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February 17, 2023: Stanford Health is focusing on simplicity and usability in 2023. CIO Michael Pfeffer shares some of their priorities and it's all about sustainability. How can we optimize our platforms while maintaining an awareness of the sustainability of our solutions? How can we derive pragmatic value from said sustainable solutions? What makes on-sight work environments valuable? And how can we be using and presenting data better? 

Key Points:

  • Where is battery technology going?
  • Quantifying sustainability in health systems
  • Healthcare is an in-person business
  • Stanford Health

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Transcript

 This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

Today on This Week Health.

 (Intro) I've said this before, but lots of talk about big data.

Big data. What about the small data, right? Like that's the data that really matters. Cause that turns into big data. And if the small data's not good, then the big data is certainly not gonna be good.

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.

(Main)

  📍 All right. Today we are joined by Dr. Michael Pfeffer, CIO for Stanford Health. Mike, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, bill. Always a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation. We've run into each other a couple times this year. I think we've done one interview.

But the last time we were together, you talked about sustainability. It piqued my interest. We're gonna talk a little bit about sustainability today, and we'll hit the usual suspects. We'll talk data, we'll talk innovation and whatnot. It would be criminal to talk to the CIO for Stanford and not talk about innovation, I think fair.

But before we get there, the first question I have to ask always tell us about Stanford Health. What are some of the stats of Stanford Health? What is Stanford Health about?

Yeah. it's actually a real privilege and honor to be the c i o for Stanford Healthcare and the School of Medicine, Stanford Healthcare being the adult hospital and clinics as well.

Stanford Children's has separate. IT department and, ed Kopetsky my, my esteemed colleague over there really doing amazing stuff. So my portfolio is the adult side of the business and the school of medicine and it's such an incredible place. I mean, the amount of discovery and innovation and education and.

Quality and complexity that healthcare delivered here is just so, impressive to see and be part of. So, it's truly an amazing place.

So, Stanford Healthcare, are you guys building out the clinically integrated network across the a, a larger geography? Are you still essentially a standalone hospital kind of situ.

No we, we have a very large footprint in the East Bay and South Bay, and actually mostly in the, in the South Bay area and extending into different areas throughout the kind of 10 county region in Northern California. So we have a hospital in Pleasanton, California. and , that's really an amazing place.

Really community focused and growing our ambulatory practices around there as well. So, it's about partnerships, it's about expansions, it's about really how do we care for the populations in this area that really entrusts themselves to Stanford.

All right. The only compare and contrast question I'm gonna give you, cuz you came from ucla, now you're up there getting to the office, UCLA better or worse or, or Stanford, better or worse?

Well, that's entirely a function of how close you live. But I would say mile per mile it's easier to get to.

Yeah, I would imagine the handful of times I had to go to UCLA or go up to Cedars, my wife would say, when are you gonna be home? I'm like, I cannot give you that answer. It just, yeah.

And the morning

is about half as bad as the afternoon. So, yeah. I would say the commute here is better, but again, that's a mile per mile thing. If you live, further away than I. It could take just as long.

Let's start with a general question. there's a lot going on in healthcare.

What are some of the priorities for you at Stanford going into 2023?

Yeah, for, for me a lot of it has to do with simplicity and usability. When we think. , all the new technologies we wanna deploy. How do we wanna optimize our systems? How do we get platforms and applications to work together?

I want us to focus and we are focusing very much on these ideas of simplicity and usability. I always joke, how many times have you opened up your iPhone manual or went to training to use that? And of course the answer is never. . And I'd like to continue to keep that as a goal for us.

That we really think about the technologies and how they work together in a way where we're laser focused on usability. And it's not just our clinicians, but it's also how our patients use our systems, and how our employees at large use our systems and can do the things that they need to do better, faster.

So that's a big thing. Talent, right? This is a always a very, very critical thing. We're doing some of the most complex implementations and trying to support discovery that that requires in incredibly smart people in the IT organization. So how do we continue to retain and recruit talent?

to keep delivering on our missions. And, we're very fortunate. We have such an incredible professional, talented team that really just blows my mind every time I see what they accomplished on a day-to-day basis. I,

there's a couple conversations we've had recently that I wanna bring up.

I think I'll start with sustainability you still practice as a physician? And we talked about that a little bit. I wanna come back to that conversation cause that's, that was interesting to me cuz it's really it speaks to the quality of your team and the things that they can do when you literally are not around and not available, even though you're, right down the street, you do not make yourself available unless it's absolutely critical.

And that's pretty interesting. We'll come back to that sustainability. So. Your team you did a presentation that I was a part of and got to see, and your team has put together some just phenomenal stuff. Talk about the genesis for the conversation and how you got to talking about sustainability as an objective.

So, Stanford's actually really. A leader, I think, in sustainability and actually launched the School of Earth very recently, which is a brand new school here focused on sustainability. So it, it really runs deep throughout our organization. In fact, our c e o David Enw and our VP over kind of our infrastructure and, and real estate Helen Wilmont went to the White House to actually talk about all the amazing things that Stanford Healthcare is doing in this space.

And so from the IT standpoint we've really been initially focused on infrastructure. So our, how we purchase our desktops, our support service. . And Anne Marie Yappa, my team has been really spearheading that with her team. And then we wanted to do something bigger.

And so we, we really decided that we would commission a a governance group in it that reported up into leadership team. To focus very much on sustainability, put together a plan with strategies and metrics and, and baseline ideas so we can actually make this part of everything that we do going forward.

And it's not just it, it's also inclusive of biomedical engineering, so all the medical devices and there's a lot of opportunity I think, there as well. So I think saying that, sustainability, Is absolutely critical to the health, not only of the planet, but of all of us. And so it has to be part of what we do, especially in healthcare.

It to be able to not only support the business but do so in a sustainable way.

It would be interesting to talk about low hanging fruit here. , but you and I were talking before the show cuz I was, I was looking through our catalog now. We've been doing interviews for five years and we have literally thousands of interviews and sustainability was really only mentioned like three times, right?

So think about the context. The context is I'm interviewing somebody who's highlighting the things that they're proud of and excited about at their health system. And only three times in the last five years. . But one of those that the whole show was really about was one of the HCA CIOs.

And I think that speaks to the same thing that you were talking about, which is there's a very pragmatic reason to approach sustainability, not just the obvious, it's good for the planet, it's good for long term, it's good for us to continue to be a viable species, but but there is pragmatic.

Savings to approaching this correctly?

Yeah, I think so for sure. I mean, a simple thing, right? How often the monitors stay on throughout the hospital. Do we need all the computers that were there? We, we can use data and, and determine are, are they being used? Should we not use them, move them somewhere else, turn off the monitor, , there's a lot of very, very simple things and then you can get way more complicated in how you do this and partnering as well with the vendor community.

Lots of opportunity, lots of companies talking about how they're gonna be sustainable, and that's who we wanna do business with. We wanna do business with. Companies that really take this seriously. For example, we have a colo data center. And they're, carbon neutral and that was a really big.

Piece of why we chose to, to partner on that. So I think there's, there's huge opportunities. I think it's, you're right, it's not only the right thing, but if done appropriately, you can I think save money and put that money back into doing what we do best, which is caring for patients and supporting discoveries in, in life science.

One of the interesting conversations I'd ensued cuz it was UI and a bunch of CIOs was we were talking about lifecycle of equipment and you just posed the question, it's like, who determined that three years was the right lifecycle? Who determined that? It's just asking those questions. And it was interesting to see the going around the circle like.

Isn't that like the industry standard? Do you question such things and and you can, and we have data to support, hey, you could probably get four years out of this, or, we used to be guilty in healthcare of. trying to make a PC last for 10 years. That's a, that's a whole nother thing, right?

Right. Yeah. I mean, some equipment gets used very heavily and should be replaced. Going back to usability and simplicity, there's nothing worse than using a a computer that's very slow or, really needs to be re refreshed or a battery that, that dies very, very quickly. But on the other end, there's a lot of equipment that's functioning just fine, yet it's end of life.

It's, it's due for its refresh cycle or whatever, but that, where does that stuff go? Parts of it can be recycled obviously, but it doesn't all get recycled. And there are issues with recycling too. So, how do we, make the most out of the equipment that we are using?

And when it does come time to replace it, we think about, well, what's the next best sustainable approach? And so I think there's a, there's a lot of opportunity. Opportunity there for sure. The cloud OB obviously poses some really interesting opportunities in sustainability, but it's really that partnership with, with cloud vendors to make sure they're sustainable.

The hardware is somewhere, right? It, whether it's in the cloud or it's in a colo or it's in your own data center, right? The hardware is somewhere. And there's a lot of talk about, disaster recovery in the cloud and things like that. , if everybody needed disaster recovery at the same time, or there's regions that need it, where's all that equipment?

Where, where is that gonna come from? So, it's that partnership. I think that's really gonna make this work.

Yeah, I remember reading about Microsoft's initiative and they were essentially putting data centers. Not the bottom of the ocean, but, but they were literally submerging them.

Yeah. Cause they generate a lot of heat. That's one way to dissipate the heat very quickly. I don't know if that's good for the environment or not, but I like the experimentation of it, right? Thinking a little differently and saying, all right, this is how we've been doing it for years.

Or things like building near a hydroelectric power plant as opposed to in a, in, in a place that's competing for power. And

I'm very excited about, battery technology and where that's going. Right? I mean, if you think about all the lithium ion batteries that we use across all our medical devices, our, our laptops, iPhones, iPad, the list goes on and on, like what's next?

Solid state batteries batteries with less that are less toxic to make, like where's that gonna be? And then how quickly as an industry can we shift to harness that kind of technology, I think will be really interesting. So I'm very excited about that

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gimme an idea of how it functions though.

You, you have this, this group that has gotten together. Are they just asking questions? Are they raising things? Are they raising opportunity? How does, how does the whole thing sort of function? Can anyone bring an idea forward?

Yeah. So, absolutely. We wanna have wins, so what we need to do first is measure how we're doing across the different modalities of our organization.

and first, determine what those metrics are, measure them and determine where we're gonna get the most value. And so we've have lists of initiatives that came from all different aspects of our IT organization. The committee vets them. And comes up with basically, here are the initiatives that we are gonna focus on this year, and then measure our success on that.

And again, it's, it's not in, in a silo within our IT organization, but it's in partnership with the larger healthcare organization and then, and then the university because we don't wanna duplicate and we want to partner on where there's opportunities that cross all of the entities. So, that group then, Interdigitates with the other groups throughout the health system and the university so that it all comes back to our sustainability group.

And that group then reports out on a quarterly basis to myself and, and my leadership team. So it's always front and center. And so that's how we kind of have built it into the way we're thinking about really weaving sustainability in, into everything we.

Talk to me a little bit about measurement and then we'll move on from here.

So, it would be interesting to have like awards at the end of the year for the health system that does X, Y, or Z. But if, if you asked me to put that award together, I'm not sure what I would measure. So I'm curious what measures you guys are looking at.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. It really depends on, what strategy or what potential opportunity you have.

So, let's go to the refresh cycle question. You can measure how often you're refreshing your equipment that potentially doesn't need to be refreshed or how much potential savings there could be there. Power utilization, that's another one. Is there a way to, what's our baseline power utilization across our systems data center, however, and how much do we want to reduce that?

over the next year and then then look at what are the strategies that we are gonna use to do that. Waste is another one. How much waste are we generating? Can we, improve that somehow? The list kind of goes on and on. That would be really tough, I think, to potentially think of an award based on metrics, cuz they're gonna be unique and that different organizations are going.

Potentially have different opportunities based on where they are, what's the collaboration with the health system and the university so yeah, I mean, it's a good point.

I Progress against the baseline essentially is what we would look for.

Yeah. or even, even the idea, like if you embedded in some of the current awards or stages that we currently do, it could start simply as, do you have a committee that looks at that and, and do you have a number of initiatives that you're tracking? It could be as simple as that to say, okay, well, yeah, now we have a group thinking about it.

That could go an incredibly long way.

Would be interesting to incorporate it into. Most Wired wouldn't, it could be. Yeah. I don't know. Just, just throwing it out there For somebody who's connected to most Wired

look it couldn't hurt, right? I think, the other thing is you could gather data didn't learn before you would put in place some metrics.

So like, what are people doing across the enterprise? are people thinking about these things? When I come across people in this and talk about this, people are very excited. So I, I can't imagine that there would be an opportunity.

let's talk about people and leadership and I'll get back to that story of you practicing, but I, I wanna start with you.

You guys have a beautiful campus, beautiful place to work. Are you guys back on campus now or is it still kind of a hybrid situation?

In terms of the IT department, it's hybrid. So we, we have professionals on site obviously, and we have hybrid and we have fully remote.

And actually in the beginning of the year we're doing some work on our office space to make it a more collaborative place when our hybrid employees. come Back to the office more regularly. And when I say regularly, that's probably the wrong word because it's really about value.

And so what we're trying to do is really say, okay, what's the value of you coming on site? Well, collaboration with other teams, sometimes you need to get into a room and whiteboard a very complex problem now going to the business rounding those are really great reasons to come. on sight coming on site and sitting at a cubicle and doing eight hours worth of work.

Not a good use. Not very valuable. And so it's really changing the mindset. There's the new way to work. I mean, there there's many, many ideas and philosophies, and I'm not saying I have the right answer, but I'm trying to approach this from a value standpoint. I really want the in-person interactions and coming on site to be valuable.

Healthcare is an in-person business. I mean, yes, we do video visits and and such, but it's an in-person business. I haven't yet seen a surgery done fully, remotely. Someone's gotta be there to like actually hook up the equipment and such. I know there are some, examples of robots being controlled remotely for surgery, but the patient isn't in their, their home so it's still . An in-person business, especially on the other missions, education, research. I mean, we need to be there to support. So it's making sure that we're, we're connected, we have the relationships, we understand and that there's value to those in-person interactions. So that's kind of how we're really thinking about it.

And from, from a recruiting standpoint, this has to help

you to recruit the best. I would assume just being able to have that kind of flexibility with regard to where they're gonna work. Are you, as you go out and look for new roles mm-hmm. , are you looking for healthcare background as much as you're looking for a specific technology background or temperament, personality and, and those kinds of things?

How do you weight that? .

It varies and it depends probably on the role itself, but fundamentally, it's, it's someone who's, really, really excited and passionate about our missions. That's why you do this. And I think you've seen all the stuff in the news, right?

About the tech industries and how they're, laying off people. And this is a real opportunity to come to, he. and be part of something that's truly amazing where your work really impacts patients' lives and, and hopefully gives them, a chance to add to their, their life story.

Support our researchers, help train the future clinicians. It's an incredibly exciting and important place to be. So that excitement. Passion about our missions is really critical. This is still a relationship business. So, really being collaborative and wanting to be part of something bigger I think is really critical.

And then the skills and everything, we want a diversity of skills and diversity of experiences, diversity in general. Because, if we're gonna actually, truly be highly successful on health, We need to have a very diverse IT organization to be able to support that.

Describe for me when you are practicing now I know you still do email at night and we all, do that kinda stuff, but when you're practicing, you really do focus on your practice. Like Yeah. You, you're practicing medicine and the IT team, your team is supporting you in that talk about how long. Go about doing that. And how does your team respond during that time? What's, how do they function during that time?

Yeah, well, they probably function better. so, no, I do a week on, on service. I'm a hospitalist, so I take care of patients in the hospital. Again, a real privilege to work with the residents and medical students here at Stanford.

I mean, I learned so much from them. Hopefully they learned from me. And of course the greatest teachers of all are our patients. So I get to, really dive in there, see how our technologies are working, get an opportunity to care for people. And during that time, my leaders in the IT organization, and of course the teams do phenomenal work and they, if they really need me, they'll ping me.

But fundamentally, I try to debrief with them after the week on some of the things that I've learned and, and seen, and it helps really, I think, cement our focus on usability and simplicity on how the work is being done. And then of course, there's things to celebrate some, there's a lot that works really well and I think often we focus on the things that don't work well.

But, but there are a lot of things that work really well so that's really, I. To me. And I'll often take people on rounds with me too, from the IT department or other areas so they can, see what it's like. And that's a lot of fun, especially to hear, what they think after afterwards.

It's interesting the email thing. , I've really tried it. I'm trying very hard not to do emails after hours or send them out and I might type 'em and they'll, they all have save for later or send later, which I think is an amazing feature. But, I really believe like, we gotta figure out better ways to help people disconnect.

Yeah. Not just healthcare, it's everything. Right. I mean, I bet if we. , if we looked at sleep patterns since the introduction of the iPhone or the smartphone, like they wouldn't be nearly as good as they were. Man, I don't know. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's not true. But we have to figure out ways to disconnect and, when we venture into the whole, discussions on burnout, it's individual and it's, I think having some, some ability to disconnect.

Technology.

Yeah. I don't wanna go into this too far, but some of the stuff I've read on sleep, I mean, we sit in front of these screens and it actually communicates to your brain the sun has risen. Like Yeah, yeah. It's gonna take, take a little while of you being in the dark before your brain goes, ah, maybe that was a false signal. let's go to sleep. And just anecdotally, my two parents are in town. My mom and my dad are in town 85 years. and there's been a couple times where my wife and I just look at each other. Do we tell them to get off their phones? I mean, it's like, that generation has now, since the pandemic has completely embraced the use of technology.

And they're like my dad used to read the newspaper to get his news on the Philadelphia Eagles. He now has like 10 websites. He goes and he get. Detailed information. He's just like, this phone thing's amazing. I'm like, you realize the Internet's behind that phone thing? He goes, oh no, it's just, it's on my phone.

I'm like, yeah.

Crazy. Yeah, I was talking with our chief technology officer here at Christian Landmark and about, traveling back 20 years ago in traveling now and if you wanted to get around somewhere, you'd have like a map or a guidebook. , you walk around and you, you'd kind of get lost and end up in places that you probably would've never had visited, but are amazing and, and some of your greater stories.

And now you never get lost. You have your phone, you just go wherever it tells you to go and which is great cuz there's a lot of times you don't wanna get lost. Right. You, you need to find where you need to go. I mean, it's great, but like, how do we balance the two? Right? Both should be. Both should be the way we, the way we do it, and then how do we balance that?

And I think that's really important. As, as technologies, we really think about that and how we design our systems.

And I'm just pic, I'm picturing a new MAP app that says, are you okay with getting lost for a little bit? We'll help you get back, but

we'll help you get lost and then we'll help you get back.

That would be great. that's really interesting. I haven't seen the help me get lost button yet on any of that products

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let's, let's hit innovation. In what area are you seeing Stanford really pushing the envelope with regard to technology or data at this point?

Yeah, I mean, Stanford, just the amount of innovation that comes out of here is, mind blowing and

And I think one of the challenges is defining what is innovation? And I think there's many levels of innovation, right? I mean, there's innovations that's happening in the day-to-day. Just how do we tweak things to make them better, faster, more efficient, more automated, all the way up to, spinning out a company that you.

Does something really?

Yeah, we could push the envelope right now in healthcare if we made all, all aspects just easier, simpler, like you were saying earlier.

Yeah, just simpler and so there's many, many innovation opportunities across the spectrum. And so trying to really say innovation is everybody's responsibility.

It's not, there isn't a group over here that's gonna innovate. So as the IT department, right? Our job is to figure out how to help make these innovations happen a lot faster. And so we're spending a lot of time thinking about how do we do that and how do we do even better on bringing things into healthcare.

So an example is we recently appointed Dr. Nigam chief data scientist for Stanford Healthcare and partnered him with our. Enterprise Architect on re and basically with focus on how do we bring ai into the clinical space in a sustainable, different kind of sustainable, but sustainable, scalable, thoughtful way that solves problems for.

Clinical care operations and really, really exciting stuff. So thinking about platforms, thinking about standards, thinking about frameworks, governance, value assessments around potential algorithms and how they would actually scale. All those innovations are not gonna come from Stanford per se.

We may partner on different ideas around. Ai, ml, all those fun buzzwords, but they're really, nothing until they actually get into use and then are monitored and are cared for, and they need that kind of, oversight in order to be successful. both at scale and long term.

So that's just one example of how we're thinking about innovation there. There's also this amazing program, Stanford Medicine Catalyst. It's run by two phenomenal leaders here on Michael Hollis and you and Ashley. And it takes just incredible ideas that come from Stanford Medicine.

and through a very extensive, process gets from hundreds down to, eight and basically provides them the resources to implement and scale. And take their ideas, hopefully one day to market. And so we're involved in that, in the IT organization and really supporting some of these just phenomenal ideas that come outta the Catalyst program.

So just two examples and the list goes on and on of

is that an incubator or an accelerator? What, how does that function?

Yeah, I guess I would call it more of an accelerator because the ideas it's not incubating ideas per se, it's more. Here's the idea, or there's a, initial product or, something to that effect that then is accelerated through the process.

Amazing. That's a lot of fun. I wanna ask you about data. I mean, you talked about building that team who's bringing AI and I, I think we assume from the outside, An organization like Stanford understands the need for data governance, and you as the CIO never have to have conversations about it cuz everyone just sort of gets it and the data is all clean and ready to go and whatnot.

But I would imagine your AI initiatives get stalled just like every other health systems based on the, the quality of the data and getting it out there. Talk about some of the initiatives or challenges or initiatives around really cleaning the data to make it.

It's a great point. I mean, I've said this before, but lots of talk about big data.

Big data. What about the small data, right? Like that's the data that really matters. Cause that turns into big data. And if the small data's not good, then the big data is certainly not gonna be good. And we've seen this play out over and over and over again. . So how do you get good small data? I mean, you gotta make the systems usable and simple, right?

So it goes right back to what we were talking about in the beginning and that the right people are entering that kind of data into the system so you get it as accurate as possible. And then how do you aggregate it all? And, and, standards are really, really important on how we think about this.

And data governance, of course. Of course we have a lot of work to do in this area and. Chief Analytics officer Johann vetted, is spending a lot of time with his team, really thinking about the new enterprise analytics strategy. Like where do we go from here? Obviously there's tons of data we can build, lots of dashboards and reports and everything like that, but what's the next step?

And imagine that you are in your workflow, doing whatever it is that, that you're doing, and an analytic or piece of information that's absolutely relevant to you is presented to you in a way that you could actually do something with it. And I think that's where I'd love to be. And you've seen dashboards, right?

They have like all these graphs and lines and you look at it and. . Wow, this is really amazing. That's a lot of data, but what do I do with it? It's so complicated, right. I wanna get to like, here's a number four of something. Right. And that's all you need to know because it really should be two and it's four.

And maybe here's two things you can do of why it's foreign, not too right. And so now that could be really action. if it's presented in a way that's personalized and in your workflow. So I think as an industry, we have a long way to go,

the beauty of the iPhone or the Mac interface in general, is the things they've said no to.

If you remember PCs back in the day, we used to have like all sorts of menus and things all over the place. Like everything had to be like right there for you. But, what Apple did for us is they really showed us human-centered design. They really thought it through and they said, no, no, no. The design's really about what you say no to.

And make it as simple as possible for people to access what they need. And with analytics, it's interesting because we're, as healthcare, we're generating more data daily than we've ever generated in history. I mean, just an amazing amount of data. Yeah. And more and more it's gonna get to be alright.

I'm a cardiologist and I'm working with this patient. I need four pieces of information, gimme those four pieces of information. Now, if I want the graph and whatever, I know intuitively that I click on that and boom, there it is, and I can look into more detail. But don't put it all on that screen.

Just put four things I'm looking for.

Yeah, it's hard. I mean, it says, every clinician thinks a little bit differently and all data is not created equal in the sense of some could be more meaningful in different situations than not. And really trying to figure out how to show that I think is really complicated.

But you know, a good example that I I love is that your energy provider, right? You get an email, it's like this is your energy usage, this is your peer's energy usage, then your neighborhood, right? , you're doing well. Or Wow, you really, used a lot of energy this month and it's really actually been very successful.

One data point, that's it. It's like your energy usage and how you're comparing to your peers in a very simple graph that's emailed to you and it really gets you thinking like, wow. Why was I so high last month? Oh yeah. I ran the air conditioning too much. I'm gonna change that and.

I think that's a really great example.

Data. Storytellers are in such high demand, Twitter's a great example, or LinkedIn or whatever. They give you that one graphic and you look at it and you go, okay, in that marketplace we don't have any beds.

There's this many people who are sick, there's many who are vaccinated, this many are in the icu, some of those graphics during the pandemic they were kind of clunky in the beginning, but towards the end I'm sitting there going, wow, that one graphic told me an awful lot about what's going on in that community.

Yeah. I love that term, data storyteller. , that's really what it's about, right? It's how do we get stories out of the data that not only like inform you, but then, it's kind of then to the choose your own adventure story and then you could do A or B, based on what you learned from the data set.

That's where I, I'd love to get to, obviously, people, self-service, the ability to dive into dataset for hypothesis generation, all of that stuff, right?

You're a research institution. You absolutely have to give them

of, of course. And again, how do we make it faster, better, simplistic, easier to use, right?

Better platforms. All of those things, I think is the iteration of where we are. Stanford has a, this data repository called star, which is phenomenal. It was built many, many years ago. One of the first de de-identified data marts and de-identified the notes, which is really amazing. Had that here for a while.

And so the next iteration of that even more modalities and you. better Usability, simplicity, and then telling the story how to even find it. Get there, it departments, I think we need to market what we have better, what do we have in our product portfolio and how can you get to it?

Like, I've a joke, but I'm serious. I want us to create a, I need data button and you, anybody can click that button at Stanford. and then, walks you through like the use case of how to get what you need based on, what you're looking for. And so that's where I'd like to get to.

Right. I love that. I need data. Like, here's my problem, I need data. And it goes, all right, let me ask you a couple questions. Here's where the data is, or even better at, here's the data. .

Yeah. And so, I mean, it sounds easy to do. It's actually quite hard. And there are experts in, designing these kind of things, design thinking, like how do you, how do you actually do this?

But point is, I mean, there's an opportunity I think, for all of us to really focus on that usability and simplicity aspect.

I'm trying to think my, my exit question here, cuz we're, we're up on our time here, so I think my exit question is gonna be technology you're keeping an eye on that you believe is gonna.

A significant impact on healthcare in the next three to five years.

Yeah. So, that's a great question. I'm really excited about ambient voice technology and,

it would, it would be nice for that keyboard to go away completely, wouldn't it?

It would. And so, To really be able to, take all of the insights from the clinical visit and create that, documentation that's necessary And really, use the computer for showing things like radiologic images and how we would do surgery X or whatever, but not, using it to do the typing.

I'm really excited and it's getting better and better. And I think, as we get more vendors into this space and really think about how to do it, it's gonna get more affordable, which is the other piece I think that's important. But the ambient voice and really bringing that connection between the provider and the patient better is really key.

And again, it's not that the computers shouldn't be part of it, cuz there's so much you can do in terms of educating and explaining. with images and such. So it's not taking it outta the picture. We don't wanna take the computer outta the picture. We wanna take the, piping of the notes out of the picture.

So I'm really excited about that. And then I do think that we're gonna see, AI and ML really start to become more and more used and applied in the healthcare. So I'm really excited about those two things.

Fantastic. Mike, always a pleasure to catch up. I wanna thank you for your time and look forward to the next time we're in the room together.

Thank you, bill. Always, always so much fun to chat and really, really appreciate the time.   📍 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.

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