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Today on Unhack the News.

(Intro) you have to consider that. Just because something works today is not going to work in two months from now and it takes diligence and it takes a lot of work, but like you said, we're all partners here

. And now, this episode of Unhack the News.

(Main) Hey, welcome to Unhack the News, where we try to take some time to make sense of what sometimes feels like a lot of nonsense happening in the world. And I'm joined by Christian Boucher from Island Healthcare today. Hey, Christian, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Drex. Always a pleasure to talk.

How's it going?

Very good. Very good. It was great catching up with you at VIVE last week.

Yeah. Where are you today? Where in the world is Christian today?

Nice. I don't know when this will air exactly, but just in case, your booth number at HIMSS?

It was a very good event. This was the first time for Island to participate. As a sponsor. So it was very interesting. The amount of conversations we had, not just with customers, but also a lot of the partners who are very interested in what we were doing. It was a great opportunity to get in front of a lot of different people and showcase what we're building here.

And I would say that we get a lot of positive feedback of our view on how the transformation of computing and healthcare will look like in a couple years.

You were hanging out to the, with the SHI team too, so we saw you guys over there too. I was lounging on those couches quite a bit.

That was my,

they were nice. I wish we had a couple of those in our booth. 'cause my feet were a little sore after, 10 hours on your feet all day long.

We have two things to kick off the conversation. The first one was written by Bill Russell from This Week Health, an article on LinkedIn, and he says, health care still doesn't understand the cloud. And thanks for sending that. And so I'm going to ask you right out of the gate.

What was the thing about that you thought was especially intriguing?

I think there were a couple pieces. And, historically we saw some organizations jump in full bore with cloud and intense in that scenario. And then we saw some that were a little bit more conservative and maybe only, adopted some SAS applications and moved other workloads there.

And you look at it as just another extension of your own infrastructure. But as we start breaking down, where it makes sense, it's, it, for me, I come from more of the. The CTO operational kind of how things are impacting my teams. We did a study, this was going back when I was still on the provider side, but how many hours a day are my engineer spending on just keeping the lights on?

And they're not spending the time actually developing solutions that improve overall operations and user experience or, cost savings. That's where I start looking at where the benefit is. And also it gets to that point where, especially in health care, a lot of monolithic solutions where you're constantly having to refresh hardware in some instances, every two to three years.

Yeah,

I think we will see efficiencies, not only the cloud adoption, but in Our, overall operational initiatives to, and bleeds into second article is. But how do we de stress our clinicians? How can we make those interactions with technology, because it's everywhere now, how do we make them simpler?

And if we can take our engineering teams and work more on that, I think overall we'll see a better outcomes across the board.

And it was really about the investment that you made. Not only from a dollar perspective, but the humans to do lights on doors open stuff, just keep the trains running on time. And it takes a huge amount of the budget to do Lido. And so Bill's argument here essentially is.

If you can figure out how to shift that LIDO burden to the cloud, you can take the people that are doing lights on doors open today and shift them into making life better for the clinicians and the business and the clinical, and the research operators. And yeah I love where your head's at, especially as you look into the future and what we're really going to have to do to.

Maximize the challenges that we have in the number of care providers and the amount of care that we can really provide, given the people on the front lines now,

And spent, 25 plus years in health care, understanding how those use cases play out and how we can help curate those to make sure that when the engineers and the architects that are working with the product delivering solutions back into those clinicians hands.

They have the ability to scale to what is needed. Now, sometimes that's cloud resources, sometimes it's on prem, sometimes it's bringing in certain VDI solutions. How can you curate that experience so it's on demand for each of those use cases and at the same time make sure that the overhead for those administrators and engineers is lowered as well.

Yeah, the user experience too. Just giving them a consistent user experience, whether they're on mobile or on a tablet or on their phone or, at a desktop like device, whatever it is, they don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about okay, I'm on my phone. How does this work on my phone again?

How do I get to that? That is all sort of like, just wasted time that they really should be focused on the patient and we've distracted them with technology.

Absolutely. It even bridges out into, remote workers. How are doctors interacting with the technology when they're working from home?

Or, partnered with a BPO that's doing medical coding or radiology. We've seen a big push in that recently. How do we simplify their ability to interact your applications and data as well?

Yeah, I want to move to the second article because I like this one too. This one's by David Muntz good friend from Starbridge Advisors.

There are eight of the 16 are listed in part one. Which one was your favorite? What prompted you to pick this article?

What prompted me is that, not only is my wife, a nurse, so I interact with how she interacts with technology and sometimes, just the, and of course, by nature, a lot of her friends and a lot of my friends are physicians and their struggle with adopting new technologies or delivering.

So it really comes back from that user perspective. At my point, I really enjoy. trying to, even historically work at elbows, distance with physicians trying to understand how they deliver their care. Because in reality, our job as leaders is to make that as simple as possible or make it as like as possible.

And I think it's progressed significantly since then, but we have to understand from their perspective. And I always try to be able to look at things from everyone's viewpoint, because really When really get down to it, their job is to take care of patients. What we're asking them to do is far beyond what they signed up to do originally.

Every single step that we can make to make their lives easier, and some it, I think we mentioned this earlier, I'm not sure if it was pre call, the investment that we're making in technology shouldn't have a negative impact on the people that we're trying to help. And that's where sometimes as engineers, we look back and we think we know how to fix this.

If it's

a ER, if it's a critical care unit, if it's an oncology unit, everyone has to be comfortable with how they're interacting with technology.

And I also feel they don't know what they don't know. Like they see the technology and they like I think I'm supposed to do it this way, but what can I possibly do with it? So those real interactive sessions having, and we had an innovation unit back at one of our hospitals where we would bring new technology, new applications, new devices out to the floors, and they signed up to be part of that process.

they were a split unit. So they had a couple of different units on the floor. So they actually had different interactions, depending upon which unit they were interacting with. So it gave us a lot of insight and we were able to really curate specific. Experiences for those clinicians.

So it gave us a lot of insights into how different it actually is. We may think all nurses work the same. It's not even close to that. It's amazing how different you can see different. Don't get me into the doctors because they're very similar. We hadn't. Everybody wanted to do something different.

So it was very interesting. But the whole adoption of technology has to be a partnership with those groups and understanding that one size doesn't fit all just in technology, we can't assume that. One EHR operates the same as the next EHR, they're all different, and we need to look at those individually as we start engaging with those specific populations we're hoping to help.

Those are our partners to be engaged in the provision of great health care to our patients and families. We have to build tech that doesn't cause them. Pain, right? We want them to spend more time with patients. We want them to help cure patients. And so when we give them tech that causes them that kind of like distraction and challenge and pain, that's not good for our customers.

Meaning, like one of my favorite parts of innovation was always the go look at the process before you make any more investments. Just go look at the process and see, cause sometimes. The person who's using the application might just be using it wrong. Maybe they just need a tiny bit of training that at the elbow reference that you made earlier just sitting down with them and watching them.

You can probably help them become more efficient just by being there and teaching them how to use the system better. But sometimes it also comes back to this idea of we also need to. Adjust the application or the way the applications delivered because that makes their life easier too, right?

Yeah, are we delivering the right tools at the right time for them and of course you have some disparity in understanding of the interactions, especially, you know Recently with a lot of you have a lot of travel nursing

involved. So

How do you make it repeatable enough?

Communication with the teams, but sometimes things like, we had a certain medication scanner that was problematic and we didn't know. Things

becomes irritant for them and they just start to live with it as part of the normal part of the process.

And you walk into a nursing station and we see a box full of them is there, what's these need to be repaired.

It's not like they're just Throw in tickets to the help desk and ticket is never going to get done. I can remember I had been in my health system for so long. The doctors knew my cell phone number, so they wouldn't even go to the, I had been on call, just call me at two o'clock in the morning.

But those are the relationships you build. And I think ultimately what ends up happening is you bring, better products to them and they can bring better products ultimately to the patient and give them, the focus that they need.

Thanks for being on the show today.

I really appreciate it. It's great conversation. As with several of our guests, I feel like I could go on forever talking about some of this stuff, but I really appreciate you being on the show today. And I'm looking forward to seeing you next week. Hope our paths cross.

I will make an effort to find you.

Sign up at thisweekhealth. com slash news. I'm your host, Rex DeFord. Thanks for spending some time with me today. And that's it for Unhack the News.

As always, stay a little paranoid, and I'll see you around campus.