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Welcome to This Week Health Conference. 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 and events dedicated to leveraging the power of community to propel healthcare forward. Today we have an interview in action from the Fall Conferences on the West Coast.

Here we go.

hi there. I'm here at the fall chime forum here with another interview in action. I'm Reid Steffan, VP and CIO at St. Luke's Health System of Boise, Idaho. And I'm joined today by Amy Teskey of amy teskey.com. So you must love your boss first of all.

Yes. Yes. We have a great relationship. Yes. Very good. Take a second. Maybe just tell us who you are and about Amy teskey.com and.

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So amytesky. com is just, it's a relaunch, it's a rebrand. And it's just taking my 25 years in health tech and running, always on the vendor side, running sales organizations in tech companies and being a GM a time or two and just helping sales leaders today be more successful at rallying their teams and being more motivated and engaged to go out there and do the job, which, It's not very far from a line of sight perspective to supporting the impact of healthcare.

And I think it's really cool, I just don't think it's talked about enough. So I just have ways in which I have a playbook, I have services that I help sales leaders, with their day to day job, and just do it sanely. Which is kind of the hard part. I come to Chime because I interview health leaders.

Just a 10, 20 minutes of what's your expectation of sales. Has there been anybody who's been remarkable in your tenure? And who were they? And then I just like to give them a gift and say, Thanks for being an example. And then put them on a bit of a stage and say, Tell us your story. Like, how did you manage those crazy long sales cycles?

Like, how did you keep your job when you have a quarterly number? Yeah. When you're trying to do all these things. So, that's why I come to CHIME.

And I think trying to find that balance of, I can tell you as someone who gets pitched, want a relationship. And I don't want to feel pressured, and I don't want to be transactional.

But then to your point, there's the sales cycle, and there's targets. So how do you kind of thread that needle?

Anymore, I just say, what's old is new again. And it's relationship. We're past this age of, you want more tech, you want more tech. And so it's relationship, and be a human.

Well, I think you're in a great role, and keep it going.

Perfect, thank you. So you posted something earlier today on LinkedIn that I want to chat about. And it resonated with me, because it spoke to a complex... I have with this idea of digital health and even digital transformation, digital in general. It's such a ubiquitous term. It's this umbrella kind of blanket catch all, which means that it doesn't really mean anything.

And so maybe just for those that don't know what I'm talking about, share kind of the theme of your post and would love then just to kind of talk through what that means, digital health. Yeah.

So the theme of the post was this ubiquitous digital health and what does it mean? And I've literally spent time trying to define it, put it in a box.

Like, is it kind of like an EHR? Is it telemedicine? Is it... And I had come to the conclusion, even just recently, that it's the B2C. It's how the consumers or the patients interact with their healthcare, their own, and then with the health system, together. And that literally was my definition.

And then I come to CHIME yesterday. I'm walking around, I'm looking at all the signage, and I'm like, everything says digital health. It doesn't say health tech. It doesn't say health IT. It says digital health. And I'm like, wait. that was the genesis of the post, which is, okay, so now there's digital health, and is that the umbrella term of everything that we do that includes EHR, and telemedicine, and the B2C, the digital apps, and all the things, and I'm just, so now Going into this post was, okay, that's the name, but I'm, is it?

Is it just kind of an evolution of the term? Yeah.

Of what we do? Maybe. And so, like, my, my thought process is that unless it's driving the desired outcome or outcomes, it's meaningless. And so the only concern I have is when it's used as kind of a catch all, this panacea, and it's just used superficially at a water ski level, then you're really missing driving in.

You use the word interactions, and I think that's right. Because those interactions are then, whether they're good or bad, they inform the relationship. And that relationship then is what I think drives the outcomes that we want. So if you think about the roles you've held, maybe let's double click on that a bit.

And this idea then of digital interactions and how those can then lead to the outcomes that we want, based on the relationships that are formed..

So the interaction, I think it's right before this we talked about its relationship. anD it is, the relationship. And it's so easy to get lost in the tech. And it's missing the force for the trees. It's, it is the interaction between the patient and the provider and the care team and the system.

It's the whole experience of it all. And whatever we call it. Digital health or otherwise, I think you're absolutely right. It's the interaction. Because at the end of the day, it's not B2B or B2C or B2B2C or all the words. It's human to human. It's H2H. And that's what I think, to kind of double click on what you said, interaction.

I think that's what it is. So I think you're right.

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 Well, I love that. And words do matter. So I do, I feel this compulsion to define, like, for an industry, like, what are we going to use so we don't have this tower of... So that we also then create the right expectations. I was talking to a CIO yesterday, and he said something that was interesting.

Talking about hospital at home. So you think about that use case, and then this idea of digital health. And he's like, if you go right to deploying scales or tech in the home, yeah, that's digital health, but like, it's complicated. And it's hard, and the reality is that they may not use the devices, or they may be rural and not have the broadband to take advantage of it.

He's like, if you go upstream, there's probably... There's some lower tech things we can do, like some simple questions to ask, that actually drive the outcomes we want. And so I think that's what resonates in my mind is, are we leading with digital at the expense of actually achieving the outcomes that we want?

So I would just caution to, digital is not the goal. The goal is, to your point, human to human, how do we drive outcomes?

Yeah. Yeah. Whatever we call it. Yeah. So we can call it digital health for now. Yeah. Can we land there? Like, let's just, maybe you can call it what you want

to call it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe.

And as long as we have some kind of crosswalk to, one, help us as practitioners to create a reality of what we're doing, not create unrealistic expectations, for vendors to help them kind of attune their antenna for then the solutions that they should bring forward to really drive the interactions that we need.

So, okay, well we solved it. Digital health, there you go, listen to this again. Is this your first time at QIIME? This is,

no, this is my fourth or fifth time.

Okay, so seasoned veteran. What are you looking to get out of it? What are you hoping to see and hear?

do two things. So one is, I interview help leaders.

It's the 10 20 minutes. It's either I do it here or I find time afterwards. And it's hard to get 20 minutes. Time is precious. It's the one commodity that we only have 24 of, all of us as humans in a day, right? So I take it very seriously, but it's trying to understand the expectation of sales in a completely unbiased way.

Because I don't work for a vendor anymore. I'm not sponsored by one. I don't support one. I'm independent. And it all started just being novice. Because I did it for 25 years. And I'm like, what don't I know anymore? How can I be a novice again? And what do you guys expect? So that when I mentor, and I coach, and I advise on how to grow sales, I can be more knowledgeable about the expectations.

Because if I ran a sales work again... I probably org a little bit differently based off of the last few years talking with you guys. Because I interview about 50 of you a year. And it's not always a CIO. It's, somebody who's been influential in a sales selection process or a software selection process.

And what are the expectations? But my favorite part, other than that, and helping my business and the way I do it and advising, is trying to find the diamonds in the rough. The ones who just are almost at a different level in how they sell. Because it's not really sent, it's helping. It's relationship.

And they probably wouldn't even articulate it that way. They don't know why they're so good. They're just really helping people and wanting to help people. That's what makes them good. So how do we take that message and level it up?

Well, I love that spirit of curiosity. I love kind of this unlearning process that you described.

So, Amy, thank you for the time. I do have an ask, I just had this thought. So your LinkedIn post, so I would encourage listeners, look for Amy Taski on LinkedIn. Yep. Eske, T-E-S-K-E. You got it.

A-M-I-E-T-E-S-K-E.

Perfect. And the post about digital health. Like respond to it? Yeah. Because again, two people aren't gonna solve this, but I think a robust dialogue of the community absolutely can help us kind of shape how we think about it.

Love it. Okay. Thanks Rick. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Yeah, wonderful.

Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and experience with the community and we greatly appreciate it. We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

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