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Bill Russell: [00:00:00] Today on the 2 29 podcast.

Chris Carmody: To create that simplification, it's actually gonna propel us even faster and more forward on adopting new technologies and pushing an envelope because now we don't have to make the change 10 different places

Bill Russell: My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former health system, CIO, and creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare one connection at a time. Welcome to the 2 29 Podcast where we continue the conversations happening at our events with the leaders who are shaping healthcare.

Let's jump into today's conversation.

Alright. It's another episode of the 229 podcast where we continue the conversations that get started at our 229 project events. And today we are joined by Chris Carmody. Let's see senior Vice President, UPMC, information Technology Division, chief Technology Officer.

Do you have any other titles these days?

Chris Carmody: I don't think so. [00:01:00]

Bill Russell: Well, you know, every IT job should have and other duties as assigned. It's just pretty much, I've been called worse, pulling straight from the UPMC website on this, so you can get it updated.

But let's see more than two decades there, variety of roles. CTO SVP leads more than 1700 IT professionals on UPMC bridges Project and IT technology. Shared services including data centers, state of voice, video network, cybersecurity, analytics, hospital based technology, so forth, plus your integral in the Epic go live as well.

How old is this? Do you need to talk to your media people to update this? It's probably a little old,

Chris Carmody: but that's alright.

Only people like you go out and read it once in a while, so it's okay Bill. It's, little bit behind it. Well, today I'm actually, in one of our offices here.

We had some Epic project meetings as we're. 29 days from today. We had our executive steering group meeting. We're meeting on a weekly basis with them. Now [00:02:00] as we've gone closer and closer to go live and really, we're at the point of the project where we're focused on the details of crossing the t's and.in the i's for making sure that we can mitigate all the risks.

So when we flip the switch. We have as smooth of a process as possible knowing that there's gonna be issues. We have very solid processes established in technologies and communication channels to handle the problems. But you know, until we're in the midst of it, we have to keep practicing and keep preparing.

Bill Russell: so 30 days out. I'm having PTSD just thinking about this. So I heard Judy from the stage say that Big Bang is the way to go. They found that they have had more success with it. We did ours in three regions. We didn't do Epic. It. Just different but we did an EHR go live in three different regions and I wish we had done them all on the same day, quite frankly, but I'm not sure we had the resources to do them all on one day.

Are you guys doing Big Bang, like the

Chris Carmody: entire [00:03:00] thing? We wish we could do that, but we have two waves. So end of September is wave one. So it's basically all of the UPMC sites domestically. That are outside of the Pittsburgh region, so there's 21 hospitals and hundreds of physician practices, outpatient clinics, and so on and so forth.

We have about 42,000 users that are in the process of being trained as we're leading up to go live. And wave two is May of 2026. We have closer to 66,000 users in that wave, and probably more by the time we get to it. And that's obviously the Pittsburgh area our flagship hospital, UPMC, Presbyterian, Shadyside and others.

And then there's been some more recent acquisitions, a couple hospitals that were, we're calling Wave three, just for names sake, but it's it's really gonna be back to the old days when we would acquire a hospital. [00:04:00] You'd go through your typical cookie cutter process. So with these big waves I agree with Judy.

I think it reduces the risk from a patient care perspective because even between our two waves, this is why having one big approach would be great. We have multiple EHRs still. We have multiple patient portals. You have service lines that are providing support based out of Pittsburgh for all the different hospitals across the region.

So you're gonna have clinical users, operational users accessing. Different systems depending upon who they're seeing. So that's part of the challenge. That's why communication's so key and critical to what we're doing. And the engagement, like the Go live readiness assessment's, a great opportunity to hear feedback directly from those on the front line that are gonna have to adopt all the change that we're, bringing to them with a new system, a new platform.

And as we iterate on that and get better. Hopefully for wave two we're gonna have a lot [00:05:00] of lessons learned and make it even more efficient and more effective for that group of users. But yeah, I definitely, the recommendation I would agree with Judy's statement.

Bill Russell: Well, speaking of agreeing with Judy, so UPMC, fairly sophisticated organization, a lot of change management, and thanks to that effect how much of the prescriptive Epic plan did you take, and how much of it did you look at and say, look, we've been doing this.

For years and you sort of adapted it to the UPMC way.

Chris Carmody: I think what Epic and what Judy has done is nothing short of amazing of the company she's created the movement and obviously most importantly, the platform to help keep the focus on patients, which we are totally aligned with that thought process.

But every health system, every organization's different. We have different priorities. We have different communities and patients that we're serving. So you have to be nimble and adjust, and you have to use what works for you. So in a lot of cases, there's [00:06:00] some components. A lot of the AI that they'll be developing and that they're working on right now that we're interested in.

And there's other stuff that we're doing on our own or we're doing with a different partner. Again, what makes sense for us and for our patients that we're serving. So I always go into the UGMs and listening very intently. I wanna process what they tell us that they're working on, what's gonna be coming in the future.

And that leads me to go back and meet with people like our chief nursing officer and our hospital presidents and others to help. Look at what are the options? What's the biggest problem we're trying to solve? Where are we trying to advance what we do at UPMC and then make our plan?

And so it sort of just becomes another input, gonna UGM and listening to what's new, what's upcoming, making that determination. Is it part of that future roadmap for us or not? And I would say, in some cases I totally foresee. Using Epic a little bit more in some other areas that they've announced.

And other cases we're gonna continue [00:07:00] down our path of creating our own ecosystem of technology at UPMC.

Bill Russell: Not to get you in trouble here, but you know, UPMC is a leader in technology and has been for decades.

How does it feel to be the laggard finally? I mean, you're you guys are some of the last health systems to get over onto the Epic platform.

Chris Carmody: I think the good it's

Bill Russell: Actually kind of nice, isn't it? I mean, it's all the learning is out there.

Chris Carmody: Absolutely. When you're out in front adopting new technologies and sort of doing those transformations.

It's nice to have all those lessons learned. So I think that's been a big benefit for us, that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Now we've tweaked some of the best practices to, again, to fit into our world and to make sure gonna work for us and be effective. But yeah, that doesn't necessarily bother me so much.

I'm excited about having one platform to be that foundational system to build off of. We're working with 10 different main EHRs right now. We have seven patient portals. Right. We have [00:08:00] over 43 million ADT transactions that occur every 24 hours just to appear to be seamless across all those EHR systems, all the ancillary systems.

So yeah, to create that simplification, it's actually gonna propel us even faster and more forward on adopting new technologies and pushing an envelope because now we don't have to make the change. 10 different places we can make the change once we can expedite things POCs on different technologies and then quickly deploy them at large scale across our environments.

So that's the excitement from a technologist perspective. I think that the bigger value to us, and I kind of mentioned it, having nine different portals and yeah. It's all about patient access and making that experience better. And I think the end goal of what we're doing by having that one stop shopping is gonna have a much bigger impact on our patient care and access.

So patients can see whoever they need to see, when they need to see it at their convenience [00:09:00] instead of trying to have to navigate through different systems and different processes. And again our team to our credit I'll pat ourselves on the back. I think we've done an amazing job to sprint the marathon to this point, by making all these systems work together and talk together, especially at scale.

our patient portal today is amazing solutions called My UPMC. It gets a lot of data from Epic, but also from Cerner and other systems, and it's really created a great experience for our patients. But there's still six other portals out there that, bringing them together that's a difficult process.

So this is enabling us to. Hopefully do it effectively and not be as impactful to our patients during the process.

Bill Russell: Well, and that's what I've heard from people. What I've heard is I don't wanna call it wasted effort, but the amount of effort it takes, the amount of resources, the amount of programming, the amount of, database knowledge and skill is required in order to keep all those things running, especially at the scale of a UPMC can now be [00:10:00] focused in on.

Higher level things, if you will. I mean, because that whole bottom layer the system of record and the integration and all that stuff is going to be handled. And now you guys can say, all right let's solve the higher order things. At least that's what I've heard from other systems, and I hear you saying, yeah,

Chris Carmody: I mean, that's no different than what we've done before.

Just it, to your point, it's gonna make it a little bit more efficient and effective and probably cost less because we don't have to do so many integrations. Behind the scenes, beneath the scenes of an application or an experience.

Bill Russell: Has this been all consuming for you? I know you coached basketball.

You still coaching basketball?

Chris Carmody: I am, but it's not basketball season yet. I have a little break right now. I, I coached Oh, I see what you did there.

Bill Russell: You have the go live in September in the go live in May. Did you say so?

Chris Carmody: Yeah. Basketball seasons like end of October too. Early March, so Wow.

I

Bill Russell: didn't realize you wielded that much power that you could keep the go lives around the basketball season.

Chris Carmody: It just the stars align that way. It's not, I have no power [00:11:00] per se, but yeah, no I love basketball of the sport of basketball. I played college basketball and I have four adult children now that I coached, and when my youngest, my daughter decided.

She wasn't gonna play basketball in high school, which broke my heart. She chose volleyball. The parents of the seventh graders I coach grades school basketball, they asked me to stay on and, this will be my 17th year of coaching, which is great. It's a great escape. It, keeps me in the game, which I'm a very competitive person and, it's fun to do that and fun to, to teach and coach and, teach them life lessons through a sport.

Bill Russell: I would imagine it translates really well to the job that you're doing.

Chris Carmody: I think be being in a team school, co

Bill Russell: Coaching seventh grade girls te transitions really well.

Chris Carmody: I don't think it's, I don't know about that. You know that the great part about seventh grade girls and eighth grade girls are, they are great listeners and they process things much differently than seventh and eighth grade boys.

because I've coached both over my time. But it's a fun experience, but I [00:12:00] think that, team sports are a great breeding ground for great teammates, for great leaders in information technology. Because you can't do everything yourself. You have to rely upon people who might have different skillsets.

You have to be inclusive. You have to learn how to listen. You have to sort of work together and find that. camaraderie of being on a team and having a shared goal and purpose. So it all those things, matter. So I think it's paid dividends for me in my career and how I approach things.

Bill Russell: So what does that tell you about me? If I did cross country wrestling and golf?

Chris Carmody: I thought you were gonna say like tennis too, probably, but I ran cross country as well. There's nothing wrong with that.

Bill Russell: No, I'm just saying there are three team sports that are essentially individual.

Like you're the one that you know, especially in a wrestling, I mean, you're in Pennsylvania, wrestling in Pennsylvania is, and that's where I grew up. It's

Chris Carmody: big

Bill Russell: time. Yes. Yeah. I mean, they put that mat out [00:13:00] there, they put the spotlight on. You go out there and it's like there's nowhere to hide.

Like either you're ready or. You're not, and you get embarrassed.

Chris Carmody: Well, I think in your example Bill, with those sports, that limelight is shining upon you when it's your turn to wrestle when you're running that cross country race, but you're still part of a team. Those points, how they do the scoring systems for them, you're still contributing.

So I think there's even more pressure on you when you don't have a teammate on the mat to lean on when you're struggling. So.

Bill Russell: Yeah, there's no one you can feed the ball to. You're the only one who can do it. Exactly. Exactly. So CTO I'm gonna lean on the CTO thing, a little bit.

Lot of AI announcements at Epic, a lot of AI announcements across the board. I know you guys are a big Abridge shop as well. I mean, things going on in a lot of, I mean, Microsoft has a ton of. Announcements and things, heck, ServiceNow, workday, they're all loading up with AI announcements.

Where, how do you think AI is going to [00:14:00] I don't know, get, get incorporated into the workflows that we have today? And is it gonna be through these partners? Like they're just going to keep rolling out features and we're just gonna flip a switch?

Chris Carmody: I think it's gonna be different experiences.

And this gets back to your comment about Epic. Epic, I think Judy announced 160 to 200 different AI models that they're building and incorporating their products. And of course, in that case, if it's built into your subscription, you can turn it on or turn it off, depending on what you wanna use.

When we look at AI at UPMC, we obviously don't wanna reinvent the wheel. So if there's something like ART. We're gonna be going live with ART and 10 other AI models with our Epic go live on September 27th. That's great. We don't have to build those, but we've been working on machine learning and AI algorithms for the last 10 years around our clinical data, our financial data, and we just spent the last three or four years replatforming it into what I refer to as our data [00:15:00] layer, our virtual data layer.

We have different technologies sort of coming together, so we minimize the replication of data. We control access, but yet we can still present and aggregate in a way that whether it's a clinical user or operational user, financial user, they can access and get the insights that they need. The benefit of that from an AI perspective is defining.

Data. Having that metadata, the data about your data is important to actually train some of these models and help accelerate that process. We actually just launched an AI model today that we're calling Vana, which is voice analytics. So we're taking for our patient access for our call centers. We do voice recordings of those interactions and there's a wealth of information there that can form different processes, different procedures.

So we actually have been working on that with an NLP model. That [00:16:00] now we're ingesting the state and spitting out results. So I'm very excited to see how that impacts and influences the operational efficiencies. And ultimately there's gonna be clinical data that we're gonna be able to pull out of there and better inform our longitudinal records.

That's the other thing too with Epic, there's some great tools there. Obviously they're Nebula platform, but their analytics, with clarity and I always mispronounce this so I apologize, but co. Yeah. It's something like that, but you know that you get a part of that person's journey and record.

We have data that goes back to 1992. One of our systems in that virtual data layer has close to 5 billion records in it.

Bill Russell: So, so you're not gonna, you're not gonna try to bring that data? No. You're not gonna shove it into Epic. You're gonna keep it over here?

Chris Carmody: No, we're gonna use Epic where it, the reporting and those processes where it makes sense.

Yeah. And then when we need to look at that longitudinal view of a patient that's been A UPMC patient for 20 years, or they've been a cancer patient for 15 years. [00:17:00] That we want that data in the hands of that care team, so they're able to do their job, right. So that's why we're always gonna have that separation, why we have to do a little bit differently than just going all in with Epic.

We're back loading five years worth of the most recent clinical data. So Epic's gonna have a wealth of information, but again that's back to 2000. So got a lot more data than that.

Bill Russell: How did the conversation of participation with Cosmos. Go. Is that something you wanna talk about or are you talk no, it's fine.

Chris Carmody: No, I think it's a, it's an organizational decision, right? To see about sharing your data. And I think it takes a lot of education on, for different leaders to understand, Epic's not going out and trying to sell it. And that's, honestly, that's a concern with many other vendors out there where they're gonna try and sell you this shiny object.

Oh, we have an AI model that does this, and in reality they might have the model, but you have to train the model with your data. You have to make it applicable to your environment or to that process, whatever you're automating, or if it's an agentic [00:18:00] type of AI solution. So I think understanding that and understanding some of the value that comes back there's value there.

So we have physicians and researchers that are, very excited about that opportunity to leverage cosmos, to do things like the patient lookalike. If there's some rare disease and, UPMC's a mecca for treating some of the sickest of the sick that come into Pittsburgh to be treated.

And that's another source of information and insights that, creating that connectivity that, physician here can talk to someone who may be treated, a patient that had the same symptoms and issues, I think is, it's a good thing.

Bill Russell: We, interviewed Rob mache a long time ago. I think he hasn't been CFO there for

Chris Carmody: he's been retired for Yeah, a number of years.

I wanna say like six or eight years, probably now.

Bill Russell: Yeah. Well, that shows how long I've been doing this. But the conversation we used to have a fair amount of, because he is, he was on a couple times. Was on the fact that healthcare didn't understand their costs and really doing cost-based [00:19:00] accounting.

And he brought that with him, I think from GE or wherever he came from. He came from

Chris Carmody: GE. Yes.

Bill Russell: Yeah. And he brought that across. And so it was one of the areas where you guys were really leading the industry. You knew what your costs were by procedure, by location, and whatnot. And is that something that you're keeping separate or is that something that you're bringing in

Chris Carmody: it's definitely separate. It's part of that virtual data platform that we're making that data available because that historical data is very meaningful to our finance and operational and, clinical leadership to know what's most effective, what's most efficient.

And having that comparative data is valuable to them. When we go live again, instead of doing the big bang of one wave, like having two waves, there's a period of time where we're working with some legacy systems still and the new Epic foundations environment that we've created.

So we have to bridge that gap. We have to make that data come together and be accurate and have integrity. So that's, it's a very big focus of theirs as you can [00:20:00] imagine.

Bill Russell: We've been doing since we relaunched the podcast as the 2 29 podcasts.

Continuing the conversations. I, you came to one of the 2 29 project meetings and I thought you had one of the more interesting sessions. So we have two prompts that we generally do with CIOs. One is, something you've done at your health system that you're proud of. But then we immediately go to problem or challenge you're currently dealing with and how can your peers help you?

And you took that time because it was a while ago, and you took that time to say, we just signed the agreement with Epic. What do I need to know? And I. It was phenomenal. I learned a ton from that. because it went around. That's, I, every one of those academic medical centers was like, okay, here's what you need to know.

Do this, follow them here, question them here, do this here. I mean, it was, I don't know. I, it was the only meeting I had ever been in that I got that much knowledge on the inner workings. That's what it's like to have them as a partner.

Chris Carmody: Yeah, it was great to have, folks open up and [00:21:00] share.

Their lessons learned. I think that's the cool part of our community of, CIOs and I guess I'm an honorary CIO when I join that group, which is great. So they welcome me in.

Bill Russell: It's because I invite your CIO and he does, and every time I invite him, he says Chris can go.

Chris Carmody: Well, I appreciate him deferring to me and letting me participate. But it's a great event where you learn a lot, to your point, people open up and share, Hey, I'm struggling with this. How, what have you done here?

Bill Russell: We've been doing the CIO escape room. We'll call it the CTO Escape Room today for you.

But the the case is pretty near and dear to my heart because it happened to me during our go live. So, you're going live we'll make it the second wave. This will be even harder the second wave's going because it represents more revenue and larger population that you're serving.

So you're doing the second wave. And all of a sudden large sections of your clinicians can't log in. And it turns out that there's a problem with the licensing server, Citrix or whatever it happens to be. I don't know if you're using Citrix in [00:22:00] this case, but Yes whatever the licensing server is a problem and all of a sudden, half of your locations aren't able to log in.

I'm sure you've thought through these scenarios, because that's part of the planning that you guys do. I don't know. You're an hour in and half the clinicians can't get on. How do you escape that room?

Chris Carmody: Well to your point we explore different scenarios, what could go wrong and again, we've done a lot of these go lives in the past, just nothing to this scale.

And the one thing that's really different that we are hyper-focused on, we don't have one command center. We actually have three IT command centers because it's, we're so large. And then we have 20 command centers in all of our hospitals. So we were just talking earlier today, all my IT leadership about the flow of information, bi-directionally what's happening, how does this process work from an issue management perspective.

We're gonna be training and sharing like the day in the life of an issue, how's it resolved? And part of [00:23:00] the cool tools with ServiceNow is you can take seven messages, seven phone calls. So you have 14 issues that are all related. You can basically. Aggregate them into one overall issue and assign it.

So if we start to see that activity happening where a physician can't log in, we start going through our normal problem resolution processes. Yeah. But what happens when it

Bill Russell: goes from one to 50 to a hundred to 200? I mean, can, part of that is, can someone pull the plug or is that a committee decision?

Chris Carmody: There's a process again, we have an executive steering group that if there's an issue where we have different thresholds defined, so if it's impacting patient care, if it's impacting multiple locations, that all triggers a communication and triggers some decision makers.

So we can look for is there an, is there a workaround where we're working on the technology fix or not? And then we kind of go from there. The one thing I will say that. And I think this may have came out of that first meeting. We've asked [00:24:00] all of our, non-Epic vendors and partners to commit and staff their response teams during our go lives.

And so we have it in writing. We want that 15 minute turnaround time. And in fact, we just did our second mock cut over go live yesterday in Harrisburg, pa one of our. Main hospitals that'll be going through this go live. We had vendor systems, like we have a lot of systems, third parties that are connecting into the new Epic environment.

They're online checking their interfaces to make sure things are working. As we're going through our log of the six hours that's gonna take to switch over systems, so.

Bill Russell: What I don't think people appreciate is the number of details that have to go right. For an EHR implementation from I mean from the old adage people, process and technology, but the number of details is staggering. Yes. And that's why, I think this is part of the reason Epic has won this battle is they became [00:25:00] very prescriptive during a time where a lot of EHR go lives, were failing.

And they essentially said, all right, we're gonna take this upon ourselves, and this is the roadmap.

Chris Carmody: we've made some tweaks to the roadmap a little bit. You have to adjust it to your organization, but. The Epic team that we've been working with directly have been tremendous. The exec director, and I don't know her official title, but her name's Jackie Thornton. She's been on nothing short of amazing and partnering with us and, demonstrating. In this healthcare business you see, and you work with those who you'd refer to as vendor, who they just wanna sell you something and walk away.

Jackie has really, and her team have demonstrated their commitment to UPMC and most importantly, to our patients. Like, they get it, they know what this means to how we can transform patient care and improve it. And so you see that in interactions. They don't walk away from a problem.

They're engaged, they're partnering with us. They fly Into Pittsburgh and work with our teams on site to make sure that we overcome some of the [00:26:00] issues and challenges that we have. So it's been a great journey. And that's not just on the Epic side. The cool part to all this bill is, during COVID it really brought different parts of the organization together for every organization, right?

You had your clinical your operations. You had the revenue cycle, you had it coming together to solve problems. Not the best use case to do it, but the benefit of that is those teams come together to actually achieve a common goal. This project, this journey for us has been great in. Magnifying that journey tenfold with the amount of people that are involved in this and the collaboration that has gone into it and the partnerships that have been formed at all levels.

It makes me proud to be part of UPMC and to be involved in this project. And when they say, like, it takes a village. It takes a village to make this thing happen. And honestly the, our part on the technology side is. Somewhat straightforward. Right? You can turn it on and it works.

It's getting the nurses, the doctors. Oh, it's, [00:27:00] yeah. It's adoption, it's

Bill Russell: training, it's, yes.

Chris Carmody: And our CNO Mary Beth McLaughlin, her name is, she's done a tremendous job of rallying her troops, leveraging her nursing informatics leadership, and they've been awesome on this journey. And again, the training processes, not, we've had little hiccups and stuff as we're going through this, this massive training exercise, but the team continually pivots in the right direction and makes the changes.

And so to your point, when wave two comes around, it's gonna be a better experience. because we're gonna learn from this first wave and. Carry those learnings forward. But it's those partnerships that have been formed have been awesome. Like it's rewarding to me being in such a large organization.

I don't feel like we're that large, except when you look at the numbers and stuff like that because everyone knows each other and we're all in this together.

Bill Russell: Yeah, the one thing I will say to you is, post go live it, I mean, the first day is the worst. Like, you should do your survey the first day after go live.

because you've moved everything, right? And so it's, yeah, it's very challenging. And we did, like, within the first month or so, we did the survey. Well, within the, [00:28:00] after the first year, the survey results get a lot better because people are get more comfortable. They see what they can do, what they can't do.

But invariably, and I'm sure Epic has driven this home, the doctors who like faked the training or did not do the training. Invariably a year later we had people at their elbow going what do you do that, oh my gosh. Like, customize this. Like, make it work for you. Like,

Chris Carmody: we're, it is funny you say that we're in the midst of, that type of physician training where they're learning how to create their preferences in Epic.

And a lot of those trainings we have are our physician leadership in the sessions as well, because you have physicians who build their own computers on one end. You have other ones who Right. Still would wanna use paper if they have the choice. So it's good to get that feedback and help assist them, but yeah, that's gonna make their use a lot easier if they buy in and they actually engage in the training and apply it.

Bill Russell: All right. Here's the exit question for this, you're a coach. So I'm gonna come back to the coaching. You walk into the room, it's [00:29:00] a new season, and you look at the team and you go, this is gonna be a good team because they have the right qualities and that kind of stuff.

I'd love for you to comment on that, but I'd also love for you to comment on hiring. So you're hiring into it today, given what everybody's saying about AI and whatnot, how do you like, sit across from a person and go, yeah, this is gonna be a great person to have on our team.

Chris Carmody: That's a great question and yeah, we have a program that I'm involved with from a leadership perspective for it.

It starts with. College students. We have a summer, intern summer associate program, and then they come on board for six to eight weeks and we assign them to a role. And they don't just come in and do a job or just do like, pushing papers. They're actually doing stuff and it's so impressive to see their talent and their capabilities.

We match them up with a manager and with a mentor and someone who's in our, Rotational program. So if we like these people, which most of the time we like everyone we hire because we do a extensive [00:30:00] interview process. They turn into our ITR program, our IT rotational. So for two years we hire them.

It's full-time job, everything, but we put them through six month rotations on different jobs. They kind of figure out the lay of the land on how to navigate UPMC, but they also figure out, Hey, I like this, or I don't like that. Someone who isn't extensively in like computer science programmer, they come in, they turn and they wanna go into cybersecurity.

And then at the end of the two years, we have a matching process. We figure out where do they want to go. They give us our, their top preferences, and we matched where we have the greatest needs. So a lot of these folks are going into roles that they didn't think they even would want to when they start the program, but that interview process,

you have to be able to communicate. You have to be willing to learn. You have to be a problem solver, you have to work in a team setting and you can kind of get that and hear that in a lot of the interviews, but then you see it in action as a summer associate and kind of go from there for all those IT [00:31:00] students that are coming through with ai, obviously in their face.

And you hear all these. Very negative reports like that those entry level jobs are gonna go away. I think that's a little bit farfetched. I think those entry level jobs are changing, that you need to learn ai, you need to learn some prompt engineering. You need to learn how to understand it, and then apply it to all those other soft skills that you've learned or developed.

Or inherently have some people have and some people have to work at it. But I think there's a lot of stuff, opportunities, especially moving forward in healthcare. I'm so excited for our future. We've the, CNO I mentioned before, we spent some time Wednesday in Harrisburg talking about like, what's next?

Like, and how fast can we do it? And again, having one EHR platform in place is gonna enable that speed and that scale to happen so we can truly transform. The patient experience, the nurses and physicians and everyone else who uses our technology, their experience to make it much better, more efficient.

Bill Russell: Your [00:32:00] summer associates, do you require them to come into the

Chris Carmody: office? It varies. It depends on their job. And that's how we for our IT professionals today. And

Bill Russell: How do you mentor them remotely? That's,

Chris Carmody: Because I think people have learned to work this way and they've kind of grown up that way.

Remember they took classes remotely. Okay. They had to be self disciplined, had to study. Had to speak and present, had to pay attention online, have to have their cameras on. So I don't think it's that big of a challenge, but our sort of approach to all that is we need to be where the customer's at.

So if you need to come in, you gotta come in. And there's people like our tech support, PC support, Datacom, they're in every day. They never left. But there's other people, and this has been beneficial to us. Right. You expand your. Your talent pool. We have people that work all across the country that support UPMC and that's a good thing.

And they come and they'll fly in every so often. When there's something happening or a meeting, like the go live. A lot of people are gonna be on site. There're gonna be a lot of people that are remote and that's where the coordination and the communication is so [00:33:00] important to make sure that it's working.

Bill Russell: Next time I come up to Pittsburgh, hopefully you'll be through some of these go lives and who knows, maybe for once I will fly into Pittsburgh and the airport will not be under construction, but

Chris Carmody: I think next, I think Earl in 26, it's done.

Bill Russell: Really

Chris Carmody: So modernizing it. Yes.

Bill Russell: How am I like dreaming things, but it feels like it's been under construction, been for a decade.

Chris Carmody: It's been in a long time. I was on the an initial kind of advisory board around technology for the international airport. So we kind of formed a couple years just helping, talk about different technologies and processes and then they moved on to, their bid process and then the construction.

But it's been a number of years, but it's it's well over a billion dollar investment, which is great for our city and our region. Making travel a little bit easier to get in and get out of which I honestly, I don't think it's bad today. So, but maybe I'm just biased.

Bill Russell: It used to be a hub for US airlines,

Chris Carmody: US Air.

Yes. Yes.

Bill Russell: So is it still considered a hub [00:34:00] for,

Chris Carmody: It is not. It's, I would say the most predominant airlines is Southwest. And only more recently have like British Airways started to have direct flights to London. So it's starting to grow again. And I think that's with the renovations in the new airport.

I think we'll see some, more options coming into Pittsburgh.

Bill Russell: It is a hub for innovation and technology and absolutely. It's pretty impressive. Chris, I wanna thank you for your time and thank you for carving out some of this Friday to hang out with us.

Chris Carmody: Absolutely. Thank you Bill.

And thanks for what you do.

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