Today in the health, it, I'm going to give you a recap of a fireside chat that I gave this week for an organization. And, , you know, it really covers five points. It was really focused on BCDR security and those kinds of things. But, , and I'm only going to give you a very small part of it, cause it was a half hour, 45 minutes that we were talking. But I'm going to give you the key messages from it and let you do with it. What you may. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for 16 hospital system. And creative this week health I set of channels and events dedicated to leveraging the power of community to propel healthcare forward. We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders. Short test artist, site parlance, certified health, notable and service. Now check them out at this week. health.com/today. As you know, we partnered with Alex's lemonade, stand to raise awareness and money for cures. For childhood cancer, we set a goal of $50,000. We've raised $55,000. This year, and we are starting to hatch our plans for next year. We're going to support Alex's lemonade stand. Again next year. And I think the goal is going to go up and we have some creative things going on with our team. Around how we're going to do that. Hope you will join us. In fact, let's plow through it this year. If you get a chance to hit our website top right-hand column, you're going to see. A link to the lemonade. Stand, click on that, to give today. We believe in the generosity of our community. And we thank you in advance. One last thing, if you want to help us out best way to do that, share this podcast with a friend or colleague, you said as a foundation for daily. Or weekly discussions on topics that are relevant to you. And the industry, they can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. Here's the core of my message. There was a five things. I, again, , it was a fireside chat. , it was around security. It was a security company. I was talking to healthcare professionals as well as a payer professionals. And these are the five key messages that I gave. And then I took some quotes from the various people that I've been interviewing lately. , The first is healthcare is now and always will be under pressure. , there's a, there's a group of people that believe that somehow magically we're to go back to a. A better time in healthcare where we're not under pressure. It's a $4 trillion industry there. Everyone has figured out that there's money to be made here. There's regulatory pressure. And, and there is a competitive pressure. There's all sorts of new entrance into the market. , not to, not the least of which we also have to worry about attack vectors and, , security. , threats to our organization. So healthcare is now and always will be under pressure. And so this is the new norm get used to it, and it's going to be a slog. We have to know who we are. , what value we bring to our community and accentuate that value at every term and optimize that value. I number two technology is now universally viewed as an enabler, but implementation is unequally. Distributed. So. There was a time where we had to convince people that technology was going to bring about positive change in healthcare. And it. You know, maybe eight years ago, 10 years ago, we were still talking to people and they were saying, we should go back to paper papers. Good. I think we have gotten beyond that. Technology is now universally viewed as an enabler. And we're starting to see use cases that are really, really interesting. And an example, I just talked to somebody about was a AI applied to medical imaging. And yes, it's going to come alongside the radiologist and the cardiologist in terms of being a copilot and say, Hey, this is what I saw. What do you see? Kind of thing. But, , we also have the ability to go back and have it look at the last 15 years of images. And identify the things we didn't see, and that is good for patients. It's good for our community. It's good for health. And so, , and I think these kinds of use cases. Really are opening people's eyes to what is possible once you digitize. The medical record and everything around it. All right. Number three, significant focus on AI right now in all areas. I'm not going to hit this too hard cause we talk about AI a lot. But, , it's important to note. That a lot of AI started before generative AI. And that AI is way past the hype cycle and past the trough of disillusionment. And is moving into real practical application. Okay. , there is a lot of focus in healthcare right now. Everybody I talked to has some sort of, , initiative looking at AI. In fact, I think if I were a CIO today, I would either be partnering with a company or I would have, so my staff members, I had some, , some real nerds and I say that because I am one and I really appreciate. , those people that really love what technology can do. I would have them working on training a model, learn what it takes, , provision some GPU's up in the cloud. , take some of the open source models play around with it. I would be doing that. And I think the reason I would be doing that is because I'm pretty well convinced that these large language models have practical application within healthcare. And I want my team to really understand it at the root level.

And if we can understand that at the root level, and I'm starting to read stories where people are training these models in days, like a couple of days, , with some really interesting outcomes. And I know we have really smart staff within, , I don't, I did within my healthcare organization that I could have given this to, they could have spun some things up and then they could demonstrate training a model onsite with our data. And then who knows, maybe I wouldn't have to pay as much to a cloud provider, , to, , to utilize their model. So I'd be looking at that. And all right, so there you have a significant focus on AI right now. There's really two ways people are looking at it. The easy button is your vendors are going to build it into their products. And so people are evaluating that aspect. And then the more hard. Or more advanced is, , build and train your own models, which is what I was just talking about. And, , I think the primary focus right now is on the clinician experience, financial and patient engagement. If I had to really classify it. It's you know, financial is driving. It, there's a lot more efficiencies, but there's, , patient engagement, things that are being done that I think are really interesting. And then the clinician experience, obviously, Is at the forefront of everything we're doing right now. All right. That's number three, number four security officers. Again, this was a security. , conversation security officers are finally empowered. Even if they are underfunded. Okay. And w. I just had a CSO. , 2 29 event and we had a bunch of healthcare. , chief information security officers. In the room and they are being invited either to sub committees of the board. If not the board itself, they are, , definitely, , front and center. Top of mind, the CEO is aware of them. And it is aware of the job they're doing is looking at metrics that are created. By the security officers. In fact, a handful of the security officers shared. The, , the dashboards and the reports that they were taking in one of the things is you can not overcomplicate it. And so they were simplifying these dashboards to really focus in on the things and the metrics. That were important that a board understand. So that they could, , they could ascertain where the organization stood in terms of its risk profile. Again, great work being done by these, , by these CSOs. And, , yeah, so again, they had a new found prominence. They are now. , at the board level, this is a, this is exciting stuff. Yes. They're underfunded. , everybody in the room could use an additional three to five staff members in the security, but they're getting creative there. They're outsourcing some things there. , they're utilizing vendors in different ways. And so, , you know, I, again, the most creative people in the world to me are the people who can in like seven letters or less on a license plate, say like a whole sentence. Like you could look at somebody's license plate, they have seven letters in your life.

Oh, that guy's a golfer. He has three grandkids. He. It's like, it's amazing. And when we're given constraints like that, , I think that tends to bring out the best in us and that's what's happening with the security officers right now. So they're empowered. They're elevated. , but yes, they are underfunded. And then the final thing we talked about was BCDR strategies evolved significantly during the era of ransomware. It continued to evolve. And heard some exciting things, you know, we're, , you know, one of the things we've heard over and over again is it's not, , if, but when you're going to be ransomed, And so if you start with that mindset, you can do a handful of things. One is you can, , you can, , , you know, essentially. Order your defenses for they're already in there already. You know, moving around your network. , and then the second thing you can do is you can plan for a recovery. , if you're planning for a recovery, you can think about things like a clean, active directory. What are you going to do to stand up a clean, active directory? What are you going to do? , to stand up your prioritized apps? And prioritize your apps. , look at all the integrations, have them mapped for when that happens. And so we've, we've seen a lot of really good stuff happening there. I like the work that's going on with the Cisco community. In that space specifically. , you know, a lot of that's happening in the cloud. You have your, for the things you have on prem, you're going to the cloud for the things that are in the cloud. , you know, your, your backup is actually on prem and it's, , it's very interesting to see how this stuff is evolving. The, , the thing that still concerns me is our backups. And a BCDR of cloud specific SAS applications. Continues to be concerned for me. , if I asked somebody, Hey, if you lose Workday, You know, what's your, what's your backup? And they'll say, well, Workday has all these things. Yeah. You got a VR. You got to validate those things, verify those things. Make sure. That Workday can do that because that's what we had with the Kronos situation where people were like, well, it's in the cloud. Of course they have all these things. And then it was gone for 30 days and we had to find ways around that. Well, that's going to be really hard when we move our ERP and our financials. Into Oracle and Workday in the wrestle in the cloud. So, , I am a little concerned about that. So here where my key messages healthcare is now and always will be under pressure. Technology is now universally viewed as an enabler, but implementation is unequally distributed across AMC to critical access hospital.

It's just unequally distributed. A significant focus on AI right now in all areas. , security officers are finally empowered, even if they are underfunded and at BCDR strategies evolved during the era of ransomware. And it's exciting where the security officers have taken it. So that's just a high level. Now we talked for 45 minutes. I pulled some quotes. From the various health system leaders that I've interviewed, , recently. And, , and there were good quotes. Great. , Great, , support and, , things that are going on at the various health systems across the country. As you know, Fridays for me are time suggests, , catch up, catch you up on the things I've been talking about, who I've been talking to and that kind of stuff. And that's one of the things I did this week.

Thought I'd share it with you. All right. That's all for today. Don't forget that. Share this podcast with a friend or colleague, start the conversation, or keep the conversation going that would be greatly appreciated. We want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Short test artist, site par Lance certified health, notable and 📍 service. Now check them out at this week. health.com/today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.