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Welcome to this week Health Community. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this Week Health, A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 fall conferences of Chime in San Antonio and Health in Las Vegas, and we want to thank our show sponsors who are.

In our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders and they are Olive Rub, trx, mitigate, and F five. Check them out at this week, health.com, and here we 📍 go. All right, here we are from the Chime Fall Forum and we're doing another interview in action. We're here with Kevin Storms. With the the center of orthopedic and neuro neurosurgical care and research.

That is a mouthful. But you're out of Bend, Oregon, right out of Bend, Oregon, yes. Cio. Fantastic. Tell us a little bit about the center. Yeah, so the center, we, we have about 46 providers. We have 10, 10 clinics throughout Central Oregon. Headquartered in my physician group, also owns an asc, which we run. Wow. So our, you said Central Oregon.

Is that predominantly rural or It is, yeah. So Bend is the biggest town and kind of a hub in Central Oregon and it gets more rural the further out you get. So we do clinics throughout Central Oregon. It gets more challenging the further away from Bend that we get. How do you, I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself here.

So you're the CIO of that. What is the, tell me about the CIO role for your organization. We're small. We have about 346 providers, 300 total employees with, with the, we wear lots of hats at the ceo, but also hooking up computers. Lot of lot. Yeah, no, I love this conversation. And the reason I love it is the most impressed I ever was.

I'm on this, I'm on this panel and I had 700 people reporting to me in it, and next to me was a woman who, I was in this Texas Medical Center, a really small medical center, and I had 700 people and she had six, and she had the same regulatory requirements, the same cybersecurity requirements, the same and actually her people were starting to push her on consumers, Hey, we need to create experiences and that kind of stuff.

But they had to do it with so few resources and it was so graceful to watch her say, Hey, here's how we're doing. This is how we're per, yeah. But it's amazing. How do you stay ahead of this stuff? Chime is one way, learning, keeping abreast of the industry. I come here and other organizations have the same problems.

Yeah, they do. The scale is definitely different, but definitely the same problems that we're facing on a daily. So I can take nuggets of information from them and how they're dealing with it. Apply it in our situation. It's so predominantly orthopedic surgery. So we're orthopedic neurosurgery and physiatry pain management and, and physical medicine.

So specialty, very special, very specialty. What does a normal visit look like? Is it essentially is a referral that brings them? To, to you. Yeah. Very often a referral that brings us from out. From outside of your health system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're physician owned ourselves, so it's, we have a lot of referral partners throughout Central Oregon.

But yeah, so those people will come in and that's where you pick up. You have to create the experience. Can you look at the experience? Let's take orthopedics at this point. When you look at the orthopedic. How many visits do they typically have to do? How far are they driving? What technologies have you put in place to orchestrate that?

Yeah, so that's interesting. We, we do a couple of things. We try to come go to the patients as much as we can. So that's why you have 10. So we have 10 clinics throughout, and some of them are Like, we maybe do a clinic a week or in some of the really remote places, a clinic, every two weeks or so.

So we, our physicians travel out to try to meet the community out in the community, really. Of course, depending on what, what the issue is and what they're being seen for, they may eventually come to Bend to have the surgery or follow up visits, but we try to go out to the community as much as we can.

📍 📍 All right. We're gonna be doing webinars a little different this year. I've talked to you a little bit about this. We got together with our advisors. They told us, Hey, you gotta do 'em different. They're just not serving the community well. And we said, what do you want? They said, community generated topics. Great contributors. Not product driven. They want a more honest and open discussion. And they said what we want is not no on-demand webinars. We want once and done type webinars on a consistent date and time. So every first Thursday of the month. Our first one being January 5th first Thursday a month, one o'clock Eastern time. We are gonna be doing a webinar. You can count on it. Put it on your calendar every first Thursday of the month at one o'clock Eastern time. We're gonna do a webinar. The topics are gonna be generated by the community, and we would love to have you there. Our first one, January 5th, priorities for 2023. A CIO discussion with Integrated Delivery Networks, February 2nd, we're gonna come back with Academic Medical Center CIOs talking about their priorities. And then we're gonna hit some of the other great topics that they've given us for the year, and we would love to have you join us again this week, health.com, top right hand corner, it'll have our current webinar and our upcoming webinars. You can sign up right there. And if you miss it, it's not on demand anymore, so. We would love to have you there. Make sure somebody from your team is there taking notes and bringing stuff back to your staff. So we hope that this works out. Any feedback? Go ahead and send us a note. We would love to hear about it. 📍 📍

What's your core, eh, So we are on Allscripts right now, Touchworks, and also Touch, and also Allscripts is a practice management, I guess I should say Alterra Health now, but you said today, so I, I don't want to talk about that, but we were on Allscripts as well where I was at.

so you primarily an ambulatory center? Primarily ambulatory center, yep. If you do surgeries, do you go to a partner organization? So we, we are the orthopedic partner for the regional hospital in band at St. Charles. And of course we have our ambulatory surgery center too, which has been a great asset for us.

If it's a, if it's outpatient procedure, we'll primarily do it in our, if it's a more complex procedure, we'll do it in the hospital for you. So what you just described to me, Fairly large geography, a lot of different players. They come in and out of your house system to others and that kinda stuff. Talk to me about the data strategy.

How are you getting the records in? How are you getting the information out and then how are you just orchestrating that data? Interoperability? Yeah, some we're a little bit constrained by what we can do with all scripts but we also work through our partners epic systems through, through either scheduling surgery or referral process.

That's what St. Charles is said with St. Charles. Yeah. And a lot of our referral partners actually just in the Bend area, believe it or not, are on Epic, either through a Connect program or an instance. Yeah. It's surprising you haven't gone to to a different EHR at this point. It is, but that's one of the drivers.

Right. So if the entire community around you is, yeah, that ends up being one of the things. Talk to me about, talk to me about. Technology platform and how you, do you have a digital front door? Do you have a way for people to schedule and all that stuff? Is that through your EHR as well? Yeah, so yeah, we use a couple of partners to do things and our kind of our digital strategy as we're positioning right now is to really look for especially in these times with staffing challenges and and whatnot, is to look for items that can help both the patient.

And the staff experience. And a good example of that is we are looking at a self scheduling solution at a guided scheduling solution. Our schedulers, as we struggle to, to keep full, fully staffed, will have better tools to schedule with and reduce our training as people come in, and also eventually help patients get to the right doctor and the right appointment for the right reason.

Orthopedics is a little tricky to navigate that decision tree with different insurances and different special and provider preferences. Tools like that, we really are focusing on where we can see a relatively quick return on our investment and the experience of the staff and providers. Kevin, talk to me about the conference.

What are you gonna walk away from this conference with? I mentioned kind of the start. I look around and I see the same problems that we have just on a bigger scale. Staffing's definitely front and center for a lot of, I think one big thing that that I see especially is as we. Presumably look towards a harder economic times is relationships will be key.

We're gonna be asked to do more with less. And one way I see to do that is, is to leverage relationships that we have collaboratively and sometimes we can work towards a solution without having to spend money that we don't have or, and can affect change collaboratively through mechanisms like that for relationships.

Yep. Kevin, I want thank you for your time. Yeah. Appreciate it.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it is Phenomen. That they have taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community, which is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors one more time, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. They are Olive, Rubrik, 📍 Trellix, Medigate and F5. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.