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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

You too. Nice to meet We're gonna start by, well, first of all, introducing yourself. So your role at ST Luke's So I am over all of IT physician services which includes all of our service lines. I also have the access center, so getting patients into our hospitals and outpatient facilities. And then I have our project management offices, both in IT and operations.

Nice. The access center, is that the same as a call center, or is it very different? Yes. Nope, it's a call center, so. We recently went through an 18 month transformation, a whole business transformation. We worked with operations. We identified different use cases and we put them into a pod model.

So we pulled the bodies out of the office. We removed the phones from the offices. And we put the pod agents at the house. So they're taking calls from home now. From their home? Yep. How do you, I want to talk to you about projects. Yep. I'm going to talk to you about M& A in a minute, because you guys I've talked to Chad a couple of times, and I love your approach to M& A.

from a project standpoint, you just described a project. How do those get kicked off, and how do they get prioritized? Well, it's normally a phone call from somebody saying, hey, we're going to do this. so as the PMO leader what is, what's the goal? Why are we doing this? Who are people let's pull them together, let's define what our goals, scope are and we execute.

I mean, that's very high level. Very high level. It sounds super easy when you say it like that, but it's an organization right now of about 28 project managers, and we have a portfolio of about 100 projects. So, so typically it's either a strategic initiative or there's a problem. so actually we have.

We have multiple categories now. So we have a strategic initiative. So if we're bringing a new EPIC module we're doing an ERP implementation right now with Workday. So that's what we would consider a strategic. My team will also do complex routine projects. So, win 11 rollout across the network.

Massive coordination with operations, my team will pick up something like that. But anything that like a hybrid cloud engineer can do in the background, keep the lights on my team. doesn't touch that. But where is there a massive change? Where do we need to work with operations to communicate and ensure they're ready for that?

Then we have our CMA, which we call construction mergers and acquisitions. And that's really my growth portfolio. So your brick and mortar moves at changes at a larger scale. If it's like a 10 person, something small like that relocation. My team won't pick it up. We have an IPS team, an infrastructure product solution team that will run that on their own, to the side.

Then we have IT security in their own portfolio. That's a massive book of work in itself. So our CISO has a dedicated, what I call a dirty project manager who's embedded with him. I flip in other coordinators with her to get experience and exposure out there. Because that is the hardest area for me to get project managers in there's really in the security space.

It's learning that terminology, the tech it's fast paced. So you can't hire just a generic PMI certified project manager and pop them in there. We have not seen success in this security space. But the others you can. Yeah, we can really like if you were. Construction PM, you can, you probably would be good on my infrastructure side of the house.

We can probably teach you that. We really hone in on when we identify a project manager, we hone in on their specific skill set. Where do they grow and thrive? So I have PMs who are very focused on infrastructure, so I give them the CMA projects, and then I have IT driven agile project managers.

They're looking at the strategic large scale initiative. I was going to ask you gone to agile or you're more we are hybrid Yeah, there's we have a dev team now that they're using some agile methodologies, but we're really it's a hybrid shop across. So access center call center. Yes, which category does that fall into?

So well, that was a business transformation. So that was really a strategic initiative at the network level. So it's a combination of the call centers have changed so dramatically and the opportunities have changed so dramatically. Not only from the technology side, I mean, you can literally put people anywhere now and the distributed nature of the telephony services is pretty amazing.

But the needs in the organization have changed. really changed. How do people access services and whatnot? Help me understand. So you get started and you're gonna identify the objectives. Are the objectives already identified for you? Or is it sitting down with the business owners? There's a organizational goal.

Why are we doing this? What problem are we fixing? And then we have to identify the requirements and timeline to make that happen. So we have business analysts, we have PMs, the teams get together, they work with the subject matter experts, pull everybody together and say, Let's make this happen.

What do we need to do? And basically, it's a work breakdown structure. And there's a lot of opportunity in the fall semester. Yes. I mean, did you see a significant change? so it was a massive transformation. So, in our old structure, we were decentralized. So, in the offices, they were taking all of their own scheduling.

They were, if you were a provider and you wanted a special template you had your way of doing that. So when we centralized everything, capacity management being one of them, we went to standard templates across specialties. So that was it. That was people. It's like that little phrase there people think, oh, that's how hard can that be?

Oh my gosh. They're Everywhere and then and then when you go in to have the conversation, they're like, oh no, you don't understand It's like I'm sorry. How is this office different than this office than this off and you're not different Yeah, but they like their processes, right? And everybody has their own little flair on how they do things So it's my way my way is the right way and that's not always the case.

You have to think a little differently When you pull those things out of the office, how do you maintain the personalization that they feel like they get from the individual office? And that is actually something that operations is feeling right now. when the idea initially came out, when we initially started going out to operations and building that excitement, there was a clear You're still part of your office.

You still own that relationship. So if there's a luncheon, you're going to that luncheon. If there's a meeting, you're part of that team. I think what happened, it was an 18 month initiative. We had to go live every three weeks, so every three weeks a different specialty went live. The hiring of different staff, because it was a different work model.

So not everybody who left one office, they may be supporting now six different offices in that specialty. So they're, I, evaluating different ways to bring that team building and camaraderie back into the offices and those agents, there is definitely some trouble in that space. Yeah, it is one of the things that people are concerned about, and to a certain extent, takes care of some of that, because people become more familiar with the workflows and the, Because you're hiring a lot of new people, I would imagine, in that process.

But it's the technology. How do we give them the technology that they can easily communicate back to the offices? So we are a Microsoft shop. We're also an Epic shop. So, with Microsoft, we use Teams. So, we took all of the phones out of the offices. Which is, you go into an office, you don't have somebody at the front desk sitting there on the phone anymore.

That's nice. You get that one on one attention. But teams has allowed for easy communication back and forth from a clinical perspective. Epic SecureChat. They, so the agents can connect right back to the office that way. So there's different ways that technology are leveraged to keep that. I want to talk to you about building and acquisition.

Is that what you called it? CMA, Construction Mergers and Acquisitions. Yes. Let's talk about construction. For those who haven't been to Bethlehem, it is a special kind of competition that goes on between Lehigh Valley and St. Luke's. Yes, it is. And it's not uncommon to come up to a street corner and have like a St.

Luke's. I drove up to a street corner and I think three of the corners had a St. Luke's building on it. Eighth Avenue. There were different buildings. Huh. Yeah, I know exactly where you're at. And I'm like, and I understand it because I remember at one of these conferences, The gentleman from it was either Walgreens or CVS was talking and he was saying how CVS was going to compete with health systems and somebody asked the question, well, why do you think you can win?

And his answer was parking. And I thought, yeah, it's an access thing, right? It's just easy when you have those individual buildings, it's like, Hey, it's this building, lots of parking, full end. And that's our mission, easy access. So how do we bring care closer to the patient? But I would imagine you have a playbook now.

Luke's in Norwigsburg, Pennsylvania. That was out of the ground as well. So when they say construction now, you don't even blink. It's just like Nope. I have about five to six different PMs that I say, All right, here's another one. And here you go. They get excited and acquisitions. A lot of organizations struggle with acquisitions.

And I remember talking to Chad C. I. O. At ST Luke's. And the it was amazing to me when we had this conversation. He's like, Yeah, they're gonna go live on epic here. Negotiations have changed in health care. It used to be like hey, you can stay on your systems and that kind of stuff You guys don't even entertain that.

No, it's not even an option It comes from a security standpoint and a clean data standpoint. We don't want any of our patient employee data to be at risk so We don't know what those other networks did before us. So if we tie them into ours, we're compromising our network So we don't want to do that.

So how long does it take from? acquisition to live. Well, so we are in the middle. It's public right now. We're waiting for Attorney General sign off. We're in the middle, potentially going to acquire another facility and it will be a 90 day go live until we go live on epic. So as soon as we get that green light 90 days later, we will be live on epic.

So you're gonna extract the data from their EHR. So are just the problems, allergies, medications. Yeah, there's they're gonna do a manual abstraction process for that. Exactly what you're saying. We will give them a link to their sick trips. So they have read only access to Meditech in the meantime, from

All right. Unfortunately we did have staff that were furloughed during that time. But as a network, the commitment was they would be back by july one anyway. But I was able to pull a dedicated team of 25 I. T. Professionals from project manager, cable pullers and like the whole kit kaboodle build out epic and we had them live july 1st at midnight.

That's amazing. Yeah, in five weeks. I've had surgery in that hospital when I was a kid. That's an old hospital. It is. And we did at a much smaller scale. We didn't open all their services that they had previously. It was, primarily we needed to keep their ED open, especially during the pandemic there, there was un so.

We had the core functionality that was required for a hospital to keep them open, and that's And now it's growing. So it is. Have you done building out there as well or no? Well, they're they're landlocked. So there's so it's like your original ST luke's. It's completely yes. But there's a lot of space that we're not using right now.

So we have a lot of opportunity in there. Patience. This was fun. Yes, it was. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks

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