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Imagine a healthcare system where technology works seamlessly in the background, keeping your data secure, your teams connected, and your patients at the center of care. Visit This Week Health slash Google Chrome OS to learn more. Today we're talking about health systems ramping up IT hiring, and I'm joined by Sarah Richardson, President of Community Development. Sarah, thank you for being here. Happy Friday, Kate. Happy Friday. Are you excited for the Super Bowl? Yeah. My goodness, it's the Chiefs again, which there's so much grief that comes with that statement. I'm married to a legitimate Chiefs fan for over 20 years.

I get it. People are tired of seeing them, but you can't be that lucky and go five times. Just saying Absolutely. I'm going to be at an indoor water park with my kids, so I'm excited about that. But watching my team's former running back have the season of his life, that's Saquon Barkley, not excited about it, but, happy for him.

Children's Mercy Kansas City is transitioning to Epic and adopting a hybrid cloud approach. Necessitating roles like cloud engineers and informaticists. And Sanford Health plans to expand teams in AI, product management, patient facing digital tools, emphasizing the need for modern technology mindsets.

And it also emphasized the need for more people, good people, and this is so timely because staffing was a huge topic of conversation during our most recent 229 summit in Phoenix. And in fact, CIOs from two of these organizations, Amy Feaster from Colorado Children's and Brad Reimer of Sanford Health were in attendance.

So I imagine you have some thoughts on this since you moderated the panel. I do. But what I love about the conversation while we were in there is the things that they have been able to do to create truly a high performing team. And they have said we are high performing doesn't start like that.

Always. You have put a ton of investment of time and energy into your teams. But the thing about it is geography is going to be a big play in that. We heard other CIOs share that it. When someone's getting to that 10 year mark of clinical expertise, especially as an epic analyst, they are being poached or as informaticists, they're being poached for remote work, which is always something to have to consider.

So if you are a healthcare CIO, it's. Of critical importance that constant investment in I. T. Talent to drive digital transformation, whether it's emerging technologies and modernizing infrastructure, being able to tie it back to patient care, operational efficiency and positioning the organization for future success.

I'm a fan of either on site or hybrid work, primarily, especially when you are doing care delivery, and it gives you such an opportunity to be more connected or most connected. To the mission of your organization. So if you're going to think about recruiting and retaining top IT talent in health care. It demands domain expertise.

It demands regulatory knowledge and security awareness. It makes hiring more complex and being able to attract talent with competition from big tech and some of the AI companies and startups and partners for that matter. How do you position yourself to be attractive as an employer? It's beyond salary, by the way.

You've got to have a career pathway. You have to have training programs. You have to have leadership development. You also need to be asking people where they want to be in that continuum because not everybody wants to move to the next level. Not everybody wants to have people reporting to them. So how do you create Pathways for improved status in the organization, more expertise within a certain domain, and one that is financially tied to those components, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to become the boss in the organization.

And so many roles allow remote work. How do you balance on site needs? EHR teams, potentially the hands on infrastructure teams. With remote flexibility. One of the hardest conversations is who needs to come into the office and who doesn't. Yeah, we really see that come up so much. And like what you said before about, how this is so much more complex in healthcare.

And it is. are really specific areas of expertise that you have to know and know well. Things like clinical decision support. Automation and billing operations and, how AI can be leveraged there. Understanding personalized patient engagement, understanding the ethical considerations and bias in AI, and the need to balance AI's potential with regulatory and security risks.

This is really Important.

And all of this needs to be done with patient care in mind. So it really does make this a unique situation for CIOs and others who are trying to hire. It does. And there have been so many conversations this year alone with CXOs in our community and beyond about their EHRs. Even today, you've got new implementations, you've got optimization, and then you've got these mergers and these acquisitions which are happening more and more.

So many places are still struggling with their post EHR implementation. So what are the best practices for fine tuning, for workflow efficiency, clinical adoption? All of the automations and all of the new tech that's available help with so many aspects of the environment that is your EHR. You still have interoperability and data integration.

You still have got to be able to have legacy systems, app rationalization. What are you going to archive? What are you going to get? How are you complying with Tefco regulations that end user buy in that training, that whole operational and organizational change management aspect so that clinicians, nursing, operational teams are understanding what these transitions mean, what these optimizations mean, how we're not burning them out and how Really having that tie into vendor contracting selection, cost management, supply chain.

They are high cost contracts. These are long contracts. How do we make smarter partner decisions when we're either switching or upgrading our core systems and the ancillary components that go along with them? This is really interesting, because I don't know if you can list all of these things on a job advertisement, it's just so nuanced.

And there's so much when you talk about cloud and, understanding hybrid and multi cloud environments and compliance risks, scalability. And even getting into disaster recovery, business continuity, this type of understanding is so important. And when I am speaking with a CIO and asking them about what they're looking for in a candidate, it's interesting to me that what I hear most is somebody , who wants to learn, who wants to absorb the information.

And that's just huge, right? Because there is so much to absorb. It changes all of the time. And the amount of information coming at us every single day is huge. mind boggling, truly. You do, to your point, exactly want those people on your team. When you say, Hey, you know what? There's a new California Consumer Privacy Act.

How is that going to affect what we need to do with data? Is it the start of many? And is it going to be following from GDPR as an example? And you want the person who says, I'll figure it out. Let me go do some research. Let me talk to our partners. Let me talk to legal, et cetera. You want those people who are passionately curious to help you solve some of these challenges.

When you've got colleagues who don't want to learn that they're very happy with status quo, you're not going to have digital transformation. You're not going to operationally disrupt your organization in a way that's introducing new technologies or digital tools because It's going to be like having to pull it through the mud and your own org back to the change management user adoptions.

What are the best strategies for getting buy in from clinical financial operational teams? You got to also have it on the technology team. So you may need to upskill or re align some of the responsibilities of your team because keeping the lights on is important. And it may not be the same team that is going to be innovating and bringing these new ideas forward.

They don't have to be mutually exclusive, but there may be some bifurcation of responsibility that you're going to have a tight budget. How are you going to prove the financial clinical impact of these efforts? And how are you keeping the organization secure? Everybody we talked to CISO, CMIO, CIO, down the line CTOs.

They're talking about cyber security and third party risk management and how the vendor security, privacy, compliance and data sharing policies have to present have to prevent attacks against their systems. We have that conversation in Boston about supply chain and it synergies and how digital transformation can.

Improve the bottom line. We just had those conversations in Boston with one of our partners and every CIO has it top of mind and is thinking about it and new and different ways because that constant reinvention of yourself and your career also lends itself to that constant reinvention of your health system and what needs to be true to stay competitive with so many factors affecting it every single day.

It almost reminds me of the movie Mary Poppins, when the kids are making the list of what they want in a nanny. It's wait who's going to be able to do all this? And yet, CISOs are finding people, but they're developing those people. And that's just becoming more and more important. It's not just understanding automation and these new digital tools, but understanding how they can be implemented without disrupting the workflows, without turning people's lives upside down.

It's not a small job. There's a reason that we talked about it so much during the summit and it is. Certainly a passion of both of ours and something that we're going to be talking about for quite a while. Yes.

Great discussion. Don't forget to share this podcast with a friend or colleague. Use it as a foundation for daily or weekly discussions on the topics that are relevant to you in the industry. They can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Sarah, thank you for joining me. Happy Superbowl. Thank you.

And thanks to everyone for listening. That's a wrap.