Newsday - #JPMHC22 Themes, Telehealth 2.0, and the Labor Crisis with Chris Logan

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

Chris Logan: Nine times out of 10 ransomware starts with a human being. Are they training their people? Are they segmenting out the environments? What's running in their platform? I wish this would continue to get pushed by the feds and become reality so that people know exactly how their operating environments are running. That way we can identify a breach quickly. Isolate it and move on.

It's Newsday. And I'm excited for this week's conversation. We're going to talk a little bit about telemedicine 2.0, and I think a great article. We're going to talk a little JP Morgan. L ittle bit of investment and some other things that have happened.

Chris Logan: Bill, always a pleasure to join you, my friend.

Bill Russell: You've been on Newsday once and our conversation was so good that we're going to kick off the year with another conversation. So I'm looking forward to it, but since we have you on and people are last week was Drex and we started with security.

I just want to touch on this security thing. I have a bunch of CEOs that I work with that have been hit by various issues.

Chris Logan: You should have been worrying about.

Bill Russell: Oh man, you're right. I probably should have been.

We can do these things. And then they're hit by a ransomware attack, where they get in and they kill you from the inside and they're as vulnerable as anybody else. Well, who knew what was I supposed to do? I mean push them is one thing, but what am I asking them?

Are they training their people? Is somebody clicking on a link in an email that's causing serious disaster across that operating environment? Are they segmenting out the environments? Here's my favorite one, because this spins off of the whole log for J issue. Do they have a defined software bill of materials? What's running in their platform?

Bill Russell: I will say this. I love my staff where I was CIO for a health system. But they always felt like I was pushing them too hard. Hey, no, no we need to know the things you're just asking for. We need to know what systems talked to which. What defines normal traffic on our network? What defines the normal flow of data across our network?

And that's why we have to stay ahead of this stuff. And not only what's going on today but what goes on to the future. Let me ask you one more security question. Then we're going to go into a bunch of other things. And that is, rumor out there on some of these breaches is that these organizations are paying the ransom.

We send our people to these care networks. They get horrible care. The digital experience is bad. And we're working with an insurance provider and the, again, the experience is bad. People can't figure out what's covered. What's not covered.

These are some solid partners. And my guess is the only reason he doesn't have other partners is because he tried to raise money so fast. And some of these other health systems cannot move that fast on an investment like this. But I think we'll see some other names sort of tag along here in the next three to six months who said I didn't get in that round, but we'd like to be a part of this.

Not even my family, in benefit costs. It far outweighs what it would've cost me out of pocket just to go see my primary care. Now I understand, some things happen. I may need emergency services. I may be on a drug that I have to take every month. There's there's issues there. Right? But put the cost of healthcare, put the drive for healthcare services back to the individual.

And what Glen sort of stepping in there and that team is, I hate saying Glen it's the team is stepping in there and doing is they're looking at that saying, look, we're going to partner with Walmart. It's the first of many partnerships that is going to drive down the cost of medications. They may partner with Amazon, which is a large pharmacy.

So they're going to step in there and say I understand how hard this is for you, your family to navigate care. We know care and we're going to, we're going to plow through this junk that exists within care and make it a better experience. And when you talk to Glenn and he'll say we are a healthcare experience company. That's very interesting.

Chris Logan: Yeah, I like i ta lot actually.

There was nothing new. In fact, it might've even made the magic of radio less compelling as you could see behind the curtain of your imagination. Television was new and powerful medium but for many, it was just a simple evolution of the old radio. He goes on to talk to the internet the same way. And if you around in the early days of the internet, and I was in some of these conversations, I have the gray hair to prove it where people were like, Hey, we've got to get our brochure up online.

Bill Russell: I think I know where you're going with this. Go ahead.

Let me go on to what he talks about. And so this is the money paragraph, I think, in this article. By the way, the article the urgent need for telemedicine 2.0. It's on his medium account. So you could look it up there. The future of telemedicine must leverage the tools of user engagement that are already in our consumer toolboxes.

And you don't do it again until January, February next year. Let's talk about what it's going to take for you to have a more balanced and healthy lifestyle throughout the year. Maybe your goals are too big in January for your exercise regimen and maybe we can reduce those to, Hey, let's, let's just get you moving two days a week.

We're now starting to dabble with Oculus quest in my organization. And this is no plug for them to have joint meetings, to whiteboard with each other, because it's a new way to do work that technology is readily available for us, and it may spark some innovation and ideas that we didn't have before. We need to take that same model and put it into direct care and make it much more preventative.

Perhaps we can get better at things like med ahderance. Keeping people out of the ED. Getting them to the right point of care. Those are just some of the things off the top of my head. All right. I love the JP Morgan conference. I wish I could attend every session, but all day Monday, all day Tuesday, all I did was sit in the nonprofit track.

And for the unvaccinated, I mean, it's a viral infection and can impact them a lot of different ways. But at the end of the day, this is impacting staff. So we heard a lot of questions, a lot of conversations around staffing. How are you addressing this? And I heard CEOs for the first time, really in my mind, talk about labor supply. chain

Chris Logan: Yeah. We've had a shortage in IT securities since the jump. We've never had enough supply to meet the demand and we're seeing the demand curve spike so rapidly. And now, again, I'm just specifically talking about IT security here across all industries at that it's not just healthcare.

I always, every year I try to anticipate what's going to be my problem three years from now, and maybe that's too hard and maybe it's just, what's going to be my problem next year and make sure I set aside about 15 to 20% of my time this year to prepare for next year's problems.

Most pandemics lasts for two or three years. At some point we're going to have a vaccine mandate and we're going to lose five to 10% of our clinical staff. And it didn't take that much foresight. It just, it took us stepping out of the urgent for an hour. Maybe having a few conversations with our peers and say, Hey, do you think we're going to face a clinical shortage?

The most important element of that is just take that step back. What you have going on right now. It's not going away. Right. We may solve for it, but what's going to be that further outcome. So if you took that step back and started to think, what's the next thing that's going to manifest itself based upon what's happening now, we could've come up with a better answer, but like you said, Nobody does that because we're so caught up in what's the issue of today and that's across every industry, right?

I can't look out three years because everything's moving way too fast. And again, there's way too much variability with certain outcomes, but I can have an impact and effect on what's manifesting today to impact tomorrow. And that's what people need to stop and think for a hot minute. Is that not be so drawn into what the problem of the day is? What's going to manifest from the problem that day for tomorrow.

And that changed how I thought about cybersecurity moving forward. And it's the same kind of thing. So sit down right now and say to yourself, assume you're not going to be able to get a hundred percent education across the board. And every email attack that comes in at least 3% of your organization's going to click on it.

And you talked about the immutable record and you talked about recovery and I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is we need to detect within seconds of abnormal activity and be able to go through because there's a bunch of abnormal activity on your network every second of the day.

I believe I'm never going to be able to educate a hundred percent. Somebody is going to click on an email and some of those emails, it might be me clicking on that email. They're sophisticated. And then the other thing, I would say on a cyber security. This is the low hanging fruit.

And figure out a way to stop it in its tracks, because when we get more sophisticated, it's going to be harder to detect what they're doing. It's going to be harder. But at some point they got, they have to actual trait, they have to escalate privileges. They have to do something that should trigger something in our on our systems to say, yeah, I say that doesn't look right. Chris should not have that level of rights on my network.

And then every single organization that could spell Medicare advantage had to get up there and answer the question of what's your enrollment. And Cigna's Medicare advantage enrollment is down as well. So there was a big discussion around that. ProMedica who presented in the nonprofit track is selling their Medicaid business to Anthem.

Chris Logan: Significant.

Why can't Intermountain do this? Why can't Ascension do this? What are your thoughts as you hear that? I have a couple thoughts on this, but as you hear that, what are your, what are your thoughts on that?

So I think they can have nothing but success with that model as they add the right pieces of the puzzle to create that great team effort, to take advantage of those incentives.

Bill Russell: These are two very different organizations. Intermountain runs at about 10.8% operating margins tend to 12, let's say percent operating margins, which is indicative of a very, very well-run company.

And I think the answer to that, and I know at least 30% of their markets is going to be even though we have essentiality, even though we're one or two in this market. This market would be better served. If somebody else ran this hospital And that takes a lot of courage as a leadership team.

So but Intermountain, I'm a huge fan of what they're doing, but very different market and the other. Intermountain is a very healthy population. I mean, when you look at the markets that they serve, they're fairly healthy. It's one thing, I said this on social media it's one thing and I'll take it a different market from both of them at this point.

And you sit there and you sort of look at it and go if you start with a healthy population, it's easy, it's a lot easier to take on risks for that population than it is to take on risk for a population that's generally unhealthy. Wow. Did I, I just pontificated. I'm sorry about that.

Chris Logan: I like it though.

Chris Logan: Yeah, I appreciate you having me Bill. Have a great day, man.