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This is Laura Dierdo with the Becker's healthcare
podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by
JD Whitlock, chief information officer at Dayton Children's
Hospital. JD, it's a pleasure to have you
on the podcast today.
Thanks, Laura. Great to be here.
Now I'm excited for our conversation because I
know you're doing some amazing things at Dayton
Children's, and so we'll dig into that a
little bit. But before we do, you tell
me a little bit more about Dayton Children's
and what makes it unique?
Certainly.
So Dayton Children's
is a small health system. Our revenue is
about 750,000,000.
And if you know health care, as most
of your listeners do, you know, that is
a small health system,
but that does not mean to say small
organization. Right? 4,300
employees,
and there's a lot of things going on.
What I would say makes us unique,
we are an excess and experience
brand.
We do very well at that. We have
a net promoter score in the low eighties,
which is world class, of course,
And we compete with two of the top
10 ranked children's hospitals in The US, Cincinnati
and and nationwide in Columbus.
And we do that, successfully. Right? So we
we we can't compete on academic reputation, but
we do
compete
on on access and experience. So that's, I
guess, that's what I would say makes us
unique. We're blessed to be
in the Children's Hospital Association. The pediatrics community
is really tight. And even though we at
the end of the day, we are we
are competitors, we we do a lot of
really great collaboration,
which, of course, is true generally in health
care, but it's even more true on the
on the pediatric side.
And then one other thing I would say
is that
we are on Epic. We are on Workday
to shift to the IT side of things
for a second.
And, what that means is that so we're
on the best DHR and the best DRP,
and that's great.
It also means there's a lot of care
and feeding,
and we have to do all the same
things that a larger health system,
would do, to keep to keep all that
operating correctly and giving the, you know, the
best experience, the best best quality of care
to our patients, most importantly, and also, of
course,
best experience
for all of our caregivers.
That's really great to hear. And, you know,
definitely,
a lot happening,
within the that space and on the technology
side too. I know things move so quickly,
and so it's great to have that kind
of sophistication
behind you. Now when you're looking back in
the last year or so, what accomplishment are
you most proud?
The number one thing that I'm most proud
of is,
I wanna talk about the Class Arch Collaborative
Pinnacle Award, and I wanna
spend a minute on what that is because
there will be probably a lot of listeners
of this podcast that have been in health
care for a long time and may not
even have heard about this yet because it's
relatively new. It was awarded for the first
time last year.
So what it is is the Class Arch
Collaborative
is,
as the name implies, a collaborative
of health systems that sign up
to
survey
their caregivers
on their experience
with
the EHR.
And so it is a really nice of
course, in health care, we're we're we're very
used to very standardized
surveys that we give to our patients. Right?
That the government tells us how we're gonna
ask a lot of the questions on the
patient survey. So it's so it's benchmarkable.
And so now,
now CLAS is is doing this with the
arch collaborative for EHR experience. So we can
compare ourselves,
to all the other health systems. And, you
know, how are we doing delivering
a good EHR experience
to to our, providers and nurses and and
other clinical staff?
And so I am happy to report
that due due to our really stellar performance
when we look at the percentiles that we
get, the percentile scores compared to everybody else
in the partnership collaborative,
We score in the ninetieth percentiles for both
providers and nurses,
and,
and that that is,
good enough to win us the,
Class Arch Collaborative Pinnacle Award.
And so I would predict that, in coming
years, you know, more you'll see more people
talking about this and and striving to to
win this particular award. So it's a it's
a it's a it's a great way,
that we can talk about our dedication
to which we like to talk about the
quadruple aim. Right? The the fourth part being
being the the caregiver experience.
And so we we do a nice job
of that, and we're able to do it,
efficiently. Once again, it's it's a smaller health
system. Right?
So that's that's the number one thing I
would point to.
Got it. No. That's great. And and definitely
impressive to see what you've done with the
class pinnacle award and and being able to
achieve it there.
And I think especially, moving forward and looking
at, you know, standardizing, continuing to find best
practices and making things benchmarkable,
how do you, really change a culture when
that's not something that's been done in the
past? You know, I I know there's a
lot of health systems out there that are
trying to figure out how to wrap their
arms around a lot of the new processes
and systems to become better and better than
ever before, but it's not just the technology.
I know it's the people side of it
and making sure that we're able to go
through the change management processes there as well.
Absolutely. Absolutely. So,
what I would say there is there's this
really boring topic called governance
that we,
I don't think, talk talk about enough.
And
I think that part of our success is
due to that. So we have a really
great,
clinical informatics team,
and we have the committees that we have
put in place
to do the governance on, you know, what
are we building next in our epic EHR?
How are we doing that? How are we
making smart decisions
about,
you know, the opportunity cost? If we decide
to do one thing, that means we're not
doing something else or at least not doing
that other thing in the next couple months.
And so if you do that with good
transparency,
then your caregivers,
have a good understanding
of, well, that thing that, you know, somebody
asked for,
didn't get done by the EPIC team, but
that's okay because we understood that there were
five things, you know, that that were voted
as more important by by the governance committee.
And so the thing we asked for is
gonna have to wait. You know, that can
if there's good transparency around that, then then
it doesn't mean people are they're not they're
not happy that their thing didn't get done,
but they understand the reasons why. So that's
probably the one thing that I would point
to.
And that's really helpful to know. Thank you
for spelling that out for us. Now
I'm I'm curious. In looking ahead to where
do you see some of the biggest growth
opportunities for your team in the next twelve
months or so? So I'm gonna answer this
one not for my team in IT, but
but for the organization
as a whole. So, unfortunately,
we have an epidemic
in this country for adolescent,
mental health,
and I'm proud of what we at Dayton
Children's with with our
executive team and board has, they made it
impossible to stay in front of this,
but I would say we've done a good
job,
responding to it as best we can.
And we're we're actually in the next six
months, we're actually opening
two new buildings
dedicated,
for mental health,
at a new building on our main campus
that will double the size of our inpatient
behavioral health unit and then a well, not
a new building, but a repurposed building at
our at our secondary campus
for some intensive outpatient,
mental health treatment.
And so we
are just doing a a a really great
job as an organization
doing the very best we can to meet
the needs of our
adolescent community
in our market area,
for all their, unfortunately, increasing mental health needs.
Got it. That's such an important area to
focus in on and really, you know, great
work in that space. I can imagine added
capacity will
really help, serve the community better. And I
I know
from your side of things as a CIO,
what does that really mean for you and
how you're needing to move forward in the
next year or so?
What it means from the IT perspective
is that
there's just
so many cycles are taken up by that
as you can imagine
anytime that happens. Right? So there's the there's
the IT provisioning,
with the new buildings and everything that goes
along with that for the for the tech
team side of things. And then there's, as
you can imagine, a whole lot of epic
build that that needs to happen,
to support that. So and project management or,
really, almost almost everybody in the IT team
is contributing in some ways, you know, when
you open a new building. And and what
that means is because we're doing
two of those in the next six months,
it just means that there's less time available
for some other things. So there's a little
bit of a joke,
is going on at children's these days as
well. As soon as we stop building the
buildings, you know, we can we can do
some of the other things we've,
gotten a list to suit. Now for a
large health system, building two buildings, you do
that in your sleep, you know, every month.
For us, that's, like, a really, really big
deal. Right? And so,
so that's that's the challenge at a place
the size of Dave Jordan's.
Absolutely. And that's really helpful context to understand,
especially given, everything that you're undertaking, you know,
on a regular basis meant to add in,
like you mentioned, those two new buildings.
You know, is huge. Now I know a
lot of opportunities, a lot of exciting things
happening, right now, but I know there are
challenges as well. What are some of the
big challenges that you have your eye on
right now, and how are you navigating through
them?
Well, the first thing that pops into mind
with challenges is, of course,
cybersecurity.
Right? If if you talk to, of course,
any
really anybody in health care or leadership
that understands what's going on with cybersecurity.
It's it's a huge worry. You know?
Pretty much every week in in in Becker's
and other trade publications, there's a a sad
story about some health system,
that's that's been ransomware.
I, for one, you know,
with a with an understanding of the threat
and understanding
of what's required to counter that
threat.
I'm really not sure how
organizations smaller than Dame Children's
do it.
We have a,
small but mighty cybersecurity team. We have a
good toolset in place. We have
a good partner for managed detection and response.
We but there's always more that can be
done for disaster recovery, business continuity,
and that is that is just always gonna
I don't unless the threat changes significantly, which
I don't see that happening,
that's just always gonna be a challenge for
the foreseeable future.
And related to that is the regulatory environment.
And, you know, one thing that we're all
scratching our head about,
right now,
yeah, are the new HIPAA security
proposed regulations,
because they're
if
they
come through,
it's massive change and,
pretty massive
amount of new work that would be required.
Basically, a lot of things that have been
in the past, things you should be doing
are gonna be things you must be doing.
And once again, for smaller organizations, I'm not
quite sure how that would be feasible to
do. So I'm on a couple committees.
I'm on the, China policy steering committee. We're
trying to figure out how, as an industry,
we we respond to some of these things
and say, hey. There's some really great things
in here, and there's some really there were
some things in here that are probably not
particularly doable. So
how can you know, what can we do
to to to advance
the regulatory environment smartly
to that would actually advance
cybersecurity
within health care as opposed to perhaps
putting a regulatory framework on things that that
have our cybersecurity teams
doing box checking exercises that actually that actually
reduce the cybersecurity posture of most health systems.
So that that's what I would
point as the biggest challenge right now.
Got it. Well, that that's really helpful to
understand. And in particular, knowing, obviously, cybersecurity, like
you said, is something on the tip of
everybody's tongue, coming off a really challenging year
in 2024.
And then two, looking at the regulatory environment,
I know there's changes every day, in in
in potentially, you know, even bigger shifts ahead.
And so
how do you stay, really focused on the
main thing and being able to, you know,
steadily plan for the future when there's so
many unknowns and and uncontrollables?
Well,
that I guess that's job security. Right?
There's knowables and unknowables.
And related to cybersecurity,
you know, one of the debates, of course,
is all the generative AI going to make
the bad guys
smarter, faster, or the good guys,
you know, smarter, faster? In other words, the
defense is smarter, faster. So,
as we explore
some of the tool some of the cybersecurity
tool sets,
we I don't wanna get into exactly which
ones we're using, but,
we're using some tools within the last
year or so that are are powered by
Generative AI and and and really have,
advanced
our defensive capabilities
and
and and allowed our small cybersecurity team
to do less of the scutt work
that is required for keeping things secure
so that they can address
higher end
defensive
posturing
to to to bolster our cybersecurity
defenses. So I'll I'll leave that one there.
Got it. Thank you so much for digging
a little bit deeper. Now, before we wrap
up our our call, I I'm wondering,
you know, what's the number one thing that
you're doing right now to set your organization
up for long term success?
What I would point to is convenient timing.
We are just literally today,
signing the contract
with a bridge
for our Amien AI Digital Scribe vendor.
We've been piloting
it it successfully for the last couple months,
and we are now committing to to an
enterprise agreement with a bridge.
It's always nice when the when the plucky
startup
is competing successfully with, with big tech, which
is exactly what Abridge is doing.
We're really happy
with their Epic integration and with the experience
that we've seen in the pilot, which which
mirrors some of the early adopters that have
been doing it, you know, before us. We
like to say we're,
we can't really be bleeding edge innovators at
Dave Jordan's because of our size, but we
wanna be fast followers. And I think we're
doing a good job at being a fast
follower,
in this case. I would predict
that
in the not very far future, maybe a
year out,
you know, once the, I don't know, half
health systems are
using an ambient tool
from from whichever vendor,
there there there are multiple good tools out
there,
that it is going to be a challenge
for health systems to recruit physicians if they
are not using an Ambiad tool because it's
it's just so popular
with,
you know, 90% of providers. I say 90%
because there's there's,
some providers that that just just don't want
to use the tool because they have highly
templated workflows or they are just very particular
about the wording,
of their notes, and they're going to rewrite
everything that the AI generates.
But for 80 to 90% of providers, it's
just such a huge win,
and it improves,
the quality of their life and decreases their
burnout.
And so I think we're going to see
a really rapid adoption,
throughout the industry.
And so I'm I'm I'm proud that we
are moving forward with this, working closely
with our,
CMIO and the rest of our clinical leadership
about how we roll it out, to whom,
when, how we support it, how we train
it.
So it's it's one of those
we don't we don't very often in IT
get to roll out new tools that are
so immediately popular
with the users. Right? Oftentimes,
we're saying, hey. There's this new thing we
gotta do. We understand it impacts your workflow.
Maybe not in a way you really like,
but here's the reason we have to do
it for compliance or whatever.
But in this case, it's a here's a
new tool. It actually makes your life better,
and everybody
wants it. So it's it's it's fun to
be involved in a project like that.
Absolutely. That that sounds amazing and definitely,
good to bring such a relief to the
clinical workforce,
to support them and boost them in everything
you're doing.
JD, thank you so much for joining us
on the podcast today. This has been a
really fun conversation, and I look forward to
connecting with you again soon.
Thanks, Laura.