HIMSS24 from a distance

I haven’t been to a national HIMSS conference since 2019. We all remember how the early days of the pandemic led to a last minute cancelled HIMSS20. Since then, there has been a multi-year transition in the conference approach. It was back to what appeared to be a pre-pandemic level of attendance at HIMSS24 this week. I sat it out again this year but watched from afar on social media.

On social media I saw the key vendor announcements, session highlights, and got a glimpse of the oh so valuable in person networking as many people shared pictures of reconnecting with one another.

Bill Russell’s This Week Health Newsday episode on March 8 – “HIMSS , Yes or No?” – asked are you going to HIMSS, should you be going? He aptly named national conferences like HIMSS as “carnival” type events. With over 1,000 vendors exhibiting at HIMSS, the description fits. But, if you are looking to meet with your vendors or research new vendors to solve real problems, the exhibit hall was the place to be. He also refers to “relationship” events – smaller conferences and events where there is an emphasis on the peer-to-peer connection we all value. That’s where I am putting my focus given my current work.

At any conference, networking is key. There are benefits to you and your organization as you build relationships and learn from your peers. It is not just about your own career journey which is often what people think about networking. In the past four years we’ve become accustomed to virtual connections and events, but I agree that there is nothing like in-person events for networking and renewing relationships.

Did I have FOMO this week? Maybe a little. But am I continuing to build new and nurture old relationships with colleagues and clients every day? Yes.

I look forward to reading the HIMSS24 recaps in industry publications and from attendees on their social media accounts to learn even more. Here are a few to start: Continue reading

What do healthcare CEOs want from technology in 2024 and beyond?

When do you stop wishing people “Happy New Year”? Probably soon if not yesterday. When do you stop reading recaps from 2023 and predictions/forecasts for 2024? It depends. When do you stop listening to what healthcare CEOs are saying is important to them? Never!

I’ve seen two pieces recently from healthcare CEOs that are worth sharing here.

First off a very powerful message from Michael Dowling, President and CEO at Northwell Health published in Becker’s Hospital Review on January 2 – “The most pressing question to start the year”.  He reminds us of our mission as we start the new year.

“Health is how we work together to build a sense of community. Having a healthy community also requires everyone doing what they can to tone down the political rhetoric and social media-fueled anger that is polarizing our society. Health is bringing back a sense of civility and respect in our public discourse, and promoting the values of honesty, decency and integrity.”

 The second is a piece from Becker’s Health IT published on December 19 – “Health system CEOs’ tech wish list”.  Here is what’s on the technology wish list for the next three years:

    1. Seamless care coordination applications
    2. Drivers of elite patient experience
    3. Automation everywhere
    4. Precision medicine capabilities
    5. AI-driven technology to support the workforce
    6. Health equity and population health boosters

Sound familiar? Does this align with what you are hearing from your healthcare executive team?

You may be wondering how you do this with limited budgets due to continued financial constraints and the workforce challenges of recruiting enough staff and the right talent. The job of health IT leaders is as challenging as ever but as exciting as I’ve seen in my several decades in healthcare. Finding ways to take costs out and create capacity, optimizing existing investments, hiring talent and retooling to ensure your team is ready to deliver on the new demands – those are some of the leadership challenges for 2024.

Related Post:

From reflection to action – preparing for 2024

 

Beyond Cost Cutting: Health IT’s Role in Financial Health

Health systems continue to face complex financial challenges. Industry articles highlight the few that have strong operating margins while also noting the many facing continued operating losses. Becker’s Hospital CFO Report published the article, “25 factors that could affect health system performance in 2024”, by Alan Condon on September 8th. It is a comprehensive list and worth reviewing.

What do these financial challenges mean for health IT leaders? I talk to many CIOs who are faced with cost cutting targets and dealing with very limited budgets yet long lists of priority projects. It’s no surprise. Health systems often fall into the trap of relying solely on cost-cutting measures, particularly in the realm of IT and staffing.  While trimming expenses is essential, it’s just the starting point.  Organizations must carefully consider all the impacts on operations and especially morale.

At StarBridge Advisors, we advocate for a comprehensive approach that goes beyond mere savings, encompassing revenue growth, digital transformation, and effective change management. This multi-faceted strategy promises swift improvement to your bottom line, operational efficiency, improved staff morale and progress toward the goals of the Quintuple Aim.  IT enablement is often essential to these activities. You can use these opportunities to leverage the IT investments that have already been made.

In a recent series of four blogs written by Principal, David Muntz, we offer practical and pragmatic guidance on each crucial aspect of this approach.  The benefits are tangible and span from immediate gains to long-term sustainability.  Our expertise empowers your organization to undergo both tactical and strategic transformations, ensuring uninterrupted top-tier patient care without compromising on IT performance or security.

We can help your organization hardwire the Quintuple Aim. Partner with us to revitalize your health system’s trajectory, creating growth opportunities despite financial constraints.  I hope you’ll take time to review the series and let me know if we can help you and your organization.

StarBridge Advisors blog series:

 

Divided opinions on AI in healthcare

Are you and your doctor ready for AI? While patients may be getting more comfortable with AI, how healthcare professionals embrace AI is critical to its evolution and eventual use.

Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School conducted a poll in May among 3,317 adults age 18 and over in the U.S. and included a sample of 357 healthcare workers who were asked about how AI is already affecting their jobs, and how it might continue to do so in the future.

So how comfortable are healthcare professionals with AI? According to the study, “Healthcare professionals are somewhat divided in their opinions of AI: 23% think the use of AI in healthcare will help more than it hurts, 33% think it will hurt more than it helps, and 42% think it will equally help and hurt.”

Another interesting but not surprising poll result is the age differentiation. According to the study, “Younger adults express more comfort with AI-led healthcare, with 40% of those 18-34 saying they would be comfortable with a primary care appointment led by AI, vs. just 24% among those 65 and older.”

A Becker’s story, published June 29 by Giles Bruce, “Where Americans want and don’t want AI in healthcare: 7 things to know”, provides the following highlights from the study:

    1. Two-thirds of Americans believe AI will play a bigger role in healthcare five years from now.
    2. 34 percent expect AI to be better than healthcare providers at treating patients without bias.
    3. 1 in 4 are comfortable with AI-led therapy.
    4. 22 percent expect AI to be better than medical professionals at diagnosing conditions.
    5. 12 percent said their healthcare providers currently use AI to augment treatment, diagnosis or communication.
    6. 83 percent of medical professionals don’t currently use AI.
    7. A third of healthcare providers say AI will do more harm than good.

AI is already being used in many ways in healthcare and will continue to evolve. IT leaders need to stay current as it evolves, leverage their existing vendor partners, carefully assess the new niche players and their claims, develop AI skills within their teams, partner with clinical and operational leaders to find ways to experiment that make the most sense for their organization, and learn from other organizations who are more advanced users of AI.

Bill Russell’s This Week Health podcasts often cover AI so it’s a great resource for keeping up and hearing what the issues are and how it is being used in different organizations. One of the newest episodes is TownHall: The Potential and Unknowns of AI and Emerging Tech in Healthcare, Part 1, a conversation between Dr. Brett Oliver, Family Physician and Chief Medical Information Officer at Baptist Health and John League, Managing Director, Digital Health Research at Advisory Board.

As my favorite television news anchor likes to say, “watch this space”.

Related Posts:

AI and AI – Use them Responsibly

AI in healthcare – is 2023 the breakout year?

Navigating the AI landscape in healthcare: HIMSS23 recaps and more

Unlocking the power of time: insights from an inspiring leader

Today is the longest day of the year and the official start of summer. This longest day leads me to reflect on how we spend our time.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Saad Chaudhry, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Luminis Health, for a Townhall episode on This Week Health. Saad is an inspiring leader on so many levels so preparing interview questions was easy. I had heard Saad talk in the past about what he calls his Manifesto of Time, so I wanted to make sure we discussed it in the interview. For Saad, looking at the number of hours the average person has in their lifetime means looking at how we choose to spend it and whether we give or take time from others.

As a health IT leader, he says we are in the business of time. He is committed to giving time back to staff and patients. He asks in his manifesto – “Does a process/technology/policy steal time from a fellow human? Is there a better alternative to simplify the experience?” He challenges us to make systems and processes easier for patients and staff, giving time back rather than taking more time from them.

I can’t say it nearly as well as Saad, so I encourage you to read The Manifesto of Time and listen to the short clip on time from our interview – Spending Time: Why It’s Important to Maximize Giving Back Our Most Valuable Commodity. We covered much more in the full interview if you are interested and willing to spend 30 minutes of your time listening – A Realigned Role, Generational Diversity, and Giving Back Time.

I know your time is precious – thanks for reading and listening!

ACP – addressing the digital divide

“We need to advance health equity in a sustainable way – not with charity care and not performative health equity”, said Dr. Alister Martin, ED physician and CEO of A Healthier Democracy in the closing keynote at the annual NEHIMSS chapter conference last week. One of the many initiatives of A Healthier Democracy is Link Health which focuses on connecting patients to the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) to close the digital divide.

Listening to Dr. Martin last Thursday, I decided to use this week’s blog post to amplify this important initiative and help raise awareness among health IT leaders about the ACP and its importance for healthcare. As they say, timing is everything. June 14-22 is the ACP White House Week of Action and June 16 is the ACP Healthcare Day of Action.

Here’s some background on the ACP taken from the Link Health website:

COVID-19 Accelerated A Massive Shift To Telehealth.

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in widespread acceptance of telehealth and other digital innovations in medicine and dramatically increased the use of telehealth as an intervention to reach patients.  A recent HHS study shows a 63-fold increase in Medicare telehealth utilization and 32-fold increase in behavioral health care through telehealth triggered by the pandemic.

Access To Broadband Internet Is A Social Determinant Of Health.

Despite widespread internet usage in the United States, 15–24% of Americans lack broadband internet connection, a foundational requirement for telehealth and the bevy of other services that underpin the social determinants of health. In fact, access to broadband internet has been considered a “super” social determinant of health (SDoH).

The Affordable Connectivity Program Expands Broadband Access But Needs Help From Healthcare.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law created the Affordable Connectivity Program which provides a subsidy of up to $30/month for lower-income households ($75/month for households on tribal lands) on participating internet service plans and a one-time $100 subsidy for a connected device. 51.6 million households are eligible for the ACP, yet only 25% have enrolled. 38 million more households are potentially missing out on money to pay their internet bill. Importantly, only 13% of patients with Medicaid have signed up for the ACP.

Link Health is partnering with the White House, Civic Nation, and leading healthcare organizations on the ACP Week of Action to leverage the health sector to connect patients to the ACP and close the digital divide. There are resources at this site if you are ready to be part of the action and amplify the message through your organization and in your community. Continue reading

Inspiring the next generation of healthcare heroes

It’s Health Technology Management Week, a time to celebrate and thank all the biomed technicians and clinical engineers who make up the critically important HTM teams in our hospitals. Not being involved in AAMI as I was over the past decade, I thought I didn’t have anything new to say this year. And then I saw a social media post that inspired this week’s topic. What better way to celebrate and acknowledge the work of our HTM teams than to highlight the need for more HTM professionals in the future.

Like many healthcare professions, HTM faces staffing shortages now and into the future. Educating young people about health careers and building a pipeline is one aspect of addressing those shortages.

Ollie the Biomed” by Chace Torres is a new children’s book that describes what a biomed technician does. Like other children’s books about different jobs and careers, it makes the life of a biomed technician exciting and attractive. And it is written from the firsthand experience of a proud biomed tech and dad who is well aware of the staffing shortage in this field. Torres is the lead technician for Texas-based medical equipment manufacturer SPBS Inc.

AAMI featured the book in this May 2, 2023 article: “Meet Ollie, the Biomed ‘Device Doctor’ Who’s Teaching Children About Fixing Problematic Medical Products”. An excerpt from the article:

Torres, who also shines a light on the HTM profession via an ongoing podcast, says it’s more important than ever that young people are exposed to a “profession struggling to build awareness, [because] the majority of the workforce is set to retire within the next decade,” he wrote in an overview of his book.

The book is “about inspiring those who are younger and letting them know that there are other jobs out there besides those found in a typical children’s book—the standard professions that all kids see, whether it’s a police officer, firefighter, or doctor,” Torres said. “Many people have reached out to me who have purchased the book or have bought it for somebody else, and they will say, ‘My son, or my daughter, or my grandchild had no idea what I did as a biomed, but after reading the book, they understand and loved it.’”

The book description on Amazon provides more background:

This children’s book is a depiction of the profession known as Biomedical Equipment Technician, AKA “Medical Device Doctor.” Ollie the Biomed experiences a work day repairing, calibrating, and solving real world problems found within the everyday job of a Biomed. It illustrates the complex but rewarding career filled with so many devices used in healthcare today to treat patients. Biomeds are directly responsible for inspecting, repairing, calibrating, and managing all aspects of any medical device found in hospitals today. I wrote this book for my son to learn exactly what his dad does and why I love what I do each and every day. I hope to inspire kids across the world to seek out more information and become Biomeds because it is truly rewarding and fun.

Torres is an advocate for his profession in other ways. Since 2021 he has hosted “Bearded Biomed”, a podcast that drops twice a month. Some of his recent topics: Women in HTM, the 2022 HTM Salary Survey, and Dealing with Biomed Burnout. Continue reading

Navigating the AI landscape in healthcare: HIMSS23 recaps and more

Last week I jumped in on the hot topic of AI with my post, “AI in healthcare – is 2023 the breakout year?”. HIMSS23 was just wrapping up so I was waiting to hear overall recaps and especially updates on AI and ChatGPT.

Those recaps came as expected. Here’s a short compilation of several I found:

And finally, a resource to keep watching and listening to is Bill Russell’s This Week Health. His most recent Newsday show was “Today: Deploying Chat-GPT in your setting”. He references an article by Jonathan Balaban, a data scientist, and emphasizes the need for governance and security. Bill sees a lot of potential for ChatGPT but argues organizations need boundaries. As my favorite television news anchor likes to say, “watch this space”.

The use of AI in healthcare is evolving quickly. Every vendor seems to be an AI vendor in some form, or so they say. CIOs need to stay current, leverage their current vendor partners, carefully assess the new niche players and their claims, develop AI skills within their teams, and find ways to experiment that make the most sense for their organization.

If you have AI stories to share, please do. I may use them in future posts.

AI in healthcare – is 2023 the breakout year?

It has been a while since I wrote on a technology subject. I usually leave it to others who stay much more current and are doing the day-to-day IT work in healthcare organizations. But the rapid acceleration of generative AI with ChatGPT the past several months has caught my attention.

I put my toe in the water and asked it to draft some marketing messages for me several weeks ago. For first drafts, they weren’t too bad. Using ChatGPT in this way gets you past the blank sheet of paper (or screen) and writer’s block. Or as my minister husband would say at times when writing a sermon, you need to get past picking out the font.

My StarBridge Advisors colleague, David Muntz, recently used ChatGPT to do an internal presentation on AI for our advisor team and gave ChatGPT “co-author” credit to make a point.

Bill Russell has talked about it often on This Week Health podcasts. He and his team are exploring ways they can use it in their business. Here are just a few of the podcasts he’s done on ChatGPT:

Generative AI, the new Medical Generalist

GPT4 Use ideas and Use Cases

ChatGPT4 on ChatGPT4

Several health system digital leaders told Becker’s that AI can only do so much in this article dated March 16, 2023, “How far is too far for AI in healthcare?”, and how it needs to be thought as of “augmented intelligence”. Ashish Atreja, MD, CIO and chief digital health officer of UC Davis Health said it well, “Machines lack internal consciousness, and the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Roles that depend on human empathy and critical decision-making in ambiguous situations can be supported but should never be replaced by AI.”

David Muntz’s blog post from October, 2022, “AI and AI – Use Them Responsibly”, talks about artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence. His view is similar to the digital leaders quoted in the Becker’s article. David closes his post by saying, “AI and AI should not be seen as ways to replace humans but as technologies that allow us to instantiate learnings from the human experience.  AI applied responsibly and compassionately allows people to share evidence-based practices and focus on the more human-oriented tasks that cannot be automated.  Importantly, AI helps us recover time to spend on our community, our providers, our patients, their families, and ourselves.”

The potential for medical AI is so significant that there will be a new AI-themed journal from the New England Journal of Medicine called NEJM AI. The inaugural editor-in-chief is Isaac Kohane, founding chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. Continue reading

What makes an effective sales approach?

HIMSS23 is less than two weeks away. The second annual ViVE event happened last week. It is a busy time of year for healthcare vendors and their sales staff. I’ve been on both sides of this relationship – for many years as CIO and buyer and for fewer years selling services. It gives me a unique vantage point.

Buyers attending these conferences will be looking at vendors who have solutions they need now (and have budget for) and vendors who are new and interesting with innovative and niche solutions that they may want to explore further in the coming year (explore is the key word here). And they will be meeting with their current vendors to strengthen connections and get educated on what is newly available or coming soon as they leverage their existing investments.

Sales staff will be working hard to get the attention of potential buyers. They may even reach that stage of annoying and overbearing. We all know that kind of salesperson.

In my work as principal at StarBridge Advisors, I recognize it’s all about relationships. As I said in a previous blog post, it’s not just about who you know. It’s about who you are and how you show up with people. You need to be capable and competent with the right knowledge and experience, but also honest and authentic with high integrity. That’s what it takes to be successful in a business that is all about relationships. One of the best pieces of sales advice I got from a colleague was the “know-like-trust-need” model. People need to know who you are and what you can do, they need to like you, and they need to trust you. If you have all that, when they need you, they’ll call you. Simple. That’s why I focus on relationships.

My husband and I were recently on the buyer side of a sales discussion. By the end I thought, this will blog, meaning, there’s a kernel here to learn from and share. So, what happened? Continue reading