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Welcome to this week Health Community. 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. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 fall conferences of CHIME in San Antonio and HLTH in Las Vegas, and we want to thank our show sponsors who are. In our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders and they are Olive, Rubrik, Trellix, Medigate, and F5. Check them out at this weekhealth.com and here we go.

Here we are interviews in action at the Chime fall forum and we are here with Matt McVey. With National Children's. Yep. And look forward to conversation. First time we've met.

It is, by the way, people think I know everybody in the industry and then I get to meet someone for the first time.

One more on that list. I'm, I'm getting closer to everybody.

I'm excited so since it's our first time meeting, tell us a little bit about National Children's.

Yeah, certainly. So, Children's National DC I say backwards, DC based Maryland, Virginia region as well. So entire dnb standard alone pediatric. with a heavy focus on both community care and the district, but then also the surrounding regions with pretty much every specialist and subspecialty you might imagine in pediatrics.

Well, how many children's hospitals are there in that area?

You know, the closest children's hospital that we, you know, standalone hospitals up in Philadelphia. Chop. We kind of see ourselves in that kind of grouping. Top five US News, World Report, Children's Hospital. There are other children's hospitals within the systems around us, so Inova over in Virginia and Hopkins as a smaller facility in dc. But we're the, we're the peer play standalone children's hospital.

what's top of mind? What are your priorities coming in this year? What are you looking at?

You know, sometimes it feels like there's way too many priorities, but yes, focusing, focusing in a bit. Certainly we are in like a lot of organizations in the midst of our cloud journey. Consolidating out of six different data centers into a private cloud, we call it, with Equinix kind of our, our new data center footprint and then making that extensible into any number of cloud providers with

How did you get into six data centers?

It's a great question. Right? So sprawl right within our organization and some acquisition. So we acquired a smaller hospital called Hospital for Sick Children's. It's like a skilled nursing facility hospital. They had. So it's like when you acquire, you kind of multiply. But we also thought we needed multiple locations and you just don't anymore. So we're really trying to consolidate in and be cloud ready.

what does a cloud journey look like for a children's hospital?

Yeah, so, you know, certainly it starts with our core systems where a large server client and Oracle, e r p client, those systems have already been hosted for a long time. So our cloud journey really looks like the, you know, four or 500 other systems that we have our research data sets and really our, our entry in the cloud was there.

So we put in a high performance computing. Cluster for genetic research so we could scale up. We cooked it into aws and we've been doing that for really the last four years now. It's really getting our core computing into the cloud.

You said Equinix data center? Equinix data center, and then you said aws. Yep. So you're clearly going in a multi-cloud direction,

multi-cloud direction. With the Equinex footprint being our, you know how we like to think about it as our private cloud or our still kind of on ground, if you will managed and. The VMware environment, but we are putting in the foundation to be able to scale up on demand and really into aws, Azure, and then even some Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

AWS Azure. Yeah. it's interesting because you're leveraging the best that each of the clouds has to offer. Yeah. How are you able to do that and not end up with something that's uncontrollable?

I guess? It's a great question. Right. And I think you are even seeing some of the cloud providers say, How do we work more collaboratively? Right. And you saw Oracle's announcement working with Azure for. Certainly it's complicated and we've really had to rethink our staffing and our, our expertise and we're continuing to grow our, you know, what we call our cloud center of excellence with experts that kind of make sure we're managing it.

But a lot of it comes down to, you know, traditional you know, security driven network routing, understanding where our data. And we're really kind on the front end of it. So we're, you know, we may at some point in our journey say, You know what, We're gonna go with kind of a single or more agnostic cloud provider, but right now we're just, we're staying general.

Yeah. And when you do something like that, it's I don't wanna talk vendors specifically, but this is where VMware really comes and shines. Absolutely. Right? Because you have that abstraction layer between Absolutely. The multiple clouds. Yeah. But from a data. Is it a little different on the data side?

Yeah, so on the data side, we're actually in the midst of, so one of our other big initiatives right now is to figure out what our long term data strategy is and where we can best aggregate. So we've, we've aggregated significant amounts of clinical data out of our Cerner EHR and others in, in the region.

And now it's really the how do we mix clinical and financial data together. So we're really actually on the front end of defining our data. We think that will be in the cloud as well. And perhaps with a strong you know, partner that can kind of help us pull this together and then start feeding out these other systems, organization like ours.

we've landed with dozens of different SAS based data platform. Right. And so we're really thinking about how do we allow to meet the business needs that drove those decisions. But how do we start aggregating and getting this into a common repository?

So you guys are a research institution as well? We are. That's like a whole nother

Yeah. It is a

whole nother deal as well. Yes. Plus you get, you get funding. Yes. And then that can spin up its own right thing.

Yeah. So we're kind of in the, in the top 10 of grant funding from the NIH for pediatric hospitals, Organiz. And really set out on a mission. And over the last couple years have, have actually opened up a research innovation campus.

So we've actually found the model of like UCF and others. We built a research specific campus. It's at the former Walter Reed site down in downtown dc Very historical. It was, it was the old Army Pathology Hospital, Georgia Avenue. And working with the State Department, we got that parcel of.

And now we're bringing in not only children's researchers there, but we have an innovation lab with Johnson and Johnson. We've got Virginia Tech. We've got a bunch of parties that are coming together in this kind of research ecosystem, but our primary focus on that campus, genetic medicine research, pulling in our rare disease, and then even our, our translating that into our clinical care delivery for genetics as well, kind of all on one.

Do you do children's oncology as well, or? We do, We do. So talk about the patient experience. This is one of those things. Yeah. I'm, I'm not as familiar with in the children's side. I, I've examined it very closely on the IDN side, but how do you approach the experience?

It's a great question because, because it comes with its own set of challenges and some of those have been historical. Challenges with even the traditional patient portal.

So you guys just deal with the sickest of the sick

We deal with the sickest sick, but we also have a fairly large and robust you know, well care as well. We've, we do. Okay. Lots of pediatrics, pediatricians in the region. So we kind of deal with the whole spectrum.

And then with acquired HSC entity, we actually have home care and skilled nursing for, for children as well. Which is kind of a whole new idea as well as a health plan for, for children. So we're kind of running the whole health system gamut. But the digital experience for pediatrics is different because it has to involve the whole.

Right. So we think about things like how do we create family centered rounding? So one of our innovations was to be able to, you know, kind of set a rounding list automatically, text families, Here's when we're gonna get to your child for rounding. So the whole family unit can be there. And then to kind of re-sequence that if things get out of auto, auto re-sequence, that if things get out of order, if you will, on the round.

So, so the whole family can be there physically or virtually

physically. Of course during the pandemic we started doing virtual rounds. We could bring in, cause we had to limit kind of our onsite presence. We started doing virtual rounds as well with families because you usually have, you know, certainly a parent, guardian, mom, dad, and any other family members that, you know, wanna be a part of that experience.

But we also have to think about even your core, you know, constructs around digital. How do we. Who are we engaging, right? Because there's a point at, at which you're actually engaging our adolescents directly versus just parents and thinking through those dynamics. And it varies by state and it varies by state on what you can share with whom. And it's, it's a real complex issue.

📍 📍 All right. We'll get back to our show in just a minute. We have a webinar coming up on December 7th, and I'm looking forward to that webinar. It is on how to modernize the data platform within healthcare, the modern data platform within healthcare. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation. We just recorded five pre episodes for that. And so they're gonna air on Tuesday and Thursdays leading up to the episode. And we have great conversation about the different aspects, different use cases around the modern data platform and how agility becomes so key and data quality and all those things. So great conversation. Looking forward to that. Wednesday, December 7th at one o'clock. Love to have you join us. We're gonna have health system leaders from Memorial Care and others. CDW is going to have some of their experts on this show as well. So check that out. You can go to our website thisweekhealth.com, top right hand corner. You'll see the upcoming webinars. Love to have you be a part of it. If you have a question coming into it, one of the things we do is we collect the questions in the signup form because we want to make sure that we incorporate that into the discussion. So hope to see you there. Now, back to the show.

📍 📍 It is really, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm, I'm starting to, I'm starting to brainstorm in terms of. For care for children, primarily in probably 70%, if not 80 or more percent of the cases you're dealing with the mom who is quarterbacking the care. Yeah.

So your digital engagement is with primarily the mom and the family primarily. Yeah. And the outreach. The outreach though, you're not really, you're not worried about creating a consumer experience to bring them in. Where an IDN would be, you're really your referrals take care of that.

Well, so what's interesting is there, for the vast majority of kind of our highest end Marques services, where we pediatric heart s for example, you know, we're competing maybe out of region with. You know, high end children's hospitals. So it isn't quite the same. We're not trying to capture but then it's just how do we create experience?

But I'll tell you, a lot of, you know, a lot of where the competition is globally, right? So we, for example, put in a remote second opinions portal built on Salesforce to try and be accessible to families that wanted a another opinion, and then, and use that as an attractor for you know, kind of outer region, kind of out direct market share.

You know, patients and then There's still a maybe 80% of the commodity and volume of the commodity business where we are kind of competitive with, you know, other options in the region and providing things like telemedicine on demand and, you know better virtuals experience or things we're thinking about to be able to capture that market.

I love, in the last minute, I want you to talk to me about your digital. Foundation, So your digital front door, if you will, which is, Yeah, term I hate, but I'll still go with the,

Well, I, I can't think of a better term. I can't either keep thinking about this. We keep using it. But you know, right now, in fact, it's one of our biggest initiatives right now is to build out the CRM capability. So we're a Salesforce customer, building out that capability. And then we're really at a nearing a decision point on where take this collection of, you know, good applications that we've acquired over the last couple years. A lot of it pandemic driven. And where do we visually kind of pull those things together in the, in the front door concept?

Do we build that on Salesforce? Do we build that ourselves? Do we do we use our core HR capabilities, our, our vendor's capabilities? And so we're really at that decision point to make that decision. But that's something we expect to have rolled out by next, you know, middle of next. Because we're, we've got the capabilities, but a lot of, we're still tying together the solutions and that seamless experience,

we will have to stay connected cause I'm curious to see how this progresses.

Absolutely.

Should be fine. Yeah. Matt, thank you for your time. 📍 Appreciate it.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it is Phenomen. That they have taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community, which is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors one more time, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. They are Olive, Rubrik, 📍 trx, Mitigate, and F5. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.