- Prepare to dive into the forefront
of healthcare innovation at our 14th annual meeting coming
up on April 8th
through 11th at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, with thousands
of industry leaders converging over four dynamic days
of discussions on crucial topics from health IT
to executive leadership.
It's where the future of healthcare takes shape.
We can't wait to connect with you in person
and engage in these important conversations.
- Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast, made
for the people who power US healthcare.
I'm Molly Gamble at Becker's,
and today I'm sitting down with Scott McLean,
senior Vice President and CIO of MedStar Health.
Scott, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for being our guest. How are you today?
And where does the podcast find you?
- Thanks, Molly. I'm really pleased to be with you all
and I'm at our systems headquarters in Columbia, Maryland.
- Well, Scott, if you can start off by, from listeners
who are less familiar with MedStar Health,
but wanna be more familiar,
can you share a few key facts about the organization
and just help us better reacquaint ourselves?
- Certainly. We're an integrated delivery system in the
Baltimore, Washington DC region.
We have 10 hospitals and, uh, about 300 ambulatory sites.
Last year, our revenues were, uh, about $7.3 billion.
And, um, we have, uh, a large number of ambulatory, uh,
outpatient visits, over 6 million.
We, um, are affiliated
with Georgetown University Medical School.
We have an insurer in both Maryland and uh, DC
and we have about 8,000 nurses and 4,000 physicians.
So it's a, a large operation,
and we take care of, uh, many people here in this,
uh, in this region of the country.
- Perfect. And Scott, you
and I are speaking, we're, we're rounding out Q1 here.
It's already been a, a really busy and dynamic year.
What have you been spending most of your time
and energy on as of late in your work?
- Terrific question. And for us that we're running on our Q3
of our fiscal year, we finished up our fiscal year in June.
So it's, uh, we're, we're trying to strive to the,
to the finish line with all the goals we have for this year.
And I, I think what to talk about here, Molly, is
how we're organized.
And as, as CIO, our team has informatics,
we have applications, uh, information security,
infrastructure, uh, telecommunications,
and we, we partner with our, our chief, uh,
innovation officer, our chief digital transformation
officer, our VP of analytics and,
and other senior leaders
that are my peers in, in the organization.
And I think a lot of what we've been spending time on now,
in addition to, to running the, the daily systems, right,
the EHR revenue cycle systems is, um, we're partnering
with our innovation officer
around virtual nursing intervention interventions.
Um, we are piloting ambient speech recognition.
I'm sure you're hearing this from other, uh, podcasters
looking to improve our clinical workflows
and be able to deal with some of the issues we have around,
um, the, the shortages of, of clinicians and,
and making their workflows easier to re reduce their,
their burden, um,
and, um, helping them to be able to focus on taking care of,
of patients with our Chief Digital Transformation officer.
We're supporting our vision
around an integrated digital health platform,
which we would say is more than a portal.
This is where you as a, a consumer, even
before your, a patient can come to us with issues
and have various channels
that you might be able to discover care.
And, uh, like many others, we have, uh, intake automation
and self-scheduling and,
and ways that, that people can get care, um,
through telehealth, through urgent care,
primary care specialty and, and whatnot.
So, and then, um, we, we have a lot of data.
I think we know this in, in, in healthcare,
and we're trying to organize it
well through data governance.
And we're looking at our next generation analytics platform.
So we're spending a lot of time with the analytics officer
and, and his team.
Um, our teams do a lot of the, uh, loading
of data from these transactional systems into the,
into the analytics platform.
So it's quite, quite an aggressive agenda.
And, uh, you know, I'm,
I'm sure you have many other people we talked to that,
that are dealing with these kinds of, of things,
but we're enthusiastic about what we're doing
and the, the platforms that we're running in order
to serve our clinicians
and the people administering the, the enterprise and,
and ultimately in service of location.
- Yeah, I have, I have a question for you there.
When you mentioned ambient speech recognition, you know,
as a reporter, I remember sometimes
the way the language we use around technology,
it sometimes doesn't evolve as the tech evolves.
We still use the same terms to refer
to really different capabilities over time.
When we talk about ambient speech recognition being put
to use for healthcare workers
and clinicians today, what, what should we keep in mind?
How has it grown? How has it advanced
or grown more sophisticated from your perspective over time?
And what, what is it capable of now that excites you?
- Well, we, we've gone from dictation
and transcription right to, to backend speech recognition,
to real time speech recognition, to
what I use the term ambient for is the, the listening
between a clinician and a patient
and the, the technology being able to capture
that conversation,
extract the important clinical pieces from it,
and create a, a note in the electronic health record,
which then would obviously be reviewed by the clinician and,
and signed off upon.
And I, I've seen this demonstrated,
we have several pilots going on of, of various technologies
as we've been following this the last couple of of years.
And, and our clinicians are finding it helpful
and being able to reduce their, their documentation burden.
And, uh, and I think that we've done a lot of this
with physicians, but now we're also looking
to explore it in, uh, in nursing interactions as well
to see if there are use cases that are applicable.
So does that, um, resonate with, with what
- You're hearing it?
It does. It does.
And I, I imagine from what we've heard about clinician
and physician burnout, this is something
that's really warmly welcomed.
Have you encountered any concerns
or maybe nervousness with the staff that you've had to work
through with 'em about this tool being put to use?
- Not specifically about this tool.
I, I, I think we have a lot of technology and it's important
and people like to, uh, to use technology to solve problems.
And I think just like we always talk about, we, we have
to organize it in a way that people can understand it,
they have a good process,
and then the tech is applied in a way that they can,
they can use it well and optimally.
So I, I haven't heard specific concerns about this as much
as there, there are a lot
of different workflows and it will work.
Um, it'll work well for some,
it may not apply as well to others.
And that's why we're, we're not drawing in on any one single
uh, vendor yet as we,
we wanna check these different use cases in different
specialties and, and see what works for them
and, uh, and how it helps them. Mm-Hmm,
- and then Scott to, to check in on something.
I know last year when you spoke with Bucker, you had noticed
a significant investment on behalf of the system toward
engineering talent and engineering talent.
It's just one aspect of the healthcare talent pool
that can be pretty easy to overlook at times, just given
how much attention is paid on the clinician shortages
facing our, our country.
What's important to keep in mind about recruiting,
retaining, growing, and,
and being a hub for engineering talent in,
in healthcare today?
I, I wanted to get your take on this specialty.
- Sure. Thanks, Molly. I mean, I think it's
important to, to all of us.
Um, attracting
and retaining, uh, talent is, is important for any leader.
And we're, we're very fortunate,
I think in at MedStar Health, uh, and,
and many healthcare providers
that people are very interested
and engaged in the mission of caring for people
and working on EHR configurations
and revenue cycle configurations.
Um, architectures are, are things
that people can participate in the care process
because, uh, our clinicians are
so dependent on it on these days.
And so we're, we're very fortunate to have people
who are extremely dedicated to this mission.
And, you know, it's a, it's a bit of a 24 7 job, right?
We, we need to be available
whenever there's an issue with any
of our technologies available to be responsive to the,
the care processes.
When I was talking to the podcast last year,
I think I was probably talking about our, um,
our infrastructure is outsourced.
And so we invested a lot in the last couple of years about,
um, improving that, that outsourcing relationship.
And that came with, uh, specific engineers
and architects who are, are very knowledgeable
with the technology and, and in healthcare.
And I think we, we had an outsource strategy
for infrastructure for, um, since 2008 now.
And, uh, we really think in this region, particularly
where there's a lot of government and defense
and that kind of industry, that if we go
to a global service provider on IT infrastructure,
we can have consistent resources and,
and a consistent cost, uh, that's predictable.
And so that's, um, that's why we do it,
and that's worked out for us.
And, and I think the investment we made last year in, uh,
changing some of the, the talent that we have
puts us in a place where we're able
to architect our networks
and our, our, um, data center, server room storage, uh,
and, uh, right up to the end, end user computing devices
and, and be able to take advantage of new technologies, um,
software defined networking, new security technologies and,
and ways of, um, organizing data that make,
make it most useful for the anticipation of, um, applying
artificial intelligence and other algorithms to it, to,
again, make it, uh, most easily
and helpful, helpful to our clinicians who are trying
to make decisions at the point of care.
- Mm-Hmm, . Well, Scott, I wanna thank you
for the updates on what you're doing
and leading at MedStar Health as CIO.
Is there anything I didn't ask you
or a thought that you wanna leave our listeners
with as we wind down?
- Sure. It's a great question, Molly.
I, I think a lot about the, uh, conflicts in the world,
and I know people worry about this a
lot for, for good reasons.
And so I've been thinking a lot about reconciliation
and what it means for people to really listen
and understand each other
and respect different points of view.
And I I also know, we all know that there, there are
so many social determinants of health for people's wellness
that are outside the healthcare system,
or at least outside the acute ambulatory system.
And so I, I think a root of a lot of challenge,
uh, that we have is people not having the right food,
the right housing, the right education, um, opportunities
for, for, um, economic development.
And that plays into, as we see, uh, people's, uh,
ability to be well.
And, um, so, uh, I'm personally involved in our community
and, and trying to help with some of those, those issues.
Their, they're, they're big tasks and, uh,
but I, I see it as part of my role as a,
as a health system leader regionally here,
to be thinking about that
and helping people understand what, uh, our, our, our
ultimately our patients out there in the community are up
against, um, so they can get well
and, and stay outta the hospital.
- Mm-Hmm, , I really appreciate that, Scott.
And I think there's, it's, it's tough to think about
an aspect of societal
or community living that isn't somehow correlated to health.
So to hear that you are taking time in your,
in your free time to even touch those factors further
upstream, I mean, what a, what a great leader, um, you,
you must be to not only be working toward health
and outcomes and patient care,
but then even, uh, on your own time trying to, uh,
support those measures further away
from the health system too.
- Well, thanks. Yeah. I mean, it's just,
I'm just one, one person.
What, what I, what I can do is talk about the issues and,
and do leadership
and in the community like I do at admit our health
and, um, you know, be able to bring the, the explanation
of what's, what's actually happening and, uh, and,
and bring resources toward it.
- Scott McLean, senior Vice President
and CIO of MedStar Health, I wanna thank you again
for being my guest on the podcast today, for checking in
with us, getting us up to speed on your
work and your initiatives.
Hope we can do this again soon.
- Thanks, Molly. It was great being with you.