June 13, 2024: Jason Joseph, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Corewell Health, talks about the monumental digital transformation following the merger of Spectrum Health and Beaumont. How does Corewell navigate the complex integration of cybersecurity, infrastructure, and core applications? What challenges arise in standardizing workflows across diverse hospital systems, and how does the organization plan to optimize its One Epic ecosystem? Jason also explores the role of AI in healthcare, pondering its potential to revolutionize call centers, home health, imaging, and patient and clinician experiences. What are the implications of ambient computing for clinicians, and how does it alleviate their documentation burdens? Finally, Jason reflects on leadership qualities vital for driving innovation in healthcare IT, emphasizing accountability, humility, and teamwork. As Corewell lays the foundation for future advancements, what strategic initiatives will shape its path forward?
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โAll right, it's Keynote, and today we are joined by Jason Joseph, who is the Chief Information and Chief Digital Officer at Corewell Health, the combination of a couple of major companies up in the Michigan area. Jason, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Bill.
Great to be here. Well, I'm looking forward to it. The last time we talked Spectrum Health and Beaumont were coming together and it felt to me like we were just in the beginning of that conversation. You were bringing two organizations together and forming one in terms of culture, in terms of architecture and integration and all those things.
How has that vision for the merger and digital transformation, how has that gone since last, I think we talked in August of 23, is when we talked last.
August of 23, so last August. Yeah. So, we've certainly had a lot of milestones since then. It's one of those things where you do a lot of work and then all of a sudden you start to see the go lives, which are the culmination of months and years worth of work.
So we've been at a very aggressive schedule really right from the beginning, we said, look, we've got a lot of big plans of what we. Believe our potential is as an organization where we want to go, and none of them involve having a mess from a technological foundation perspective, right? They all require some level of organized purposeful way of us operating this as a system and not as just a collection of random things.
So we've been on that journey. We've been doing it from a cyber security integration perspective, just of the tools and policies and making sure we have the same level of standards certainly from an infrastructure and a core applications. Last summer, we probably were talking about going live with a single workday instance across the organization.
And We just hit the first of our two big goal lives for our One Epic ecosystem program, which is really to get us onto One Epic as an entire system. We call it ecosystem because we always talk about Epic and that's obvious, but boy, there's hundreds of other applications in that ecosystem and we're standardiz on a ton of those as well, almost 160 of those third parties that we're bringing together from the PACS to the nutrition system to credentialing and everything in between.
is all going to be really aligned. And we'll have a little bit of a tale after our big go live for what we're calling Core Well Health East, which is the legacy Beaumont organization is going live in July. And we're going to have probably another six to 12 months worth of just the smaller things to clean up the optimization that we'll wind up inevitably doing.
But it'll feel a little bit less like the entire focus of the organization and more like a thing we're doing as we're continuing to be able to advance and now build on top of a much more robust foundation.
Was that epic to epic? And are you moving more towards foundation or is there a fair amount of customization?
It is epic to epic. I would say we're, depending on which part of the organization we're definitely going to be closer to foundation in our new, what we're calling our destination instance. So we've taken a lot of the best things about. The Legacy Lakeland Organization, the Legacy Spectrum, and the Legacy Beaumont, we're actually doing a three to one combination.
the best of those things. We've certainly started with one of the foundations, but that's really what we're going to. There's a lot of foundation in it, but there's a lot of things that are just, we do heart transplants, we do lung transplants, we do research, we have a lot of things that You know, you can use foundation to a point, we have a large pediatric children's hospital, there's foundation will get you a good starting point where we can we use that.
But there's a lot of things where we know that we have content or some other things built. We're always in that battle of maximizing and using whatever we can. And a lot of it isn't about customization or not. A lot of it's about just choosing how you're going to practice. How are you going to handle endocrine, therapy and how are you going to deal with diabetic protocols?
And, there's not a wrong answer. There's just a choice that needs to be made clinically in a thousand different spaces of how we're going to practice. And we try to do that with the evidence and the foundation as much as we can.
love to hear more about the build process. Some of your peers, you have Intermountain doing a major thing right now, you have UPMC, you have Northwell, you have others.
Did you look at it from regional build standpoint, or was the build like we got everyone together? So orthopedics got together and had to decide on a build.
that process look? We decided that we'd get all the orthopedics together and decide on a build, right?
So, there are what we'll call standards and there are variations. that we've allowed purposefully. So for example, we have, some hospitals that are a thousand beds and we have some hospitals that are a hundred beds and those are not the same, right? How you treat an admission, how you set up some of the order sets can vary very purposefully.
So we do have areas where we say, this is the set of orderables for this particular area, hospital, or region. But for the most part, we're saying, no, this is how we treat this population of patients. And this is our protocol, how we operate in the Corewell Health way. And so we've got service line teams that got together and decided on those standards.
Some areas, much more for effectively than others. Some, still have a little bit of those challenges that we're going to see manifest themselves. And sometimes it's devil in the details where, well, we thought we agreed on this, but then once we see it in real life, it feels a little different.
We need to talk about whether that's as effective as we thought it was, or maybe it was more efficient in this different way. So there's probably a million of those little things that'll come after you go live. So the key is to get live with as minimum of a disruption as you can, knowing that things will probably never be perfect day one.
You're going to go through a change curve, but if you can then say, now let's all together look at the best way to do this going forward, that lifts all boats, right? We get the best practices in place. We have a lower cost of ownerships. We have training. We have a whole bunch of benefits, but boy, this is healthcare and it's a hard.
thing to do at the scale we're talking about, right? We're talking about 22 hospitals, all on the same thing, and some large ones amongst them, 60 plus thousand employees, all really using the same configuration, the same build, the same workflows. And so, lots of change management, lots of us being encouraging, working through this, but that's the world we're living in here.
Agile, Waterfall, combination, was it? We're a combination. I think these types of projects look a little bit more waterfowl as they're phased and you've got a build period and you've got build buckets and you've got to iterate through those. And so we've gone through all of that within this program.
As a system, we actually are combining multiple different ways of working as you imagine, the legacy spectrum versus the legacy BOMA had different ways of thinking about project management and agile. And so we have an enterprise project management office that is. really managing what we're calling a hybrid, right?
So we've got areas where Agile works really well and many teams, especially in our health plan, are really pushing forward with Agile value streams and setting up the way they work with their business colleagues in an Agile workstream, loosely based on SAFE. In other areas, like in our population health workstream, which is really a combination of value based care, our health plan and care delivery, we also have Agile running around there, but there's other areas that are a little bit more Maintenance run, or just we have complicated projects that are very hard to dedicate resources and single leadership over.
So we still need to have that project management discipline for that coordination. And it's, a large organization, as you can imagine, our digital services team collectively is just under 2, 000 people. So we have a lot of different opinions and ways that people are comfortable working. And so what we're trying to do is say, look, here are the minimum ways you work and communicate with each other.
Thank you. It's okay that this team is running their ticket process on a two week sprint with a Kanban board, and it's okay that this team is working in a more first in first out method, but when we need to communicate, these are the ways that we're going to do it. We're going to have standard project intake, we're going to have standard Ticket response times.
If you're an Agile team, this is the way we're going to engage you through the program increments and the sprint cycles and those kinds of things. So I would say we're getting there. I'd say we're 65, 70 percent of the way towards getting better, but we still have some journey and quite frankly, in this period of time, it's been all about, let's just make sure we can execute on the work in front of us.
The methodology is secondary, but we know as we emerge from all this big M& A related work, we really need to get into a good. operating rhythm that's efficient and effective as this new combined organization.
of the things that I love, because we had a phase like this as well, and governance is really easy during this phase, because everyone's like, no, we've got to focus on this, we're just going to do this.
And all this other stuff just stays to the side. But one of the things that happens as soon as you get to the other side of it is this deluge of stuff just comes in. Is Corewell laying the foundation for governance while you're moving forward with all these things?
Yeah, actually about six months ago, we started, we dedicated a team on that.
We actually put in plan view almost four or five months ago now in anticipation that, look, we've got multiple project management tools. We've got JIRA, we've got pieces of project. We've got all these things. We need to be aligned. We've got a governance structure that is follows our organizational structure to some extent.
And within those, we're calling them enterprise portfolios. We've got different. Program teams and governance teams that are leading sections of our organization. Even within those, we have parts of it that are maybe designated as projects or programs and some things that are designated as value streams.
And so it's interesting to see a portfolio management structure that has both traditional projects on the list of things, but then you'll also see a value stream with a list, and then you can double click into that and you can see the backlog and you can see who's leading that work and how we're getting through it.
It's a lot of coordination that's happening, but we know to your point we have to be ready to go as we get beyond this major sole focus and we start to go from one big thing to lots of minor things that all need to be managed. We've got to have that infrastructure in place or it turns into chaos pretty quickly.
Yeah, plus you have a big optimization Project just right. Follow me.
I would argue that people haven't really slowed down on what they,
at this time. so Chief Digital and Information Officer, what does Chief Digital.
What
does that title mean in
your role?
a lot of debate about that when it was added to my title a few years ago.
I think I was early in the cycle, so, I thought, hey, this is great, maybe I'm going to get a big raise. And, it was interesting because at the time, this was when a lot of chief digital officers were coming to bear. The role wasn't as clear. Well, what is that? Is that a technology role?
Is it a business leadership role? And I had the conversation with my CEO and just our leadership team. I said, look is the way we do technology nowadays, isn't it almost all digital? That's just the evolution of the world. And so to think that somebody else is in charge of digital is almost like saying, well, you're in charge of all the facilities.
the business of technology in:That is a very small part of where we focus. We need to focus on bus business enablement. driving more advanced technologies, leveraging digital, the business of digital, right? Have we created a digital business out of it? I'm a hundred percent ready for somebody to come and say, I'll run that P& L. That could be a very different role.
It wouldn't be a chief digital officer, probably be a leader of the P& L for a digital business line. I think drawing that separation. so that we are partnering from a how do we digitally enable versus how are we embedding digital into what we do is a good way and it's worked well for our organization it keeps I think the turf wars at a minimum and doesn't you know start to fragment things along this AI is going to be the next evolution right people are going to say do you need a chief AI officer I think that one, most people still say doesn't your CIO or CDIO kind of own the plan for AI to some extent?
And we're likely seeing that same type of pattern first
there. Well, it's interesting, Chief Digital Officer, the way you described it, and I've heard it described that way. It's the application of technology to the business, to workflows, to processes, to the patient. We've been in the business up for a long time.
We just have no tools at our disposal, right? And so when AI comes in. It really does align with that Chief Digital Officer. It's like, all right, so we just have another technology that we're looking at. And since we broached the subject of AI you brought it up first, I just want to note for the record but it is a relevant topic, it's a very relevant topic.
We're seeing these things evolve very rapidly you have a lot of other things going on right now, but in this world, you're probably doing a lot of things at once. How is AI being considered and I it an add-on also, or is it just starting to become fully integrated into the thought processes
and workflows?
Yes. The end and all of that? So I think, there's what I would call the everyday ai, which we're all just going to use and it looks like a feature. I just wrote a document was it yesterday? I think yesterday. That I drafted and co pilot, and it was a two page document that took me, five minutes of prompt engineering, and it would have taken me an hour to write, and it did a pretty darn good job.
Teams is amazing at its ability to just, document a meeting and summarize it. Those are things that We're just doing, right? There's little risk to them. They're parts of the feature set. There's a lot of AI enablement of our core vendors that we're just gonna do those things, right? When those features come out, hopefully we don't get raked over the coals on the pricing of them.
We're gonna try to adopt those things. Then I think there are the things in the middle, which are new technologies and vendors that have an AI component to them. I think Gen AI is absolutely gonna change the way we think about, call centers and the way we interact, the idea of the old crappy chat bot, hopefully will die soon, and we can get a much more intelligent way of automating things.
We're just at the beginning of that. And then I think that, then there's the, how do we take the tool sets that are being built on top of AI? We're not going to build a large language model of our own at Coral Health, but we certainly have to have people with the tools to wield the power of these new capabilities for automation and really moving things forward.
I think computer vision is one of those areas that's going to just explode, you can pick up so much data with a simple camera, an action, a person, something that happened, and the tools are getting so good, you can teach them these things relatively quickly.
And just think about it, Bill, like five years ago, maybe it was six, seven. We're talking about all these sensors to detect when a patient was in a room with a physician and we needed RTLS. And you look at that now and you're like do we need that? A simple camera, 100 webcam. I can say the patient's here.
They're about to get out of their bed. The nurse came into the room. She didn't wash her hands. You can go through all of those different things. How we take that data and make action of it is going to be the next five years of figuring it out. I think
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Education. As we're training the next generation of caregivers and whatnot, was watching a demo 4o as in the letter O for Omni, so that it can see, can hear, and those kind of things. And the Khan Academy was, this kid was being trained on trigonometry. And, the computer was seeing the equation, he was pointing at things, they were going back and forth. I'm sitting there going, Oh my gosh that's like a real tutor.
That's like somebody who can interact with somebody and really help them to move forward.
It's unbelievable. I'm not a Luddite by any stretch, but I was pretty impressed yesterday that I, cause I don't think about it. I don't think, Oh, I got to write this document. Let me try to AI.
And so I said, Hey, I, I got this document. My kids looked at me like I had four heads. They're like, Dad, we've been using this stuff for a year, like why don't you do it for us? All the way back in October of last year. We started in October, like we have already been doing this. I've cheated on three tests already with these guys, right?
So, do think the genie's out of the bottle in some of these things. And, there's the security and privacy and all that stuff. So there will be a normalization process, absolutely think it's exciting time for us to separate the noise from the possibilities, but to start harnessing, hey, how can we really use this stuff to change it?
ambient computing is going to, totally improve the lives of our providers, clinicians across the board, including nursing. It's just like, the sky's the limit, I think, in terms of the opportunities. We're going to see a big wave of things coming into healthcare that is truly removing the burden from our caregivers instead of maybe what we've done for the last 15 or 20 years, which is adding more to them with our technology.
All right let's talk trends and innovation, and we could do this pretty rapidly. Instead of giving you the generic, question that I normally throw out. You're a seasoned professional, so I'm going to, to walk you through different areas and I'll give you the five areas right now, and then I'll come back to each one.
Call center, home health, imaging, patient experience, clinician experience. let's start with the call center. How are you viewing the call center over the next five years? What does that
look like? How does that evolve? Well, we just talked about it, right?
The call center essentially is the thing that you try to avoid. You're not calling the call center usually because you want to call the call center, you're trying to do something. And the least common denominator is the call center. And I would love it if people would do everything they can do digitally and be an app and everything else.
But you've got variety of comfort levels. The call center is going to have a digital front end on it. You're still going to have some call center agents dealing with the really complicated, gnarly stuff. But boy, when you look at call centers in general, you can start peeling off, even just our call center, our help desk, our service desk in IT, a huge portion of those are still password resets.
It's crazy to think how much human labor we spend on that. Now there's security concerns and all that stuff you have to validate, but that goes from a scheduling perspective to a, what do you need? I think AI is going to change the game in there in the next five years. It's not going to eliminate them, but it's going to absolutely take what the vision of a good IVR system would have been, that we all hate, and turn it into something genuinely helpful, and then allow the people and the humans to just chime in with that.
So, natural language, digital front door, automation on the back end. It might feel the same, but it will
act very differently on the back end. I think it might feel the same, but it will act very differently on the back end. Here's the kicker, right? You can't do that. You can't put those systems in place when you've got garbage under here.
Those systems can't traverse eight different ways of doing things, 52 different scheduling patterns, all 158 different templates, depending on the position. You have to standardize stuff for those things to work, which is why the journey we're on right now feels like. Trudging through the mud to standardize and get on core foundation.
But we believe like in the future, the people who don't make those investments are going to be at a material disadvantage in their ability to advance the tech.
The delivery of health at home. don't want to call it home health because that has so much legacy to it. But will care be delivered out of the home?
not as sure about this one, right? We've had hospital at home things, they've been relatively small scale. There's a lot of costly logistics in bringing all of that to the home. I do think that there is an opportunity, certainly when you think about the low acuity stuff, the chronic disease management, the things that are back and forth a lot with relatively low, requirement to put hands on a patient, that's just going to continue to evolve.
I don't think it's going to be a revolutionary game changing thing at this point. I think it's going to just more and more things are going to start sliding that direction and it's become easier and more like out of the box able to provide those services.
Yeah, it makes sense. Imaging. So imaging is changing in our world.
there's this move to server side rendering. There's this move towards enterprise imaging. how do you think โimaging is going to look different? the back end,
well, I think everybody's been screaming about, how radiologists won't be employed, for a long enough time now that we don't have enough radiologists and the technology isn't yet caught up and we have a national shortage of radiologists, right?
So I think the impetus now is really, going to be pushing much higher on our ability to look at imaging as something where the radiologists are designing the algorithms or reviewing the machine. They're not being the primary on as much of this stuff. And when you think about it, it's one of the areas where machine learning, for example, is really good at looking at something, pattern.
We can teach these things. So I do think that's going to go. I do think the availability of such large think about things that have been difficult. Genomics, slide imaging for pathology. Those have been like, almost like Rackspace limited. Now, and with cloud based technologies, storage is abundantly cheap, and you're really just paying for for storage.
You're paying for processing. So I do think it's going to start to renovate that stuff. It needs to happen. I think what used to be the resistance is people don't want to do it because you're going to get human resistance. Now it's almost like, guys, we don't have enough people to do this. We need help. So I think that's going to help the process.
sitting with a CIO and he shared His map of imaging. And so he had 42 different imaging systems across the board. Now, granted, they're very distinct imaging systems. But I looked at him, I thought, I'm not sure ours was all that different. That's there's a lot of very distinct solutions that have been out there.
let's talk the patient experience a little bit. So five years from now, patient experience, does it dramatically change or is it incrementally, we're going to see some new things?
I thought five years ago by now we'd have it dramatically changed to tell you the truth.
It's not a technology problem at this point, right? We've got geolocation. We've got, near field communications. We've got digital stuff in our pockets. We've got a lot of things that could do a much better job of making our patient experience more seamless. We have a people problem in how we actually operate and execute healthcare with a lot of different steps and stops and regulatory requirements and checks and balances, so I think it'll get better.
I think it's going to be incremental, unfortunately, instead of revolutionary, but I do think there are steps that we'll see. In five years, that'll just be commonplace that are a little more exceptional. And I don't think you'll see people at the front desk. I think you're going to walk in, you're going to get a pop up.
everything's going to be driven towards more digital front use. And I think that's just going to be the world we live in, probably driven as much by consumer preferences. It is by cost and efficiency. Quite frankly,
we've seen in the clinician experience. Every time I talk about the clinician experience, everybody.
It comes back to ambient because I think we're seeing this switch like we've had this kind of technology for a while, but it was really out of reach. It was. Like we couldn't roll it out across the entire system and it feels like now it's being democratized. We can move it to the ends of the system and so more people have access.
How are your clinicians responding to Ambient as you roll it out?
I thought that they would be positive with it. I was unprepared for how positive. We got like clinicians physicians, that, that were saying this is changing my life. It's that good.
With minimal training, day two type of comments, it's this good. So I absolutely think it's at the point now where the technology is mature enough. It'll still continue to get better and it's not perfect. It doesn't work as well. And. subspecialties as primary care, but it's just going to become standard of care pretty soon.
This is how we do it and we're going to take the computer out. I think what it also is telling us is look, we've really matured in how much data we capture and how efficient we are at moving information around. We really have put a lot of burden on our front line to be the data capture engine, right?
And that isn't the best use of their time. They've been saying that for a long time. We haven't had a good option. It's been well, live in the dark ages or do the work, right? I think Ambient is bridging the gaps to say, well, actually, maybe we can actually live in the future and we can release the burden, which is a huge opportunity for us.
I think everybody's going to run at this as fast as they can. I'd love to apply to all of our clinical types, not just physicians, go into nursing and find other areas that have documentation heavy jobs and figure out how we can use it there as well.
have a couple more minutes.
Let's talk about the leadership. And so you've brought in several institutions together. You're building an IT organization. What are you looking for in terms of the qualities of leaders within the healthcare IT organization?
I think healthcare IT has become less about just the technology and more about making sure that you can see the big picture of the field.
And so, a few things that I'm looking for, well, just from a peer leadership perspective, I really focus on two main areas. One is accountability. Do you take accountability for your work? And that means you own it when it works and you own it when it doesn't work, right? And the second is humility, which is you have to be willing to let others take the spotlight and not be craving that.
Like having an agenda and having an angle doesn't really suit you well in these types of roles. Like if you want the spotlight, you got to go be like a CEO or something. If you want to, Get stuff done and almost be a servant in how you're doing it. That's going to align you well. If you're confident, you've got that accountability and you're humble, you're going to have the right core.
Then we really need to think about people that can think around complex problems and problem solve in a different way. And I think leaders that see that whole picture and can figure it out, but then can empower and lead their teams. It's a, you take all of those things and you slice it down and what you get is, wow, there isn't that many people that are going to check all those boxes.
And I think being really effective in a senior leadership or a leadership capacity in health IT nowadays is a very difficult thing to do. I think it's a very hard role to do well. It's a very rewarding role some days, and it's a very thankless role on other days. prepared. You have to be able to handle both of those and to live with the ups and downs and be able to take yourself out of the picture and just think about what is it we're trying to accomplish here.
Yep. Okay. The chief marketing officer is going to get all the credit for this, even though we did it, 80 percent of the work, fine, that's good for the organization, let that roll. And I bet you, if you talk to a lot of people, they might say that, but then in their gut, they're like, but that makes me mad.
And I'm telling you, that is like the thing that allows. leaders to really be exceptional because you just know that there's not drama there. They're just gonna be strong and solid and they're gonna roll with it whether it's good or it's bad.
as you were talking about that, one of the things that struck me is how important it is it for your direct leaders to really be able to function as a team?
I've seen a group of really strong leaders who are, they don't meld as a team. A collection of individual, yeah. Yeah, and
How do you foster that? it is a very important element of it. As a matter of fact, I was just having a one on one with one of my leaders today and he was, working through a challenge and he said, this is a struggle.
The good news is we've come together and we're 100 percent aligned on the same page. And I think, a lot of it has to do with building trust, having those things that I just said. When you know the person sitting across from you is coming at this, even though you may disagree from an angle of, I'm trying to solve the problem, I don't have an agenda, I'm coming with some curiosity and humility to the table.
You at least have a foundation for doing that stuff. We do spend a lot of time together. Every week we have a huddle, every two weeks we have a longer discussion around the strategy moving forward. Quarterly we spend more time together and annually at least once or twice a year we get together off site for a day or two and just work on the team, how our dynamics are, but we also work on our strategies and I think You know, you got to be arm to arm and shoulder to shoulder with people for a little while and then they start to trust each other and I will say I'm definitely biased in the statement but I think my leadership team is truly exceptional.
We worked hard to find people that aren't just good at their job, but they're good at being part of the team and I think that is a very great thing. tough recipe and a tough dynamic to maintain because you need everybody to have a similar level of thinking in terms of their role on the team.
And when you find it, you got to hold on to it.
So, second to last question here last one's a softball, but how do you stay current? Like I, remember the pace at which I was moving as a CIO, it was hard for me to stay up on all the things that were going on. And a lot of times I'd find things out in meetings and that kind of stuff.
How do you stay current on what's going on outside in the world? As opposed, there's so much going on at Corewell, I would imagine that could consume you. So.
You could read 24 7 on stuff, right? I very deliberately try to find, organizations, so I'm like part of two different groups that really give me the IT world, right?
I make sure I go to at least a couple of those meetings a year because I'm collaborating with other CIOs with content that is, More IT generally and not healthcare specific, which I think is really important in a role like this. Especially when you're a Corewell Health, and we need to be out in front of some of this stuff.
If I just look at what we're doing, I'm already probably behind, right? And so that's really important to me. The other is, Healthcare is an incredibly collaborative kind of environment, and other CIOs in healthcare are very forthcoming. And so I have a pretty broad and deep network of other healthcare CIOs, some of which I'm on email chats with, some of which I'll just text once in a while.
So you're always bouncing stuff off. There's different, things throughout the year. I don't go conference crazy because I think those are, in my role, a little less valuable, but community is something I would go for. So I'll go spend two days if I can get a small group of people that I can come on board with, and we can talk about meaningful stuff.
There's, of course, the different readings and research that I try to keep up on, but it's just a matter of finding those things that really push and stretch versus those things that are just a, yeah, I knew that, and it's an echo chamber, but it makes me feel good that I'm smart.
last question.
I'll ask you about So you're very involved in Scottsdale Institute, and been involved with Scottsdale Institute over the years. I'd love for you to talk about that. The value of Scottsdale Institute. And you're also pretty involved in Inspire CIO. I'd love for you to talk about those two organizations and what you invest in there and what you get out of those.
Well, I'll add a third, which is Gartner. So I'm involved in Gartner. They're really helped me think like, okay, what's the big picture, what's going on, right? Usually doesn't get me very deep in any problem, but really helps me to get out of just the echo chamber of healthcare. Scottsdale Institute, I think is great because it's equal parts kind of IT technology and operations clinical CEO leaders, right?
So what I find valuable about Scottsdale is just, it's still a relatively compact group, but it really focuses on the meat of that intersection in a unique way. And it doesn't overly do. What I'll call the vendor craziness, right? So I haven't been a huge fan of HIMSS late. I went a couple of years ago and I just like, I got overwhelmed.
I'm like, man, I felt like a steak in a pit of piranha or something. it wasn't a helpful environment. Chime is a little bit, more collaborative and a little bit smaller venue that I can help with. But, Scottsdale certainly is something I think is useful. Inspire CIO, I got involved with primarily.
because I wanted local people, right? So that was helpful because it was Michigan based. I didn't know a lot of people on the east side of the state and with the integration with Beaumont, I wanted a quick on ramp to meet some other CIOs and others that I could collaborate with over there. And so I picked that up for the networking element of it.
And there's, a few other groups that I'm part of just informally as well that really help round things out. I will say this, bill. I, a lot of people just let those things happen and I think it's really helpful to say, what part of the information am I getting from this group?
What am I getting from here? What do I want out of it? Because you could go to a conference every week and, find a million different groups that would love to have you part of them, but you have to really be deliberate about what you're trying to get from each one. I think if you can do that, you can come up with a good game plan.
All right, so I lied. my last question's gonna be. Somebody's graduating, and we're at that season right now, so it's May. When are we doing this interview? May 21st. It might not air until June, but there's a lot of graduating seniors and those kinds of things. Might be a little late for those, but those who are going to school if you were giving the commencement address and somebody, let's say it was a health IT organization or education institution that you were giving it to.
what would you say to those students?
The first thing I would tell them is to be ambitious and to go after and use their eyeballs to see things that can be better and improved and don't think that you're limited. But on the flip side, be smart about how you go about that, right?
And I often see young people that they see it, they're like, that looks good. Nobody's ever thought about solving this problem before. And the likelihood of that happening in healthcare is very low. More likely it is a problem. You're correct. People have tried to solve it and there's a pathway of dead bodies laying down there that tried to solve it and weren't very successful at solving it.
So be smart about thinking about how you go about it. You've got to not just charge straight up the hill and get mowed down by the machine gun. Be very strategic about how you solve the problems. The second piece, and this is a hard one, is be patient. I see a lot of younger folks that really have a lot of potential or ambition in their career that don't want to take the time to learn how things work and go through the process of struggling and failing and learning an area and mastering it and going to another area and mastering it.
They get too under their belt and they're like, I got it. I'm ready to be a CIO. And somebody might give you that job, but you're going to be stressed out and struggle and you may not be as good as you might have been had you been patient along the way. And I'm talking to my own younger self when I say this, that I had a lot of that ambition.
I thought I was really smart and could figure this stuff out. But the reality is there are certain things you learn only by going through and seeing it. And then once you do that and you get that wisdom, then you have to be smart enough to not let your bad experiences limit your Optimism for the future either and let the younger people do that work and really coach and mentor them, but take yourself out of it.
It is a really challenging dynamic to do all of those things well, but I'll tell you, if you've got the right attitude, you can come at it with energy and humility. Those are the types of leaders we need for the next generation of healthcare IT, and I'm looking forward to working with you.
Jason, as always, it's great to catch up with you and thanks for running through the gauntlet, man.
I'm usually not that hard CIOs, but I really enjoy our conversations.
likewise, I always do. You gave me questions to prep for them. I don't think you asked any of them.
A couple, we started with them. I just, got me interested in some other stuff, so I appreciate it.
No, that's great. I always love these conversations, Bill.
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