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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. A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 Spring conferences, vibe in Nashville and hymns in Chicago.

Special thanks to our cDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix for choosing to invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

You can check them out on our website this week, health.com, now onto this interview.

All right. Here we are hints 2023 in Chicago, and I'm here with health and Christian Harmony. U P M C. You have a title?

it's, it's Senior Vice President. Cto. Cto. And your title?

I'm the Vice President of Partnerships and Strategy Title Sounds important. Yeah, I just gonna say that you beat me.

Wow. So Tim, what, what, what's Certified Health? We

uh,

so Certify Health, we're a, a patient. Engagement and digital authentication platform. So we authenticate the patients when they step into the health system, but also can enable a digital front. So you can check in on paper clipboards, but also layer on the authentication so that the health systems, the patients are before they enter into the health system.

And then

also big, I mean, I'm thinking the duplicate problem. I'm thinking the the things I want do.

Absolutely. How, how does this plan?

So it's quite a, very well for us at at U P M C. So we, you certified for, gosh, 6, 7, 8 years. It's been a while, but it, it's really streamlined that, that welcoming access process.

So you're coming into one of our facilities, whether it's a hospital or a physician practice and checking in. It's if you check in and they whisk you back to your exam room instead of having to sit in in a waiting room and then go up to the front desk, go up to the board. So again, it's really helped.

process and anything similar for us. The other thing that Certify does that we've used them for is, the little thing called COVID and the vaccine administration, we actually leveraged the platform to do the administration, all the scheduling for about a million vaccines across all of our service areas at UPMC in Pennsylvania and into New York and Western Maryland.

And then more recently around access management, just the facility. So other spenders, visitors, whomever coming into our facilities that check credentials and. Again, they provide us with who's coming into our facilities and what they're doing there. So it's been extremely helpful from an access, from an authentication perspective as well, which is the last thing they're doing, helping us authenticate our users.

Again, it's all about efficiency. Efficiency and effectiveness for our clinicians. They have so much stuff going on. If we can remove those, those barriers and those burdens from them, that's, that's where we certify playing that role. So it's not just about patient access. It's about everyone's access

to PPMC.

So what's the difference? When I hear some of those things, what's the difference?

So we almost become a, a vendor replacement because we do so many things. So you have one point of contact for all of the different things that Chris spoke about. We replace vendors on patient facing side, the clinician face inside their vendor stuff.

So, you know, if, if you know Chris needs a change or an upgrade, it's one call versus, let me find the 10 vendors across the ecosystem. Streamline a lot of the efficiencies in the enterprise should

be, we were looking for platform, that's the key word. If it's a platform and we've leveraged their platform, like I said, with just from the Covid piece, sort of wasn't real an area that any of us were focusing on.

But because they had the platform in place, we were able to quickly move and be able to, to again change with all the different requirements as the vaccines became available.

Yeah, no, let's unwrap that. Use case Covid, came upon us in 2020 And now you're sitting there going, all right, what do we need to do? Take me through that process of, you're sitting in a room and we're going, Hey, we need to do this and this and this very rapidly.

And here's what they're going on. And what we have Certify we have a portal, we have some other client based tools. How did you

do all that?

Again, just surveying our landscape and technologies at the time, you had some bigger vendors. Obviously they're well represented here today, but just who could we work with?

That would actually listen to us, absorb and process our requirements about what we wanted to do very, quickly. I mean, we're talking, we had conversations. It was under 24 hours that Certify had been developing. We had a prototype. We had, we had a proof of concept system in about two weeks.

So it was that quick. And then again, the requirements changed about who, what age group could actually register a schedule for a vaccine. And we, it seems like a different relationship because we basically... Upon the inventory of vaccine, we weren't just scheduling people and then telling them, no, don't tell me, we want to make sure we have a vaccine for you.

So tied it to inventories. So that whole process just became so much more streamlined work with certified than any other, like every vendor was trying to create something on the fly as well. Just, we did it efficiently, effectively, and it really made a difference in our immunities.

lot of conversations with us right now around efficiency. Experience. Talk to me a little bit about how makes that experience for the clinician

so I think all it's, it's all about giving people time back in the day.

lot of the, the

platform parts of our platform solve that is how do you do staff work time back on their day to do the jobs they are actually set out to do.

On the clinician side is we don't have to enter in all the paperwork. We don't have to start out. Driver's license and trying to authenticate, getting stuff to the scanner and really turn the front desk for into great customer service type of, when people come in, it's,

creating them by their first name,

they're authenticating, who they're so it adds on the layer

of, the patient experience.

I, you kind

of can't calculate an roi. So it's that soft roi, the patient experience engagement that everyone talks about. But the biggest thing is, time back in their day to do new jobs that actually enhance, make their. 📍

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now, back to the show. 📍  But from an experience standpoint, if you're able to whisk them through that process, I would think you just end up with less angsty patients who are like, Oh my gosh, I was sitting out there for 20 minutes, now I'm sitting in this room for 20 minutes.

It's

like

Absolutely. It definitely helps the treatment. So there are quantifiable savings. We've seen that, especially when we first adopted Certify doing the fingerprint reading to check people in. It took a little bit of time with that. adoption Everyone's sort of resistant to change, especially when you're so used to going into a front desk and checking in.

But that really helps us do it. To your point about, like, the clinical side, like the actual doctors and nurses that Again, we went with Certify that can help streamline and give them more time back in their day we're also doing it very securely. And that's also very important, especially in my job as the CTO, responsible for all the cyber security.

That's, we want to make sure that the work that they're doing is secure and they're, properly, like, Authorized to do what they're doing, getting into whatever system.

We're trying to look for ways to take out. Like, all the friction of someone just coming in to see a doctor, or a PA, or whomever, whatever they're coming in to be seen for We want to make that as simple as possible for them.

They're stressed out, they're worried about what's wrong with them. Again, so if we can make that process easier, and remove that, get them right back to the exam room, and make it happen fast, I

think

everyone wins.

Where is the conversation best to start for you at a certain point? I mean, is it a little softer?

It, it, it depends really on the organization. Most of the health systems we work with is the cio, CTO, enterprise. Cause they kind of have a overarching technical if there is, so, so usually the way it works is the cio, cto, we bring it in and their next fall is to the system. Right? A huge security assessment team.

And I think that the one piece with that we lot is, is they don't have to go out and audit all of these new vendors and companies. You. It's already been processed and secured. When we handle so many, biometric and patient records data, we have to adhere to the highest compliances, and all of our algorithms are just compliant.

So, it's really an ease for a lot of these C levels, because they don't have to do large charts

and C level analysis. I would add too, like in our example, our Chief Quality Officer was very much, drives the workloads, right? We don't know the workloads as well as they do. And our CMIO was awesome.

Instrumental in helping with the, again, it's a

change management.

the devices

that we did

about Yep. All, all the biometric readers. Yeah. Basically fingerprint readers put out there. But again, very, very small investment that translated. So again, the front desk staff, they went from standing behind the desk, checking people in, crossing their name off, blocking it out on a, on a paper sheet.

To welcoming that person, helping whis them through a answering questions if it was their first time doing that. Again, we train them, make sure that they have that support, and then getting 'em back into the exam

room.

Well, Tim, thank you for

your time. Bill,  

  Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it's phenomenal that they've taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community. It is greatly appreciated.

We wanna thank our partners, CDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix, who invest in 📍 our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That's all for now. 📍