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 Today we have another interview in action from the conferences that just happened down here in Miami and Orlando. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. We wanna thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders, Gordian Dynamics, Quill Health, Tao Site Nuance, Canaan Medical and Current Health.

Check them out at this week, health.com/today. Here we go. All right. Here we are from 5 20 22 and we have some special guests, Jeff Blanding, with Optimum Health it, and we have the one and only Russ Brandel. I'd love to ask you questions about the conference, but we're gonna focus in on a really cool program.

That, that Chime and Optima have partnered on who? I'm gonna start with you, Jeff. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the program and, and what its, uh, objectives are and what you're trying to do. Yeah, absolutely. So we're going out, we're recruiting new entrants into the healthcare IT career. So generally folks who are, you know, maybe zero to five years out of a bachelor's degree, we've got about 20% who are coming through the master's degree and we, we find really high aptitude people, talented people, high potential.

Don't have a long resume, but we think they're gonna do great working with, with health systems, with health plans, with software companies in the healthcare IT space. And we bring them through a three month bootcamp. And, and six weeks of that is in, in concert with Chime. So we've got a six week program that we put them through for digital health professionals where they learn

Really the, the foundation of how healthcare delivery works in the United States and how technology supports that. And then we add onto that with a technical certification. So put them through an industry-wide recognized certification that could be like an Epic, sir. It could be ServiceNow, Salesforce, project management, cybersecurity, these really in demand technologies.

And then at the end of that, they come out. They've got really a really well-rounded skillset with the, the healthcare industry knowledge. I, I'm laughing 'cause as ACIO I'm sitting here going. Okay, can I just have the whole pipeline? Could you just feed that right into my, my words? Exactly. Well, and, and we started the program really kinda like around the onset of covid is when we were designing it.

So prior to the talent environment where, and, and Ru has been talking about the war for talent for years now, but it's never been more acute than right now. So it's, the timing has worked out really well for us, where you can't, you can't find these resources otherwise. So we're really kind of building them from scratch and, and at the end of it, we place them with, with clients.

In a long term contract to hire. So we're really helping them build that team of the future and, and bringing in these really talented people who they don't have a ton of experience, but they're really high potential and, and build that team. That's a beautiful win-win. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I think the part, and, and I'm not saying you're underplaying, but the, the part that I think is so valuable about this many cases, these are not your traditional entry point people into the industry.

You know, we've got the tech equity program here where we're really talking about giving an equal and level playing field. You look at this group of students, I don't know how many cohorts we're into a bunch, and, and even from the very beginning, they don't look like the traditional mix of people. And I mean, every makeup, every background, every ethnicity, you know, every uniqueness of our society today, it is this really crazy, eclectic group.

But then what you also realize is these are people probably that wouldn't have got a, an easy chance into healthcare. And I'm not saying this is easy by any means, but. Now you've got these brilliant people and we've got the best and the brightest people teaching this. I mean, these are the rock stars of healthcare It, uh, in leadership positions.

And usually within one day of teaching 'em during our program, one of them calls me and said, this person, I, I gotta hire 'em. This person, brilliant. I mean, they don't teach 'cause they're looking to hire people, but they just said, these people are amazing. Yeah. They're young people and they're absorbed into this program in such an amazing way.

So . Are you looking for more a applicants at this point or always? Yeah. We, we love referrals. How many, how many applicants do you get a year? So last year we got 10,000 and we hired a hundred. And that's how it works. So we, we hire them as optimum full-time employees, but their first three months, it's, it's paid training basically.

And we, we manage them that way too. So we're, you know, that's, that's kind of their performance is how are you, how do you do in training? And, and there are a few people who, who might not work out and we kind of help them find a, a different career that might be better for them. But that's a great benefit to our clients that we're kind of, we're vetting them where, you know, they're, they're getting all the benefits of that training.

They're getting . The professional skills that, that are gonna help them be really productive on day one. That, that ratio's worse than Harvard. I mean, 10,000 to a hundred. I I wouldn't make it in, I'm sure . Oh no, I've, I've already said I'm glad this program wasn't around when I was there. 'cause that would've instead a chance, that's for sure.

Wow. I, how do we get more in, I mean, when I think number of, I've done probably about 15 CIO interviews and top issue today. I mean, obviously we we're coming through the pandemic, so the other issues are . Going cybersecurity's still number one. Number two, number one. Number two is, is the battle for staffing and the clinical staff shortage, but we're talking specifically about the Health IT staff shortage.

Yeah. I think as I, as CIO I'd love to see that that be, you know, 500 people. Absolutely. And, and we can scale it. And the, the arrangement we have with Chime is, is great. We can scale up to . I'm gonna say unlimited, un, unlimited cohorts. But what I'm we'll see there probably is, is Israel right now. But , so, no, actually we talked about this at the very beginning.

This is, you know, you, you build a vision, you build a direction and, and a thought process. But I said, we're not gonna . And we were building much of this material ahead of time already for other reasons. Yeah. So we're not gonna structure this for two or three cohorts a year. This, it, it is time consuming.

It's intensive, it's a lot of effort. We've gotta build this where this thing is of scale and we, we openly said, well, there's 52 weeks in a year. Takes about six weeks. We started doing the math. We said this has gotta be able to scale with holidays and a few breaks. This has gotta be in that 30 cohorts a year.

Then we start talking about some real numbers. Yeah. Here, if we're putting 30 to 40 to 50 through every cohort, we're talking about 30 a year. You know, now we're talking about kind of a pipeline. And that's what we do with our bootcamp. If you remember, our bootcamp could scale and move forward as well, where we could get people in that kind of program.

And I, I'd say the only thing holding us back from 500 a thousand a year is demand. 'cause there is, uh, . It's a, it's a rethinking of how our clients are hiring and how they're sourcing people. So we, we meet with CIOs all the time who, who say, you know, I, I need these people and I've, I've had a position open for six months, eight months, 10 months.

They have these vacancies because they're, they're, they have these kind of unachievable experience requirements, right? So it's, instead of saying, Hey, I need 10 years of epic experience, or ServiceNow experience, or whatever, say, Hey, let's get someone who's really smart and is gonna be able to get there really fast.

And then instead of having a vacancy for eight months, 10 months, you can have someone today who in eight months is gonna have eight months of experience and, and be really valuable to you. Well, and you know, you've been interviewing people, the, this shortage is not like normal shortage or even bad time shortage.

Yeah. You know, we've talked to people that have an 880 person staff and have 400 vacancies, you know, 400 person staff with 120 vacancies and more. The attrition rate is just crazy right now. E even if this doesn't plug a big part of that hole, it's gonna start plugging some of the holes. Yeah. And, and, and you scale this across all of our membership, which represents a vast majority of the hospitals, big medical groups, if any of them are even close to that level of vacancy.

But we've gotta do a lot more. And, uh, my hope is that these guys get really, really busy , uh, and we can put people full-time on this 'cause we can't right now 'cause of the scale we have. So, as we close this up, I want to talk about the specifics. Early on you talked about . , they, they come out with potential certifications and those kind of things.

Are, do you focus in on clinical informatics? Do you focus in on the technology track? Is there like ACTO track and a clinical informatics track? How, how do you Yeah, so we've got about nine curriculums right now with specific. Technologies are really kind of occupational types of tracks. So we've got E-H-R-E-R-P, cybersecurity project management.

There's, so there, there's a, there's a bunch of them and we're always trying to figure out also what's next. Like where, where are those gaps that we can help fill? Because a lot of these things to add on to Russ's point where we're seeing in the market right now, it's, it's not just . These resources are hard to find or they're expensive because they're scarce supply.

They, they just don't exist in a lot of these areas. And so it's really an opportunity to build them from scratch. So it's kinda that, that buy versus build type thing and, and we're there to help build those resources up in specific technologies and in specific areas. So the technologies are an important part of it, but I think the, a lot of the benefit of what we have, especially with the CHIME partnership, is

They have that technical certification, but they also have just as much the soft skills because all along the three month program, we're developing the professional skills and having executive presence, being able to lead a meeting, being able to take minutes, circulate effective emails, things like that that they don't necessarily get in a, in a bachelor's program.

And then also all the industry context that they get from, from Russ's team and and from the CIOs who teach those classes. So . They come out with the technical certification, which is a little bit newer to them. But I think with those other two pieces, with the, the context and the soft skills, they're a really, really well-rounded package and can be really effective on day one.

And that's what I talk about with you. So the membership chimes membership is phenomenal. Always giving back, always thinking about the next generation. When you talk about this curriculum, what do you do? You go to like the, the community and just say, Hey, we need some people, or do you have a, a support?

Well, we develop all of our own faculty. And meaning we, the faculty on ours have to go through a rigorous process. They have to get vetted. We put 'em in a faculty and training program, they have to get evaluated. It is not a simple process, especially now with our own licensed masters and and doctorate programs.

They actually have to go through a credentialing review process as well. And I jokingly say there's great CIOs chime members out there. There's also great instructors, but there's only a few great chime digital leaders that are also great instructors. And we've all had that in college too, right? We had exactly, we had the

They, they were good professors and they could do research and that kinda stuff. And then we had communicators who we like, gravitate towards and they told stories and we left and said, that was a great, that was a great. But you know, at the part I want to add onto his curriculum part. And, and we were working on this a little bit before, which is why when, when I talked to the folks, uh, at Optimum and they said, we're about to do this, and I said, whoa, you're not gonna believe what we're working on

I think there's a great fit here. What we did was we went out to about 50 very senior leaders, and this was well before the Optum engagement on this and said, if you hired a new person tomorrow, what is everything you'd want them to know about healthcare? And we got massive lists. But what was amazing was half the list was soft skills.

Half of it was life skills. I mean our CFO of chimed as a whole personal finance class for him on how do credit cards work, how do bank accounts work? How do loans work? How does debt work? And what we found from a lot of these students are, no one's ever taught 'em these skills. And matter of fact, they ask for more of it.

Some of 'em get mentored, and then . We've got this huge curriculum of 30 plus classes, plus five, um, soft skill luncheons. They do every week. They have to read a book every week. They have to do cases every week. I couldn't pass the class. I'm just telling you now. It's way too much work, , uh, for me to go through all this.

They get done at the end. They've basically taken what I, I jokingly say about a bachelor's worth of, of the core classes, of what you would've needed, but they come out with it with 30 to 35 of the people you interview top. Yeah. Leaders in the industry is part of their network. Part of our gig on faculty is you cannot be in faculty if you're not there for those students for the rest of their career.

So every one of 'em gives their personal information out their personal email out to every one of those people. And I jokingly say these graduates have a better network than most of the people that work at Optim. It and me. I mean, it's just crazy. These people are personal friends and they become mentors for 'em.

I mean, Sarah Richardson almost adopts some of these kids and guides them later and helps 'em in their careers when they're in these place. 'cause they don't want to call Jeff and Larry and all the people at Optum when they go, I'm not surely sure what's happening at this place and I'm working here.

They call the CIOs and say, help me. And they do. It's amazing. It's, it's an amazing, like I'm, I'm jealous of the opportunities these. These new, new hires are getting that. And one of my favorite things that's, that's happened in the career path journey is we, we had a call set up with John Kravitz at Geisinger and, and I was, you know, I was ready to, to pitch him and convince him why career Path was exactly what he needed for his talent.

Cha challenges. I had my, my slide deck ready to go and, and we get on and. And John says, listen Jeff, I've seen these four people in action. I taught 'em in class. I love 'em. I want to bring 'em onto to my team. So what, what do we need to, can you send me an SOW contract? Let's make this happen. I said, oh, yes, we, we can, we can.

And, and I was seeing him the other, the other night and he was, he was raving about them. So it's, it's really, it's, it's amazing and it's really a great match between helping folks really get to that level where they can get their foot in the door that they might not have had the opportunity to. And exactly the challenges that, that folks are seeing, where can people get more information?

Uh. Both sides from, I wanna put my application in. Where do I go for that? Yeah, so they can go to optimum it.com and there's both pathways. So if you're looking for a, a career in healthcare it, we've got the, the candidate pathway or to, to reach out to us. They can also email me Jeep blending@optimumit.com.

And if people are saying, Hey. I've, I, no one in healthcare right now is saying, Hey, I've got some extra time, but , and that's, but they're saying, Hey, I, I think I wanna start doing this. I have some, I have some I want to get back to, to this next generation. Is there somewhere on Chime that they go to? Well, it's not as much as the resources, as much as a process that's on there.

So Tim Heimer now serves as the pro provost of Chime University, which is actually a, a real thing. It's not just a clever name. It's actually our whole brand and model and structure for that. Or myself. I mean, you know, I give everybody in the world my cell phone. So if, if, if you wanna be part of us or you're part of our chime membership, we now have a lot of professionals out in the industry.

Some of our keynote speakers at our events come back and said, I want to teach at your university. And we're like, well, we'll see if you're good enough. You know, kind of deal. It's part of the fun and that, but, uh, we're glad to help anytime and engage those folks. Yeah. And it's only the highest quality people 'cause I've never taught anything.

Well, we've never seen you teach. That's the thing. There you go. Yes. How about that? I actually, I'm sure you would be great. I actually did teach at a university for a while. All right, Jeff, thank you for your work. Appreciate it. And Russ, as always, fantastic to sit down with you. Thank you. Thanks for all you do.

Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and your experience with the community and it is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors. Who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, Gordian Dynamics, Quill Health, Tao Site Nuance, Canon Medical and Current Health.

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