January 22: Today on the Conference channel, it’s an Interview in Action with Lindsey Jarrell, Chief Executive Officer at Healthlink Advisors. They discuss the major challenges and trends in healthcare for 2025. What exciting advancements can we expect in the realm of enterprise imaging? How can health systems get the most out of their Epic EHR investment? Lindsey highlights the need for an Epic-first mentality and cross-departmental integration. What does it take to ensure effective business continuity in the face of increasing cyber threats? Lindsey shares HealthLink Advisors' commitment to mission-driven consulting and organic growth, detailing their unique approach to client relationships. The discussion also explores how AI could revolutionize imaging and address shortages in radiology. How is the industry shifting to leverage these new technologies? Listen in for valuable insights to help navigate the ever-evolving healthcare landscape.
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Welcome to This Week Health. 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.
Now, onto our interview
right, here we are, another interview in action. And today I'm joined by Lindsey Gerald with HealthLink Advisors. Lindsey, welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.
Well, I'm looking forward to this conversation. This is you guys are working with a lot of health systems today on just a significant amount of challenges they are facing.
ou guys are focusing on. For:yeah you know, at high level, I'll start there, like a, kind of the, who we are, right? I look, we work in provider organizations across the country. We're really focused in that leveraging technology and improving process.
We are very kind of mission minded, like, we're in it for the patients. We're in it for the community. We're in it for the team members at the health care system. I got into health care for very personal reasons. So we bring kind of that passion in our culture to wanting to improve health care and really focus in on that area.
So. We do the traditional advisory consulting work strategic planning and interim leadership, a lot of program management. But when we think about 25 and what we learned in 24, our focus is going to be in a few areas, not that we're not going to do those other things, we'll always continue to do what we do well.
We see enterprise imaging as a big growth area something that we had a lot of work in the last two years. We think there's a lot more work there both in efficiency and cost and replatforming. Getting the most out of your EPIC investment totally. We're going to continue to spend time there.
We do a lot of upfront planning. We used to get asked the question, I want a new EHR, help me select the right EHR. Now we get called and we, the question we get is, help me figure out if I can afford EPIC When can I get it approved? How much is it going to cost over 10 years? And so we do a lot of that work, but getting the most out of your epic investment and then business continuity.
So cyber attacks, ransomware down six, eight week downtimes. There is a renewed focus on, and I can't help, but smile a little bit, right. On back to how do we operate at downtimes. Well, we've been so stable across the industry for so long, we've lost our way with that. So true business and clinically led business continuity planning, we've got to teach ourselves how to do that in this industry again.
And so we're doing a lot of work in that area. So imaging, business continuity, getting the most out of your Epic investment, I think those are three big focus areas for us next year. I'm
going to come back to those three. Give me the origin story for HealthLink Advisors then.
I've been in and out of the provider side a couple of times and before co founding HealthLink Advisors with Chris Jenkins let's see, we're coming up on nine years, which seems hard to believe.
was a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers running the hospital revenue cycle business and a big piece of the HIT business. And I spent about five years at PwC, learned a ton. And one of the things I learned, though, was that kind of consulting model really just, I wasn't wired for it. I more like the boutique, get really close to the clients sometimes we give away work, sometimes we redo work, right?
You want to be so close to a client that you do those things without a second thought, because life happens, right? And, While I'm very thankful for my time at PWC I left there and literally started HealthLink Advisors with no clients and no paycheck. And Chris and I were looking at each other at times thinking we were crazy, but it worked, right?
It totally worked and we've grown it organically. We have no outside money. We have no debt. We've got a team of a hundred folks who are just passionate about doing the right thing. And, that's, it just, We wake up every day with a a little bit of kick in our step and go to work because we love what we do.
And that's a really good fit for us.
it's a relationship business. I talk to people about they get offended from time to time. I'll use the term vendor and they'll say, we're not vendors. We're partners. I'm like no, no, no. Partners are earned. Vendors sell stuff.
Partners, that's an earned position. And that's the relationship. It's somebody, when I have a problem, I'll pick up the phone and call and say, Hey I need somebody to work through this with it. I assume you get, get a fair number of those kinds of phone calls.
we track everything kind of meticulously.
It's the way we're wired. When we look over the last two years and see where we get a new client 95 percent of every new client we come to us is a client referral. We don't get it through the website. We don't get it through ads. We view conferences and things we do like that. as branding campaigns to kind of stay out in front of people so they can read our name, but we get business when one CIO calls another and says you need to work with these folks.
Yeah, that's that's a beautiful thing because that's relationship centered, right? Just to your point.
All right, so three things. Imaging. Get the most out of your EHR investment. And Business continuity. We're going to start with the third.
Business continuity. This has been an interesting year. So, we had I guess we had Ascension this year. We had Change Healthcare this year. We had we had CrowdStrike this year. I think scripts was one of the earliest large systems that took a, an extended outage, but clearly not, the last one.
But there's been a lot of this it's interesting. Has this finally gotten the. I don't have to explain it to my board anymore, they've read enough articles, they understand the ramifications, and it's just a matter of, okay, how do we approach this prudently and effectively to make sure that we are solving the right problem?
think so. I can tell you we're working at two health systems right now doing this. Both are bigger much bigger than 15 hospitals. In that case, both of the top execs knew a top exec at Ascension and had a conversation, came away from that conversation and was scared to death and said, we've got to do something.
In other places, the board is more involved. It says, what are you doing about business continuity? So it's definitely changed the conversation at a lot of these places. And the justification. While it is patient centered, COVID, interestingly enough, taught health system revenue streams.
enough to where they now believe the business case for ransomware. What do I mean by that? When you cancel electives, profitable revenue stops. Right. And you have to have profitable revenue to make up for Medicare, right? Or to make up for Medicaid. And so when you get hit with ransomware and you start canceling electives across the health system, that can be 5 or 10 million a day in revenue.
That pays for your consulting engagement right there. And that's per day. So per weekday, you know, so it's, it's really changed the conversation and we believe there's a lot of good opportunity there to really make it business and clinically led.
I was in Nashville when they announced the Ascension, when that was going down, and I was sitting with somebody and they said, buy HCA stock.
And I was like, Why? They're like, because all those Ascension hospitals overlap with HCA and they're all on diversion and it's all going to HCA. And they were right. I mean, I didn't buy the stock, but they were right. That's, there was a, an awful lot of revenue that just flew, just absolutely just went outside of that health system for that period of time.
Let's talk about maximizing the, the Epic investment or the EHR investment in general. This is a significant investment. and I think even EPIC more and more is eyeing, how do we optimize this significant investment and make it more efficient? What are some of the ways that people are identifying and you and moving the needle in terms of really leveraging that investment for, I don't know, for a return, but also for better quality, better results just across the board.
Yeah, a couple of things come to mind that we see and that's once you have EPIC installed, and I'll just, talk about EPIC because that's where we see the opportunity, is an EPIC first mentality. Now that can mean sacrifices and really what I'm saying there is if you're going to expand or you need a new system or you need a department covered, the first question is, can EPIC do that for me?
And, while I realize sometimes that It's kind of the hair on the back of our neck stood up because I've sat in the CIO role and I'm like, we can't give business, the same business to the same people all the time. That's a monopoly, right? I would think these things in my head when I would see that.
But the truth is. It works better and it's integrated and we can report better on it. Now it might not have the latest and greatest functionality but the story goes, and I believe it because I've seen it, if Epic chooses to do it, they're going to do a good job at it. And so, I think an Epic first mentality is one.
And the other thing I'll mention is putting the resources on the team doesn't necessarily mean IT to understand what Epic's capable of. And ensure everyone is using the platform. That's no different than Workday or ServiceNow. I can't tell you how many ServiceNow customers I've been in that are using a tenth of what ServiceNow can do.
And it's a very expensive application. So the same thing goes with Epic, right? And so that means, What clinical champions do you have? What physician champions? What revenue cycle champions? Who's really getting to know Epic and staying ahead of what they're developing? Epic has this concept of, you know, a BFF, a best friend forever for your account.
We talk to clients and say, you really need that inside your org as well. You need a revenue cycle BFF and a clinical BFF and an IT BFF. And those folks really have to stay ahead of what's coming out. So, Epic's in a very unique position. I don't know that we've ever seen this in healthcare IT today.
And I think it's going to continue strong, for the foreseeable future. So,
Yeah, we do our 229 events and I will open it up. One of the first questions I'll ask is, all right, let's just get this out of the way. Identify your EHR, how many people are on Epic? you know, if there's 15 people in the room, it's 12 at a minimum, it's 12.
Even the smaller systems have headed in that direction. It's really kind of interesting. I want to touch on the last topic, and that is imaging. Imaging is one of those areas that I don't want to say has been neglected. There's been an awful lot of money spent in that area, but it seems to be spent in ways that are very non integrated in terms of its thought.
It's like they treated them as all these different businesses. And is that changing a little bit? Are we starting to think about imaging as a thing within health systems instead of each individual department doing their own thing?
Yeah, I would say based on folks we're talking to and what we're seeing in the market, it's changing, right?
People's eyes are getting open to how much layered technology there is. And that's at the app level, but it's also at the tech level. It's like, how many one off technical design and architecture decisions. did we make inside our walls to get this one radiology workstation to work fast enough for the radiologists, right?
So it's the tech stack, it's the app level it's the VNAs, it's the health system that has four or plus PAC systems. Due to acquisitions, like you don't go acquire a hospital, and the first thing you think about is how do I get them off their PAC system? You just let it ride out, right? Well, now all of that is kind of coming full circle, and they're looking at it and saying, how much am I paying in maintenance agreements?
How much is it costing me to not be completely flexible with all of this imaging data, given where healthcare is going? So we're doing a lot of that assessment work and a lot of the remediation work. And then final point is there are now vendors who can really look at the platform across cardiology and mammo and all the internal and outpatient and really serve a broad health system capability.
So I think a lot of things are happening in the market that's causing people to take a hard look at it.
I mean, digital pathology as well. And then you have the, all theologies, but one of the things that seems to be driving this to me is this. Applying AI to the imaging space.
So we all know, it's one of the areas where it's, the data is very clean. It's an image, right? It's a very clean data set more so than a lot of the other data sets that we use. And it's been proven that AI can be a really great assistant, but then you sit there and you go, all right, we're going to apply this AI and you realize, I mean, we've got to apply this to 36 different systems and you've got to integrate it into 36 different systems.
And so bringing that. Bringing some of these advanced technologies to bear on a non integrated platform is is quite challenging.
Yeah and, and the other thing I'll add to that excellent point is that also going to help with the radiology, radiologist shortage, right? We are talking to clients who literally cannot get coverage.
And so you, sure you're, having Nighthawks, the old Nighthawk term, right, there's a lot of companies out there beyond just that, you're doing offshore reads, you're trying to cover this in any way you can, because the medical system is simply not producing enough radiologists, and that job is a tough job these days, right?
It is a highly productivity measured, Go produce right all day long job for docs. It can be not very satisfying. So a lot of folks are not going into it. So I think I can help there as can a single platform because it's better for people to get into the systems that you need coverage on. So it's just a lot of different dynamics going on.
It's causing people to look at this. some of those AI systems you're mentioning the incidental findings is the AI looks at an image. And the physicians focused in on one part. The incidental findings that come up as AI reads that image, if the payer contract is right, it can also produce some nice income for health systems just with the additional findings.
So that's just one way AI plays into it. There's a lot of good opportunity there.
Well, Lindsey, it sounds like 25 is stacking up to be a fairly
Busy year
in
healthcare. I think so. We're really looking forward to it. We've been blessed with a great year and great clients and fantastic team members.
And so I think I think we're just going to stay really busy in 25. We all are. Well,
fantastic. Hey, I want to thank you. Uh, Thank you for your time. I look forward to catching up with you in the new year.
Yeah. Always great to talk. Thanks a bunch.
Thanks
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