Today in health, it we're going to take a look at the characteristics of great health it organizations. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and create, or this week health set of channels and events dedicated to transform healthcare. One connection at a time. Today's show is brought to you by Panda health.

Digital health is hard and Panda makes it easier. Quickly and comprehensively vet digital health solutions and be fully prepared and informed for your next meeting. Panda helps health system leaders make confident decisions about digital health without the complexity and burden of figuring out. All of it on their own.

They help you get smarter, faster through peer input, market intelligence and advisory services.

Check them out at this week. health.com/panda. All right. Let's see. It's a Friday. First of all, Hey, we are so close to our $150,000 goal for Alex's lemonade. Stand, check it out on our website this week. health.com. Top right-hand corner. You're going to see a link to the lemonade stand page. Go ahead and click on that. You could view everything that's going on.

Love for you to be a part of that. Maybe be the one to send us over that 150,000 mark. Alright, one last thing, share this podcast with a friend or colleague, especially today's episode. I'm going to talk a lot about what it looks like. To be a great health. It. Organization, I think it would be a really good discussion for you and someone else away to you for you to mentor them. Mentoring doesn't have to be hard.

It could just be a simple conversation about stuff that you are going through together. They say they can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. I'm on a journey and the journey is to really think through what it takes to be successful in healthcare. It, I keep getting asked various. Forms of the same question, which is, w what characteristics or what aspects or what. What methods are PR what do the best healthcare it organizations do? And I'm in an interesting spot because I've been sitting in this spot for about six years interviewing the best healthcare systems in the country, the best leaders in the country. I've been going to all the conferences I've been reading all the news and reporting on that. And and I've been at CIO for a 60 in hospital system. So I have an interesting view of all the things that are going on. And I'm going to take you on a journey with me cause I'm trying to figure this out.

I'm throwing out some ideas. I've been talking to a lot of people about it, and this is the first time I'm sharing it with y'all with the with my audience. I think there's really three things. That the that I have found so far that really. I capture what I see in the best health it organizations. And the first is that they create an environment. Great companies have a great environment that breeds success.

And I know this sounds sounds interesting. I, it sounds odd. But here's my thought on this. The best organizations somehow create a culture. Where people can succeed. And the worst organizations conversely create a culture where people couldn't possibly succeed. If they wanted to. It's a culture that doesn't trust a culture that doesn't collaborate, a culture that micromanages a culture that allows bad managers.

They create an environment that just naturally just. I just cannot, it cannot possibly succeed. And it requires an overhaul. And this is a lot of times while you have a turnaround CIO come in. And one of the first things they do is they evaluate the leadership. They potentially bring in new leadership and then that leadership then goes down to the director or manager level.

And then they potentially bring in new leaders, if nothing else, they definitely re we'll retrain them. So that's one of the things is they will build a people culture where people can succeed. They create the environment. I'm gonna take this to to the money side. They create an environment where the group can succeed is they get enough funds where they can succeed too many times.

I hear organizations like. We're underfunded. We're underfunded. Now you can do that for a year. You might even be able to get away with it for two years, but if you do it for three years, your it organization is going to atrophy. Significantly. And to a point where it's not going to succeed, it's going to, you're going to have outages.

You're going to have breaches. You're going to have failures. And so part of that, creating that environment. Is getting out there and and winning some of the budget battles so that it is funded to the point where it can deliver on the promise that technology has for the health system. They create the environment. Let me talk about it from a leadership standpoint.

When I was CIO, I was, I would say that a significant portion of my time was spent here. It wasn't spent my hands weren't on the keyboard, doing things. My eye, my role. Was to get out there and build coalitions. It was too. Break down barriers for my team so that they could be successful, make sure that projects could continue, make sure that the organization understood what we were trying to accomplish.

It was not a black box because I was out there. I was on the campaign trail all the time. I was talking to the boards. I was, and there was many boards and I was talking to the clinicians. I was rounding. I was I even sharing our vision outside of the organization. That's part of creating the environment.

It's saying this, it's making sure that you're taking down the roadblocks. That are keeping things from happening. It's also building the right level of relationship. With key leaders across the organization, you cannot get things done. It cannot get things done on their own. You will require partnership with the medical group.

You will require with various medical groups with the clinicians in general. Not that any one person represents them. That's one of the challenges in healthcare. So you're going to have to develop relationships with. Whoever's leading imaging and potentially by hospital, you're gonna have to develop these. This level of relationship, not only you, depending on the size of your organization your staff can, my VPs developed really strong relationships inside the hospitals.

We had a site director at each one of the hospitals that developed relationships and we were giving them. As much information as we possibly could so that they could be successful and they could develop those relationships and take our message forward in each one of those hospitals. So the large entities had this.

You have to create the environment. They create an environment where people can succeed, where projects can succeed. Where things are happening. So the first thing I see is that they created an environment. The second thing I will say is they act with intentionality. And this is one of those things where, you know, great companies, aren't victims, they design the future that they want. I hear too many leaders talk to me about we didn't get the funding.

Oh, we didn't. Our systems went down because of X, Y, or Z. And the great organizations. I don't hear those excuses. They might have an outage. They might have, they will have an outage. They will have an outage. They may have a breach. But they learned from that and they grow very quickly and they act with intentionality.

They act to eliminate the the causes of those those breakdowns, those performance breakdowns. So they, my friend. And I worked talking once he read read an article about there's two kinds of movies, there's plot driven movies, and then there are character-driven movies. The plot driven movies.

Exactly what you think it's like in person's life. It's you get to be 12, you go to school, you join a sports team. You go to college or you go to high school, you go to college, you graduate, you get a job. After a couple of years, you get married. You. It's just a plots like D it just, things just happen to you. They happen to the main character.

It's like the plot. Takes that character and the character just rides the plot along. They don't change the plot. They just ride the plot. Along. And then there's character-driven movies and these movies. We love these movies because the character. Changes things that character moves with intentionality.

They will change the direction of their life. They will change the outcome of something for somebody else in the movie. They become a hero in the movie and I find too many health it organizations or plot-driven health. It organizations. It's they just keep plotting along and this is what epic did, and this is what these did, and this is what they did.

And. Therefore, we have to do these things and whatever, and you're like, you can't break out of those things. And my favorite example of that is. Health system leader in Atlanta. Allister, Erskine, I think he's sharing this publicly now. Is taking an entire hospital over to Mac computers. And we can argue whether that's the right thing or the wrong thing, but he has eight reasons why this makes the most sense.

And he talks about security. He talks about longevity of the PC. He talks about. The reliability of those systems, he talks about all this different stuff and he's just it's just a better machine than a PC. It just is. And and he has the eight reasons and he said, no, wait, we are, if this is a better solution, we're going to try to roll this out in our next Greenfield hospital.

And they're there. The hospital's going in. And the Macs are going in. And that's an example of, it's not a plot driven life because most people who are hearing this are going, oh, you can't do that. Oh, my gosh, epic. Doesn't run on that. Oh, this doesn't. What about devices? What about, we say all those things and instead of trying to break out of the plot, Which is what Allister and his team did.

And they met with epic and they said, Hey, we need this to run on a Mac. And they worked with them to get it, to run on a Mac. And they, in the various device manufacturers. It's a lot of work. Don't get me wrong, but it's I am not going to be bound by the plot. That has been handed to me by the EHR vendor or anyone else.

If there's something that is better or good to do, we're going to do that. So that's an example of acting with intentionality. There's plenty of examples. I will say architecture is one of those that you act with intentionality too many healthcare. It organizations just take technology in. It's oh, the doctors want this.

We have to create architecture. There has to be intelligent design around architecture. You begin with the end in mind, what does this look like? Are we going to be able to secure this? Are we going to be able to share the data? Are we going to be able to do things. So act with intentionality.

So they create an environment where people can be successful. And then they act with intentionality. And then the final thing I will say is, and this one I'm just going to touch on briefly because we're almost at time here, but they operate for progress. And, great companies will monitor and measure and adjust and repeat that process.

Often they will iterate to perfection constantly getting better. And there's a lot about it, operations that we could go into and specifically, and clearly these are our high level. These are a framework more than anything, but it's operate for progress. They are operating the environment, looking for progress at every turn they were looking for more turns of the wheel so that they get better and better iterate to perfection. And again, the more iterations you get, the closer you should get to perfection. There's probably also something in here in terms of transparency, but these three are a high-level framework that you can start working with.

And I'm in the process of putting this into papers and. Documents potentially an online course. We'll see. Creating an environment act with intentionality, operate for progress. These are our three of the characteristics I see when I talked to some of the best CEOs in the country. And I would really if you're saying, Hey, where should I start?

Start with that first one, create the environment. Create the environment where people can succeed, create the culture where people can succeed, create. A foundation of trust between it organization and the rest of the organization. These things are critical. These things are really important. Anyway, that's the start of my journey.

And I'm going to take you on. The journey with me. And if you have any thoughts, shoot me a note. You know how to reach me bill at this week, health.com. All right. That's all for today. Don't forget. Share this podcast with a friend or colleague, have a conversation around it. So if you agree or disagree we want to thank our partner, Panda health for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

Check 📍 them out at this week. health.com/panda. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.