Welcome everyone to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series.
I'm Ryan Mohammed, writer and moderator with Becker's
Healthcare. And I'm thrilled to have with me
today, Golshan Mehta, chief digital and information officer
at Blanchard Valley Health System. Sir, welcome to
the podcast. We're very excited to have you
join us today. To get it started, would
you mind telling us a bit about you,
the health system, and kinda what makes it
unique?
For sure. Good morning, Mariah.
Again, just like you said, my name is
Gulshan Mehta. I'm the chief digital and information
officer at
Blanchett Valley Health System.
I've been with the organization
a little over a year at this point.
I've spent much of my career within healthcare
technology.
I
feel like I've had a front row seat
over the course of the last twenty plus
years in terms of the digitization of health
care, and, the innovation that it has brought
about within the industry in general
with a good part of my time that,
I spent at Cerner.
And
over the last seven years or so, I've
had IT leadership roles within
healthcare, you know, health systems,
pediatric healthcare for the first six years of
those,
within,
you know, in Washington, DC,
as well as the last year or so
has been within community healthcare over here within
Ohio.
The organization I work with is Blanchard Valley
Health System, and, it is a,
medium sized,
regional health system out here in Northwest Ohio.
Serves roughly a eight county region here.
It's about an hour south of Toledo, about
an hour and a half
west of Columbus, Ohio.
It is truly a special place because,
I know you mentioned, what's the uniqueness of
it. It,
being medium sized, it kinda has the, you
know, the size and the scale and the
ambitions of being able to drive innovation. So
it kinda thinks big when it comes to
the use of technology and being able to
leverage innovation as a strategic asset. While at
the same time,
it also affords the ability to be more
nimble with the size, and being able to
be more adaptable to change that innovation and
transformation, especially related to health care, can bring
about. So it's pretty neat, in that sort
of a sense.
It, punches above its weight when it comes
to,
the breadth of services that it,
offers within the region.
So from a standard,
you know, wellness and ambulatory care services that
it has, along with the inpatient care, as
well as post acute care services that it
offers within the region. It kind of serves
as the primary health and wellness destination for
those that live within the community.
It's extremely
community focused,
you know, prides itself in terms of, a
very
high touch and,
high quality care,
which is why it continues to get rated,
you know, in the upper quartiles when it
comes to patient experience and quality of care.
So, it's, it's indeed, you know, a very
exciting,
health system in terms of, what it offers
to the community. And, you know, it it
nothing beats the fact that, you know, you
can, you can kind of walk down the
street over here and
see the impact that it makes just in
terms of,
the, you know, the fate that the community
has within the services that it offers, as
well as, you know, the longevity that it
has within the, within the area in terms
of, the population that it has served for,
so well.
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that.
As an Ohioan and someone that, went to
Ohio State and the Columbus community,
it was very nice to hear some of
those things. Is there an accomplishment
that you would think that you're most proud
of for the last year?
Yeah.
So like I said, I've been here a
little over a year,
and,
we as an organization, as well as our
leadership team, we saw it as an opportunity
to,
get back to fundamentals, if you would,
from
the IT organization. So as we look at
what we want to build on going forward,
we needed to do an assessment of where
we are currently in terms of the capabilities
that we bring to the organization.
You know, there is
a certain inclination
of maybe bringing greater speed to value in
terms of,
new work that could be introduced. But at
the same time, I think that was a
realization
that let's make sure that we build this
on a foundation of trust. So making sure
that reliability
was front and center,
before we started talking about the scalability, if
you would, going forward. So,
much of the work that, we've accomplished over
the last year has been,
again, goes back to, fundamentals
mindset
of, improving our IT service management and delivery
capabilities.
So putting in place the right people, process,
and technology, the right structure of the organization
that allows us to be successful,
along with the right service management mindset that
allows us to provide, more predictable and reliable
service to the organization.
That's been a keen focus on information security,
making the transition from being defensive,
alone to being a little bit more proactive
as well in terms of, the work that
we do. You know, the controlling the controllable
side of things and being able to infuse
that within the culture of the organization as
well.
And, road mapping, planning, and governance has been
an essential part of this. So I think
there was,
a little bit of a sense of,
lack of direction,
if you would, in terms of
what can IT truly do over what period
of time.
And, I think this was an opportunity for
us to rebaseline
in terms of the capabilities we can bring
forward,
in a more predictable fashion. So being able
to start with a visioning exercise that allowed
us to have the right balance
of, you know, fixing the foundation while also,
you know,
working towards innovative solutions and innovative means of
improving care delivery as well as efficiency.
We created a road map, that was,
that's something that the organization has had a
chance to review and buy into, which now
sets us up well for what the future
holds. So those are, some of the, some
of the more important things.
You know, when it comes to tech, I
mean, I think it's, it's really important to
realize that it's not always about systems and
tools.
It is important that,
we kind of ground a lot of this
in trust, as I mentioned earlier.
And,
IT is seen as a partner. And I
think when that happens, you know, with that
partnership within the business community, as well
as the clinicians over here, good things usually
happen and progress
follows. So that's our ability to, you know,
kinda serve as launching pad going into the
future.
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all
of those things. Are there,
any big challenges that you're anticipating for this
year or, let's say, the next four to
five years?
So with the opportunity
for
progress, as I mentioned right now,
it also comes with some of the challenges,
if you would, and we we keep a
keen eye for that.
One of those is obviously,
related
to just overall
the workforce and their ability to adapt to
change, and adapt to new technology and transformation,
just because of, you know, where the industry
itself has been maybe over the last four
or five years since the pandemic.
Burnout is real.
You know, overwork is real.
And, staffing related challenges
continue to,
pose a threat, if you would, in terms
of, the adoption of some of the technology.
You can only go so far
without the right response
from, from the staff,
you know, in order to adopt some of
this technology and make it actually successful and
within the workflow. So we we manage this
really well. It's a challenge, but, you know,
this is this is something that we've mitigated
through effective change management within our organization. So,
you know, not only in terms of transparency
for communication. So we talked about,
you know, how we would build out the
capabilities,
you know, in terms of the road map
and what we would deploy at what point.
So having the appropriate communication
is really important,
and and being able to bring transparency to
that is is really vital. But also, at
the same time, being able to be as
inclusive as possible as far as decision making
goes in terms of what we work on
and how we work on it in order
to reduce the friction for the clinicians and
the business in general is really, really vital
for us. So I think that's one of
the big challenge. You know, we can talk
about the industry again at large, and we're
probably not immune from it. Although, you know,
we've been we've been able to weather the
financial headwinds really well over the course of
maybe the last couple of decades. But, right
now, with the margin compression that's going on,
I think there is a there's a keen
realization for all of us that,
you know, new projects and new solutions that
we implement have to be grounded in a
yield on that investment.
And we're putting the right thought process in
place in order to make sure that the
the tools that we're implementing are going to
yield us, you know, in the near term
as well as in the long term in
terms of some sort of a quantifiable benefits,
especially knowing that, you know, we don't really
have, too many, too many mulligans over here
when, when it comes to,
you know, being optimal with the deployment of
our financial resources.
And then, you know, cybersecurity and information security
is always on our mind. We've made a
lot of investment in that, not only in
terms of processes and people and culture, but
also in terms of tools and technology, and,
you know, being able to stay ahead of
the curve in terms of, what can sometimes
be a very,
very intimidating proposition,
of, being able to keep the,
keep the environment safe and secure, is a
constant,
is a constant in our mind, and we
continue to, you know,
work on it as as best as we
can. So those I mean, that's, that that's
maybe the perhaps the the outlook that I
probably put in place in terms of, you
know, what we think the key challenges might
be.
Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense.
I definitely heard,
some executives say something remotely close to, you
know, what you're talking about.
What is the number one thing you're doing
right now to set up your organization,
for long term success?
Yeah.
I, I'll give you, I'll give you maybe
two. And I think they're sort of related,
in a certain sense.
You know, we've,
as I mentioned earlier,
there is
work that we're doing in terms of fixing
the foundation, but we're also looking at innovation.
And on the innovation side, some of it
is along the lines of AI and automation.
We've had some early successes just in the
last year or so in terms of work
that we've done within with the use of,
you know, some sort of automation,
within the radiology and the radiologist
workflows.
We've had some recent success in terms of
using AI effectively
effectively for clinical documentation through the ambient listening
tools and such.
We're working on the next set of priorities
beyond that where we think we can build
on some of this momentum.
We've built some of that trust from the
updating of the foundation. We talked about. We've
built some credibility with some of the new
innovation and the tooling so far. We're gonna
build on top of it with more,
automation of administrative tasks. And I think that's
going to be important for us not only
next year but into the years going forward
as we use that to learn,
and,
and continue to evolve.
The second piece of it is,
informing the organization and the leadership, but also
everyone,
you know,
that that even is at the front lines
with easy
access to data. I think there's a lot
of friction today in terms of being able
to get access to analytics and being able
to derive the necessary insights to not only
run operations, but also help in strategic planning,
what to do next.
And it's my team's role to make sure
that that friction,
is, you know,
removed as much as possible. We wanna make
that whole process of being able to get
to data
more and insights more effortless. So I think
that's the idea behind the work that we're
doing right now is we're building out a
centralized enterprise data warehouse solution that's gonna allow
us to kinda serve allow it to serve
as, as a single pane of glass, if
you would, that everyone would have access to
in terms of clinical quality,
operational
revenue cycle, and data in general to go
out and make decisions into the organization. I
think that's an important part of the data
driven
transformation of the culture that we're affecting over
here that is, that's gonna serve us well,
not only now, but also into the future.
That makes a lot of sense. Thank you
so much for sharing those, those final thoughts.
It's definitely been a very informative discussion. So,
again, I wanna thank you so much for
coming on Becker's health care, especially for the
first time, and I hope we have you
back.
Thanks, Mariah. I really enjoyed it and, appreciate
the opportunity.
Thank you.