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we wanna see us continue to exponentially move the mark for that. So, we all learned a lot in the pandemic. You have to do things faster, better, it doesn't have to be perfect. Are you better today than you were yesterday? And if that answer is yes, then you know you're moving in the right direction.  📍

Thanks for joining us on this keynote episode, a this week health conference show. 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. For five years, we've been making podcasts that amplify great thinking to propel healthcare forward. Special thanks to our keynote show. CDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix for choosing to invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Now onto our show.

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 All right, here we are from ViVE in Nashville, and we're joined by Craig Richardville, CIO for Intermountain Health. How's it going? It's going great. Yeah. You're having a lot of conversations here. I just wanna give people a lay of the land. Intermountain actually has a booth. You have this booth here.

There's the affiliates. So you have like graphite health over here and Castell. Am I missing some other on the nation? Wow. So I mean, what's this about? What's the conference about for Intermountain and why had the booth you used to have the bus?

Well, Intermountain is known for as creativity and its innovation as well as collaboration.

So when you look at Graphite Health, that's actually for major healthcare systems coming together to build a new product for the industry. When you look at Culmination, you look at Castell, those are fully owned Intermountain. That provides services not only inside, but also outside of Intermountain Health.

Well, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. You have Civica Rx, which was pretty big

founded through Yes. Yeah. As a matter of fact, our chairman of that facility and the one that actually started it, he's sitting in that room right there. So we stay very close.

If you walk in, you see you guys have a new logo.

Yeah, we do. I mean, talk about creative and whatnot. It. It's not traditional. It is cutting edge.

Yeah, it is. It was a lot of science, a lot more than what we one would expect that goes into creating a new logo and the colors.

So us tech guys looking at that, don't appreciate all that went into that.

You don't appreciate when you look at it, but when you get presented and you hear the story of what goes behind it, you fully would understand how it stands out and pops out when you look at the different colors and how that impacts a person to look at the logo. And then in comparison to.

Traditional logos within the provider side of healthcare. It stands out and pops out, and that's what we are, we want to be able to be the model of the future of health.

I'll tell you, we may not appreciate it. I appreciate it more now because I hired a branding person who worked for me for two years.

And when she came in, I was a tech guy running a podcast. When she left, we were actually a brand in the industry. And I'm like, yeah, there's something to this. There's something to the colors, there's something to the consistency of the presentation and all of it. And it's a testament to the professionals that Intermountain has across the board.

Talk a little bit about what's top of mind right now? I mean, there's a lot going on at this conference.

Yeah. Yeah. There is. The way that I look at this is not only an opportunity for Intermountain Health to share some of the its companies that it's part of or that it's created, but also to learn from some of the other ones that are out.

There's been a, to me a conference that allows one to, in not such a crowded manner to connect and to have some really meaningful, although short conversations, I know your. As, as busy as some of ours. And and the goal is to bring back a few of those golden bugs to really dissect a little bit further.

And we found a few already.

So are they excited? there, Are there specific areas you're looking at? I know a lot of people are looking at generative ai. They're looking at virtual, they're looking at a lot of different things. I'm curious from this perspective. There's common challenges that we're all facing in healthcare.

But then there's the distinct approach that your health system's taking in your market. So I'm curious what you're looking at.

Yeah. If I had to categorize both of 'em. One is around our caregiver experience, the tools and the companies that can help us have a better experience for thoses that are practicing medicine or thoses that are supporting those that are practicing medicine.

So all around that. experience And then at the same time, the same thing with patient and consumer experience. Those that truly will attract people into Intermountain Health for care and services and allow us to not only provide the value in terms of high quality, low cost, but give them the experience that they need and that they use in other industries.

Financial services, banking retail, we all. use The little phone in our pocket for that. Healthcare should be part of that ecosystem.

I'll put the prognosticator easy word to say this late in the afternoon had on you. What's next in both those areas? Let's start with the patient experience.

What's next in the patient experience? What can they expect from Intermountain? Or what should they expect from their.

health

system

They should expect 7 24 access to services. Not only access in terms of getting the right services to the right person, but also the right time, the right location the right geography.

They should be having it at their fingertips or in their pockets, 7 24. And so while we're looking at doing on the digital side is truly creating the digital workforce, using some of the technology you talked about that removes thehuman Aspect of it are providing that services. So as you would then interact with a retailer or with a financial services company, have the machine do the work, that's what we're looking at here.

So that's anytime of the day or night, holidays and weekends, you have access to a caregiver and or the services that would be provided.

What are your caregivers asking for these days?

Time. Time. Right. The way that, when you look at the healthcare workforce and our transition now to developing more of a digital workforce we wanna provide the time to allow the caregiver to bring back the joy of practicing medicine.

Allow him and her to utilize the tools that are being developed and the tools that are already available to allow them to be more precise and more precise in their diagnosis or treatment or maintaining. And as we continue to move forward with this, start moving that to self-service so that as we perfect those different tools, you now can do self-diagnosis.

You now can do self-treatment. We can also nudge you when you kind of fall off the rails and get you back, on the mainstream and keep track of that digitally throughout the whole ecosystem so that when you are moving forward with your health and or if you're managing a chronic disease, if that's all being happening with in your pocket, it's becomes part of what I would say your rhythm of life.

Right.

You've been doing this for a while. Yeah. In the CIO role, how has it changed? Coming to a conference like this over the years and the expectation on you and your schedule, what does it look like? How different does it look, say then, I don't know, eight or nine years ago?

Yeah. If you go back a decade it was very, probably what I would describe as a typical cio.

Looking at fundamentals, looking at stability, looking at availability, looking at things that kind of keeping up with everybody. Now it's more about innovation, more about being different, more about becoming the model of delivery in the future. And so you're looking at really things that are more aspirational, that are far out there, not just how am I gonna be better tomorrow than today?

How are you gonna take some big steps moving forward? So truly moving from transition to transformation.

Does innovation fall under you? Yeah. Well, innovation is every, innovation is everybody.

Yeah. Innovation is everybody. I have a component of my. One of the individuals sitting over there that is working on innovation specifically.

But I expect everybody to be innovative and to keep their eyes and ears open. Learn from other industries. I just had a meeting with a company just down the aisle here and I asked 'em, I said, how much of your business is healthcare? They said, 9%. That's the kind of partners that we need cuz we see them at Lowe's, we see at Home Depot, we see 'em at Capital One.

We want to see those in healthcare.

That's interesting. So what as we look to bring. The solutions in. Cause we're gonna see a thousand point solutions here. We've made this mistake before in healthcare. It's how we end up with 1400 applications and that kind of stuff. How do we orchestrate it?

How do we bring 'em all in because they all do something really well and orchestrate a great care experience in the process.

I'm glad you asked that. There's a lot of people who grew up in the engineering field, the technology field that really thrive upon. And now I think the success will be simplicity.

How do we take all the complex aspects of what we've built over the years? Your example of a thousand or 1400 applications? How do we have more platforms and less specific niches and more things that we can build on and move forward with? So simplicity will be a big focus of not only the health system, but of technology in Intermountain Health.

Fantastic. We're outta. Because we both have another meeting together. Craig, thank you. Thank you.

Appreciate. Appreciate it. Yeah.

All right, we'll get back to the show in just a minute. If you've been with us for any period of time this year, we've partnered with Alex's Lemonade Stand to raise money for Cures for Childhood Cancer, and we are so excited. We set a goal to raise $50,000 and we're already up over 27,000, our 26,700 for the year.

So we're close to 27,000. I'm rounding up. We went to the Vibe Conference and with your. And the help of just an amazing community, generous community. And our partners as well. We were able to raise $16,500. So thank you all for your generosity. We're gonna do it again. As you know, we did Captains Cures for Childhood Cancer, at the Vibe Conference and anyone who got their picture taken with Captain who was facing the camera we gave $1 to Alex's Lemonade.

We're heading to hymns and bringing Captain again, and we're gonna do the same thing. As you know, captain is my producer service dog. He'll be roaming the floor. If you see Captain, stop us. We would love to have your picture taken and we would love to have you participate in this campaign.

We really appreciate our partners who helped to make this possible. For this one, so far we have rubrics, so we still have a couple of spots If you want to participate, if you want your company to participate, let 'em. That they can participate in this and we will give you the details. You can shoot us a note at partner at this week, health.com.

It's real simple. If you're on the floor, you see Captain, get your picture taken. Anyone facing the camera, go ahead and post it to social media Twitter or LinkedIn. Tag this week. Health, that's how we do the county. And again, 16,505. I think we can do it. At the HYMNS conference and really make a dent in our goal to get to $50,000 for childhood cancer.

It's gonna be exciting. We appreciate our partners who stepped up during the Vibe Conference, and obviously we appreciate rubric being our first partner to step up for the hymns event. So look forward to seeing you at hymns now, back to the show. 📍  

Here we are. Another interview in action from the chime chime. It's not Chime, it's ViVE. I don't know why I keep doing that. We're at the ViVE Conference in Nashville. We're with Becky Fox, with Intermountain Health. Yes. So tell us about the new role.

So, I'm now working in the role of Chief Clinical Information Officer and really helping to set the strategy and vision of, how our care givers across multiple disciplines really can make a difference to the world.

Wow. So, is the role more informatics based? Is it different than a CNIO role or is it

similar?

Yeah, I think, many, the evolution of informatics is taking, it's really started in the medical space and now really branched into the nursing space. And now you'll find there's informatics in multiple areas, whether that's pharmacy. Population health, there's a variety of different aspects, but we really need liaisons to help translate the clinical impact, the, patient experience, impact, and then of course, understand the technology and how you can bring those two things together.

What's the hardest thing about making a transition? So you southeast to Intermountain's actually grown. I mean, it's Colorado it's Utah and whatnot. It's stem into Vegas as well, isn't it?

Absolutely, yeah. Across multiple states. So I think the hardest thing about, leaving any organization, especially if you have a great experience like I did, is really saying goodbye to friends and family that you've really done great work with.

But then it's also a great opportunity to make new friends and family. And then the thing I've loved about transitioning from one organization to the. Is you can continue to do collaboration and then, really foster collaboration. And I think, even here at five and any of the conferences where you bring people together, that's the best thing that everyone walks out with new ideas, new collaborations, new partnerships and new passion and energy to really wanna make a difference.

So we don't have a lot of time with you because we grabbed you in the hallway here, but what's next? What's next in clinical informatics? Do.

I think that the cusp that all looking to take the most advantage of is really the innovation space. And so, Intermountain Health has been a big driver of innovation in the clinical realm, in the healthcare realm, in the population health realm.

And so we wanna see us continue to exponentially move the mark for that. So, we all learned a lot in the pandemic. You have to do things faster, better, it doesn't have to be perfect. Are you better today than you were yesterday? And if that answer is yes, then you know you're moving in the right direction.

And so clinical innovation is gonna be a key. We've gotta look and lean upon our nurses, our nutritionists, our pharmacists who see the ways that we need to do things different and better. Not just within the four walls of the hospital, but outside into the community space. And then bring that perspective patient experience and patient engagement and really make a

difference.

What have you seen here? This has grown, there's a lot more booths this year than it was last year. It's not quite HIMSS yet, but it's not yet. It's vague. What have you seen what is catching your eye as you're walking around here?

Well, last evening there were a few of us that gathered and we kept talking about how it was a great feeling that, I think there's several thousand people here, but it still felt to be small enough and intimate enough that you could really have more in depth conversations.

What you might be doing at your organization, what you're thinking about doing, how you can partner better with vendors and other thought leaders in the industry and really collaborate to move the mark in a different way. Yeah.

The technology might continue to change with the partnerships are so right.

So key. Who's the best people for you to partner with internally as the chief clinical information?

Oh, that you have to partner with everyone. So you really need to have great partnerships at the senior level, but all the way down to the staff level to understand so that you can quickly learn from those on the front lines, understand what their experience is like, and yet be able to translate of why the organization needs to move in one direction or another.

And where we spend our time, effort, and resources and investing in our clinicians.

Fantastic. Becky, thanks for taking the time. No problem.

Appreciate it. No problem. Always good to see you,  bill. Appreciate it. Thank you.

all right, we'll get back to  our show in just a minute. We're excited. We have a great webinar for you in May on May 4th at one o'clock Eastern Time. It is part of our leadership series on modern data strategies in healthcare. In this webinar, we're going to explore data driven approaches to healthcare and how they can improve patient outcomes, increase efficiency and reduce cost, which are also critical at this time.

In this juncture in healthcare, our expert speakers will explore data governance, analytics, strateg. anything that can help healthcare providers gain actionable insights from healthcare data. We would love to have you there and we're excited about it. You can register on our website.

Just hit the leadership series, modern Data Strategies. It's gonna be in the top right hand corner of our website this week, health.com. you can discover how we are going to use data to be more efficient, effective in the modern healthcare system. we would love to have you join us again.

Hit the website this week, health.com. Top right hand corner. Sign up today. Hope to see you there. Now back to the show,

📍   📍 All right. Here we are. Another interview in action from vi and this will be our last one. The floor is closing up. People are walking out and we caught up with John Tippets with Intermountain Health, which has the coolest job in all of healthcare vp. Thank you, bill. Vp. Thank you. Innovation and emerging technology and Chief Architect.

Yep. Phenomenal. And with a great company as well. So. I'm glad we got a chance to catch up with you. You have an interesting perspective coming into this. What were you looking for? What kind of conversations, what kind of technology were you looking for as you came into this?

Yeah. ViVE gives us an opportunity really to look at the different offerings through either artificial intelligence, digital transformation, digital health therapeutics and really what we're looking for is, Those technologies that, and I really like the class research categorizations of technologies that they look at from an emerging tech perspective.

And that's the, do they improve outcomes? Do they improve cost of care? Do they improve patient experience and the clinician experience? And so those are really what we're wandering the floor looking at is, do those technologies facilitate helping those areas.

So this conference is really the inter intersection of technology and healthcare, which is where we live.

Do you get a chance to do a booth crawl and go around and especially these small ones back here? Yeah. Where you get to talk to the owner or the architect, the person who actually put the code together. What are you hearing, what are you seeing?

Yeah. Seeing a lot in potential, the leveraging of artificial intelligence and subset.

That artificial intelligence, a few of the interesting ones that we've been following, like Canary speech the use of of voice and digital AI recognition. That's an interesting capability that we're following. I think, yeah, just the whole buzz of 📍 chat, G P T and generative ai.

Thank you for raising $1 for childhood cancer. We just, we decided early on in this that every time 📍 G P T four got mentioned on the show that we were gonna put another dollar towards Alex's Lemonade stand.

Oh, that's awesome. Good. And 📍 chatGPT ChatGPT G 📍 ptt. No.

There we go. There we are. We're up to three bucks. I mean, have you heard that a lot from the floor or generative ai Just in.

general?

I in general, there's a few companies out there that are gonna start taking advantage of some of those large models. And so we're very interested in that. In fact, we've got a couple internal initiatives already underway looking at it in both the workforce of the future, hr some in the clinical space.

And so,

It's interesting. I had a conversation with a couple people yesterday on the air, and we were talking specifically about the hype cycle around this, and it's astronomical. My theory on that is it's astronomical cuz people talk to each other about it and they go out and use it and they go, oh my gosh, this exceeds the expectations I had coming into it.

And I assume you've played with G P T four A little bit.

Yeah.

I mean, we're getting to the point now where we're gonna start hiring prompt engineers, aren't we? And doing prompt engineering training, like, Yeah, this is how you train, this is how you get the best out of these kinds of tools.

I know this is all forward thinking, but, or forward-leaning, but how do you think this might be used in healthcare?

Well, in many areas we're already starting to tinker with it not just in the clinical space.

Well, we're limiting it right now, how it's used in the clinical space. Right. Cause you have to. Yeah. And so, our partnership with Microsoft and open their Azure Open AI will allow us to create sandboxes isolated areas where we can start to train and use our Intermountain specific data in a more safe and secure environment.

And then with hr just like with intelligent automation, we see that as allowing people to do 80% of their job and then also start to enhance what they're working on. So it's really generative AI will not take away all of someone's responsibilities, but it can at least start to get them down the path and accelerate some of the work that they're doing.

This might be the wrong terminology, but I'm thinking of it as a digital minion. Right. So as a clinician, I want to write a letter to the insurance carrier for authorization to do some procedure or something like that. It can do that, like, and it's not like you couldn't do it as a doctor, but this digital minion with giving the right prop and you're gonna give it the right prop, it's not like it's starting from scratch.

You're gonna say, Hey, I need to write this letter to this insurance carrier. Cite these articles. But then it's gonna do the verbiage for you. Yep. It's an assistant. I heard Bill Gates talk about this and what he believes is going to happen five years out is that each of us will have a

digital assistant that

will know how we live and know what we're, like, hell you fly these two airlines, I notice you're going to Nashville. Would you like me to? Look at the the flight schedules and pick a good flight or recommend a good flight for you, or keep an eye on the rates and that kinda stuff.

So we'll have these assistance. I realize this is, again we're forward-leaning out here, but Yep. It would be amazing to me if in the healthcare space, every nurse had a personal digital assistant that understood how the space. Functioned in all the things, and they could just say, I'll star Trek computer, can you do this for me?

And the computer will say, yeah, I'll respond to that alert, or, yes, I will, send that message to that doctor, or, yes, I will find this for you. I mean, that's, it's a pretty interesting future to think about.

Yeah, absolutely. And we're starting to explore some of those unique use cases in all areas of Intermountain.

Services and businesses, really trying to identify how those generative AI services can facilitate, allowing nurses and clinicians to really operate one at the top of their license. But also take away some of those for lack of a better term, mundane tasks at charting documentation allowing them to really focus more on that patient.

You are one of my go-tos to talk about 3D printing and whatnot. Are we seeing advances in that area and where is that being used more extensively in healthcare?

Oh, that's great. Glad you brought that up. That's one of the passion areas of mine and, and really excited. About the work that Intermountain is doing in this space.

It's been initially an exploratory project on really what the capabilities are, but over the last year, two years, we've in partnership with our live liver transplant, our radiation oncology radiotherapy primary children's hospital really identifying ways that 3D printing. Help in the pre-surgical planning, surgical guides, and in fact, in the live liver transplant area we've seen by creating these 3D prints and 3D models, either leveraging the physical 3D print or rendering those in a HoloLens mixed reality setting.

Oh, wow. Or in on a 2D screen. The presurgical planning is helping these surgeon. Identify the ideal way to perform these surgeries leading to better patient outcomes, reduced or times, and just better patient education as well in the radiation oncology space. Just to give you some little details we create custom bolus.

Delivery of radiation therapy that have really improved that delivery of radiation services, so

That's amazing. Do you think we'll see some papers or some studies done on that? On

this? Yeah, we've actually there have been some public publications and a number of journals about the work that we've done in the liver transplant area, and so I can definitely send those.

Oh, that's fantastic. John, I have a feeling this is gonna be one of the last things you do at the conference. It was great to catch up with you. Thank

you, bill. Appreciate it. Always a pleasure.

  📍 I love the chance to have these conversations. I think If I were a CIO today, I would have every team member listen to a show like this one. I believe it's conference level value every week. If you wanna support this week health, tell someone about our channels that would really benefit us. We have a mission of getting our content into as many hands as possible, and if you're listening to it, hopefully you find value and if you could tell somebody else about it, it helps us to achieve our mission. We have two channels. We have the conference channel, which you're listening. And this week, health Newsroom. Check them out today. You can find them wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google, overcast. You get the picture. We are everywhere. We wanna thank our keynote 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.