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 Welcome to this Week in Health It, it's Newsday. My name is Bill Russell, former healthcare CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. A special thanks to Sirius Healthcare Health Lyrics and Worldwide Technology, who are our news day show sponsors for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health IT leaders.

We set a goal for our show, and one of those goals for this year is to grow our YouTube followers. Uh, we have about 600 plus followers today on our YouTube channel. Why you might ask, because not only do we produce this show in video format, but we also produce four short video clips from each show that we do.

If you subscribe, you'll be notified when they go live. We produce, produce those clips just for you, the busy health IT professionals. We're going to a summer schedule starting on June 1st. Monday. We're gonna do News Day, Friday, we're gonna do Influence. Occasionally we'll drop a solution showcase. Uh, the big difference is we make no commitment to have a Wednesday show.

It's a break for my team, which has been producing eight shows a week, and a chance for you to catch up on some of the shows you may have missed. If you really miss me, you can still check out the Today In Health IT show where I'm gonna be doing that on a daily basis, where we look at one story every weekday morning.

All right, let's get to it. Che is in the house and we look at the future of work amongst other stories, Sue. Welcome back to the show. Thank you, bill. Good morning, and uh, good to see you. Yeah, it's good to see you. You, you were the story the last time you were on the show 'cause you took the interim role at, uh, Boston Children's.

How's, how's that going? It's going well. I just had a great call with my team on our major focus project while I'm there, which is the EHR strategy. And yeah, I'm a couple months in and busy going, well, great organization. How do you ju, how do you juggle it all? How? Because it's not like you stepped down from Starbridge, you're still a principal at Starbridge and keeping all that stuff going as well.

Right. So I had told my starbridge admin that she has to take my calls down to a minimum and they have to happen early morning, end of day or noontime. So, and they're down to a minimum and that's when they happen so that I can just focus on Boston Children's and it's going okay. And some of the work has shifted to my colleagues David and Russ during this time.

So that's okay as well. Are you committed and keeping up with the blog posts as well? You're. I mean, you've been doing that for so many years. I, I assume that's just part of your routine now, you know? It is. And a friend of mine who's retired, who I talk with every week, a couple of my Michigan days friends, they're all retired and, okay, Sue, maybe you could give up the blog.

I mean, if you need more time, I'm like, no, that's, I gotta keep it up. So, no, that's a discipline. I'll be writing it every week and, . Right now I have about, you know, 10 ideas for this week, but I haven't written it yet. So the ideas are there. It's the time to write it. So as long as I get feedback that people are reading it and it's got some value, I'll keep doing it.

Yeah. That's how I feel. I tell people that the, the fuel to keep me going on this is the, the emails I get. I had a, uh, CEO for a startup actually fly down here.

A long time. Mm-hmm. And it was, you know, it phenomenal conversation. It was great to, you know, remember on this episode said this.

Yeah. That's why we do it. It's, yeah, it's getting ideas flowing in the industry. Yeah. You know, it's a, that's a great segue to congratulations on 400 episodes. I listened to your show last week where you were the interviewee and you kind of went over the last couple years, and I remember you and I bill talking about you thought.

Me running a weekly blog with so much work and I'm like, you're doing a weekly show now. You do three weekly shows and five daily shows, but you know how much work it is or not. We share that commitment in terms of developing next generation leaders and you're doing great stuff in the industry and it is much appreciated and kudos for what you're doing.

We thought, Hey, should we do something? And we decided to do that.

Uh, you know, just a bunch of guests from over the years. Come on and we'll talk about how things have, have moved forward. I don't know, maybe we could just do it like an open channel and people just pop in over the course of an hour or so and just record, you know, some things. I don't know. I don't really have the idea of if people have an idea of what we should for the 500th episode.

Uh, you know, just lemme know. Should be fine. Well, I know you'll get creative and I've got a staff that will help you, you know, with some new ideas and, you know, put me on your list for participating somehow. I'd love to. Yeah. That's great. And I, and I appreciate your participation over the years. So you are, I, I mean, you're working this full-time job, but you've given me three really good stories and I.

And this, this is really top of mind. What does work look like in the post pandemic era? And we're getting closer and closer to that. And there's just a lot of conversations of what it's gonna look like. So you, you pulled out an article, uh, do you wanna set that up for us? Yeah, I'll do that. And, and I'll make it concrete first as well, in terms of what we're doing at Boston Children's, and then get into the articles and the bigger picture.

So as of July 1st at Boston Children's, we will start the phase return to the office. Saying return to work is a misnomer 'cause people have been working. Right, right. Sorry. So return to the office, whatever we wanna call that, and it'll be phased through the year. The group that's been working on it basically asked all the leaders to identify by job code, is this a job code that can be fully remote, fully on site required, or a hybrid?

And we have in, uh, the IT department gone through that exercise. Now, I saw the results of that yesterday and we have a mix for sure. And the, if you think about exceptions for employees, it's within job code. So if you just take that example that a job code can be fully remote. We'll be fully remote. There might be some individuals that want the exception.

My remote situation at home's not working. I'd like to come into the office. I'd like to come into the office certain days. So, you know, all those things are being worked out at this point. I think it's, you know, the articles that I shared with you, I'm gonna, if I can give you all three titles at one time, can I do that?

Sure . So one of 'em is from the globe and it's the hybrid workplace. Probably won't last. Okay. There's some very interesting arguments in it. The other two are from Harvard Business Review. One of 'em is called What Mix of work from home and office Time is right for you, and that's really more individually focused.

It's an article that says, you know, figure out your rhythms, your what kind of work you do, how many hours of this, that, and the other thing, and, and what's gonna be the model for you. Take that to your boss. If you've got the flexibility to talk through, what's gonna work for you. The other one from Harvard Business Review is called How to Do Hybrid Right.

That's really interesting in terms of, you know, there's some work that's been done over the years and it's not just during the pandemic. So one reference here is to a future of work consortium that this person has led for over 10 years. So there's a lot of research around the whole idea of onsite versus remote, and it goes into, this is the one I sent you this morning.

Did you see it? Yep. Okay, you're totally on top of it. It goes into the elements of hybrid and place and time and you know, the classic quadrants in the top quadrant is anywhere, anytime, and that's now what we're moving into. This one I think does some really good stuff in terms of talking about leadership, needing to figure out personality types, what's gonna work, how you set up that space.

And quite honestly, I don't know that we've gotten there yet in terms of at Boston Children's, when we talk about hybrid. Is, you know, so hybrid. You're gonna come in certain days up to you. Is it for certain collaboration? Is it in collaboration space? Is it, you come in these days by yourself, you work in, you know, a cubicle or an office space.

So I think that's a big challenge for people to work through before. Let me get some reaction from you on that and then I'll talk about the conclusions in that article and the, the one in the globe. Yeah, so the how to do hybrid, right? I found fascinating because Fujitsu is one of the main companies here that they're talking about, and they talk about just the culture of a, a Japanese company.

Japanese offices face-to-face interaction is highly valued. The long office hours, they talked about the fact that, you know, prior to the pandemic, 74% of all employees considered the office to be the best place to work. You fast forward, middle of March.

The follow up survey says only 15% of the employees considered the office to be the best place to work. Now that's right in the middle of a pandemic. It it'll be interesting to see how that moves forward. Some 30% said that the best place was their homes, and the remaining 55% favored a mix of home and office, which is the hybrid model.

But we get into these interesting conversations around this. You noted, you know, going through each job specification and saying fully on site, remote only, or hybrid. Each one. Here's what I like about this. Each one of these cases is really individual, and this article goes on to talk about some of that, that, you know, there could be this person that whose job it is can be done remotely, but who might choose to come into work because they're in an apartment.

That they're sharing with three roommates and there's nowhere to work and it's too loud and those kind of things. Yeah. Um, they may choose to come into work for other reasons, but I think the key word there is choice. I think that's what people are looking for coming out of this. Am I. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right and it's, you know, you put your leadership hat on.

It's like, what are we gonna do for thousands of employees? What makes the most sense? How do we figure this out? How do we have some level of consistency, yet we've got some flexibility for people's choice? And I think that, you know, , I think one of the things that's coming out of the pandemic, and I didn't pull an article on this, but I've read some other stuff, is that people are rethinking their careers.

So if you came through the pandemic, healthy and Alive, and with a job. , right? Yep. First off, if you're on that path, you know, you may be going, okay, uh, I, I could have choices in the future. I could go work for a company that's all virtual. I don't even have to go down this path of thinking about am I gonna do a commute again or not.

You might be looking for different kind of work. You might be looking for more meaningful work. So, you know, I think it can be, I, I know I talked to someone last week who.

one of the big consulting firms on the road, three cities a week, right? And has been home, basically able to see family, wife, four kids in a way he hadn't for decades, you know? And I said to him, I said, I think this can be really transformative in terms of people thinking about job changes and what they wanna do going forward and what they're willing to do.

You know, he doesn't intend to repeat. What he had before, though. He's staying with the same company, . Yeah. He's not gonna be on the road to three cities every week. Right. So I, I think where I wanna go with this is I wanna play devil's advocate, so I'll take the, we need to all come back into the office.

You can take the, the, the other side on this. Uh, because I agree, by the way, I agree with you a hundred percent. There's a shift, there's a change, there's a cultural change that's going on in our country right now. And, and you only have to look at one factor to really realize it's going on and it's. Like all these homes have been bought up and it's just outside the city.

It's even further away from the city. It's, I've talked to people that are like, you know, their jobs in LA and they now live in Colorado. I'm like, did you clear that with your company? It's like, well, we're remote. I didn't clear it with my company. I'm like, you should probably clear it with your company.

Absolutely. But, but I mean, but that thing's happening all over the place. I.

I, every time I talk to somebody in another city, I go, Hey, are there any homes for sale? And they're like, no. It's crazy. I mean, the prices are going through the roof and so, and it's everywhere. So there's a fundamental shift and I dunno what that's telling me yet, but it's telling me something. Alright, so let's play the devil's advocate.

I think everybody should come back to the office. By the way, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I don't really think this, but I, I did hear Jamie Diamond talk about this in his shareholders call. And he said, look, we have an equity problem that's gonna happen as a result of this. We have, because you have, I think he said like 40 to 60% of his employees have to come into the office.

There's no getting around it. They just have to come into the office. Yeah. You know, you, you expect a teller to be in the branch when you go to that branch. It's just the case. And we have that, uh, significantly in healthcare.

So, so what, how do we handle, how are you gonna handle the equity aspect of that? Of people feeling like, Hey, why do they get a choice? And I don't get a choice and and is it just, Hey, I'm sorry. That's the nature of your job. I think saying everybody has to come back is to rigid and strict, and we already had arrangements in.

Many organizations for people to work remote some days a week or all days, right? You might have had like the technical wizard who maybe because of their spouse moved to another state a few years ago and you said, wow, we don't wanna lose you. You stay with us, you're remote. That's fine. So you've already made all those exceptions.

You know you're absolutely right though, in terms of equity issues and fairness, there are gonna be those kinds of arguments. So what's that balance between what the organization needs and what does the employee need there? There's a handful of things around management, and maybe we've gotten better at this through the pandemic of managing people through teams and managing people through Zoom.

But there's an awful lot of practices that happen better face to face. I guess we could do that in a hybrid model, but what about teams that aren't as effective without, you know, a face

mentoring? , he said, you know, it's hard to mentor somebody over the phone. It's not impossible, but it's, it's you, you lose something of not being at the elbow, of not being, uh, with them as they're interacting with their clients and, and those kinds of things. Unless all of business is gonna be handled this way, there's gonna be people that are progressing in their career faster because they are doing that versus.

Yeah, well, I think there's a lot about the younger generation too, and how are they gonna, how are they gonna be mentored? How are they gonna get the opportunities if they come into an organization? It's all remote and, you know, period. That's it. So, you know, the, the Globe article, I said the headline, the Hybrid Workplace probably won't last, and it gave a couple different reasons.

It concluded with that, it'll probably swing back at some point. To be much more onsite and remote will be, you know, far less than maybe exceptions. I. You interviewed Jamie Nelson recently, hospital special surgery in Manhattan. Jamie said she's been there all the time through the pandemic. As long she thinks leadership needs to be on site, she thinks that as long as some of her IT people need to be there, then she should be there.

And I think she, you know, uh, expressed the preference for everybody being back on site. I don't think they've figured it out yet, but, and I think she talked about the pendulum swinging back. So, you know, I, what we see for the remainder of this year. May not be the long-term future. You know, I, it's interesting.

I think when I get, and, and I wanna say this on the show because I, I think some CIOs will come on and not be able to really say this at this point or articulate it, but. Definitely what you just said is true. There's gonna be a pull back to everybody being in the office. You know, innovation teams function better when people are, you know, regardless of if there's bean bag chairs or not.

But when they're sitting around and they're interacting and they're in front of the whiteboard and doing all those things, and the tools are gonna get better and the tools have gotten better. Yeah.

Even if this pendulum swings back, the thing I will probably be a proponent for is choice. And, and, and it is the beautiful thing that's happened here is my kid needs to stay home for two weeks because they had to be quarantined because of whatever. And you just go, great, you can keep working, be at home.

That's phenomenal. Yeah. Or yeah, or it just, you know, some people need to be home for. Yeah, A break from meetings. Yeah. That's one of the things I hated about being in the office as the CIO is I, I mean, I, every day I had six hours of meetings. It, it was hard to get that concentrated time of what is, you know, what should our focus be for the next six months, or how should I be thinking about this problem?

Because you were just going from meeting to meeting and I guess maybe that.

It's to turn down meetings. Yeah. Uh, when I'm in the office, I guess, you know, before we leave this, can we just talk about the fact that healthcare and provider organizations are unique? We are not a company that's basically got everybody in a big office building, right? We have people on premise every day taking care of patients, and we have a support staff around them.

Taking care of helping them to take care of patients. Right. So that's where the IT people who have to be on site come into play. I always tell my IT teams, we are the extended care team. We're part of, we're part of the extended care team. We don't touch the patients, but we provide the solutions and the systems for the people who do.

And I think that truly something is lost when. , your IT people are remote and not having that interaction with your clinical and support staff. Right. We do at Boston Children's, something called rounding to influence every other week, and there's key questions that leaders are asked to go for half an hour and talk with a group of their staff in a rounding situation and surface.

Issues and get input. Those have gone to virtual, but for many they can be on site. And I asked this most recently to be included in one with clinicians. I asked the CNO. Whatever you're organizing, I'd like to be with you because the questions this week are very pertinent. Things that I need to hear as the CIO and her first response was virtual or in person.

And I'm like, uh, you know, I'm virtual at this point. So yeah, we'll do it virtual. And we did, and we had 10 clinicians on the Zoom call with us in half an hour. Very rich conversation, giving a lot of input. But I just think, you know, my, my point is we have to be very careful within healthcare as to what's gonna work best in most effectively supporting our, our clinicians.

Show notes. The Harvard Business Review one on how to do hybrid right. Has a bunch of really good Yep. Uh, research in it. Towards the end it goes, uh, companies are using this moment as an opportunity to reimagine workflows. New hybrid arrangements should never replicate existing bad practices. Yeah. As was the case when companies began automating work processes.

Examples and they said one of the retail bank future of consortium and re workflows by asking three crucial questions. The first is, are any teams or are any team tasks redundant? Right. That seems like an obvious, can any team, can any task be automated or reassigned to people outside the team? And the third one is, can we reimagine a new purpose for our place of work?

You know, those are three questions. I'd probably add a couple into that. But generally speaking, this is an opportunity we're seeing the tools really become more sophisticated and to a, to a certain extent, we need to reimagine what our conference rooms look like. Mm-Hmm.

Five people will be in that room and 10 people will be remote. Now, we did this with vendors a long time ago, but doing it with your team, how do you bring them into the room? How do you make that, how do you make that really work? Really reimagining the, the work workflows and the work processes. I think it's a great opportunity to do that.

Yeah, absolutely. If, if only we had no, no other work going on. I guess I wanted to get your thought on this and I didn't, you know, you sent me over an article this morning. I didn't even send you this article, but I, I commented on it, on the Today Show this morning, and that's Boost Mobile offers telehealth.

The reason it's fascinating is if you sign up for a new plan, you essentially get telehealth and their comments were really fascinating around this. So if you sign up for their free Unlimited Plus plan as a subscriber, you get the telehealth for free. If not, you can add it to your plan for $8 a month.

And the CEO said a significant portion of Boost Mobile's customers are low income and may struggle to get access to affordable healthcare. The company CEO sees this partnership as a way to provide healthcare to people who need it most. And just to be clear, they partnered with another company called K Health.

Who's gonna be providing the services? And you know, I was just reading this whole thing and Verizon has launched something, it's a little different, but they've launched something as well, and towards the end, their chief product officer says, boost Mobile truly prioritizes its customers and is creating solutions to meet their needs.

I, I read this article and at first I thought, ah, I'm not gonna comment on this. It seems one of those out articles,

equity standpoint.

Which again, now that's powerful offering, you know? What do you think as ACIO for, let's say an integrated delivery network, how would you be looking at this and how would you, you know, how would you digest this and look at it for offering services to your, or to your community, or to your organization?

Yeah. You know, my first response with whatever hat I'm wearing and saying this is it's positive. If it is reaching an underserved community that may not have other access, and it's yet one more go to where people are in delivering healthcare. It's a good thing. You know, if I put my hat on as ACIO in a, in a healthcare delivery system, you know, , I would still say that.

Is there any play for us? Is there any connection to us? I don't know, but you know, I have said for a while that what we're seeing in the emergence of, you know, retail, I mean you sent me the article, Walmart Health acquires telehealth provider, me, MD. Yeah. That connects to this, right? Yeah. But CVS and what, you know, retailers are doing in the healthcare space to, in my mind, while it could be perceived as a threat to healthcare, traditional healthcare delivery systems, it really needs to be looked at as, okay, it's one more offering.

How do we get in on it? How do we partner, how do we support it? Because ultimately you wanna reach the people in your community and keep 'em healthy. And you know, that's what I thought when I read the Walmart article you sent as well. It's like, go to where people are and another, uh, I mean a segue to go to where people are, I don't know if you've heard the latest incentives to get the vaccine in a couple states.

And you know, in previous shows we've talked a lot about the vaccine. We're now at that point you always predicted, which is. People who don't wanna get it though. There's also people who don't have access to it. So did you see the thing about Ohio. Oh, the lottery? Yeah. You know I saw that in in my feed, but I didn't read the story.

What, what's it about? Basically, if you get a vaccine, you are eligible for a million dollar lottery and there will be five $1 million lotteries over the next five weeks. So if I get it tomorrow and I'm in Ohio, I'd be eligible for the next $1 million lottery next week. Something like that. The other . Wow.

The states are getting creative. The other one I heard, I may not get this one quite right, is Maine offering hunting licenses for free. So deer hunting, whatever for free. If you get, you know, if you get your vaccine, so you know, it's an incentive. Go to where people are. Right? Yeah. And you know, I do actually.

I like those things. It seems like very expensive way to go about it. $5 million. We'll have to see how many people in Ohio get Yeah. Get, get the vaccine as a result of it. But I would imagine your odds of winning that lottery are a lot better than buying a ticket. Yeah. Oh man, that's amazing. Yeah, I didn't put the story on the Vaccine Credential initiative, but they are starting to really get out there and move that, move that forward.

So you have 300 health related institutions coming together to create the vaccine credential initiative because I think my card's on my desk, actually it's not on my desk. I don't know where it is, but it kind of cracked me up when they gave it to me because it really looked like the card I remember having as a kid.

It's, it's literally the, the person gave me the shot and then like signed it and it, and I. Wow, that that's amazing. Yeah. But the Vaccine Credential Initiative is an attempt to really bring that forward and, and move it into the, at least the 20th century. So automated. We'll have it. Yeah. It'll be interesting.

Uh, I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about security a little bit. There's so much going on here, and I, I don't really wanna talk about the pipeline outage and whatnot, because we know enough about that yet, but we saw, uh, scripts get an attack about a week ago or so, a little over a week ago. And, and the one I'm really more concerned about is the one that happened in Finland where they hacked into a, uh, mental health psychologist practice and 30,000 patients, they actually took the transcripts of their meetings with their, with their mental health professionals, and they're not going.

They're trying to go after the, the health system for ransom. They're actually going after the individuals. And I, I, I don't know, maybe I just hadn't been paying attention, but that's the first time I saw that kind of, that kind of attack to really go after the individuals. And it's, I, I'm trying to, I'm trying think about, feel about that because.

I think is, is, is is really extreme and that is I want the ability to make a request for my record to be deleted from certain health organizations. Knowing what I know, uh, about cybersecurity and knowing what I know about certain health institutions that I've visited in the past, I know that at risk being hacked.

But there's part of me, when I read this kind of story, I'm like, I, I, I want to have that record deleted from their system, not made available for research and those kind of things. I'm more than happy to make it available to certain research institutions to use it. I just don't want it to be sitting there.

Waiting for when the hacker finally realizes they can go into that spot and get that record. I mean, I assume you're horrified by that story as I'm, in terms of the I am I, I will tell you, and here the acronym TLDR. Yes. So I had a little TLDR. As I was scanning that article, hoping that you would help me get to the so what of it, but it is alarming.

Should I say what TLDR is? Does everybody know ? Yeah. Too long. Didn't read. Yeah. Yeah, just remember that everybody on social media too long didn't read when you're putting stuff out there. But yeah. You know, it's scary to think about that in terms of mental health records. It reinforces why we are so tight on, you know, mental health records, you know, another, in terms of privacy within the health record.

Yeah, I, I was as alarmed as you were. And to your point about wanting to remove your record. If you could from certain organizations, I mean, you're one of, you know how many million people you know, that's gonna give you a sense of control over it. I mean, what we need to be focusing obviously is, you know, our response to these cybersecurity threats all the time.

You know? And the preparedness for it. And the preparedness. I love, I love having you on the show, just listening to all those things pop up. It's like your next meeting's coming up, there's something. I'm sorry I didn't turn everything off. . No, I'm, uh, yeah, it's the 15 minutes to the next meeting. Sorry. No,

It's just great. The dogs haven't barked, the doorbell hasn't rung. My phone hasn't rung. I know we're getting better at this is, and what is this, like the, the fourth time we've done a news station show, or or third time we've done a news station show, something like that. And, and maybe you need to tell me to turn off my sound next time.

I, I just appreciate.

I, I can easily create an echo chamber and this holds accountable. Sometimes you.

You have . You definitely have. It's like, ah, I don't agree with you, because my staff was laughing. It's like, did Sue just say she doesn't agree with you? We, you need to get more guests who say that . I'm like, okay. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm sure we can, it won't be too hard. You know, it's, it's, it's interesting the, I'm, I'm a huge fan of patient-centered interoperability and having a lot conversations around that topic.

If I take that to the extreme patient-centered interoperability just means I want the entire record on my phone and I wanna determine how it gets used and who uses it. And if I share it with an organization that's gonna provide me more health related as opposed to, uh, sick care. I wanna be able to do that.

I want, I wanna be able to have sort of, uh, joint custody of the record, if you will. And I get a lot of, yeah, that makes sense. Whatever. And then I take it to its natural extreme. Okay. Once I have joint custody of the record, I don't want you to have custody anymore. That's when people go, whoa, wait a minute.

Are you saying you want me to delete that record from the health system? I'm like, well, you know, we haven't had the, the, the most stellar history on cybersecurity to date. Now, hopefully that'll get better with this renewed emphasis are also. Given that there's gonna be genetic data and those kind of things, what, what happens to people's records once they die?

And if it has genetic data in there that impacts the kids and the grandkids and everybody else. So, you know, should there be some. It's almost like we need to sit down and write, okay, what is the patient's right to their data and how should the patient, because this is coming with, with information blocking whatnot, it's coming, are gonna.

Let's educate them on how to use the data effectively. Mm-Hmm. , how to secure their own data, which is what we're worried about. We're gonna give them the data and they're gonna lose it. Well, we're already losing it, so let's all get better at figuring out how to protect our data. This is something I've been throwing out there.

I'm, I'm, I'm curious, how far off base am I, uh, on this, do you think? I don't think you're off base. It's got me, you know, I'm thinking about a lot of things here just in terms of how educated our people to even worry about these things in terms of their own record. Yeah. I don't think you're off base. I don't, I don't have a good answer or projection on where that needs to go though.

Yep. No . I understand. I'm, I'm gonna have to give more thought to it. Uh, I'm getting a lot more conversations around it. Okay. Uh, Sue, what, what else haven't we talked about? We got, we have about the, can we, can we go to the, can we go to the AHIMA statement that you sent me? Sure. Yeah. Let's go ahead and do that.

AHIMA Public policy statement on telehealth, and they came out, they have essentially seven things in here around telehealth. Promote patient and provider choice. Ensure parity between telehealth services and in-person services. Invest in telehealth infrastructure, prioritize privacy and security, facilitate the delivery of healthcare services across state lines.

Address disparities in the use and willingness to use telehealth and remote patient monitoring technologies and promote program integrity. And if you wanna, if you wanna see this, it's out in the journal. They, I'm, I'm sure you can find it in other places. The title of this is Hema, public Policy Statement on Telehealth.

Alright. So what aspect of that would you like to, uh, talk about? So, yeah, so it wasn't TLDR. Okay. Excellent Summary of key points in in, in the world of telehealth. You know, the ones I would emphasize that I was really happy to see there is invest in the telehealth infrastructure. Absolutely. You know, we were, organizations were pretty ready a year ago, and then adoption took off.

But there's a con, a need to continue to invest in the infrastructure at scale. The uh, point about state lines facilitate the delivery of healthcare services across state lines. I mean, that's been one of the obstacles relative to telehealth. Yep. And you know, my husband had an example of this. He had an incident in September.

He was hospitalized. He had all sorts of procedures and, and specialists then that he had to talk to after that. He did some of it in person for procedures. Some of it was telehealth. One of the subspecialists that he had to talk to for telehealth. Turns out state lines couldn't. We live in Rhode Island.

We get our care through Mass General. Brigham still in the Boston area, and that subspecialist was not approved for telehealth to talk to him in Rhode Island. He had to go in, which, you know, it, it made no sense to me. There's many places in this country where state lines. They're a blur, right? The big box stores for us to go to if we have to go shopping are just over the state line.

They're five minutes away, right? So you gotta address the state lines and then disparities. Absolutely. Addressing disparities in the use and willingness to use telehealth and remote patient monitoring technologies. I mean, if, you know, we have many takeaways from the last year, one of 'em is health disparities, and I am happy to see organizations fully aware and trying to address that in many ways.

You know what's interesting about that? The across state lines thing is I asked who you're familiar with and he, I never know if I'm saying his name right. I think I'm saying it right, but be close, but facilitate service delivery across state lines. I asked him and he said he thinks that should stay in state control.

And it's interesting because he replicated things I hear, and most of the time I hear that argument. I hear from doctors.

Oversight that the states provide around the delivery of care in their communities, and and I was, I'm just surprised. I was surprised. I heard it from him. American Telehealth Association. I'm surprised from the other doctors that I hear from, but they also point out that there's been a significant amount of progress around this in terms of hacks made between states.

And I think like 36 of the states actually will honor the ability to go across state lines. But as long as we're under the emergency situation, they, I think they're right now allowed to practice across state lines until that is rescinded. Unless I'm mistaken. I don't know. Yeah. Does, does Dr. Veda think the state control is good in part because of competition?

I, you know it that that integrated delivery network. I would be, so for this, because I may not be ready to compete with Amazon Care, Walmart with Boost Mobile, with I, I may not have all my ducks in a row around this, and I need to, I need a little bit more time to get my ducks in a row. But, but that was not one of, one of his main arguments.

I'll have to go back and really look back because this is gonna come up again. Especially a after, you know, the emergency situation gets lifted. Right. That's gonna be, yeah. Yeah, so I, thanks for, thanks for bringing that up, Sue. It's always great to to talk to you. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

My pleasure. I look forward to it. Next six weeks, next time, six weeks away, right? Next time, six weeks away. So I will be, uh, looking for articles that I wanna to, to talk to you about. So look forward to that. What a great discussion. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, from these kinds of discussions, please forward them a note.

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