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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. Another interview in action from the vibe I wanna say vibe, fall Forum. That's not right. It's the Vibe Event. Vibe event, which is a spring event. It's only in the spring. And we're here with Greg Miller with Lumion. Greg, great to see you. Thanks for coming by. I'm looking forward to this.

We've been having some conversations on the News Day show and that's fun, but we look at the news. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what you're hearing at the conference. I know you guys did a focus group and some other things. What are the kind of conversations that you guys are participating in?

Well, I think, you know, I did a chime focus group yesterday and it was, the conversation was really around care orchestration and the topic of the focus group. That the EHR is necessary but not sufficient. And so I think that was a very intriguing concept just because, or maybe thought provoking because we had a lot of extras that came in to our session to hear about what we were talking about.

And so really there were two topics. Care orchestration, what is it? And then how does automation contribute to better care or.

It's interesting cuz I, I just had a CIO conversation and we were talking about digital transformation and one of the things with digital transformation that feels like we haven't gone to the next level.

We've digitized. Yeah. Right. So we have all this data, but we haven't taken all the workflows and all the processes and created digital workflows across all those processes.

It's very true and. we make a clear distinction between automation and orchestration. And so automation really refers to the automation of a single task.

So that could be medication dispensing, it could be robotic surgery. It could be rev cycle stuff. And a lot of times when we talk about automation with health systems well, sometimes it's just scary, right? And like, robots walking around, the health system in delivering care, that's not what we're talking about.

Sometimes we get, well, this is gonna eliminate jobs. Well, that's not what we're talking about. And especially in today's world where there is such staff shortages, automation is a blessing in that environment. So, but we make the distinction between automation in terms of a single task versus orchestration, which is automating multiple tasks within a workflow or a process.

And that's what orchestration is. And so when I actually, yesterday in the focus group, I talked a lot about my mom. And the reason I did, and I actually got choked up every time I think about her my mom died of ovarian cancer almost 20 years ago, And most, the average life expectancy for a woman with ovarian is 14 months.

My mom led seven years and during that seven year period, I was her primary care coordinator. She was visiting health systems all over the country on clinical trials and she , had no less than a hundred different providers. , That's the worst case scenario.

It was a nightmare, and it was up to. To keep everybody in sync and there was never a consolidated care plan for my mom. And at one point during her journey with ovarian she got breast cancer too. And I remember being in the room with our oncologist who said, ah, don't worry about that.

The ovarian is gonna kill you long before they breast cancer you off. And so I walked outta that, like, okay, now what? But it was during that experience that I really became passionate about this topic of better coordinated care. And so if you take care coordination up a level and you think about the myriad of people, processes, tasks, events and workflow that needs to happen for any kind of patient.

It doesn't have to be a cancer patient. The opportunities for really applying automation to a lot of low hanging fruit is when you really look at clinicians today. And I'm gonna put nurses and docs mostly in that category and administrative. They just spend an inordinate amount of time on, menial, redundant, repetitive tasks that a computer is ideal for.

Right? Well, I mean, you talk about robots, you know, it's automation really is a robot that sits underneath that layer and looks for certain activities and then just says, Hey, I can move that information from here to here. You don't have to manually move it from here to here. Talk to me a little bit about Lumon, cuz I would imagine a lot of people aren't familiar with what you're doing.

You talked about automation and care, coordination. Are you a platform for both of those?

Yes, we are. So care orchestration is, orchestration is about automation. So when we think about care coordination and we talk to health system executives everywhere all day long, and the universal theme is there's clear recognition that traditional care coordination is broken.

And when we talk about that, the heads are nodding with health system executives. So there's absolute recognition the. It's broken. It's not because of the people, not because of the efforts of the people that are trying to do it. They work really hard trying to do this. It's just a monstrous task.

Right. And it's because it's dependent upon people. It's highly variable in how it's executed because it's spent upon people. It's very expensive as well. And what we find is that the people Actually doing the work can't get to all the work that needs to be done in today's workforce shortened environment.

They don't have more people to throw at the problem, which is what we in healthcare normally do, right? Throw money in people at it. They don't have those options anymore. So we can't scale across an entire enterprise. And so what we find is that, Care coordination efforts even within the same hospital, forget the health system across clinical specialties.

It's done differently. It's executed in different ways. And what you get, the impact of that is inconsistency in how it's actually executed in inconsistency is out of outcomes too. So with automation it can alleviate the burden on the clinicians and the administrative staff and Really help the clinician get back to what they were trained to do, which is spend the time on patients versus spending the time on routine, mundane, repetitive tasks that is way below their license.

📍    📍 We'll get back to our show in just a minute. We have a great webinar coming up for you in April. We just finished our March. On April 6th at 1:00 PM Easter time, the first Thursday of every month, we're gonna have our leadership series. This one is on CSO priorities for 2023. Chief Information Security Officers, we have a great panel.

We have Eric Decker within our mountain, Shauna Hofer with St. Luke's Health System out of Boise, Idaho, and Vic Aurora with Hospital four Special Surgery. And we are gonna delve into what are the priorities for security? What are we seeing? What are the new threat? What is top of mind for this group? If you wanna be a part of these webinars and we would love to have you be a part of them, go ahead and sign up.

You can go to our website this week, health.com, top right hand corner, you'll see our webinar. And when you get to that page, go ahead and fill out your information. Don't forget to put a question in there. one of the things that we do, I think that is pretty distinct is we. like for today's webinar, we had 50 some odd questions that we utilized, in order to make sure that the conversation is the conversation that you want us to have with these executives.

So really appreciate you guys being a part of it and look forward to seeing you on that webinar. Now, back to the show. 📍

I'm sure there's gonna be people listening to this who go, but the EHR does automation.

Yeah. We get that all the time. And that is in the chime focus group. Yesterday we talked about that. And so it really comes down to what is an EHR designed to do? It's a system. It's a system of record, right?

That's what it's designed. It does it really well. But it's not designed to be a system of action. So a system of action sits on top of an EHR and other systems, other systems leveraging realtime information to dynamically alter a pathway for every single patient. Uniquely. You can't do that with human beings.

There's not enough time in the day that type of thing. And one of the, biggest impacts that we saw at one of our customers Is the amount of time that a clinician would spend in the patient's chart before Lumon was about 11 minutes per patient. So that's a doc, a nurse in the chart. 11.

11 minutes. 11 minutes. Wow. Reviewing, test results, placing orders, right. Documenting things like that. After deploying Lumon, the amount of time that a clinician spends with the church is two minutes, so it was an 82% reduction in.

11 minutes to two minutes. Like what went away?

Yeah, what went away was so with Ion's platform in particular, we have realtime bidirectional integration with EHRs, whether it be Cerner, epic, Meditech, Allscripts, or any other system record.

And so I'll give you an example. Let's just say you have a patient coming in for surgery and through the Lumion platform, they wanna reach out to that patient and via maybe a web form and say, Hey, you're on these medications according to our records. Are these. Yes. No. Next response. Are you on any other medications?

So I go back to the situation with my mom, right? Every provider knows what they do for a patient. They don't know what everybody else is doing. Everybody else, right? And so perhaps they ask the patient are you on any other medications? Patient says, yes. Okay. Which ones they record, which ones? That information then gets written back into the ehr into the patient's care as a, as an automation as an.

So that now normally what happens, take that in the pre-surgery environment where a clinician usually has to have a phone consult or a face-to-face. A lot of times it's face-to-face to do things like patient education. Maybe take some vitals ask 'em about medications things like that.

And so with automation, you can eliminate a lot of that kind of activity and reduce the amount of time that these people are spending, gathering that kinds of information, chasing information, chasing a doc, Hey, did you review those results yet with Limon, what happens is if in order for surgery is placed and it's of this type of surgery, we know what the pathway is, the Lumion engine knows what the pathway is and will fire off, knows what's in the hr.

We can see this patient's coming in for hip replacement. They have these. They need to have these lab tests done before they come in for surgery. Lumion will automatically fire off an order for the lab test, send a notification to the patient, patient then in directions and where to go.

Patient then goes, gets that lab test done. When it's resulted, it automatically comes back into the ehr. But it hits the Lumion platform first. And the Lumion platform , knows what a normal or an abnormal range is for that specific type of lab test for this specific type of patient having this specific surgery.

And we'll then say, okay, well it's normal. Nobody needs to do anything. Instead, in today's world, what happens most of the time is they have a nurse trying to chase the patient. Hey, did you get the lab test done? Okay, you did great. Now I gotta go review the results. Oh, got the results. Hey

doctor, I need you to look at these. Is this normal or not? And so there's a lot of that manual chasing that can be completely automated.

I think if a CIO or CMIO or. CMO is listening to this right now. They're thinking that sounds really good. I like that. How complex? Am I the one creating all those orchestrations when I, I signed the contract for Lumion, right?

How much work have I just created for my team?

Yeah, that's Great question. You get it all the time. And so what we don't do is we don't come in and dictate this is a pathway for this type. What we do is we have best practices that we leverage from all of our other climate deployments. We come in with our transformation team, which is a bunch of clinicians and transformation experts, and they sit down and say, Hey, this is what we've seen work in the past.

How does this work in your environment? And then we get into an active dialogue to redesign what it's going to be. At the end of the day, the medical review boards within the health system, they have to sign off on whatever that pathway is. So we're never gonna be, don't wanna be in the position of dictating how care should be delivered.

We want to operationalize. And one of the things, I spent a number of years at Health Catalyst prior to being at Limon and I, that's really where I first learned about Lumon back in 2015, when I spent a lot of time in London. And if you think about Health Catalyst business, right?

Big chunk of the revenue is based upon the analytics platform. But then a big chunk of the revenue is based upon transformation services that they provide. They use the data in analytics to actually drive improvement. And when I , first met Robbie, our founder, , he told me about Lumion. Within 30 seconds, I got it.

What I realized was all the great work that consultants do to do the transformation efforts, at the end of the day, they can't make it happen. They can tell you what their recommendations are. They can't actually do it. Lumion, operationalizes, the improvement recommendations. So , in my mind, it's sort of that last mile of the improvement effort, whether you're talking about the patient or you're talking about the clinical.

And the broader care team.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Greg, I wanna thank you for your time. Thank you. It's fun. I really appreciate it.

Love being here.

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.