Today in health it go. Or don't go to the Vive conference. How to maximize your value. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO. For a 16 hospital system and creator this week health. Set of channels and events dedicated to transform healthcare. One connection. At a time we went to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders. Short test artist site interprise health. Parlance certified health, notable and service.

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I'm recording this a little late this week. And I will be heading out to LA and I will I have already planned on how to maximize my experience. My question to you is have you planned to maximize your experience? And I'm going to give two different approaches. One is if you are attending the conference and the second is if you are not attending the conference, you might think that's odd.

How am I going to maximize my conference experience? If I'm not attending the conference? I have some experience doing that recently. So I wanted to share some of that with you. All right. If you're going to the conference. You have to plan. There's just prevent planning. You can look at the agenda at the speakers.

You can look at any number of things that's already out there. And determined. Is there a topic that you want to explore? Is there a solution you want to explore? Is there a person you want to meet? One of the things I do going into conferences, as I determine what are the key topics I want to talk about?

And for your health system, what are the key initiatives you have coming up? What are the key challenges that you're currently facing? Write out the questions. If you're on a plane right now, write out the questions that you would like to get answers to. Sometimes if I don't want to reveal too much, I will have a pre question where I say, Hey what have you done around the ERP solution? And they'll say we just went to Workday or whatever it is.

And then I can say if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a question about that. And then I will reveal a little bit about what's going on. I don't want to just blurt out, Hey, we're having a lot of problems with fill in the blank and. Whatever I generally, I want to, you. Use some discernment there and not share our dirty laundry everywhere, but just, find those people who have relevant experience and knowledge in your space. And get that.

So write down your questions, write down your challenges, write down the things you want to walk away from. Begin with the end in mind. One of the best. Things I've ever read in the book begin with the end in mind. I think I've used it a million times. The other thing is scheduled meetings with relevant people ahead of time. If you want to do an interview with us, schedule a meeting, not hard to do.

Just shoot us a note. We are doing interviews and action. Both I, myself and directs are both doing that. Directs is going to focus mostly on the security side, but he'll also do CIO interviews and, chief data officers, whoever happens to be there. We're going to we're going to try to capture some of that for you. So scheduled meetings with relevant people relevant vendors, relevant partners to discuss potential. Solutions, collaborations.

You name it. All right. Next thing. The most powerful aspect of Vive, the carnival. Is networking. Period. And of discussion. It's the most powerful thing of any of these get togethers it's networking. If you don't walk away with business cards, if you don't walk away with industry contacts, having met people, you're not doing it right. Go up to people.

If you're the introvert, muster, everything in your power to go up to them and let me help you out here, they want to talk to you. You might think, oh, they don't want to talk to me. They are geared up to talk to people. If they are at this conference, they're geared up to talk to people and our industry more than any other industry I've ever been a part of is willing to share, help and support you. So if you see a speaker up on stage and you think, oh, they'll never talk to me, go talk to them. Give it a try, give it a try once or twice.

If it doesn't work, shoot me a note. Tell me who it is. I will personally reach out to them and connect you with them later. I will shame them into connecting with you. It's not how we operate in healthcare. And you might've caught them on a bad day or they were busy or those kinds of things.

I have great stories of people who, when I was a neophyte, I knew nothing about healthcare. That they took the time and they were extremely busy CEOs. They took the time to spend time with me and helped me to understand. The nuances John Glass or John Malanca. Ed marks and others. Gosh. Stephanie reel, the list just goes on and on of people that I looked at and I thought, oh man, Johns Hopkins, mass general, these people don't have time for me. And they made time for me.

And I'm eternally grateful for them doing that. Yeah. See CME business cards. You can get, we are going with a digital business cards this year. Decided not to spend another a hundred dollars for a box of cards that we're going to replace again next year. And see if we can. Keep moving our sustainability efforts forward on our side.

So that's what we're doing. Learning innovations. There's going to be a lot of sessions. Identify the sessions you want to go to. Don't overcrowd. It don't have session after session. Identify the topics that are important to you. Leave time for networking. Again, the most valuable thing you're going to have is networking.

If there's someone leading a discussion that you want to talk to go to their session, talk to them afterwards, see if you can set up some time at a Starbucks. Vendor evaluations. The most valuable thing about the showroom floor. It is. And by the way, I've I've now I've said this a lot of times the showroom floor is I think one of the worst things that we've come up with in terms of how we've done it, we've set it up like hunger games. And the hunger games operates like, the, they open up this space and the vendors go in and they set up all their traps and they have little guns to shoot your badge and the capture your information.

And then they're going to spam the crap out of you. That's how CIO is. Think about it. And a bunch of the people in that room they're compensated to get your information, and then the CIO is going there or avoid it altogether and try to Dodge those traps. I think it's, I think it's awful with that being. I said, I think there's a way to do this effectively.

A lot of people have figured out how to do this effectively and In a lot of cases, it's to reach out to these vendors ahead of time saying, Hey, I'm coming to the conference and we're not currently using your solution. I would like some time with some key people to talk through your solution and understand it better.

If you're just going to walk the floor, same kind of thing. Identify the handful of solutions that you're going to talk to. If you're just bouncing around window shopping is probably not going to be as effective as really thinking through your strategy. I also, there's, I will set aside some time where I'm doing the edges. Where I'm looking at the, things like the Cedar Sinai accelerator, and I'm going through the, oh wow.

That's what you're doing with AR and VR and stuff. I just those are the things I'm looking to buy immediately, but those are the things I'm looking at to say. Where's this world going. And then knowledge sharing. Take detailed notes on sessions and keynotes and other things.

And I would say organize a post-conference debrief session with your team to discuss key takeaways. If you go to that conference, spend the time, take the time away, spend the money, whatever it happens to be. I think it's incumbent upon you to bring value back to your organization. Go in with that mindset, come back with that mindset and tell people, Hey, I went to the conference, I have some notes I'd love to share with you. For those who haven't gone. All right.

Let's talk about those who aren't going to the conference. So there's a handful of things. One is if there is virtual participation and I'm not really sure if there is, or not with five, there might be. And if there is. Register virtually. I know you can't go to every session you're still working, but see what you can do in terms of of of gathering information that way, or assign people to go to certain virtual sessions.

That's another way to do it. Get the team involved. And get them going to some of these sessions. I would say the other thing is you can engage with almost any conference online. Every one of them have figured out a way to do this. I think it's a Vive 20, 24 is going to be the hashtag for Vive. I think HIMS is hymns 24. Let me see. They just change it up a little bit.

Regardless. Some people are going to make mistakes. They're going to do Vive 24 and that kind of stuff. So if you want to follow what's going on. You could do that on ax. You can do that on LinkedIn. And people will be posting a bunch of stuff beyond the pictures. We're going to have a hashtag captain lemonade.

You could see who's participating in our fundraiser. For Alex's lemonade stand, but for the most part that's just the fun stuff that's out there. We'll tag 5, 20, 24 as well. And you can see that, but and so you could see who was there. That's another way of doing this.

You could see who was there. And you can shoot them an email. And, Follow captain lemonade. See who's there and say, Hey, what was the key? What did you get out of the conference? What was the key takeaway? What did you hear? What were the trends? That kind of stuff. You could just shoot those emails out as you see people who are there.

And I'm sure they will shoot you notes back. The other thing is there's a way to network from afar. And I've done this a couple of times where I see. People speak on certain topics or I will see certain people at the event and I will shoot them a note and say, Hey, I saw you. You spoke on this topic now for me, a lot of times I'll reach out and say, I saw you spoke on this topic.

I read the article over here, or I read some comments over here on social media. I'd love to interview you is what I will I'll say. But what you might say is, Hey, I see you spoke on ERP implementations at Vive. I'd love to get some time with you to talk about your ERP experience and my ERP experience.

So that's, you can network from afar. As well. And then vendor engagement, you To be honest with you that the best way to engage the vendors, if they are adviser or they post something. That's interesting on social media that you see is you just reach out to them directly. They all want to sell to you.

So they're going to set up a time, do a virtual demo. That's usually where I will start your team scattered. Anyway. That's probably where you'll start as well. Those are just, if you're not going to the conference, it's not oh, I didn't get to go write it off. There's a lot of things that will happen at the conference. One of the things is we will bring the conference to you.

We're going to do a lot of interviews and action. And that's where we grab industry leaders, healthcare leaders, and we ask them, Hey, what's new, what's going on? What is valuable that you want to share with the industry? So we're going to capture those. Those are 10 to 15 minute interviews. Both directions.

I will do that and I will probably come out with 20 to 30. Of those interviews. And those are quick listens as your, you put them on one and a half times speed. You can listen to them. A bunch of them as you're driving into work over the next couple of weeks. So that's it. That's my, I'm not going to go back through them cause I'm a little over on time, but you get the picture.

You don't have to go to the conference to get the maximum value out of it. You can also get value from afar. That's all for today. Don't forget to share this podcast with a friend or colleague. 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, enterprise health parlance, certified health, notable and 📍 service. Now check them out at this week. health.com/today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.