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[00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by SHI. As a trusted partner to healthcare IT leaders, SHI understands the unique challenges of managing complex healthcare technology environments.

Their IT asset management team has helped health systems save millions in licensing costs, eliminate security vulnerabilities, and optimize IT investments. Whether you're modernizing your infrastructure, implementing AI solutions, Or strengthening your cybersecurity posture. SHI expertise helps CIOs and their teams focus on what matters most.

Enabling quality patient care through technology. See how other health systems have transformed their IT operations at ThisWeekHealth. com slash SHI.

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 [00:01:00] transforming healthcare, one connection at a time.

Now, onto our interview

(Interview 1)

Hey, it's Sarah Richardson live from VIVE here in Nashville, and I am thrilled to be at the SHI booth with Kris Nessa and John Kirkman. We are going to talk about Island as well as other innovations occurring in healthcare with the SHI partnership. So Nessa or Kris, I'm going to start with you. We've known each other a long time.

Yes. As a healthcare CTO, what sparked your interest in Island?

I love that anytime that there's a problem or an idea that's coming the plate, I love to reverse engineer it. Ask a lot of questions. How can we think differently? And really we're at this precipice of data is our most valuable asset.

. We have to keep it secure and we can't lose focus on the user experience, whether it be the patient or the clinician. And it just really honed in on, oh, Broadcom bought VMware. We're talking about that. Oh, change healthcare and everybody else is having a cyber attack and. All of our [00:02:00] clinician staff shortages and turnover were really having to rethink our human capital changes and user experience was getting lost and I saw what my friends over at Island were doing and I'm like, Hey, this is a better way to re engineer.

This is a better way to rethink what we're doing and maybe do a little better than we have.

I agree. I always say new friends at Island. Island was the last product I put in with the security team at Tiffany before I came over to This Week Health. And I love it because really the simplicity factor of what it allows an organization to do.

More importantly, when you consider what zero trust means for the clinicians, and how it can enhance their workflows, what are your thoughts? What do you want the audience to know?

Yeah, I think it's just as simple as reducing friction, right? And speeding things up, making less steps. The latency of how long it takes to access certain assets versus others.

It should all just look the same to the end user. Shouldn't matter if it's, a thick application that is difficult to get to or operates in [00:03:00] IE six still, or if it's a brand new SaaS app for the user, it should just look the same. It should not stand in the way of the workflow. It should speed the workflow.

So that's really what, we bring to the table with respect to that. And then furthermore, because we control that presentation tier we're kinda the last piece before the pixels hit the glass, we can dictate. What can be used again, where, for instance, instead of having one cut and paste, you can have 50 of them in there, but all 50 of those clips can't necessarily be used in all of the apps, so we create these data boundaries so you can reuse that data and just speed your work along.

liken back to even over a decade ago when you and I were doing Meaningful Use down at our health system. I work for Cerner, Sarah was my CIO, so we're in there doing what we had to do, and you go in and you try to launch, bless them, Cerner, or EHR, and there's all these instances of Citrix.

Oh, go to box 60, it's functioning better than box 12 right now. So there's that [00:04:00] nuance of it. But also, having worked at Cerner and built those applications, there also was only a certain level of deftness that we could configure the system. Meaning? Oh, I can't turn that off. That's not a build config change.

At an island, what you guys have been able to do you get to have Salesforce, and there's PHI, and there's this credit card, and you guys get mass, elements of data that these super complex systems are never going to config or build in there, and it's amazing. And also water market, nobody can take their phone and screenshot it this is the biggest game changer that I've seen in actual user experience.

And I've never had like actual user experience a long time. So I love it.

What I love is think about all the history and iterations of what we've experienced in healthcare. And now you've had this very unique perspective. The island just shows up within you. It's that aha moment where you're like, dang, how come this didn't happen before now?

So this is a question for both of you. And maybe a different way you'll answer it is for SHI, what was the attraction of Island? And how do you uniquely leverage [00:05:00] that for your customers? And I'll ask you is why did you choose SHI to be one of your core partners to think about the impact you can have together in healthcare?

So whoever wants to go first?

You want me to? I think you should. All right. So I firmly believe no matter your healthcare size, that IT should be democratized across everybody. There should be a nonprofit price as far as I'm concerned for all of our friends at the rural health systems and at the big ones like we're all in a family together.

So having said that, when I saw this, being able to game change it and to maybe financially make an institution whole because you guys can offload certain contracts and things that they have in place by getting rid of tech debt, getting rid of high cost things. But also making the experience better and the clinician's experience better, like I'm Delivering on all those key aspects of the quintuple aim that we at SHI are like charged to deliver for our customers and like We're just doing what we should for everybody and [00:06:00] serving all of us as patients in the end and driving patient results So that's what I love about it because it's like everybody should have island.

Everybody should have island

I love that. I agree. But I would also, I'd tell you that, on the flip side of this is, my charter here is I'm not trying to partner with every single organization out there. We want to make a difference. We're trying to make change.

And what I find is, partners are more interested in the transaction or how they can be a part of something that they heard was really cool. But when we get into the detail and we talk, get into the conversations and who they're talking to, you pretty quickly figure out, it's not, they don't care.

That's the saddest part about it. You guys care. It's evident. And I think that's where, we're aligned. We need to solve problems. This thing does all kinds of stuff, but how can we solve a problem now?

And then how can we chart that for something long term so we can knock down the next problem.

What I love is how you all have stayed incredibly nimble and able to really [00:07:00] fit the need of your customer. And then you have someone like SHI and expertise with the team. Kris has seen it all. The myriad organizations she has effectively worked for. And you start combining all of that brain trust.

There's something really special when you're seeing it per health system. And then you're like, and we can help adapt it over here. . So you keep the integrity of the product, but you still allow that customization that's gonna be so important based on the setting of care. That's gotta be superpower for both of you.

. And so when you're seeing all these innovations here and things that are happening in healthcare, what else is exciting to you about the future of healthcare?

I'll just say this. AI are the two letters of the day in the world everywhere, but nowhere else is it more important than in this space where there's such large samplings of patient, data, patient outcomes that we can draw from, right?

So how can we take advantage of these AI technologies to improve the workflows at the point of care for a nurse, for instance, right? And enable it, but in [00:08:00] a safe way. What we can't do is say AI is scary and we're going to block that, whether it's research data that's working, with the health system on clinical trials or what have you, these are sticky things people are afraid we have to have a way to say yes, that we can work together, but in a controlled manner.

And that's where the last mile controls come in where you can say, Hey, we're only going to let certain data flow to certain things, right? So then you can say yes. That's the point.

I'll have to say AI too. But in probably more, I was gonna say micro, but also macro sense At S. H. I. We are going full in on A.

I. And doing something amazing with a big data center and an A. I. Center because health care has lost a lot of its innovation teams like they're again, they're trying to say whole financially right? And costs are being cut. We're trying to app rationalize all the time. So Sitting at SHI, it's okay, we've taken this burden off, come innovate with us and we'll do it for cheap and things like that.

But to your point, [00:09:00] we're also having those conversations with my friends, I'm just asking them honestly do you need an AI story for your organization? Let's maybe get DAX Copilot installed or let's do this or let's do that so that you've got your story versus do you really need to innovate and build something from scratch?

So AI is where it's at, but keeping it secure. Keeping it whole and being able to watch where it's going all the time is going to be key because I think we're still going to have some regulations that are going to come down that we've got to Make true on those promises that we're going to be asked.

So

Separate from AI. What do you want to walk away with by the end of I've

Want to walk away With several island instances No, just for me Additional partnerships, relationships, our industry is built off of relationships and trust and that's one thing I have with the island team that's been like so fun.

It's like you guys have opened your door to allow me to ideate and try new things and talk down and dirty with you guys, even push you to the next [00:10:00] level, which I love. So I'm looking for more partnerships like that, where, like I said, we got to do the right thing for all of us in healthcare because we're all patients.

Yeah. How do we advance together, but do it right so everybody gets the benefit of it,

yeah, that's good. Partnerships, clearly that's the biggest part of being here. One of the things I love is we have also these small speed dating things. We get to get the word out with a lot of people one time.

It was hard to actually pick and choose who we would do this with. But what's fun is in doing that, you only have 15 minutes. So you very rapidly figure out what is it that we're going to talk about and get to the point quickly. Because the feedback loop is so strong if you have all this, velocity of meetings.

We are creating a new category. This is a new idea for many and just getting the feedback. Because one of the things I love about Island is our ability to build new things very rapidly is beyond reproach in my experience. So I like the idea of being able to take this, all this that I'm doing, [00:11:00] bring it back to the product groups, and iterate and keep on adding for things that are germane to healthcare.

And make no mistake, when you have a partnership like you do with SHI, those ideas are just coming in real time, all the time. Then you have someone like Kris, who's going to always push that envelope and understand how it integrates into the healthcare system. Sure. You're always looking to say, we've got to keep it secure, we've got to create the opportunity for the clinicians to be able to do their jobs more effectively.

So powerful to see where this relationship will continue to go. And thank you both for taking time to share it here at VIVE. So you've heard firsthand about what it means to think about us all being patient, removing friction from the clinician workflow, having opportunities to be flexible, keeping it secure, using AI as one of those drivers, because what we're all talking about.

Cannot wait to keep my eyes on this one. And again, thank you so much for joining me here at VIVE.

That's all for now.

Thanks

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