This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

[00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by CDW Healthcare. CDW understands how to connect the latest technology solutions and services to advance your healthcare mission while keeping patient and staff at the forefront. Whether you're looking to upgrade your EHR, redesign your infrastructure, improve care delivery at the bedside, or elevate the home health patient experience, Our dedicated team of industry tested experts leverage software, hardware, and comprehensive services to orchestrate cost effective solutions that leads to positive patient experiences, higher quality care, and more efficient clinical workflows.

For more information, check them out at ThisWeekHealth. com slash CDW.

Welcome to This Week Health. 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.

Now, onto our [00:01:00] interview

Hey, everyone. I'm Drex. I'm really excited today to be with Dustin Leek, who's from CDW Healthcare. How's it going today, Dustin?

Good, good, great. How are you?

I'm good. Dustin's executive healthcare strategist for CDW Healthcare has a, probably a good place to start.

You have a really interesting background. You are an operator who's moved out of a healthcare system into the, I don't know what we sometimes call the dark side, but you know, in a lot of ways, it's the opportunity to help a lot more people than just your one healthcare system.

Tell me a little bit about your background.

Sure. My background I got my start in 2005 in healthcare IT at what is now Nationwide Children's Hospital as a data center senior engineer. And that introduction to Children's Hospital connected me really to the mission of number one, health care, but number two, to Children's Hospitals and how it's different Peds perspective than an adult perspective or a safety net perspective.

From [00:02:00] there, I went to go work for a safety net hospital in Florida. And work my way up through the infrastructure stack, if you will. And then left there and went to work for a large integrated delivery network in eastern Florida as their VP of enterprise technology, which was ultimately the chief technology officer role.

So that's my background. would say a little bit about the executive healthcare strategist role. How it's a little bit unique is that at C. D. W. My I'm part of a much larger team whose primary requirement to be part of the team is that you have to have been on the customer side of the desk in healthcare.

I. T. At an executive or senior level leadership role. Eso that's what makes my one experience unique, but also our role at CDW unique.

we talked about this briefly before. I've watched CDW Healthcare from the old days before they became CDW Healthcare and all the people that are all on the team, they're all really good, strong operators before they [00:03:00] ever came to CDW.

And I think it makes a huge difference, right? Your peers, you have, A real team of super smart people that you can draw on even though obviously you have a ton of experience Is this great teammate situation that you've created at cdw?

Yeah it's unique I think and really something that differentiates us, from our perspective we understand that when a customer says something for example, like Hey, we're really struggling with, our observation times in the E.

D. If a customer says that to me, I know that it means like five other things behind that, whether it be your patient transport problems or whether it be, environmental services problems in the bedrooms. And so that's where our entire team, I think, brings a different level of knowledge to help our C.

D. W. Peers have more meaningful conversations with our customers, our customer leadership team so that we can talk about I used to say, back when telemedicine was first starting, it's sure, I can sell you a bunch of, telepresence [00:04:00] devices, but I also know in the back of my head, you need a virtual waiting room, you need all these other pieces and components to make it a meaningful patient connection.

And so I think that's really what our team brings with , to your point, our history as successful operators within healthcare IT environments.

Yeah, that's the amazing value add that kind of comes with working with a team like this. So you're out there, you're meeting with tons of customers all the time solving problems.

Tell me a little bit about where are you focused right now? What seems to be two or three of the big things are taking a lot of your time and focus and energy right now?

Sure. As a team, a lot of our focus is around security and around AI data and AI. those conversations around data and come up a lot and it seems to be today.

There are a lot of people seeking use cases within health care for AI whether that be directives from above or just curiosity to say. How can I help my organization better realize whether their financial benefits or patient throughput [00:05:00] benefits or even benefits associated with getting the patient in and out of the facility in the quickest way?

I'll share, one of the things that conversation usually leads to, or the main thing that conversation leads to is a conversation around data governance and hygiene, because as if you're not buying AI off the shelf meaning it's already baked. It's already got a use case, and it's just compartmentalize whatever we choose to feed into that AI model tends to train the AI model, and if we're going to get bad data to begin with you're going to get a bad result when you think about how you might apply an LLM to that data.

So we've got people on my team that are heavily focused on just data and AI. Industry experts just like me grew up, that are able to take those conversations and help focus on, okay, today, here are a couple use cases out of the box, as we call it. Whether it be machine vision or things like Microsoft Copilot or chat GPT, those are out of the box.

But if you think about the [00:06:00] maturation of those out of the box, we really have a good year to 18 months or to 24 months. To focus on data so that we're ready when real AI shows up in a meaningful way. The stuff we can do with

Our data.

What it boils down to is, most, and this is where my pediatrics experience comes into.

Pediatrics doesn't want data trained on an adult model. And just by general population, there are much more adults going through the health care system today than there are PEDS patients. So if I'm representing PEDS perspective here, how do I get that PEDS perspective built into an algorithm or into AI that's focused on my patients, my subset of patients?

Maybe it's. Patients in Ohio or maybe it's patients in Texas, but they're peds patients. They're just different the equipment We use on patient peds patients is smaller. It's just everything's different about a peds patient those are some of the interesting conversations we're having around Data and ai and then of course [00:07:00] it operations continue to be a big conversation around how do I do more with what I have?

So if we think back to the old days of that, Hey, I'm going to use the 80 20 rule. If Epic, Meditech, Cerner, name it, if they have a module that does 80 percent of the functionality of what my clinicians are asking for, we're using the module. We're seeing that now today around I. T.

operations platforms where people are saying maybe I don't necessarily need a separate biomed or clinical engineering. asset management system when I already have one in IT that does the same thing. So we're having those conversations with them and hearing a lot about how can I drive savings to my organization through a better use of an existing platform.

It is amazing right now, the amount of financial pressures that health systems are on and CIOs and CISOs and CTOs and go right down the CXO list. A lot of financial pressure, so that improvement in operations is huge. ? Where can people see you? What's coming up [00:08:00] places that you're going to be in the next couple of months where they can come and visit, hang out, learn more, talk to you face to face?

Sure. CW Healthcare has a presence at VIVE, CHIME, and HIMSS every year. , either me or member of my team will be speaking and presenting at each of those. I just spoke at CHIME fall Forum. I know we've got folks speaking at VIVE around AVD and Epic.

We also have other folks speaking at HIMSS as well on security topics and data and AI. So those are the best places to find us, but we're also happy just to come see you.

That's great. There's nothing like a good road trip. Go to where the work is done, as we say in Toyota production speak. Go to Gemba and have those conversations there.

That's awesome. And I know we share that affinity to go to where the work is done.

It's so much easier, I think to immerse yourself in what the customers actually seeing and feeling for them to have to sometimes step out of the meeting with you to take that call from, somebody saying something's down [00:09:00] or we need this it just reminds all of us.

Hey, this is where we came from. We know you, I joked with you earlier about, the little red blinking light on the weekend, it's Hey, That's either the CEO telling me some doctor is really mad or one of my people telling me something's really bad. We get it all in, being there with them in their environment.

It is so much more beneficial, I think, to both of us, the customer as well as to us.

For sure. Hey, thanks for taking time to sit down with me today and have the conversation. I'm looking forward to seeing you at VIVE. I'll see you at HIMMS. Or I'll see one of the team members there. I appreciate you being here today.

Yeah, thanks, Drex. Drex and I appreciate the time

thanks

for listening to this Interview in Action episode. If you found value in this, share it with a peer. It's a great chance to discuss and in some cases start a mentoring relationship. One way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave us a rating. Thanks for listening. That's all for now. [00:10:00]