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Kerri Gallagher: Everyone's under the gun.

We get that. Everyone's got metrics to meet. stakeholders to report to. We want to be by you in those boardrooms, making sure that you have what you need to feel confident to present and that we've got your back.

Bill Russell: 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.

(Main) it's an interview in action and today we're joined by Kerri Gallagher with First Health Advisory, President and COO. Keri, welcome to the show.

Kerri Gallagher: Thank you so much, Bill. I'm excited to be here and connect with you today.

Bill Russell: Yeah, I'm looking forward to the conversation. You've been at First Health Advisory.

You spent 10 years with First Health and directly supported the growth and trajectory , for each of the subsequent years. What drives you as a leader? And how's your vision shaped your approach to developing teams, strategy, culture? It's a big question. It's like the world and all is within it, but how do you cultivate a culture of excellence and teamwork at First South?

And so ensuring that our associates here feel supported, valued, and also have. The opportunity to grow and learn here at the company is absolutely imperative, and that's really what drives me as a leader. I want to make sure that all of our associates feel seen, heard, and valued here so that as they're out there representing us and responsible for some pretty big, hefty deliverables that are outlined in our statements of work with some of the best healthcare entities on this planet, we want to make sure that those individuals have what they need to be able to succeed.

So that's really what drives me as a leader here at First Health.

Bill Russell: Are there common traits or focus areas you look for when bringing on new associates or leaders?

You can follow the more traditional route by going to a four year school, maybe getting a master's degree, or you can do the bootstrap method where You're learning hands on biomed activity because you're working at a hospital and then you're getting some certifications that align with that technical skill and development.

But the biggest thing that I'm looking for is the technical prowess and understanding some of the state of the art information that's out there that our clients expect us to know. We need to be the subject matter experts. So one of the biggest things I'm looking for when we are recruiting talent and even retaining our own individuals here is making sure from a technical standpoint and an education standpoint, that they have what they need to best approach our clients.

The second thing that I'm always going to be looking for Is how do you collaborate? Collaboration is absolutely imperative because here in the healthcare IT space, it is a very big sandbox and you need to play nicely with everybody. You also need to be able to learn from the individuals that whether they're on a different team or coming from the vendor side of the house, having that collaborative attitude and approach is absolutely imperative so that you can take that.

So the collaboration portion is just as important as the it proficiencies that I look

Bill Russell: for. So do you hire the person first and the skills second. And we hear that all the time, but there's a certain amount if you're doing consulting work if you're coming alongside these people, there's an expectation of skills as well.

So how do you balance those two things?

Kerri Gallagher: It's a delicate balance and I love that you asked that question because the greatest thing about First Health Advisory is we can hire people first and we can train them up because we already have the greatest technical SMEs out there that can help align individuals with what they don't know yet.

I think that's really important. We need to make sure that we're growing from within, and if we see something in somebody that they want to learn, they want to grow, We are happy to bring them on board and we know that we can train them up so that they can eventually be that technical SME and be able to talk to some senior stakeholders at a client site.

They might not be able to do that from day one, but that's why we're here so that we can help mentor and guide them along the way.

Bill Russell: FirstHealth recently rebranded for further thought leadership on Cyber Resilient Digital Health. What is that about?

Kerri Gallagher: Yeah, Cyber Resilient Digital Health. That's essentially saying from the entire ecosystem at a healthcare level, You need to be cyber resilient.

You are ready to go because you've already done the tabletop exercises, you've already got your plan of action in place, you've already done the crown jewel assessments or analysis, which is a great tool to be able to do for any health care level, and ensuring that From a 30, 000 foot view, everybody is constantly thinking about cyber first, because ultimately, that is going to affect patient lives and patient safety.

Bill Russell: Yeah, has that conversation changed recently? We've had so many ransomware events, so much in healthcare. I would assume that's top of mind. What kind of conversations are your clients approaching you with?

Kerri Gallagher: I think if anything, the conversations have just been amplified, right? It's now people are starting to get ahead of it.

What are some policy and procedures that we can start rewriting and working and implementing now that are like low cost, low investment, but massive impact? Doing those analysis and even the enterprise risk assessments, that's really where people are coming into us and talking to us so that. We can just start opening the door, we can come in, we bring our team, we do the assessments, we do the report out, and essentially now we can partner with our clients on all of the action items that need to come next.

Not only is network, your data, everything is as safe as it possibly can be. And that's the scariest part, is not only getting the report back to you, but knowing that whether you are the largest entity in the country or a small rural hospital in Illinois, there's always going to be some problems.

Pretty big action items that are going to come out of those reports and assessments. But the best thing is, you now have a partner to help walk you through what you need to do next. And most importantly, just prioritize. I think that's the biggest thing. It's just, you realize that there are certain areas of how the healthcare system might be running that is just unsafe, not up to par.

Bill Russell: It's interesting. I was talking to a leader yesterday and we were just discussing how far have we come.

And it wasn't a comforting conversation. At one point he said, yeah, at one point he said to me, he goes, they're not hacking in, they're logging in still.

Kerri Gallagher: Yeah.

Bill Russell: was a great conversation because he started to talk about.

How they've changed their emphasis to detection and limiting the blast radius. He also talked about how much work they're putting in terms of resiliency and recovery, especially in the recovery side. They're like, we now have a plan for if there is a complete outage. What's it going to take to rebuild?

And I said how long is that going to take you? He's we're still measuring it in weeks. It's not where we would like it to be. that still the state of healthcare? We still have a long way to go.

Kerri Gallagher: Yeah, absolutely. I wish I could sit here and say, no we're on the up and up.

And as long as you are Meeting with your cyber teams and different departments and everybody does have an incident response plan in place or knows what needs to be done should there be a breach or a ransomware attack. That is true cyber resilient digital health. It's always top of mind, regardless of what department you're in.

And so as long as you are, Meeting monthly with your department leads and weekly with some of the senior leadership team members. It's got to be a trickle down effect that everybody is constantly thinking about cyber health, cyber security, and overall cyber hygiene. It has to be top of mind for everybody.

Bill Russell: so there are CIOs, I think that suffer from a disease. I'm going to call the disease like tool disease. If we just, if we could just afford that one tool, we would be, but I hear you talking about process, transparency, education baselining. I hear you talking about all these things.

I haven't really heard you talk about specific tools as much as and cybersecurity, it would appear to me, from your perspective, is much more than a toolset.

You can give Bryce Harper a wiffle ball bat and he's going to still go yard, all right? It's it's really not about the tool. It's about the person and the people and the processes behind the tool help driving it to ensure that you're reaching and looking for certain metrics of security.

Whatever your secure appetite might be. So it's more about whatever tool you buy. And this goes back to, there are some healthcare entities out there that have a massive budget to invest in all the tools and all the things, but some rural hospitals who don't have those big wallets, if they invest in a tool that may not have the big name brand recognition as some of the big five out there.

Bill Russell: Yeah that's a huge message to get across The other thing I will say is. I remember interviewing one of the health systems that was breached. And it was a great interview because they shared a ton of, Hey, this is what we went through and this is what it was like. But when he was talking about their implementation of one of the tools, they had misconfigured it across the entire enterprise.

And it's one thing to be able to buy the tool. It's another thing to. Know how to use the tool. You could give me that wiffle ball that I'm not going to hit any major league pitcher.

Kerri Gallagher: know, Bill you hit the nail on the head with that. I think that's why it's so important that when you do buy a certain tool, you are partnered with the best advisory firm out there to ensure that the implementation goes smoothly and you can do that hand holding with the team.

have workable, manageable, consumable data that individuals are going to be able to report up to senior leadership and say, Hey, because we have this tool, XYZ was uncovered. We found an MRI machine that wasn't properly networked. Or segmented properly. And it was a massive risk and we were able to identify and pull it down off the network or at least segment it properly.

So again, it's just ensuring that whatever tool you are investing in, you have the right people that understand how to implement it and use it, and if you don't, in your dollar will go so far investing in the right advisory firm to ensure that cyber resilient digital health is met.

Thank you. through these tools that you're investing in.

Kerri Gallagher: Oh my gosh, great question. So we're always going to be at the top industry events that are going on. So that's first and foremost, if you want to see us face to face, you can always reach out to our marketing and communications team that's led by Jessica Davis and David Finn.

And just to understand what we do and what we offer. Our classic website and LinkedIn. We have a massive presence on LinkedIn. There are constantly webinars that we are focused on for educating, not only just some of the individuals in healthcare IT that are working. A lot of analysts find our webinars really thought provoking and educational, but it also gives anybody that would like to partner with us insight as to what we do from an enterprise As well as clinical and operational. So those would probably be the key places. See us in person at all the major events. And then of course our LinkedIn and our website as well. Firsthealthadvisory. com.

If you were just having their first conversation with somebody. What's the discussion you want to have with them?

Kerri Gallagher: I want to hear what they need help with. Where do you feel like your gaps are? Where do you feel like. You've got some key initiatives that you need to meet from a cyber security standpoint, and you don't know where to start.

That's where we want to come in. When you don't know where to start, bring us in, and we can help at least get a plan in place together, help you prioritize, and that would be our goal. We want to hear where your gaps are. And how we can get you forward and meet some of those KPIs. Everyone's under the gun.

We get that. Everyone's got metrics to meet. You've got stakeholders to report to. We want to be by you in those boardrooms, making sure that you have what you need to feel confident to present and that we've got your back.

Kerri Gallagher: Thank you, Bill. Appreciate it.

Bill Russell: Thanks for listening . If you found value, share it with a peer. It's a great chance to discuss and in some cases start a mentoring relationship. One way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave us a rating. it if you could do that. Thanks for listening. That's all for now..