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Today on Newsday.

I feel like actually at the precipice of a transformation for healthcare. Industry is, I think, ready for adoption, ready for a change a very positive way. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health. where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time. Newstay discusses the breaking news in healthcare [00:01:00] with industry experts

Now, let's jump right in.

to Newsday. One of our final shows of this season and a repeat with Jason, which is great because One of the things that Jason and I were just sharing is, I think this is Jason's third month in a row of doing Newsday, and we're both at home recording this session. It's amazing. With some really good perspectives on data, which is obviously right in your wheelhouse.

But the trends and the challenges specific to integrity and security. And so Jason, I want to jump right in. One of the things we'll talk about first is healthcare data management did an article about the critical condition that the delicate state of healthcare data. And to me, this was really about the key challenges that we're facing.

And I thought about interoperability, integrity, cyber threats, slow progress, despite investment, and also balancing security and access. This is such a big issue. obvious space for you. It's what you guys do best. How are you tackling some of these challenges? And [00:02:00] what did this article inform for you?

Yeah I gotta say it's a put me down memory lane a little bit because the article calls out Dr.

David Braylor, who was the United States first healthcare ITs are back in 2004, under George W. Bush. And just as a quick anecdote, Sarah back 20 years ago I live in Nashville, and in the state of Tennessee, we had no HIMSS chapter. Believe it or not, which is shocking for healthcare capital in the country, some people think, we had no HIMSS chapter.

Myself and a few others said that can't be, so we decided to put on a chapter event. and then one of the people, so who should we try to get to be keynote speaker for this new chapter we're going to create? And I said, I pull up modern health care and it was number one, most powerful persons in health care was Dr.

David Braylor. And we cold called him. He said, yes. And then we and voila, I ended up, the pitch was, this is a little I think it's okay to say it's been 20 years, so [00:03:00] our pitch to Dr. Braylor, he doesn't actually know this, I don't know if he'll ever see this podcast, was we have, hundreds of IT executives in Tennessee and across the country coming in for this event, and we have all seven RIOs.

They're going to be represented there, all seven of the CEOs. And he said, okay, great I'll show up, which was like, oh my gosh, we just got the most powerful person in healthcare to a local national IT incident. So what did we do next? We called the seven Rios and said, hey, by the way, we'd like you to join a panel that Dr.

Braylor is going to talk. He's expecting you to be there. Please come. So we got all of them, plus John Halamka, Dr. Halamka. And but you go back 20 years ago, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. Meaningful use, Obamacare, all this information that's now digital which is, I think, important, but at the same time, we haven't moved the needle with respect to what the idea was originally at all.

And there have been lots of reasons why, but we [00:04:00] still actually haven't gotten anywhere close to that. I do think, The last couple of years, something's different though. I think with all the new changes with technology, that healthcare seems like it's finally adopting and being on the forefront of things like artificial intelligence and other areas of of automation.

I feel like maybe the last 20 years, we just have to get to this point. And I really frankly would never have said that until the last year or two. So I feel like actually at the precipice of a transformation for healthcare. And I can tell you, I've never said anything like that.

I just never believed. That we would have that, but something's changed where our industry is, I think, ready for adoption, ready for a change in a very positive way. And we wouldn't have gotten there, or we wouldn't be there in that position if it wasn't for all the data to be digital like it is now today.

So I'm really bullish on where we're headed. We now have a [00:05:00] much more comprehensive view Of that data, we have technologies Clearsense being one of them, obviously, where we can patch together 20 years of data and current data in the same medical record, patient match, for point of care, for release of information, things like that wouldn't have happened had we not spent all that money.

But I feel like we're actually right at that edge of a major massive change for the better.

To me, it's that moment of now what, to your point? We spent, billions of dollars to get all of this information digitized to have the vision from people like Dr. Brewer, which was huge to say, this is what we're going to need.

Maybe not realizing the explosion of information that would continue to filter into these organizations. So you've got data coming at you from so many different sources and how you stratify that information and how you make sure it's accurate. Now, how are you protecting it against the bad guys? Meaningful use was a huge win in terms of how we are able to utilize.

our EMRs in a [00:06:00] similar fashion, now you've got this element coming through and saying, do we need that same level of rigor around cybersecurity? And if we do that and require organizations to meet all these requirements, we pay them for meeting it. That ongoing care and feeding and maintenance of these environments is tremendous.

It actually has added a burden in some cases, because what data do you include for the physician to review? When I think about what Clearsense does in the industry, how are you helping your clients make sure that There's accuracy in the data that's being utilized so that providers can confidently use it in clinical decision making.

Yeah, so the way I think of data and revitalization of data, the terminology we use is we revitalize your data for other use cases. And so the way we think about it's got to be timely, complete, and accurate. And so timely as in. The last 20 years of data and also, near real time data.

Complete, comprehensive use of all the data, patient [00:07:00] matched, so it's complete for multiple EHR instances or other clinical ancillary systems. And then accurate that the data source, whatever system it came from, is exactly matching this source here on the landing spot in ArcBot. And timely, accurate, complete.

From the answer to your specific question, so we have lots of different validation methods to make sure it's accurate. One of the methods actually, we're about to press release this, we just got, another certification from NCQA, which is the National Community Policy Association. For their DAV Data Aggravation Validation Certification for FHIR and CCD.

So we just got this in the last couple days. And this is on a series of other DAV certifications, but it really is a NCQA saying that we have gone through the process of rigor to show that the data that came from Allscripts, Athena, Epic, Cerner, whatever it is, Exactly matches this ending spot.

So that's one feature that we [00:08:00] provide to our clients that are participating in our healthcare data lake platform of OneClearsense.

Which is going to be a win in terms of the ability for people to trust what's then being handed off. When you consider the certifications or the level of intentionality that you're placing on the data, and the usability factor.

Because one of the other, articles we uncovered is, Hey, what's the integrity and ability to utilize this effectively even look like? There's this culture shift though, that you mentioned that's, been a result of the last 20 years. How do you help inform that? And from the perspective of what culturally needs to happen in organizations for the maximization of all this information coming into their EHRs to be useful all of the time, versus just in these like spot scenarios.

Yeah, so first of all, I think this is a layer of cake. The bottom layer of the cake we have going back to the first article, is [00:09:00] that we have a bloated set of applications proposed across every health system in the United States. 20 30 percent bloatedness. You've got all this data that are in these applications.

Some of them are homegrown EHR systems. Some of them are Systems that are in the process of being retired, a lot of them are going to Epic, some are going to Cerner, but, most are going to one of those two, obviously Epic being number one for that slotting, but you still have this data.

And there's a huge amount of costs associated. with maintaining those legacy applications. But the data is critically important. It's also regulatory compliant. And I've yet to see a health system that wants to take all of that data and put it into Epic. Because you take, the last two, three years maybe, I've seen one client that does five years.

It's unusual you can go that much. It's really expensive to do that. So what we do is we take that data and From all these ancillary systems and all the prior EHR systems. And we recreate the reporting and we patient [00:10:00] match it and we play the right into the active EHR like Epic. So when they're the doctor or the clinician is in their patient chart, John Smith, let's say they can click on a tab in Epic.

And it looks like they're still in EPIC, but they click the tab and it actually launches our UI into our One Clearsense platform. And it shows that John Smith and all the data for the last 15 years right there. And they can search, they can slice and dice on the data for any questions that they might have across anything in their prior history.

But for the user standpoint, this is so important. And by the way, this is the heaviest usage of all of our applications is that security use case. By far above any ERP systems for decommissioning or financials, et cetera, of operational systems. This use case is by far number one. And it's because the clinicians, when they're, taking care of their patients, they need to see more than the last couple of years.

What goes further back, and it may be other hospitals too. [00:11:00] It's not this hospital, it's other hospitals inside the health system. But you obviously have to have that easy for the clinician to have accessibility, instantaneous accessibility, not waiting for the data to pull up as like immediate.

And it also needs to be one place for John Smith, not, I've got Allscripts John Smith, I've got Athena John Smith, I've got Cerner John Smith, and I've got Mennon John Smith, etc. And so it's got to be really easy, simple, and immediate, and accurate. So not much to ask for, if I'm the clinician, because their time is money.

I played golf with a guy over the weekend, and He said he saw 30 patients last week on one day. These people don't have time to be waiting and trying to sift through data. They need it right now.

In any case it's critically important to be accessible and accurate.

I want to talk about the security lens on all of that. So how are you making sure that there's enough security applied to the information without it being a barrier to it [00:12:00] being timely?

Yeah saw the stat that I had to double click on it.

I was blown away. It was the stat is at 67%

Healthcare organizations in the past year have had a material successful ransomware attack on their network. Not that they've been attacked. It's actually had a material impact to their business. I think it's probably a hundred percent that they've been attacked, but 67 percent of them have actually had it successful and had a major event because of ransomware.

Ransomware attack I could not believe it was that high, but it is. I've talked to CIOs over the last couple of weeks and they're like, yeah that's spot on. So what's the reason why? I think one of the reasons why is already, you have, like I said, homegrown EHR systems and you have legacy applications that are still sitting out there.

Some cases it's the best practice when you do a archive program and you shut down these systems, a lot of [00:13:00] times, some of these health systems actually don't go all the way to decommissioning the actual application. They go all the way to the point of. They have a couple licenses still sitting there, but the application is still there because they just don't trust that the data is going to be accessible somewhere else.

So when we go into clients we identify and prioritize not just the costly applications, but also the ones that are most at risk for cyber attack. Because these are the, anywhere from the access database underneath the doctor's desk. Bill thought he was going to make 10 billion, 20 years ago, but it still sits there hunting and finding those. But also, all the way through the decommissioning, actually, even to the point of where we're starting to get into helping our clients Take the gear out of the data center and wipe it and remove it completely. It's all the way through. Because that's how you actually will mitigate your cyber threat.

Not just getting it down to a license and you [00:14:00] save costs. The cyber threat is incredibly real. so it's important to be comprehensive in the way you decommission these applications. And then, the way we sell this and it's an easy sales pitch, is that because Clearsense is SOC 2 and HITRUST certified, you're immediately getting an uplift in tremendous IT security and cyber mitigation, because you're moving from applications, multiple, dozens, hundreds of applications, in some cases, for some of our clients, where we're decommissioning.

And you're moving into a high trust SOC2 certified cloud system, which is ours. So that's an obvious thing to do. And table stakes.

It is table stakes. And here's one of the things I consider as a consumer. If we know that health care is one of the most attacked surfaces. That we consume.

What expectation do we have as patients that there's a level of vulnerability built into that part of how we live our day to day lives and knowing [00:15:00] to your point, that maybe there are some extra steps that we are taking. So there's all the things that we do from the government perspective, whether it's CISA or NIST or HITRUST or HIPAA, all these different certifications had a fantastic conversation with Chuck Podesta from Renown Health yesterday, who was sharing.

There's a level of self governing that's also the responsibility beyond these protocols. When you add that element of best practice and self regulation into how you help connect with your clients and the consumers, what comes to mind for you?

First of all Chuck's a great guy. I love Chuck and he's his modeling career is really taking off.

So now that Yellowstone is slowing down.

He became a, like a Western model after Reno. It's so great.

It's a Western model with a thick Boston accent. And Renown is a great buy in, of course, since for a long time, too. answer, your question now is what specifically?

Yeah, there's government standards, there's the self regulation, best practice.

And [00:16:00] as a con we are patients, it's a good thing. We're all a patient. What level of expectation do we have to know that at any given point, let's just use your stat, 67 percent of my data is probably at risk.

Yeah, to me your CISO is so important. You have to everything's a balance but your CISO is really important.

They need to have need to have a strong voice inside any company, regardless of its healthcare. Reality is that there are companies out there that are HITRUST certified and maybe don't have the level of rigor that your organization would expect. I think to me, high trust is the bare minimum.

It just shows that you have an external body that's reviewed your policies, procedures, and you've got evidence that you meet these certification standards. But I have a lot of respect for the organizations that I've worked with over the last 30 years. that put another layer of scrutiny on top of that.

Not to the point of [00:17:00] exhaustion and repetitiveness, but there may be some certain things that some of the organizations are double clicking on to make sure that they are safe. And I'd start, to me, it's internally. It's the vendors, a lot of cases are safe. It's what about your own house?

So does that CISO have the. The ability to say, hey, I just identified 150 apps that I know that this chairperson really loves this app, but it's actually fraught with, cyber threats and things of that nature. So I think that the CISO needs to have a strong voice within the health system to not just obviously look at vendors and make sure they're high trust and SOC 2, et cetera, but also internally too.

Is that health system running at a place where, you're protecting your patients because, you have a an attack. it's incredibly damaging. It's not just the 300 a year or so you got to pay to the patients for the monitoring over the next, couple of years.

It's the brand damage [00:18:00] is just immense. And I just don't know whether or not health systems put as much scrutiny on that as I think they should because, when you go look at 67 percent of them successfully having a ransomware attack it's going to be the ones that were probably obvious in a lot of cases that they could have, thought about ahead of time, whether it be some old AS400 or who knows what.

And to your point, there are systems that don't die. You still have some, by system, what, 36 and 38 floating around out there. You might have an AS400. They don't die. I had a phone switch from the 70s at one of my facilities in the 2000s because the SL1 meridian still worked. And yet. Go back and start doing security reviews on some of these systems.

They don't meet the requirements of today. But that's where something like making sure that the interoperability is set up with the right standards or really truly understanding what it means to have the right security [00:19:00] around how data is being handled in the organization. What are you doing when you help a customer that's perhaps either had a breach.

And it wasn't because of a system failure. Most of those failures, I bet, are human related. But how do you rebuild trust with patients and providers when there is one of these events?

so first of all Clearsense is not a IT security advisory firm, but we have an ecosystem of partners that we work with that we trust and we recommend.

And we often are asked You know, for this given situation do you have a partner that you would introduce to us? And so , we commonly are asked that as a partner with them is to help them identify organizations that we know and we trust and we've worked with for a period of time.

Most cases a long period of time to say that this is an organization that we trust. And then what we ended up doing is we ended up partnering with that firm to Let [00:20:00] it be a part of the prioritization process of which of the applications we need to mitigate because it was in our role It's it's about identifying and prioritizing the applications that need to be taken out And actually in some cases even There may be multiple Spyware, Malware tools that maybe we can consolidate that and reduce some costs on that as well.

It's actually another app rat opportunity as they actually buy multiple versions of this and different companies, but why do you need that? Just have, one or two really good ones, but in any case we typically will bring in a partner and work alongside them, help prioritize those applications as a part of our overall program approach.

I think that's, you bring in the experts, particularly when it's like IT security you want to bring in the people who live and breathe that every day.

And you've got the breadth and depth to say, I have vetted these third parties because that third party is where most of the challenges came in this year.

Something's happened to people directly by the partner, but, In other cases, in the change instance, it was the third party associated with change where that biggest [00:21:00] weakness occurred, even though that was the hallmark of what had happened. You're doing all of that ahead of time. You're ensuring that your partners that you're bringing in can give a sense of viability.

To the health systems using Clearsense. They know that you've already done your homework on. Yeah, we're not

it's our reputation, too So and these are relationships or clients are very long term. They're you know, five ten years or longer so We want to make sure if we're going to introduce a partner, whether it be for application rationalization consulting or IT security or decommissioning the actual gear.

We're not actually sending our Clearsense employees to the data center and pulling out the data. We're actually going to partner with someone. So we have a group of partners that we're building and growing. That are experts in these areas and, it's important to, have your own brand reputation to, and be surrounded by those best of breed organizations too.

I'll tell you one thing though, and this is, it just is what it is. A lot of times the within, this doesn't have to be just it could [00:22:00] be any area of any organization of any type, but sometimes just bringing in an expert and then letting them do this independent study gives power to maybe what your leadership has already been saying.

And even though it seems like sometimes that might be a waste of money, if you need to get an expert's expert in to help you carry a budget expense forward, because, these things are not, so first of all, it's very expensive, but secondly your reputation is at risk if you don't actually move the ball forward with having an independent voice.

So sometimes. It's helpful just to bring in these consultants to help you get certain things passed. And at least, worst case scenario is that they still say no, and then if something happens, you can say, Hey, I, I did everything I could. I went all the way to even getting an independent voice in here to make a suggestion change.

I can tell you as a CEO of Clearsense and prior organizations, Cyber [00:23:00] security is number one. It's culture and cyber security. Those are number one in A and one B. How do you make sure that you're protecting the company? And how do you make sure that the organization has the right culture to within, from staff all the way up to me is make sure we're all working towards the same things.

And a lot of these, it takes. balance and it takes it's fungible.

More and more often from CIOs, we are hearing and CISOs about the importance of the shared risk with their partners. So we bring you in to help us with our data platforming and we want a sense of shared risk. What's that reciprocal evaluation?

So if you pick up a client, can you say. Dumpster fire over here. And until you do these 10 things, this is your risk score, and we accept it together. How have those conversations evolved over time?

I love taking risk on contracts because , my not so hidden secret is that when I say, sure, I'll take risk, or we'll even take share of [00:24:00] risk, which we're open to do.

the reality is that I'm able to then say, okay, as long as you do these things. Then I'll do this because and I think these are not for our business. We're not doing vendor kind of relationships. These are not project based. We're more long term solution partners. And there's a very big difference.

It's not just words of vendor and partner. I really mean there is a big difference. So if you're going in to just do a project and we just don't do that. You go in and you go out and you're done and we just don't do that type of business. Versus a partnership to say, I need to decommission 150 applications over the next couple of years.

Okay, great. That means that in order to do that, these are the things that need to occur. We need to have a governance board set up that will, that we can run it, if you'd like. We need to make sure that we have resources lined up to do data extractions. We can do that if they would like. They can do it, or we can find a partner to do it, whatever the case may be.

We need to make sure that we have [00:25:00] an ongoing, concurrent set of applications. So in our case, we might have 5, 10 apps concurrently. We've gone up to 60 apps concurrently on any given client that we're decommissioning. No one on the planet has made a request to that, by the way. For many years ongoing.

And let's make sure that in order to do that, you have to have the supply chain of all these applications. Prioritization, the data tracks. The operating model so that when we as the SaaS company are constantly being fed. And yeah, I'll take risks on that. If you're not going to do all the things I just said above that, I'm at risk as a company.

To generate the cost savings that I guarantee you, but you didn't do these things ahead of time, nor did you, whether you do it, buy it from me, or you buy it from someone else, you source it internally, then that makes it really hard to do a partnership in that way. So I like to push the envelope, help clients identify there's a much, much bigger opportunity, particularly those that are, More [00:26:00] complex and are doing lots of m and a and rolling out enterprise initiatives, whether it be ERP or EHRs.

All those are ripe with opportunity, but it really does take a comprehensive solution, a turnkey solution versus only. Doing the actual SAS component, which is one piece of this goal.

And yet. The DCOM and app rationalization, huge aspect of really ensuring that, heck, a system is set up for efficiency, excellence, managing expectations.

They're also going to lean into you when they're bringing new solutions on board, whether that's making sure that there's standardized data exchange like HL7 or FHIR that enable the systems to exchange data efficiently. Thank you for listening. What does it look like when they're bringing new systems on board?

Because, to your point, supply chain and the governance and everyone involved, because you could change one widget over here on the left hand side, That downstream effect of data flow could [00:27:00] be significant. You go, oh my gosh, we just broke something in Biomed that nobody even maybe knew about or was thinking about.

How does the conversation change, Jason, when it's bringing new systems in as opposed to decomming them?

Yeah, to us it's all the same we like to go as upstream as possible. So we're not just waiting for the next set of applications. We're actually, in some cases, we're actually doing the extraction itself.

And we're even running the governance board or part of the governance board that's prioritizing the apps that we know in three or four months are going to end up plate to do the actual application reporting and things of that nature. So we like to go all the way upstream, so there's no surprises.

So for example a lot of our clients are doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions like everyone else the United States at this point for health systems. So lot of times we're being given early indication of this is the health system we're going to be [00:28:00] acquiring, hasn't hit the news yet, please keep it under confidence.

These are the applications that that we see are redundant. That need to be absorbed into the overall portfolio. And I always like to say there's some CFO that's sitting down on some spreadsheet that has said, if I acquire this health system, I get to take out this cost. And so what we like to do is go all the way up to that level to say, and you'll have it out by this date.

So that they actually can rapidly take that cost out at the point of acquisition, they can see, okay there's things that we can do, we can start reducing seats off of this particular application, even before we decommission it, because you can start saving costs way upstream before it even gets to the SAS.

There's a lot of like tricks that you can do to get that procurement process running way upstream that we help with so that there are no surprises on the back end where we're like, Oh my gosh, yeah we're like losing millions of dollars a year [00:29:00] because we can't get this application decommissioned fast enough.

So we like to go up as far up as possible upstream.

Because there are so many mergers and acquisitions. What's the best point in time to be having the conversations like what you just mentioned? Is it part of due diligence? Is it the immediate post closed transaction? I've worked in orgs where we waited a really long time to do integration.

I've also worked in organizations where we did it too soon because then the deal actually didn't go all the way through or we decided to buy some of the strategy. From your perspective and the things you've seen, when is the best time to really be doing that analysis?

In our partnerships, we're part of the M& A organization of the IT team.

They're not going to pull us in where they don't have some signed agreement that this is going to move forward and this is likely the day, even though maybe there's some things that are squishy. But they already have this covered, when they may be looking at acquiring a health system, but they know this piece of it's already [00:30:00] covered, and they just need to flip the switch so that when there's it's definitive and when you've got some dates.

You can use that due diligence. And we have some newer partners that we're talking to actually that are just exclusively doing M& A and helping maximize the cost takeout earlier on. Part of the reason why you do a merger acquisition is because you actually get a synergy, what they call it, synergy.

So those are synergies. It's start with software and infrastructure costs. Obviously headcount is a part of that too. Okay. or re employed as headcount versus other things is what a lot of people do. But I'd say be aware of it, that there's some things coming. And then, just making sure that we're all talking on a regular basis and there's no surprises.

The vendors are really important to not be surprised too, because you're depending on that vendor or the partner to, they're going to actually come through on those cost takeouts.

Although the M& A takes a while, and having done a ton of them in my career, and you've done a bunch as well, setting the expectation of [00:31:00] how long certain efficiencies and cost savings measures will be gained.

Because there's a curve, even post consolidation, rationalization, and archiving, and utilization. Data. Management does not have an end date to it. And so as you were working with your clients and setting appropriate expectations for the right level of cost management, for lack of a better term, to put around going data programs, how are you planting that seed with the CFO so that the chief data officer.

The CISO, the CIO can have that informed conversation and also raise it to the board. You've done this M& A for this reason, but the cost of you making sure that your data is secure and operable and usable in a clinical setting and beyond, this is what you can expect post merger as an example.

there's a couple elements to what you just said, Sarah.

So one of the things that we do, which I'm not sure if it's unique to us or not, but I think it's really important is having a [00:32:00] level of predictability on what our spam will be to our clients. The way we work is we have a platform fee, which is, subscription to all the data.

And then we have a called implementation fee, where we have our data engineers and our data architects are actually working to move the data from source system to our cloud and but pre signing up for that level of effort for how many applications concurrently that we'll be doing.

There's a, different prices if you're doing 10, 15, 20 apps concurrently over a period of time, one year, two years, three years, whatever the case may be, but just having that agreed upon upfront. And when we signed the contract is really important because if you have a bogey of 150 applications you need a plan of how you're going to take them out so that there's a cost to the applications you're shutting down, but there's also a cost to us too and you want as much.

[00:33:00] predictability as possible, as much transparency as possible. I do hear a lot of nickel dining with some organizations that did. We'd rather just be fully transparent up front and say, this is the time it's going to take to do this type of work. Here's the level of resources

we're going to bring to bear.

Here's how many applications that we need to be served up so that we're constantly working over the next year or two or three years, whatever the case may be. And they know exactly what they're spending with us up front without having surprises in the back end from us. And then at the same time, what that does is it gets their budget right, our budgets are right, we can staff appropriately on any given client.

And at the same time, it also sets the expectation of going back to that supply chain analogy. How do we make sure that we always have, we're always fed? Because you're gonna be locked in. For a certain number of concurrent apps, which only benefits the health system. It only benefits them because they're reducing cyber threat, they're reducing costs, and they're [00:34:00] consolidating to, less vendors, all those things.

But it really sets the stage from the get go on the strategic nature of what we do on that particular solution.

I can tell y'all have been listening. Whether it's to Newsday or anything else that's out there in the industry, and here's why. What we hear over and over again, in addition to what we shared previously, here's what CIOs and CISOs need from their partners.

They need an understanding of the governance of the process of the information. So you've shared governance of data. Predictable spend. Imagine that. How much is your solution going to cost me? And where are the biggest efficiencies going to be gained? Acceptable and shared risk. Not all partners come into the equation saying, if you do these things, we'll accept this level of risk with you, which is huge because you're helping them inform what level of spend they may want to have or processes to get to a certain point, and then understanding what those milestones look like.

This far into a merger, this far into an implementation, this far into an upgrade. Those four things are huge, Jason. And with you being able to deliver those and share those with your [00:35:00] clients, those are the things that people need going in. Whether they're a repeat, or they need help with you being a true partner in transparency, non transactional, building business cases, and beyond.

Yeah I concur on everything you said, Sarah. we have a client right now that's, going through a merger and it's a huge cost to them. And they're, we're having conversations about, hey, if you can move faster, in a clearer sense, maybe we bonus you for that work and because we have unlimited scale just because of the way our model works.

We have unlimited scale. I was in a interesting thing I wasn't expecting. I did a focus group at the CHIME fall Forum, and we had a round robin of CIOs, and one of them, I won't say who or the vendor and all that, of course, but CIOs said that such and such vendor always has staffing constraints and can't seem to, do the one year project.

It's another year, three of the one year project, and and she said, how do you deal with those staffing [00:36:00] issues? I was like, I looked at my head of delivery and I said, I don't think we ever have that issue, do we? And it's just, I think the way we approach it is because we're being upfront.

We're not just scampering to say, oh my gosh, you have more applications and let's go do all those right now. And just, I'm trying to whack a mole. it's just running a good operational business and knowing up front what the work is going to be and as things change, you modify those things and having a nice transparent scorecard in terms of progress towards that.

That's the only way to, have no drama kind of environment. You really need that collaboration and transparency.

And the CIOs are talking to each other. If I was going to go into business with you prior to doing that, I could get a whole bunch of benchmarking reports, or I can just call five of my peers and they will tell me the truth.

And that truth is hard to build up, but once you have it, to your point, you're not saying yes to everything that walks in your door, because maybe you can't handle the volume or you adjust appropriately, but CIOs will inform from one another, which has been also [00:37:00] just the loud and clear thing we've heard throughout the year is if you put.

Our name on a slide, or you put us as a reference, know that we will check it, a perspective. And that's how you'll garner, how you're building all that.

Whether you're asking for the reference or not, they're going to

call their friends. They're going to be in a text chat. It's going to say, Jason and Clearsense.

They're going to be like, it's going to be a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Regardless of what

class says, class is great too. We're partners with class like everyone else is, and class is great. They have a great need. But the reality is that peer network is instrumental in picking the right partners.

And there's so many great benchmarking opportunities out there, to your point. There's Class, Gartner, others. There's even Panda Hub now. And at the end of the day, hey, what is my crew telling me, or my tribe informing me of? But no year end show, no year end show would be complete without, I don't know, Jason's predictions or desires for 2025.

So with all the things that are out there, what do you anticipate will be the most significant impact in healthcare in [00:38:00] 2025?

This is the easy button. I think it's AI. It's I'm personally, I came in very skeptical over the last few years because we've had so many different, buzzword du jour, whether it be big data, massive parallel processing, blockchain, like just, all these things over the last several decades and just none of them have really panned out.

I really, I think that AI is different and and for us, for a clear sense, What we're now launching next year, early, very early next year, actually, is a tool where we can do AI validation. So we can build that healthcare data link for the health system, and then they can go buy whatever AI, they can buy the BYOT.

and they put it on the healthcare data lake, which is timely, complete, and accurate data, like I said earlier, but then you put the AI on top of it and you can test out whether it be your proprietary tools and or the AI before you actually deploy it, because you need that real world [00:39:00] scenario and need to validate that before you actually deploy it, particularly if it's going to be patient care.

I do think that patient care related AI is going to be really important. further down the road. I don't just generally speaking because of the obvious consequences if you do that wrong. But I do think that there's going to be a ton of synergies and operational improvement from AI, and we're glad to be a part of it.

Yes, and a phrase that I uncovered last week, and maybe it's more than a week old, and I was just latching onto it was, Data distilleries. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. So I said, what's the difference between the lake, the warehouse and the distillery? And it spit out all the different perspectives, but don't be surprised if that word starts entering people's vernacular this next year too is tell me what to do with my data distillery.

And I'm like, Is that a question or is it a, is it more of a perspective? About a happy hour. About a happy hour conversation. One last fun one, though, for you personally. It's nothing to do with business, etc. What are you wanting to achieve in 2025?

[00:40:00] I'm focused on first of all it's non business.

I guess you're saying non business. I'm focused on my own personal health. I'm trying lots of new, different things. I've always been into sauna, both infrared and traditional. I like to weightlift. I'm going to go skiing in January. It should be great. Over in Breckenridge but I'm focusing on my own personal health.

I'm going to try some red light therapy. If you've ever heard that's promising more to come on that. But just trying to get, I'm 53 now, so I want to stay young and focus on all those things. I also would like to improve my golf game, but , That's another story.

We do have the golf tournament coming up at HIMSS in March, so you'll see where to go. You should join us for that. And to your point, and I think it's when we hit our 50s, we're like, I'm trying sauna. I've got my acu, my massage, my chiro all blended in. However, bringing all of these perspectives into your conversation with your PCP, these are going to be anecdotal data points from Jason with his doctor [00:41:00] versus just being in the EMR.

I can't imagine a person better informed to be having those conversations and telling us next time we chat about that journey of how are you bringing in Yeah,

focus on your gut health is, I think your gut is right at the pinnacle of I'd like to see more traditional Western medicine adopt some of these other holistic perspectives on fermentation and gut support and those kinds of things.

So that's on my personal side.

If you haven't read the book, Outlive yet it's pretty fascinating. He was a guest, Peter Edia, on the Huberman Lab not too long ago, but also it's just a really good view on exactly the things that you're talking about. How do we live a longer, healthier, happier, independent life?

Outlive. I'll take a look at it.

Outlive. Thank you for joining us again on Newsday. I always love the perspectives and things that you're doing at Clearsense. I also appreciate your partnership and the perspectives that you share with our audience because When you don't know where do you go and ask the right questions this is one of the formats that makes that possible.

So thank you for sharing your insights today, your expertise. More than [00:42:00] anything, have a very happy New Year.

You too. Happy New Year.

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