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This is Laura Dedo with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Michael Wiener,
chief Medical officer of M S U Healthcare. Dr. Weiner,
it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you for having.
Me. Now, I know we've got a lot to talk about.
There's so much happening right now in healthcare and just really so much big
trends and innovations,
and so I'm excited to learn more about what you're doing in M S U Health.
But before we dive into the broader questions,
can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background?
Sure. Michael Wiener,
I am a board certified practicing internal medicine physician.
I am proud to have served 30 years in the US Navy as a flight surgeon,
as a dive medical officer, and as a, uh, space shuttle,
landing and takeoff physician for nasa. Um, and along the way,
I spent some time in corporate America as IBM's lead for healthcare
and, uh,
recently with a global health and human services company called Maximus.
That's amazing. And, and definitely, you know,
to have all those experiences folded into one and now be, you know,
the Chief medical officer at M S U Health, I can imagine, you know,
the skills that you learned, um, you know,
in the military as well as with I B M Health can bring a unique perspective to
what you're doing today.
I feel honored to be able to share all that I learned in my last 30 years with
the, uh, great team at Michigan State.
Fantastic. Well, you know, getting right into it,
what are some of your top priorities right now?
What's top of mind for you and you really feel like you're spending most of your
time on?
Yeah. This,
this year is our relentless pursuit of quality,
um, quality care, quality, patient experience,
and quality in preparation for value-based care, right?
We are, we're jumping on with the rest of the company.
We've gotta get to value-based care, but to get there,
we need to understand where we are now, where we need to go, what we cost,
and what is being asked of our insurers to us.
Yeah, I think that's such a great point. And, you know,
starting off with quality is a, a great place to be. And,
and if you can show that and prove that, you know,
it makes all the difference in the world when you're looking at and leading a
medical team that's got more information and more data than ever on quality.
How do you manage that?
What do you really see as being important in that transition of going from just,
Hey, I'm seeing patients, you know, I'm,
I'm doing the best I can on a qualitative aspect, and then getting into,
we actually have numbers and information, um, that, you know,
really show what's going well and we need to, you know,
use them to the best of our ability.
Laura, I'm usually a grouper, but for that I'm gonna be a separator.
We're gonna pull those apart. So on the first side of it is, you know,
what do you do with all of the data? And, you know,
I think what we found quickly as we made a turn towards being a data-driven
organization in pursuit, in relentless pursuit,
pursuit of quality is, you know,
the data isn't as easy to find as you think it would be, right?
We think you just click a button and it comes out of your and electronic health
record and there's your data and, and then just show it to everybody.
It's not quite that simple.
So there's a little work that needs to be done in curating the data and then
presenting the data up in a easy to understand, um, format.
So the, there's the data and you know, in our journey right now, you know,
there's a,
the journey with data is we currently are offering up dashboards
to our organization, right? Nothing complex here, just here's the data,
here's where we were in the past 90 days, in the past 30 days, and you know,
let's get a vibe on that,
let's get a feel on that so we can all move forward in pursuit of quality
metrics. But really where we want to be is, you know,
a self-service organization, we want people to press a button on their desktop,
know what their data scores are,
and ultimately to be able to predict what those data scores will be
under their current practice. So, you know, we want to get to predictive, uh,
data as much as anybody else. And, you know, I'll leave it there.
I'll leave it there. So we currently have dashboard, our future is prediction,
and then the other part of this discussion is,
so how do you improve your data? How do you improve your quality? Excuse me.
And the answer is, boy,
this is where healthcare really becomes a collaborative team effort, right? So,
you know, we all wanna just turn to the doctor, the provider and say, like,
you need to do better at, at your quality. And, you know, I,
I would offer the last 10 years have been, it's been,
it's been a blood fest for the physicians. It's been a slug, it's been a slog.
It's been a hard decade to be a provider, right?
Just more and more keeps getting thrown on the providers.
So our goal is to begin to alleviate some of that suffering that
our providers nationwide are facing and, you know,
causing unprecedented burnout, right?
We all thought we had burnout before covid, covid, you know, drove many over,
over the edge. And, you know, we need providers, right?
We have an aging population, we have an unhealthy population,
so we can't lose that many doctors and nurses along the way, right?
So we have to figure out a way to collaborate to make it a more pleasant
experience. So I mentioned earlier, you know, one of our initiatives is,
is patient experience,
but I wanna make sure as a chief medical officer that there is a provider
experience that's improved as well.
And some of that is just listening to the providers in what is
rubbing them wrong, right? So some of it is, I just need some help, right?
So now we put out these new quality programs on them and you know,
the help that we're offering is we have to get case management involved.
We have to start to push down things that can be done
by someone else other than the provider, right?
Let other folks operate at the top of their license. Again,
nothing groundbreaking here. Just needs to be operationalized in our day-to-day,
um, settings. So, you know,
can a nurse do an annual wellness visit for Medicare? Yes.
Right? Yes. So who's responsible for that? Um,
that quality dataset, the provider, that patient falls under their name,
but we can alleviate that responsibility by putting a talented nurse
in into that program and allowing them to care for that patient
along the, along their journey as well. So, team effort, um,
support and understanding the processes and understanding the data sets that
we're asking for or, or that are being asked for and supporting them.
I love that. I think it, it is so helpful, as you mentioned, just keep all of,
um,
those aspects of the teams and healthcare front and center as you're making a
transition in any way, shape, or form. Now, when you look at M S U healthcare,
where do you see that EV organization evolving over the next two to three years?
How, um, are you looking to the future and where do you see growth coming?
So at its core, Michigan State University,
our goal is to become the premier place to be seen for healthcare
in the state of Michigan. Right? Let's just,
we'll start with the simple vision and you know, how will we do that? Well,
we will do that with partnerships.
We partner with many hospitals around the state. Um, we'll continue to do so,
and we will also create that through expansion of our own services.
We have, we are about to go live with our own lab in the state of Michigan. Um,
we have started some unique remote telemedicine programs across the state of
Michigan, tele telemedicine for physical therapy, telemedicine,
and remote monitoring for blood pressure and for diabetes. So again,
I think bringing in technology and, you know,
ensuring that we deliver quality care with a,
an incredible experience for our patients of ease and convenience and
support and compassion and love,
will help us become the premier provider of care in the state of Michigan.
Um, that thank you so much for,
for going through all those different areas that will make a big difference.
And, you know, I know the healthcare delivery is evolving and changing too.
So how do you see some different technologies coming in with virtual care,
telehealth, remote patient monitoring, you know,
what place do they have in your, your overall strategy?
So I, you know,
I think if one thing has happened from post covid is people
no longer wanna wear pants, they don't wanna park anymore,
and they don't have any patients to wait to see a provider, right? So I think,
you know, with virtual care, we can support patients,
patients, their, uh, theirs, their,
their interest in not having the three Ps in their life
pants when they go to see their provider parking,
and then the patients to wait for, um, a provider.
So I think telemedicine is going to be at the core of care.
And, you know, the beauty of it, it allows us in,
in a small community of East Lansing to reach out to the rest,
the rest of the state.
Got it. And that makes a lot of sense. And, and you know, I,
I'm wondering too before, and I don't.
Wanna wear pants when I see patients either, right? Be clear.
definitely, definitely makes life a lot easier no matter what. .
Um, before we wrap up our conversation here,
I was wondering if you could talk through what is one change you and your team
has made that has yielded great results in the last year or two?
So I'm gonna focus on provider burnout, right? Uh,
unprecedented numbers over the last year and over the last three years. So,
you know, we gotta, once again, if you're gonna be a data-driven organization,
what's the data behind that? So,
just recently published data was the number one cause of burnout,
and it stayed number one for many years. So, you know, you gotta give it a, um,
the ability to, um, stay at the top.
And that is the use of the electronic health record, right? So for,
for all that we've done and,
and all that we've mandated with electronic health records,
it's still creating great angst among our providers. So we,
um, with,
with our clinical community and with a very talented chief medical information
officer, are working to solve the, um,
the pain and suffering that comes with an electronic health record,
doesn't matter which electronic health record,
just with an electronic health record. And we're doing that through, again,
not cutting edge,
just back to the basics optimization of the use of that electronic health
record. And that's elbow to elbow, hip to hip,
shoulder to shoulder training on how to use the electronic health record
in the most efficient manner. Now, it may be the addition of, um,
voice recognition and maybe the addition of complex templates,
um, that, you know, will,
will do all of your documentation with the click of a button,
or it may be the use of ambient, um,
ambient scribes and, you know, advanced AI to put,
to put that entire, uh,
physician patient experience into the record, right? We're trying all of them,
this is more of a shotgun approach on our behalf to get all of these things
done, see which ones bring the greatest joy to providers. And I'll just,
uh, I I, I always have to say, you know,
you think of what goes into becoming a provider in America today, right?
It is not a quick six week course, right? It is four years of college,
four years of medical school, four years of residency, right? Like,
it's a good 12 years dedicated to caring for someone else, right? It's really,
it's a mission.
It's a calling that a human being has for o to care for other human beings.
And then, you know, we make it an unenjoyable experience for them, right?
And we wanna get,
we wanna bring the joy back to the care of our
community, right? So for us, it's really the community of, um, east Lansing,
Lansing, and the state of Michigan. So we're gonna keep wedging away, um,
at the things that are not supporting, bringing joy to our providers.
We know that in that block of granite, you know,
there is an angel to be released of joy for our providers, and we're gonna,
we're gonna chip away until we get to that.
Fantastic. Well, Dr. Winer,
thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
This has been such a fun and interesting conversation.
I love your passion for healthcare, healthcare providers, physicians,
and the clinical teams.
And I look forward to seeing you in person at our annual meeting next April. Um,
it'll be great to have you, uh, speak there and excited for your session.
Thank you, Laura. Look forward to seeing you soon.
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