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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.

Okay. Hi everyone. We are at Sean 12 Forum with another interview in action. My name is Carla Sola and I'm the CIO at Rocky Mountain Human Services, and we are joined by Kevin. Kevin, thank you for stopping by. Yes, ma'am. My pleasure. Um, So yeah, yeah, no. So tell us about what do you do where you work?

So, actually I'm uh, in the US Army getting ready to retire after 36 years. I'm the CIO for all. All of the healthcare, IT systems, etc. that we use out in Indo Pacom, the Pacific Basin. And the last two years I've been doing Cerner we call it Genesys implementations of the new EMR for DoD worldwide.

So, what is on top of mind of your healthcare system right now?

So, we all know cyber is a big concern in the industry right now. Where it really hits home for me is the securing of our medical devices. Huh. It just seems like a big gap to me and others right now. What I'd like to see is where we take biomed and even facilities to a certain degree and realign those under the scissor of the CIO to make sure that entire cyber gap that I see right now is being driven by the same governance without variance and being able to reduce that level of individual risk to the patient that I have on the table right now.

Okay. So, we just finished the deployment of Cerner to the entire Department of Defense. So now this first year is going to be a lot of optimization. So getting our revenue cycle in order, the back end getting the adoption not only from the providers, obviously, but also the patients to a certain degree and the support staff.

So, just a lot of optimization. I know that's not typically what we do. Talk about innovation these days, but for us, I think that's where we're gonna focus in the next year. ,

So you have your bio project and then you have your EMR projects or implementation going on. How do you see ai or do you see AI playing a role in any of your initiatives?

So, not at the local level where I'm at or even the regional level, but at the enterprise level, absolutely. I know we're looking into it in a couple of areas where I see a lot of value in it upfront. and early wins and adoption from the organization no matter what type of organization you're in is getting into that, getting your coding done in a quicker manner and a more accurate manner and really being able to increase those reimbursables because you're increasing your efficiencies, you're getting your coding out in a much more timely manner and more accurate, capturing more of what you're doing versus allowing the human error there.

And so, you and I were in a couple of sessions, we know that there were, I mean, there's a ton of Unknowns with AI, right? And is the resource, how do you how to upscale your resources and how do you define your use cases? And you talked about something specific, but were there any aha moments, something that you're like, Ooh, you know, I never thought about this, or I didn't think about it this way, during the sessions or, what you've learned so far throughout the forum?

So one thing I found interesting, not so much as an aha moment on the AI side is a couple of the organizations. Now are actually bringing their supply side in and their acquisitions in under the CIO and the CISO also. So we've talked a lot about governance in the past where there's not enough in the industry right now, which is same in all industries.

But I hear a lot of the facilities now where they're making you go through the ISSM side of the house, the CISO side of the house prior to going to budget, but bringing that contracting office in and that acquisitions arm, in under the CIO, CISO side of the house to make sure that you check those blocks where I can integrate it into our systems and our network.

That's something I think is really encouraging that I'm hearing more facilities do.

specific? Individually, I'm going to be focusing on moving on to my next career. Yeah, yes,

just

Because we just got done seven years deploying a new EMR to the entire global structure of Department of Defense healthcare. And so now it's getting in there, making sure everybody's on the right workflows. We're optimizing those workflows not only to conserving our resources, but also to provide better care to the patients and provide our satisfaction.

Anything else you want to share with us? Really want to say hi to Captain. Oh, yes.

That's very important. That was one of the reasons that he decided to stop by,

by the way. If you don't know who Captain is, he's a service dog that's been used for a lot of great charity fundraising uh, that's uh, sitting on our feet right

now.

Yeah, we love him. That was a condition, so I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. It was great meeting you, and I'll see you around. Yes, ma'am. Thank 📍 📍 you.

 Hi, we're here at the Chimefall Forum with another interview in action. My name is Tim Zoff and I'm joined today by Jen Folks, a partner at McKinsey Company. Jen, welcome. Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you're doing here this week.

Yeah, absolutely. One, thanks for the opportunity to speak with you, Tim. So, my name's Jen Folks. I'm a partner in McKinsey's healthcare practice. And I spend all my time working with health systems on a variety of technologies. Technology and operations topics, and so excited to be here, share some thoughts on what we're seeing in the industry and learning from the executives that are here from a provider perspective.

Great, you know, this is an exciting and challenging time for us. I know one of your topics this week is talking to both CIOs as well as our foundation CEOs about what we've called the gathering storm, kind of our ongoing conversation about what's really going on in the industry and what we should pay attention to.

A couple of key observations or themes that we're communicating this week. Can you talk about, if you will, the storm that we're in healthcare? Yeah,

so we estimated last year that there was a coming storm in healthcare as you think about rising inflation, labor challenges, and I think the takeaway this year is the storm is here.

We don't see it abating anytime soon. And it really hit providers very strongly in the last year or so, and we're now seeing that costs shift down the healthcare value chain, and we're starting to see payers improve, increase their med costs. and kind of going down that chain. Labor is still a challenge, and workforce is something that we hear from every single CIO and CEO that we're talking to across the system.

Great. And because we're here at a CIO conference, technology obviously is going to play a really important role in this. So, given all the challenges, how are we giving sort of aspirational thoughts and messages, and maybe even what other industries are doing? Because at McKinsey, you all understand that.

So, a couple things that you're saying to CIOs and even to the foundation CEOs. Yeah.

So we see a lot of focus on technology, particularly to address these challenges from a cost perspective and also from a growth perspective. A lot of focus on how do we do more with less? How do we help our struggling workforce in terms of automating activities that are not within their scope of practice or not at the top of their license?

So, documentation, trade offs and hand offs across nurses. Also, Gen AI, I'd be remiss not to bring that up. I think that's on the topic of everyone's mind. I think the jury is still out in terms of how that will actually move the needle and really support patient care and clinicians. I think there's a lot of opportunity there, but there's a lot of potential risk and that's what we're hearing and really making sure that it's really moving the needle to support delivery.

Great. And

learnings across industry. Right, so one of the things is we can learn from hospitality and... Transportation and other industries that consumers, they see every day, but also have been down, if you will, a more mature path than this. So, what can we learn from those other industries that we can actually begin to apply here

in healthcare?

So, one of the things that my colleagues have researched is how do you create a rewired organization for digital and analytics? And a lot of it is how do we scale some of the great work that's happening in terms of products and pods and agile pods that people are We're starting to experiment with, but really to move the needle from a technology perspective is how do we scale that broadly across the organization and be really focused on what is the value we want to create, how do we stop doing all of the other things that are happening and really get that senior leadership focus and really do things differently too from an operating model.

This is not about let's deploy a technology solution and then we spend the last month trying to get it right for the end user. How do we bring them throughout the whole process, so it's something that's really going to. And then I'd be remiss to say the kind of technology and modernization to support that.

Particularly in healthcare where we do have quite a bit of legacy data and information. So we

have the storm, but we have technology

here. There is hope in the future. Are you optimistic about all this, Jen? I am optimistic. And I would say I am most optimistic by looking at the great amount of people that are here and the wealth of knowledge that's been brought.

And it was nice to look in the CIO forum to see half men and half women leaders in the industry. Yeah, and

as a long time boot camper to know we had more women than men for the first time in boot camp. So, you've got to have a big smile on your face about that

this week as well. Yeah, I think that's fantastic.

Still a long way to go, but it's exciting to see the progress. Okay. Thank you, Jen. Enjoy your week. Appreciate it, Tim. Thank you.

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.

They are CDW, Rubrik, Sectra, and Trellix. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.