaces. The way that we've become used to in our commercial devices over the past couple of years is, is really the future.

So voice-driven actions are gonna be key as far as policies and procedures. It's an interesting question because over the, as smartphones have come into use in the hospitals, there are now more and more ways to reach people, whether it's by text, voice, SMS, video, et cetera. Each of these modes of communication brings with it advantages and disadvantages.

So for example, if I'm trying to communicate with you, and it's a large volume of very highly contextual information, it's probably best that we have that discussion. Like we're doing today, some kind of synchronous communication. If it's a small short message that's not very intricate, perhaps a text message is appropriate.

Some of these message, uh, modalities are more interruptive than others, so it's actually made the communication environment more complicated, not simpler. In the old days, I either walked up to you or I called you. So you do need policies today. You need policies that guide what are the appropriate uses of certain technologies and inappropriate.

I'll also give you one other important example. In health systems, there's a policy that defines the electronic health record as your gold standard place for all patient documentation. There's probably 150 different options for secure texting. I mean, I could literally build a secure text solution if that's all I wanted to do.

Build an isolated, secure texting solution. I could build that in my garage in in days. Literally, I've done that. So you need to have a top-down solution that says, look for our enterprise communication and collaboration. Here is the system that we will all be on, because if you have your doctors on one system, your nurses on another administration, on another respiratory care, on another.

They're not truly communicating and they can't collaborate. So policies regarding communication in general are gonna be very important. One of the first interviews we did in the Covid series was with Angel Pande, the CTO for Stanford Children's. And at the time we saw this really growing need for telehealth and the the

Number of visits for telehealth going up significantly. And since I had ACTO on the, on the, the show, I thought, Hey, who better to ask about how we were going to scale this up from a technology perspective? How were, how were we gonna handle the ? The increasing load on our networks, the increasing load on our platforms, if we had a platform in place or even standing up new platforms, if we needed to do that and he didn't disappoint, here's Anhe, Anhe, Pande, the CTO for Stanford, children's, CTO, you're, you're handling, you're focused in on the technology aspect.

So let's, let's talk about that. 'cause I've gotten some questions from people on scaling up and, and those kind of things. So. So your telehealth is increasing in capacity now. Did you, did you factor that in when you sort of provisioned your telehealth to be able to scale to this, this kind of magnitude or, or are you doing a lot more telehealth right now than you were say two months ago?

Yeah, so we were scaling up telehealth for the last two years. There was a, it was a gradual ramp up every year's. Target was two to three times what we did year before. And it has increased about seven to tenfold in the last two years from a telehealth perspective. So it's a gradual ramp up on the other side.

In the last week it has gone up 10 x just in terms of the number of visits. It's a different kind of a ramp up, which requires, uh, a different kind of a framework. So it's ramping up support it. How are you going to get the docs or working from home to get trained on a new way of doing business rapidly?

How are you gonna support the patients who have never done telehealth and they make a call to say, Hey, I don't do X, or I can't download something, or My video camera is not working. So that framework to support has been, has been an interesting piece besides the technology portions around it. And then working very closely with the technology partners to say, okay, what is the next scale limit?

So today we are expecting about 300 plus visits, and every day the first call is, okay, what's the next hardware limit or software limit that we're gonna hit? And then how do we be prepare for it so that we don't hit it? In the middle of the day. We're getting to a point now at the end of year three that we have some recurring guests on this week in health It and Nasser.

Nazami is the CIO for Jefferson Health and one, one of my favorite recurring guests. He is, uh, really, really articulate, really well thought out in his approach to just about everything that he does. And what I decided to talk to him about is how we were going to take some of these digital gains we've seen through the pandemic.

We talk a lot about these silver linings that we've seen a lot of, uh, positive things happen. We've, we've developed a vaccine and record time and we've started to use, uh, digital tools like, like chatbots and. And, uh, some remote, uh, patient monitoring and home tools and those kind of things. And I, I was, I was curious how CIOs were thinking about taking some of those gains and banking them and making sure that we don't go back to, to square one, but that some of the gains, clearly telehealth being the, the most dramatic

We have a tenfold increase. We don't want to go all the way back to zero. And that's what we're seeing now. Some of those gains have been lost, but there's still significant gains at the time. We're talking to Nas, AMI pretty close to the, to the peak of the surge in New York City. And, uh, just asking, all right, what's, what's this gonna look like post pandemic?

Are we gonna see some of these digital gains stay with us moving forward? So here's Nasser Nazami to talk about that. You guys have so many digital initiatives. So you, you weren't caught flatfooted by any imagination, but you know, the, the gains in telehealth are pretty amazing. Digital, remote, patient monitoring chatbots.

I mean, there's so many things that people have put in to combat the pandemic and to improve communication. How do you think those things. I mean, those things have been accelerated. Do you think those things will be integrated into our post pandemic work models? I think so. Look, I mean, digital is the right word, I think for technology.

Uh, folks on technology leader, I mean, uh, future is digital. And I, I am hearing this not from CIOs, but CFOs and CEOs and everyone, and this is not just healthcare. This is beyond healthcare. And I. Things prob are going to step. Now there are some question marks, and the biggest question mark I think is in the reimbursement model for telehealth visits, right?

So obviously. Will insurers with CMS are going to roll back some of the rules or they are going to extend and what will be long-term future? That's, I think, probably the business driver of telehealth, but the, I think the big win or silver lining out of this pandemic is the cultural, uh, shift both on the provider side and the patient side.

And the, the providers, uh, who have used were pleasantly surprised. By the technology and just the processes and so forth. And I have to say the processes are still evolving. Same thing on the patient side. I mean, initially we saw a large number of technical issues that were connections, app not working, et cetera.

But over time, as our patients are using technology, they're overcoming and they're finding that it works. Technology works. Same things to be can be set, things like Zoom. We are, we were piloting remote patient monitoring way before covid. But now the, the, the, the adoption I think is going to just increase in that same thing is true for online learning.

We don't, I don't expect, uh, to go back to the same levels in any of the areas that I mentioned. Telehealth, online learning, remote work. As a matter of fact, we, we are now considering. Pretty significant number of folks to be perhaps permanently working from home. Right. A lot of changes I think are gonna happen.

I think we, we saw an exponential increase. It's, uh, it's not gonna be back to pre covid levels. It's going to be somewhere in between, and that's, there are a number of factors that will decide where we land. All right, before we get back to the clips, just a quick reminder, we are in the middle of our CliffNotes referral program.

And clip notes is our email that comes out 24 hours after each episode. It lets you know who was on the show, what was said in summary format, bullet point, format, and four video clips. Great way, easy way to, to share those clips with people on your staff, with others in the industry. Uh, great way to get the conversation started within your team.

ave are sending out well over:

So if you're not signed up, go to go to, uh, this week, health.com/subscribe, or our homepage, click on subscribe, sign up for CliffNotes today. That would be great. But we also have this referral program going on, so if you want to get your friends to sign up, uh, for each person you get to as a referral, they put your name, your email address in there as a referral.

You get, uh, an opportunity to win in a drawing that we're doing on January 1st, which is for a, this Weekend Health. It Work From Home Kit. Uh, we also have a black Mulkin notebook for anyone who gets up to 10 referrals. And we also have, for whoever gets the most referrals, the opportunity to come on the Newsday Show and discuss the news with me and, and maybe direction forward we'll see.

So that is still going on, and we hope that you'll be a part of that. I met Rob Demic, she the, uh, former CFO for UPMC at the Health Catalyst Conference a couple years back. And we did a, uh, did a conversation on cost-based accounting, and I developed a relationship. And early on in the pandemic, I really wanted a.

Perspective of what this was doing financially to these health systems. And it was hard. I mean, we, so Rob and I got on the, on the call and we started, started talking about these things, but we, we were hedging our betts. This was early on in the pandemic. You had health systems that were, I. That were saying, Hey, you, you shut down our primary source of income.

The beds haven't filled up with, uh, covid patients. We have empty hospitals. And that was a significant financial hit to these health systems. And so at the time we were trying to make sense of it. And Rob even, uh, in, in this conversation said, bill, I we're gonna have to evaluate this information based on what we know today.

And what we know today is that we've had a significant hit to our, to our revenue stream. And that hit in some cases was 30, 40% drop, if not more than that for a lot of these health systems. And it's, it's interesting because. What it showed is how we did decision making during the pandemic, right? We, we did it based on the information we know, and we anticipated a certain outcome based on the information we knew at that moment.

But then we went to bed, I. We got up the next day and we had to reevaluate the information because the information was new. Almost every day, if not every week, we were looking at new information saying, okay, the equity markets did come back a lot faster than we thought they were. Okay, this, the, the revenue stream came back faster or it came back slower, or we're still missing about four to 5%.

And, and so I, I include this clip. To, to say, Hey, here's how we were thinking early on in the pandemic based on the information we had. This was a significant hit to the, to the bottom line for health systems. So here's, uh, Rob Demer, former CFO for UPMC and, and I talking about the financial hit to health systems.

So right now we're on the, we have not flattened the curve, so essentially we're right in the, of the crisis. So CS is really facilitator. Get, taking out the roadblocks, making sure that there is the funds available to do the things that you need to do. That's the role. Once the curve flattens and we start to see this, then does the role change or, I mean, will there be different phases in the role over the next six months, I guess?

Well, I think so and, and I don't, I mean, this is probably going to have a rather long, uh, period. So even though the curve gets flattened. If anything, that just is hopefully right. We're wanting to extend this so that it isn't a spike, but it's a much longer timeframe. So this facilitation role, I think will go on for six months, nine months, until the crisis truly passes.

The other thing, there are other impacts We haven't talked about, the investment portfolios bill. Many of the large nonprofits have multi-billion dollar investment portfolios. Some of them use them to support and fund operations. So with where the equity markets, that's, that's going to be years before they recover.

So I think what you're going to see is financial impact. And again, these are paper losses to many of the health systems, but others do use these funds to support operations. These large, uh, organizations, you're gonna see investment losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, close to a billion dollars on some of these systems.

And you'll see those as soon as the first quarter, but certainly for the full year. So that's gonna impact ratios, uh, potentially lending arrangements so that that can't be discounted, uh, either in terms of the impact and then also philanthropy. Donors who had significant equity portfolios, their their fund.

Charitable decision making will change. It will likely become more conservative. And again, we have many systems that do quite well, uh, on philanthropy, so that's going to be impacted as well. So I think the CFO role is going to be this way probably for the next six to 12 months. And then, uh, really it's, it's going to be about actually some retrospective work and thinking about what could have gone better, what, how could we have reacted, how could we have prepared better?

As an executive team for, for the next crisis, and there will be a next crisis, whether it's in several years or 10 years or 20 years. But I guess the way viruses work these things, they continue to recur. We had the opportunity to sit down with Sherry Deville, who is ACEO for a uh, tech startup. and we, we had a lot of conversations with individual health systems, and from time to time I just, I needed to step back a little bit.

I needed a break and I wanted to talk about some different topics. Sherry gave me that opportunity and I thought, who better to talk to than a sitting CEO of a, a successful health tech startup about what a. female, an aspiring female CEO would want to do today to prepare for that role. If, if a female was looking and saying, Hey, that's the role I want in the future, what should I be doing today?

So I pose that question to Sherry and, and here's her comments. First, talk about a woman who's not ACEO yet, how do you prepare knowing what you know now as the, as ACEO and board member, how do you prepare yourself? You're as you're progressing through your career so that you're, you're ready to take that, that type of role.

That's a great question and.

Really self-awareness is, is really the biggest lever that, that you have because having daughters, you probably have talked to 'em about it or maybe you will talk to 'em about just getting a lot of missed me mixed messages from a lot of stakeholders or, or people or, or institutions and, and really it's the clarity of having self-awareness and, and navigating what I think women leaders face.

Lots of paradoxes and, and at some point I got to, got to a point in this journey and I was very fortunate. Like I said, uh, I brought in the biggest investor to the company. He's also my mentor, but, and, and we can talk about him a lot. His name is Wim, a great leader. He is got 34 at their. He is in Silicon Valley that he's mentored and, and so has seen a lot of movies, mentored a lot of people, and, and the thing about innovation, um, is that innovation does not discriminate.

And so that's why he, he is then very open to mentoring lots of different people, not just the classic prototype. And so I'd say to your daughter. Just work on understanding herself and understanding what motivates her and, and what she's interested in understanding, uh, what drives her understanding sort of her, her own psychology.

Uh, and that's the best place to start when you're young. All right. As we said earlier, New York City was really the, the heart of the surge, the initial surge. And we had a conversation with CIO for, uh, NYU, Langone Health, nato, mbi. And Nader is the kind of leader you want when the pandemic is surging in your market.

I love his perspective on this. He essentially said, look, we've been here before. Let's apply what we already know and learned quickly and adapt to those things we don't know. And he, he said, we went through Hurricane Sandy, we went through nine 11. Uh, we've gone through crisis before, so let's keep our heads and our witts about us.

This is gonna be a little different. But for the most part it's, we're, we're dealing, uh, with, with a lot of unknowns. And, but we've done this before. We've dealt with unknowns and we know how to do this. And I just, I, I love how he approaches this, how he, he, he just has a, he had a calming effect on me, and I'm sure he had a calming effect on all those people around him.

So here's, uh, Nader, MBI, CIO for NYU Langone on, uh, dealing with crisis. . What's one thing you discovered in the past few weeks that might Ben benefit others that are maybe a couple weeks behind where you guys are at? Well, so first of all, I may talk about, um, crisis and emergency. So I know people ask me, well, what did you do?

It's, we've been, fortunately, unfortunately, I've been through many crisis. September 11 blackouts, Sandy Storm, and of course this. And part of that is our institution having a good emergency planning since even, uh, Sandy, even before that in place. And that's a broader institutional plan about the case of an emergency.

What to do and we plug into that and then when it, we create a structure and for many years in place. But how do you deal with crisis Now? We all know, and based on my experience, there's crisis all different. So you never get the same crisis again when people thought, so the question is how do you set up a structure to deal with a crisis with.

React quickly improvise as different issue arises. So this crisis totally different than what Sandy was. Sandy was an event in, and then you have aftermath. This is continuing. So in such, you have to prepare your staff to dealing with this an everyday basis. And so.

Need changes to be able to deliver the technology services, whether that's expanding ICU, telehealth and various other things. And the other thing is about really having, um, your technology architecture in the way of integrated environment and capability really matters. This is what it shows is either crack or strength as how you architected your technology infrastructure.

And that's, that's puts at the real test here. Both your staff and your, your structure and your your technology capabilities. Alright, to close this out, I wanna close this out on a positive note. And BJ Moore with Providence Health does not disappoint. He, uh, closes this out on a positive note in this series, and the question I asked him and another CIOs was about priorities coming out of covid.

And I, I just love the way he, he looks at it and says, look, we're gonna go through this. It's gonna be tough, it's gonna be hard. We're gonna learn a lot of things, but you know, at the end of the day, we are gonna be better for it. We are going to be smarter, we're going to be more resilient. It's, it's, uh, very encouraging and I'd love to leave you guys with this note.

A ton of projects. Right. So we had our multi-year plan and you had your multi-year plan. Yeah. And then there's gonna be a whole host of new projects that come up about as a result of this. Yeah. How are you gonna prioritize those and how are you gonna knit those together? Yeah. I think it needs to be a balance.

Those long-term plans. I mentioned epic consolidation, getting on single R, getting on Oracle Cloud. Those are 18, 24 month investment.

But when we evaluate new projects, it's gonna be what support these new emerging health. What are technologies that are gonna enable us if, if there, or when there is a second wave of covid that are gonna allow us to respond to that. What are things that are gonna help us generate revenue in this post covid world?

What are things that are gonna be able to allow us to cut costs and things that have really short paybacks, right? Six, six months is really what we're looking at. Anything more than six months, we just can't this point in time. And so news is, there's. Revenue opportunities. There's a ton of new opportunities from a business perspective.

So we'll have a lot of new projects coming our way. It's what can we handle as a health system from a, a change perspective, from an IT perspective and, and obviously from a funding perspective. But I, I feel optimistic it's, I think we'll come out of this, this stronger. Even though it's things feel pretty low right now, I think we'll come outta a stronger perspective.

That's all for this week. This is the second last time I'll be saying that. I'll say that one more time. Don't forget, we have the end of year top 10 countdown coming up, so you're gonna wanna I. Make sure you you listen to that. We're gonna be releasing at the same time on social media, the top 10 countdown, each one of the clips going down to number one.

So that's our last episode of the year before we get to the new year and we start our whole new programming schedule, which is, uh, the daily episodes where we do, uh, today in health. It. All new channel. Looking forward to that. Monday, we're gonna do News Day, Wednesday, we're gonna do Solution Showcase, and Friday we're gonna continue to do the Influence episodes, so hope you'll join us for the new year as well.

Special thanks to our sponsors, channel sponsors VMware, Starbridge Advisors, Galen Healthcare Health lyrics series, healthcare Pro Talent Advisors, HealthNEXT, McAfee, and Hillrom for choosing to invest in developing the next generation of health leaders. This show is the production of this week. In Health It.

For more great content, check out our website this week, health.com, or the YouTube channel, which we designed just for you. Please check back one more episode this year. Check back. We wanna make sure that you listen to our Top 10 countdown. Should be a lot of fun. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

Chapters