Today in health. It, what I learned from three CEO's. On a webinar yesterday. My name is bill Russell. I'm the former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health set of channels, dedicated to keeping health it staff current. And engaged. So we had a webinar yesterday and, , it was fantastic. I'm going to share a little bit about that with you before we get there.

, I want to thank our sponsors who make all of this content possible. And you will hear more about them in the coming weeks. , this year we've partnered with Alex's lemonade. Stand in supportive childhood cancer for the month of January. We did a drive yesterday in the, , webinar, , So much money per everybody who showed up and we raised $10,000 in January. Our goal is 50,000. You can help us with that. Hit our website top banner.

Click on Alex's lemonade stand. , logo, you'll get taken to our, our lemonade stand and love to have you participate in that and be a part of our drive this year. All right. So yesterday we did our webinar fantastic webinar, by the way, , really appreciate the, , CEO's who were a part of it. Craig Richard Ville from Intermountain, Brad Raymer.

From Sanford health and Aaron Mary from Baptist Jacksonville, the premise was essentially, , the macro challenges facing healthcare and the priorities that those health systems are, , , , pursuing this year in 2023. And we had, as you, as you found out, we, I mean, we raised a ton of money.

, we had a lot of participants and in the form we gave people the ability to put a question there. And we ended up with, I dunno, like 75 questions. From people. I'll give you a little flavor of some of the questions that came in. How does your it budget compare to a year ago in 2023? Are you approaching, , , how are you approaching initiatives? How are they prioritized and funded?

, let's see, who is setting your priorities, you the CEO of the board. How does your role of app dev dev ops roll into it? Strategy with epic on-premise. What strategic initiatives and needs do most CEOs have where the enterprise imaging. , so forth. And so, I mean, it's just great, great questions. I was, , in fact, I.

I prepped and I had a whole bunch of questions. I ended up asking maybe two of my questions and, , just let the, the, , the group ask the questions for the most part. So, , ended up being a great discussion. I apologize. We're not going to do these on demand. So that, , that webinars in the can I have a recording of it, but we're not going to share it. So, , we have these webinars every Thursday, our, every.

First Thursday of the month and their one o'clock Eastern time. Love for you to get that on your calendar and get that to be a part of your schedule. , we might release a clip or two here and there, but we're not gonna release it in its entirety. , all right. So what did I learn? First of all the financial pressure is real for all the health systems. Intermountain is notoriously one of the strongest balance sheets.

In all of healthcare. And even with that Craig Roseville, , communicated that they are cognizant of the financial pressure. That, , is going on in the industry and they are not. I'm not going through this not impacted. Right. So they they're feeling it as well. , the worker shortage and worker experience.

Is also a top of mind. Right. So we want to make sure that the clinicians out we'll all staff, quite frankly, that their experience of coming to work. And how they experience, , delivering care to individuals. Is a, is better. We're trying to reduce burnout. We're trying to, , help people to be more efficient, especially with the worker.

Shortage that, , that does exist. We went, , we talked about a lot of different things. We talked about, , people and, , returned from work and all that stuff. We talked a technology, we talked Tet. At tech debt, we talked, , , again, priorities, you know, what are you prioritizing? We talked clinical, , priorities as well. You know what clinical projects are being.

Prioritized. And, you know, there's a handful of things. That I learned from this, as I said, the, , the financial challenges are real that the worker shortage. Is a, is impacting things. Cybersecurity is table stakes. Now we see that and I want to be real clear what that means. It means that it's prioritized in every healthcare organization. That doesn't mean it gets funded at the same level on every healthcare organization, but it is prioritized as a top priority in every health system.

, so there's not a, , a challenge anymore. To get the board to understand this is important. There's not a challenge to get the, , executives understand this is important. , now. There's competing priorities. And we talked about governance a little bit in this, , In this conversation. There's competing priorities and you have to allocate resources.

In various directions. And so sometimes security doesn't get as much money as maybe what somebody thinks it should get. But at the end of the day, you not only have to do security as table stakes. You have to do a lot of things as table stakes. Right? You have to. , keep the systems running. You have to avoid tech debt. You have to address the clinical needs. You have to continue to grow and expand and meet the needs of your community. , and so anyway, there's a, there's, there's a lot of competing priorities. I thought it was interesting that there are different budget cycles now.

So Intermountain has gone to a floating forecast. , the floating. I want to say budget, but budgets, wrong word. There they're forecasting on an ongoing basis and adjusting their budget. On a, probably a quarterly basis. I thought about it. Although I heard monthly. And maybe that is the case. Maybe it's a forecast and they're saying, Hey, we're going to allocate more money in this direction or this direction.

So the F I think the forward-leaning CFOs. Are taking their organizations in a direction of being more agile. And being able to respond to the needs. Of the industry. As they come up, the, , the other two organizations have a very traditional model. And one of the things that Erin Mary really drove home was, Hey, w w we make decisions for our budget, what, what technology we're going to invest in and whatever.

, you know, probably six, six to nine months ago for the 2023 calendar year. So, you know, A message to. To a vendor partners is that the sales cycle for a lot of this stuff is 16 to 24 months. , and that's not what people want to hear, but at the end of the day, you have to get into that sales cycle. You have to.

, understand the priorities of the organization. You have to position your things in that organization. And without doing that. You are going to end up with, , , false expectations that you can walk in there and close the deal. , today. Because they need what you have, even if they do need what you have, , they need, , you have to get into that deal flow. You have to get into that, , that budget cycle and whatever that is. So.

You know, we will, we will see. How that, , how that transpires, we did talk a little bit about cloud. And, , cloud is no longer considered. A strategy is considered a tactic. And so all the people who ask questions about cloud. , and there's a lot of really good questions about cloud. The, , the answer that we heard from the CIO is, is luck.

, it's, it's not so much that we're going to differentiate from one health system to another based on cloud computing. , but we are going to differentiate, , based on, , you know, the, the implementation. Of those things, just like anything else, you know, when EHR from an EHR, from one health system to another.

, those can be competitive differentiators based on how did you design your workflows? How did you design your care care models? How did you, , integrate, , , virtual into. , your workflows, it's not the EHR itself per se. It's how you implemented it to support the care models that you have in your community.

And the same thing is true now of cloud. , you know, everybody has access to cloud. It's becoming more, , commoditized. I don't know if that's the right word. I think that's the word that was used though. It's becoming more commoditized. All the players. , I have a, a good understanding of what the needs are in healthcare. They've been working in healthcare for a while now. They've been listening, they've been adjusting their models.

, they have, , they have healthcare specific. , things that they are presenting. As offerings. And so, , so anyway, so it's becoming commoditized. There's. There's opportunities there. For that. I'm trying to think if there's a. Anything else? Well, let me close with the way we closed. We talked about people.

Right. And it's returned returned to work. And all of them communicated. One thing very clearly, which is the, , there still is a battle for talent. And since there is a battle for talent. Oh. , first of all, that, you know, About 40%, 30 to 40% of your workforce has to be onsite. They just do roles that are on-site and there's still a need to be onsite.

In order to interact with the clinical teams, you can't support them completely from afar. So, , a hundred percent offsite. Is not the norm. It can happen, but it's not the norm. But then there's this battle for talent and you have to expand your thinking in terms of how you're going to approach that in order to get the best talent that is available for the roles that you're trying to fill.

And that a lot of times is not down the street. It's a lot of times, not in your state. And in order to be competitive in order to find the right talent since they can work remotely. , there's a need to hire people. Fairly far away. And if you're gonna hire people far away, then you have to really consider how often are those people going to be coming on site because there's a cost associated with that as well.

And so. All of them are hiring in multiple states. They're hiring, , and, and all of them are maintaining their work. , from home policies. , moving forward. I didn't hear any major shift. And what they're doing. That's not that I'm not hearing a shift in the industry. There is a, and I think they agreed.

That there is always going to be a pressure to return to the office. Either the culture of the entire health organization might push in that direction. , or the culture, , an industry in general might, , push in that direction from time to time. But there are other needs that the organization has with regards to hiring the best employees.

And creating an environment where you're not burning out workers and not causing them to waste time by sitting in a commutes and other things. And there's also a strong belief. That you can have the same impact. You don't lose much. If anything, by having workers remote. In fact, you gain. A fair amount of things. So you can maintain the culture. You can maintain the, , ,

What do you call it? Serendipity? The, the chance meetings and those kinds of things. Actually, I think that's the thing that's missing. I think the, you know, the, , we didn't went out to lunch. We had a conversation and we, we, we found this or we uncovered this. I think that's the thing that's missing.

And so that's the thing in a remote world that we have to continue to foster. And look to, , look to replace, turn away. Great. First webinar. I am. I am ecstatic with, , with the conversation that we had. I'm glad that our partners. And at this week, health have enabled us to do this in this way and not go the traditional route of talking about.

, speeds and feeds and products and whatnot, and just allowing us a forum. To have these kinds of conversations. So, , thank you very much to them for being a part of that. , it is greatly appreciated. All right. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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