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Executive Interview: Where Will AI Focus First and Huntzinger Announcement with Bob Kitts

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health.com/avion. That's A-V-A-R-I-O-N this week, health.com/avarion.

I'm Bill Russell, creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare, one connection [00:01:00] at a time. This is an executive interview on the keynote channel.

Quick powerful Conversations with Leaders Driving Change. So let's get started..

Bill Russell: All right. Today we have an executive interview and I'm joined by Bob Kitts, chief Executive Officer and founding partner at Huntzinger Management Group. And that's part of what we're gonna talk about. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, bill.

Bob Kitts: Great to, great

to be here.

Great to be,

Bill Russell: Working with you and talk with you again. So appreciate the time. I'm looking forward to it. There's a lot going on in this industry, but, let's start with, what's new at Huntzinger? Yeah.

Bob Kitts: So give you a little background.

So me, I've been doing this 35 years I think and healthcare. It started off in the payer world and in 2000 started working with a company called Superior Consultant. And with my other founding partners, Tanya Freeman and George Hunsinger. We did that for a little while and then, when that company got sold to a CS back in, around 05, 06, we decided to start our company in 07. So we've been doing 18 years now with Hunsinger Management Group, and it's [00:02:00] been a lot of fun, a lot of great work that we've done. We evolved in the days from more of an advisory company to doing quite a bit of advisory and staffing and then back to advisory.

so our world today is really. Three things that we do around it. The advisory consulting and helping folks with figuring out where they can best leverage their EHR and their IT components and all the way to consulting and staffing and all the way to managed services. So. It's been 18 years of

Bill Russell: a lot of fun and great team we have at our top 18 years.

Sounds like you guys are pretty responsive. I mean, it's like we started as advisory, then we moved where the, where people asked us to go and now we're moving back to where people want us to where they're asking you to do work and to help them out.

Bob Kitts: Yeah, I mean if you look at our industry and what we've gone through in that 18 years, I mean, you start off with.

A lot of staffing, a lot of needs. We had all the money available from, you know, getting your EHRs up and running and any of the money there that ran out in 2016. So 2016, we had to pivot [00:03:00] as consulting companies and say, okay, now we're not putting these systems in. How do we help our clients optimize them?

Now what are they gonna do and how do we help them in our business run it better? And in some cases. Help them with interim leadership, interim, CIO, some of those types of things, interim CTO work. So we basically pivoted in that timeframe. Back to the advisory side, we we purchased a company called Next Wave Health Advisors from Ivo Nelson right on end of 2016, and brought in former CIOs that do our advisory work.

And we still have those folks with us today. So it's been good.

Bill Russell: what are you seeing in the industry right now? I mean, it's you know, we just had one of our 2 29 meetings with CTOs. That's an interesting group to talk to. I think they're at the tip of the spear with regard to AI and the integration of ai.

They're looking at it as a tool that is going to help them operate a lot better just on the IT side. Let alone integrate into the delivery of care. But really on the IT side, they talked about how they're already using AI in their security tools. They're using [00:04:00] it in their operational tools.

It's really kind of permeating the new model of running it.

Bob Kitts: Yeah, no doubt. We're seeing that as well. I mean, for us we kinda lump what we'll call digital road mapping AI analytics kind of in a category for us because they really rely on each other. I mean, if you don't have good analytics and good AI to know what the data's doing and a good digital presence, some of the AI tools cannot be as effective in some cases.

And. We're seeing folks dip their toe in the water. Some are gonna wait to see what their EHR vendor's gonna do with AI and how that's gonna work. Other ones are getting more innovative and doing some studies and doing some real clinical strength with it. But we look at it as folks have to use technology in such a way, and AI being one of those tools that they can best.

Do it for their organization and a small rural Hospital's gonna use AI much differently than a large academic medical institution. And how can you tweak that capability to their needs? Because some will be similar but some just can't [00:05:00] afford to do the the higher things that they want to do.

Bill Russell: That's a refreshing answer by the way. It's like the business hasn't changed. The things we need to deliver haven't changed. It's just another tool you're gonna reach for. It's like, should we use generative ai? Should we use machine learning? Should we use computer vision?

It's just another tool in the toolbox. And the CTO sort of drove that home. It's like too many organizations are leading with ai. It's like. No. We're still solving, we're still solving the same problems we did yesterday. It's just, you know, tell me how it's different today, how we're gonna solve it differently.

Bob Kitts: Yeah. No, I think you're right. And I think if you look at our industry too, and just go back to history for a second, I mean, we at healthcare have been a bit slow to adopt technology. I think it's getting better, but I mean, when I started in the business, you know, we were 10, 15 years behind.

Sometimes I watched spanking go through and really do. Much better with transaction. Back when I was in the payer world, and now as I look today at our provider space in healthcare, look at the cloud. I mean, we've been slow to adopt cloud technology, but now look at where cloud is today in our [00:06:00] industry, folks are adopting a more, they're getting more comfortable with it.

The public cloud now is a lot of folks are looking at how do I do public cloud and private cloud for certain things? I look at AI in the same category where AI is gonna be a tool, but you gotta start somewhere where you're gonna get the low hanging fruit. And then I think as they start there and then evolve,

Bill Russell: you know, low hanging fruit.

What I'm hearing over and over again is RevCycle? I'm hearing a, I don't know. desire might be the wrong word, but a belief that rev cycle is gonna look very different 12 months from now than it looks today and 36 months from now. We may not recognize it at all compared to how we do it today.

Bob Kitts: I would agree. And

then you factor in revenue cycle outsourcing, which has been a recent trend. And so I think those folks who can use tools, I mean, it would be, we have tools available today where. When a patient walks in the door, we can predict what's gonna happen, what we need to do, how we need to do it, but we gotta get better at, okay, now that we know the patient's coming in, how can we collect for that patient?

What's [00:07:00] the expected cost to do it? I think AI's gonna take a huge help with that one. And additionally then in actually communicating with that patient before and after their

Bill Russell: healthcare. So what do health systems like if I'm a health system leader. I mean, what do you tell them? Like, Hey, if you have if you're thinking about this call, ger, if you're thinking about this, contact one of our advisors, like we've we'd love to, we have these conversations all the time.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think for

Bob Kitts: us it's I'll say three categories and we look at our market differently based upon size of organization because they have different needs. So for us, if you're a, i'll say 500 bed or greater hospital, what would you call Huntzinger for? We help our clients when they do merger and acquisition type of things, helping them get on a common platform.

We've done that type of work with several of our large clients, mostly moving to the Epic EHR when they do those types of transactions we'll get asked to do how do we help with IT strategy, where do we go? How do we make sure that. We're meeting the business needs of the organization and it, and how do [00:08:00] we help evolve that?

We get asked to do that kind of work application rationalization when someone wants to actually save money. So we'll get asked to solve those types of problems and more That mid-market, which we define as a two to 500 bed hospitals, that's more blocking and tackling. They don't have some of the funds and some of the resources that the larger ones do, so they'll come to us and say.

Where do I go with my EHR? How do I determine what's my best path? How do I, they're still using disparate systems, ironically enough, quite a few clients. How do we consolidate that? So we'll get asked to do that type of work. In addition to project management type work. They'll have a need to bring folks in to do projects but not want to hire.

And so we'll get that type of work as well from a staffing, and then go down, you know what we call the below the 200. Which is they're not really can afford advisory type work, but they'll come to us and say, how do we do managed services? How can you come in and help us with our IT function? How can you come here and help us become more efficient at the same time, spend less money [00:09:00] while we're doing that?

So that, that's kind of what we do when we get called in Bill.

Bill Russell: Well, I would assume that last phrase, spend less money is pretty common. 500 or more, or 200 or less these days. That's I'm hearing a lot of economic pressure you know, what does that look like? I mean, what does the strategies look like for organizations these days?

If they're coming to you saying, look are they still focused in on the problem or is the economic pressure one of the problems they wanna try to solve? I think it's the second

Bob Kitts: economic pressure is what they wanna solve. So for our clients unless there's an ROI. It's very hard for them to do.

So if this type of advisory work they're doing where someone will come in and say, Hey, where do we go? How do we begin to transform this organization to where the industry's going? There's a cost to do that, but if it's not a return, then they're apt not to do it. So from an ROI perspective.

Sometimes you can save money, but sometimes if they have to spend the money, where's the return gonna be? So if I gotta spend more money, then I better be, make sure it's got an ROI [00:10:00] component to it,

Bill Russell: So Bob we were talking earlier that you guys have some big things in the works. You have a major announcement about Huntzinger right now.

Bob Kitts: Yeah, so Bill, thanks for that. We're changing our name now. We've been doing this for 18 years and we're changing our name to avarion, and avarion was as an exhaustive surgery We went through and Avarion for us, resembles more of a evolution of where our industry's gone.

Clients for us, and hospitals aren't looking for us just to come in and help them solve a problem. They're asking for us to come in and help them change. And so for us we're changing our mission to where we say, together with our clients, we're building a smarter, more connected future for healthcare, where systems run efficiently, teams are empowered, and technology delivers real value.

As you and I spoke earlier. Unless you can deliver a value with the technology doesn't make sense. AI being a big one that we just spoke about, so that's our focus.

Bill Russell: The more I'm talking to these health systems, one of the questions I ask them is, you know, what's healthcare gonna look like in five years?

And it almost doesn't matter who they are. They all will say. [00:11:00] We recognize that now is a time of great change in healthcare and they will also all communicate that they've never experienced this much change in such a short period of time. I mean, we went from pandemic to financial struggles to AI and they're like, man, this has been a, you know, on the digital side, on the security side, I mean the, just the land on the care side that the landscape is changing so rapidly. So, very timely focus for a variant. I'm gonna have to get used to saying that. Me too. I, me too. I

Bob Kitts: mean and it is a neat name because when you see the image, and people come to our website and look at it, you recognize that circular image.

Healthcare is always evolving. There's never and we've learned this in the 30 plus years I've been doing this, there's always something new coming. There's some new regulation coming and that and something coming along that causes us to have to change. You mentioned earlier that we had to be nimble and be agile through our history.

That's what we're very good at, and so for us. This new look and feel [00:12:00] and messaging for us. Still the same hunt singer, still the same work we do, still the same people, but now we're focused now with how do we help folks evolve and continue to transform healthcare, not just solve that problem and say Thank you very much and call us again.

Bill Russell: Well, Bob, I wanna thank you. I wanna thank you for the conversation in 18 years and seven months to be exact. On with Huntzinger Management Group now Avarion, A-V-A-R-I-O-N-I assume.com. Dot com. Yep. A

Bob Kitts: new website. It'll all be up on September 29th. Really excited about it. And we've got a press release coming out and our team is extremely excited to just have a fresh look at what we do and good place to go.

Thanks for joining us for this executive interview on the keynote channel with me, bill Russell. Every healthcare leader needs a community they can lean on and learn from. Subscribe at this week, health.com/subscribe and share this conversation with your team. [00:13:00] Together we're transforming healthcare.

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