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And we have CIOs. We have CMIOs. We have clinical informatics. We have data scientists who I've tapped on the shoulder and asked them if they would essentially interview people within their networks about topics that are a little closer to what you're doing on a daily basis. And we're excited about airing those channels again. Four new channels.

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David Bensema: Good to be here. Good to see you both.

Bill Russell: I guess the news of the year has to be Sarah Richardson took on a new role as CIO, is that one of the biggest news events of the year?

So that's a, I'm always grateful to my husband for just kind of go along with the show most of the time.

Bill Russell: I was reviewing some of the clips from when I interviewed you earlier for another show we did before our end of the year show. And it was interesting, at the time you were right in the midst of meeting the entire team, the entire IT team, and you committed to having a one-on-one with everybody on your team. In a pandemic world that had to be very different than what you had done at previous organizations I would imagine.

And also contractors who are with us for long periods of time. And I commit to it at least once a year with everybody. So we'll start that cycle in about what 31 days or so.

Bill Russell: Are you starting to meet them in person now or are still remote?

Sarah Richardson: I would like to believe it's probably close to 85% of the team I have met in person because we still have two primary hubs.

Bill Russell: Your VP team number of times zones?

Sarah Richardson: Four. Like, me, but Arizona sometimes is different, but then I'm the one that gets the short end of the stick because I'm on Pacific time. They're mostly Eastern and Central so if I don't want to schedule them past 4:00pm, ideally, especially noon on Fridaysto give everybody a little wiggle room. My day starts at 6:00am.

Does it feel like we're making progress with regard to the pandemic? In the beginning of this year, I was looking at some of the shows and we were talking about, we feel like by the end of this year, we'll be stepping out of the pandemic and now we have new variants and other things.

I'm curious, just give us a little of your thoughts on that.

The convertible individuals we've converted. The hard liners are where they are. But the vaccines make a difference. The place where I see the progress is as we talk about Omicron we already are talking about how does the disease act in vaccinated individuals versus unvaccinated individuals who are already gathering data and disseminating that data?

So we're not light years, but months ahead of where we were the last time we had to deal with the original, the Alpha and the Delta variants. We're light years almost ahead but we're months ahead in our ability to flip and create new products and have disease modifying regimens out there.

That was one of the lessons that people really felt like we learned. But the reality is there's enough stories as we go through this year of Amazon moving their Amazon care program forward. Signing the parent company for Peloton as a user of Amazon care. And then towards the end of the year, they signed another, big name as well.

When you think about what big tech's doing, when you think about what these outsiders are doing, is that one of the stories for this year, do you think?

That's been kind of remarkable to me. Showing that in outside the traditional healthcare realm organization can actually have success. But I like how they've done it, because it's seems to have been a very thoughtful, pragmatic approach to it.

Bill Russell: It really is interesting best buy. We talked about it last year Best Buy the healthcare company.

Sarah Richardson: Oh, absolutely. So many you think about Best Buy getting into the mix. Any of the brands that you trust.

You go to their websites. I teach this stuff for CHIME. We want to make healthcare the easy button. So if you're already remember you, I think bill it was you and Drex that had the podcast about Amazon have handled the vaccinations across the country because you trust certain things to come into your home and your houses.

And if, if that alone happens at Dollar General, that, that could be a big movement. As I'm looking at this, you brought up the episode I did with Drex and we've talked about if Amazon had handled vaccine distribution, it would have gone much better. Because we were trying to coordinate states and new websites and new scheduling things and all this other stuff.

I think. It feels to me like we develop some new muscles in healthcare, like how to work with the state better, how to work with entities better. I think for me that feels like it was one of the stories of this year that we got better at partnering than maybe we've been in the past. David do you think that's true?

Bill Russell: I'm going to hit a couple more stories real quick, and then I'm just going to, to take the reins off. You guys can talk about whatever you want. Kaufman hall came out mid year and talked about the impact of doing the shutdown of non-essential surgeries and what that did to the financials of health systems.

And about 30 days where they were without their EHR and had to go on diversion for much of that time. As I look at the rest of the year, we had some interesting things. The vaccine credential initiative came out as we came to the end of the year, and people wanted to know, is it safe to be coming back together?

Of those I think 4,200 or something to that effect people that they tested, there was only three positives. Two ended up being false positives and one actual positive from that event. And I didn't hear of anyone going away from that event. HIMSS came back together this year. The CHIME fall forum happened this year.

Bill Russell: As I think about that, Sarah, the question is who's going to build the experiences and I'm sure you've seen this study, this trusts survey that they do and the the nurses, I think are the most trusted.

Is that the player that's going to build the experiences that we as a customer finally go yeah healthcare is starting to feel like it's moving into the 21st century.

Bill Russell: David, do you wanna weigh in on this?

But I think, the one that's been most interesting to me, again, getting back to my Best Buy I guess, obsession at this point, is Best Buys ability to create this in-home relationship and social work relationship and call center support for emergencies and folks are really comfortable with that.

Thought we could be good at home care. Well, it's nice to capture that loyalty, but we're not really great at that because you got to maintain that workforce in a geographic dispersion. And it's hard to maintain the control that at least acute care hospitals that I know of like to have. So we have to think about how do we collaborate?

So they're becoming a different company. You have Providence and all those players launching Truveta. Providence, Ascension, there's an article about Ascension Ventures and the fact that they're pretty much a massive VC firm. They have invested in a lot of different companies and they're in a lot of different businesses serving healthcare.

I mean, it seems like everybody's trying to get into a different business than the, than the one they're in. Is that just the nature of where we're at today, that you have to diversify?

Sarah Richardson: I'd like to look at it as a space of more of the on demand activity. And I literally say that because. There are certain times when you want and need to go to the physician, like not get your annual physical on in theory, some of your preventative care, just doing a video visit.

They wanted like five things that parents could just literally do a video visit form. One of them was pink eye. When you're a parent, if your kid has pink eye, you don't want to drag the whole brood in because everyone's going to get sick or kind of thing. You got three kids at home and one sick.

You don't want to go to the doctor, especially when you know what's wrong with them. So the convenience factor back to the, the human approach. If it's an on demand capability for that percentage of all of us that want to be able to do then absolutely. My father-in-law's 93. He hates telemedicine as he should at his age with all of this, all of the different things he has going on.

Because every time I do telehealth, I'm not going back to the same doc. It's kind of a different kind of deal. And maybe that's my age, right. So I'm only. I actually I'm 54 now, I got to think about that these days. I'm 54. So maybe I should have that recurring primary care, Doctor,Bensema is going to shake his head here in a minute and tell me I should have that ongoing relationship.

Bill Russell: It requires policy change. It requires funding. And so just for clarity, is that Medicaid and commercial, because I mean, clearly

David Bensema: I stayed in Kentucky at the parody laws for all payers.

Bill Russell: All payer. But not CMS?

David Bensema: They cannot do it through medicare. Yeah. So getting Medicare to sustain that would help.

He doesn't want to come in out of his business or have to figure out what to do with his son. So telehealth is great thing for those groups. So the United healthcare is the Anthems, the Humana being on a parody with in office visits has been a huge boon in Kentucky.

Sarah Richardson: I'm going to go with two brief items. The first one is paying attention to the future workforce. And literally, like we learned all these adaptations throughout the first phase is what I will say of the pandemic to wait to the endemic state.

Bill Russell: Wow, fantastic. I'm glad I'm not following that. David?

David Bensema: Actually, Sarah has set me up for one of my two, which is ambient technologies. Ambient listening technoligies. Because how are we going to get the nurse to be able to hold the hand? How're you going to get the position to maintain eye contact with the patient?

And I think we're back there again, just because of how rapidly we had to roll things out. And I think we've got to get back to where least, or within striking distance or vis visual distance of those nefarious actors. They're always going to be ahead of us in this race. If we think that we can get ahead of them, we're delusional.

Bill Russell: Well, the old adage is if you're the smartest person in the room, find a different room. So clearly I'm in the right room. With the other group, what I said was automation is going to be key.

And if you're not a good manager, not a good executive, you're struggling to keep and build that culture. As a result I think there's going to be a call for much more automation. We also have the nursing shortage, which is going to be close to 500,000 down. And it's not like in 10 years, they're like saying in two years we're going to be half a million nurses short.

Sarah Richardson: I love it.

David Bensema: You're in mental health already. So you're, you're not far off,

Even just pain management in general. And what VR can do for people that have pain management. It's pretty incredible. You look at the research it's out there today.

Bill Russell: So another year is in the books. I want to thank you guys for being advisors and people from time to time will come up to me and say, it's amazing how far that you've gotten in this thing.