On this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie were live from the HIMSS Conference in Orlando with special guest, Nanne Finis. The trio discuss the ins and outs of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society Conference, which had more than 35,000 attendees with an expo hall the size of 90 U.S. football fields.
On this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie were live from the HIMSS Conference in Orlando with special guest, Nanne Finis. The trio discuss the ins and outs of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society Conference, which had more than 35,000 attendees with an expo hall the size of 90 U.S. football fields.
Hey y'all and welcome to the People Purpose podcast, the show that explores all the ins and outs, challenges and opportunities, HR, people, managers, and all people face at work every day. I am with my lovely co-host and workplace bestie. Julie Develin Hi, everybody. Julie. This isn't you!
Nanne Finis:Nanne, Nanne Finis. Hi. Hi. Hi, Chas.
Chas Fields:And we'll get to your story here in just a second. We are obviously not in studio No, either HIMSS National Julie.
Julie Develin:And Chas I had to look this up. HIMSS, right. Healthcare Information Management Systems Society. Say that three times. Healthcare Information Management System Society. We're here in Orlando, Florida. And we are at a very, very, very large show. That's our healthcare information system.
Chas Fields:That's right. Yes. Right. So we have a big a big market share to health care. But before we do that, as we do every episode, Nanne, we're gonna start with you what is on your mind?
Nanne Finis:Why? You know, I was I was wondering about that and thinking, there are 35,000 people here. And when you look around this conference center, and you're in these sessions, everyone is coming with their own perspective on what they're trying to achieve. And it's, you know, it's just dramatic to see the excitement, the creativity and the innovation here. So that's on my mind. It's
Chas Fields:awesome. Jules.
Julie Develin:Yeah, chairs, what's on my mind is wow. And here's the thing, you know, we've been to a lot of these conventions and these trade shows, and they're, this is the largest that I've ever seen.
Chas Fields:I remember yesterday, Julie, that was also mine. When I came to get my badge. Yeah, see where we gonna set up for today? And it's a 20 minute walk from the parking lot. Yeah,
Julie Develin:it's definitely crazy
Chas Fields:the way I parked right across the street. Yeah,
Julie Develin:yeah, this is this is quite large. It may mean, yeah, very, very large, you know. And that actually brings me to the business side of the day, because I thought this was really interesting, just to give folks an idea of how big this place is. So we're in the Orange County Convention Center, and we're in what's called the west building, and it's 4 million square feet. And I know that's difficult, man, that's difficult to kind of picture what 4 million square feet is. However, it's 90 American football fields. 90 just this a couple. Yeah. So so just to give our audience some perspective, that is how large the expo hall alone is. Yeah. So this is just like every expo hall that we go to Chas, beautiful, beautiful booths that are set up. UKG has a beautiful booth setup. And it's just a lot of, you know, companies showing what the new innovations in healthcare are.
Chas Fields:That's right. That's right. I think it's really special to see all of these vendors come together. And you think you kind of know about tech, right? I like to think I know a little bit about tech. And then I come to these places and realize how little I actually know. And there's so much that we don't even realize impacts healthcare holistically. But healthcare is on the leading edge and a lot of this stuff, right? Oh, and it
Julie Develin:has been it has been for many, many years. And, you know, we have the good fortune of seeing a lot of different industries and what's going on in tech in a lot of different industries, but to see the kind of machinery see the kinds of computer systems that they have here. It's really, really inspiring in a way, because we as people are going to benefit from this right now. Absolutely.
Chas Fields:Absolutely. So man, obviously you are our very special guest and close to your friend personally. Right. But teammate, yeah, teammate too, right? And let's, let's kind of dive into some of the content we want to cover today. But first, who are you? What do you do? And then we'll kind of go from there.
Nanne Finis:Sure. So you know my name. And as the Chief Nurse executive at UKG. What what my focus is, is to really think about what's happening in the industry, healthcare industry for the future, helping our clinicians we have 25 of them at UKG and four regional nurse executives. So we all really work together to think about what's happening in our customers, in our organizations that we are, you know, speaking with and working with, as well as just relationships that we all have across the organizations that that we know. We have a Chief Nurse Advisory Board that is 15, Chief Nurse nurses strong right now. And it's the opportunity for US and UKG to bring together leaders in health care all from across the country, but also from from different walks of life, if you will, from healthcare systems, small, large rural, and talk about what's happening in health care what solutions they're putting in. And, and really to think through with them. How can we improve healthcare together? That's that's what I'm, that's some of the things I'm doing. So
Chas Fields:you've got a lot going on. Okay. So but I'm glad you highlighted the chief nurses Council, right the council because this is a way that not only you is our Chief Nursing executive, but a way that you can G also hones in on what's going on, within within the business of healthcare. And you are our healthcare fellow. In fact, we have several fellows from public sector to service and distribution to manufacturing. And it's just another way that UKG approaches the business to say, Hey, listen, we can tell you all the great things. But we also work with our customers in a significant way to understand what's going on in their business, so we can partner together
Nanne Finis:well. And also, Chas, as you know, is we need to fuel our product and our innovation and our forward thinking with all of this knowledge. So there's, you know, a really a great linkage across UKG Sure, we share the learnings with all of our colleagues across UKG, so that we can be on that leading edge. Yeah.
Julie Develin:And I want to bring this to a little bit of a different place, so honored to have our audience understand, you know, you may say, Well, why is UKG at a health care conference? Because we're an HR software company? Well, there's a lot of HR and healthcare, but just so everybody knows, you know, from a workforce management perspective, you 90% of US News and World Report's Best hospitals Honor Roll, use a UKG solution. 90%. Right. So we're talking about more than 3500 Plus hospitals and health systems that use UKG to help support their workforce transformation. So we are in many, many different verticals. So
Chas Fields:let's talk about transformation. I'm glad you brought that up to CNN, what are you? What are you working on? What are you innovating with right now from from a healthcare perspective, it could be tech, it could be it could be anything, right? You go to these organizations, you talk to all these people? What is something that you are working on that is going to help them be different be better, if you will?
Nanne Finis:Right? Well, when you see, I think that's a great question, Chas. And, Julie, when you see organizations in healthcare, and across all the industries that we work with, it feels as though there's so much energy on the technology, but not not as much energy into looking at what's happening internally in those organizations are the structures right? Do we have the right people delivering the right work? You know, are we using an allocating our resources to the best of our abilities. So all of that sort of operational wisdom is is inherent in these organizations. But with this new shiny tech, particularly AI, the fears that organizations are going to add in a siloed way can't keep plopping in technologies that's support, you know, a niche problem, yet not address some of these systemic organizational issues. So I'll be really brief. But one of the things we're working on and we're going to be launching sometime, early spring, is a maturity model that we're calling a people centric maturity model. We're starting it for the healthcare industry, but we intend to move it out to other industries. And we're looking at how does an organization's maturing towards a people centric workplace. And that means everything that an organization does, should be for your people, about your people, with your people. So that you know, and we know that a great place to work is is really defined by an organization that that is about their people. So if you're maturing along that path to be that people centric organization, we also want there to be at the same time, a systemic adoption and advancement of the technology to support that. So our maturity model is going to look at digital adoption, digital transformation, along with how you are advancing your work towards a people centric maturing organization. And we're tying that together. We're doing some self assessments for organizations with scorecards so that organizational leaders can talk amongst themselves to say, what are our gaps? Where do we want to be? What is our strategic plan kind of guiding us to do? And how do we bring that all together? In a roadmap and framework towards improvement?
Chas Fields:That's amazing. And one of the things that that I find so interesting, and it's not to say other industries aren't this way, but healthcare really does approach their work as someone of servitude, right, you know, you want to care for others, you choose to care for others. So what we don't often talk about is innately we have an internal culture, right of servitude, of care, patient care, let me make something great for you or make you feel better or meet you where you're at bedside, right in the doctor's offices. But what we've witnessed, and what you actually just described is that the company is significantly behind not only your tech strategy, but sometimes we get to that leadership element, and it's like, well, it becomes about dollars and cents. That's right. And that's okay. However, let's not lose sight of our mission here. And our mission is to make sure that patients are taken care of, and we're making a profit. And one of the only ways to do that as enabling people through technology to get them where they want to go. Am I missing something there? No,
Nanne Finis:no, I would say you're right on. I think the other the other piece is that, as individuals advance in their, you know, leadership and improve them around, you know, thinking about people. It's, it's some how do I say it's, it's infectious? It is, you know, if people
Julie Develin:there was no pun intended.
Nanne Finis:But, um, but no, I think, you know, I think we're just beginning to really, I think, internalize in all of our organizations, what people centric really means and what a people focused organization means. You all have lived this in HR for, you know, many, many years. But we, as clinicians, you know, and I heard this morning nurses, primarily, are leaving the workplace because of workload, and because of, you know, burnout, and we've all heard the statistics, right, but workload is we can manage and help workload we can, we can alleviate some of those mundane tasks that lead to workload, over overload, overwork, and and get patients, you know, in in person with their clinicians once.
Julie Develin:Yeah, and I think we have to understand, just as in every industry, that there is a cost to turnover. So making sure that your people have the right tools in place, in terms of scheduling, in terms of, you know, their mental health software. In 2022, the average cost of turnover for a bedside nurse was over $52,000. And that's all I mean, that's a significant amount of money. Many years ago, Sherm did a study on the average cost of turnover itself over $4,000. So I'm sure that number has increased over the years. But you know, I think when we look at nursing and we look at healthcare, there are a lot of similarities with other organizations as well. We often think of healthcare as other but Chas, you made a good point, that it's a caring profession, you're going into into care, very similar to
Chas Fields:retail and hospitality. Yeah. In fact, we often when we look at when we look at labor models, and and we look at how transformation works in retail, or in hospitality, right. One of the things that I want to talk about man and Julie, you can talk about this, too, is AI, right. And we talk about AI all the time, it's a thing, if I look around, I can't look within a stone's throw of not seeing something that says AR right. What what are you seeing them? What are some of the trends within healthcare within work? And in the AI piece? Right? How does that how does that fit you? Well,
Nanne Finis:yes. Well, I think it's open for great innovation. Okay. So I think that's the exciting piece, is it's making innovation, sort of, it's giving us all the tools, the appetite to start to innovate. But with that optimism, there's caution, and we're constantly hearing the question all, you know, remarks is is your data secure? Data in might not be the right data from which to build machine learning models or data models. So are you sure your your data is the right data to be using to solve the business problems that you're going after? Is this the right approach? Sure. So many organizations I think are are trying new, you know, innovations with AI new Pilots, new demonstrations of AI, it's wonderful. But when you look at these organizations and you think, is this going to address a sustainable problem, or that we have, or sustainable solution that we need? And how do we organize so that there's some oversight to what we're putting into place, we're governing the process in a stringent manner, and that we're being standardized, where we can, but able to innovate at the same time. So giving no leaders freedom, but knowing that there has to be some structure to all this and some governance.
Julie Develin:Yeah, it's about ethical AI to charge you talk about that a lot. And ethics in general, and especially when we think about healthcare, first, we had HIPAA. Right. And now we have HIPAA in the in the era of AI. So it's almost like organizations are needing to double down. But it's not just organizations themselves, man, you mentioned having the systems and processes in place, you know, we have to make sure that our workers are they understand the implications of not utilizing AI in an ethical way. That's
Nanne Finis:right. That's right. And, you know, I think, I think the, we're just beginning to learn the full range of ethical considerations of AI. I was at a nursing workshop here all day yesterday, and, you know, a good portion of the day was talking about AI, in in regards to governance, ethics, you know, data use. And, and I would think that it's fair to say that we're all beginning to learn how to deploy AI in the most ethical, unbiased ways and manners possible. And that's going to take, you know, regulatory oversight, perhaps some government financial oversight. But most importantly, organizations need to have, you know, oversight and governance for what they're doing. And, you know, many organizations like ours have put out in press releases, what our considerations, our standards, our ethical framework is for using AI. So we call upon other organizations to do the same that we're seeing that across the globe,
Chas Fields:I think one of the trends that I'm seeing not just within AI, but but in this regard, and I'll you know, Julie, and I want to talk about some of the things that you're seeing from a trend perspective. But one of the things that AI is going to impact healthcare is it's going to take the ambiguity out of work, right? Who's serving who, when, where, and why, especially in post acute, right? There's going to be a massive overhaul, if you will, it's gonna enable scheduling, right? We talked about optimizing scheduling, I'm talking about we're optimizing the entire workforce, right? We're going to know who's where, when, why what patient is meeting, what when, you know, and right now I get it, we have charts, and we have email, we have all those things. But when I go to a patient's bedside, or I go to a patient's house, or a client's house, and I can pull it up on my phone, and see exactly how things are supposed to be distributed. This is where I'm supposed to be on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you know, it's it's taking the ambiguity completely out of it within the regulatory framework. No,
Nanne Finis:I was just gonna say that, you know, I was thinking as we face this future of AI, and we're doing, you know, educational webinars and conferences, and also two things coming up as we're planning. One of the things that I think where we set up GE is that we are the operational support for clinical decisions, you know, clinical decision. So it's really those things that affect operations clinicians at large, the whole workforce. So I think it's it's imperative for us to be thinking in that broader term, as you're mentioning, it's really how do we impact operations right to be become more efficient, become more effective. And that's really where our focus is. It can't be on one small silo, but we have the operational framework to be able to be able to, you know, commit to this. Sure.
Julie Develin:Yeah, one of the things that I also find to be part of an interesting conversation within healthcare, and within work in general, I mentioned earlier, some of the similarities and maybe some of the differences between what it's like to work in health care versus other areas of the working world. And you know, Nanne, I know you are very well, familiar and Chas, our listeners may be very well familiar with the 2024 mega trends. And our first mega trend, is that changing dynamic between the employer and the employee. And I'm wondering, from your perspective, how do you see that changing dynamic unfolding in healthcare and what are some of the implications surrounding it as we move forward? or dive into the future? Right.
Nanne Finis:Right. You know, I think and this is a trend in healthcare. But you know, again, as you said, Julie, we're seeing this trend across other industries, employees are beginning to, I think, really have a sense of the contributions that they give back to their employer. Yeah. What is this? What are my skills? What are, you know, my educational competencies, my certifications, you know, where should I best fit that in an organization, there's the choice for these employees for all of us is so great, that that choice and flexibility offers those employees, all employees that that opportunity to really consider themselves. And and employers are beginning to understand that. Let's look at skills across our organization to say, let's not pigeonhole certain individuals into certain job classes, but let's look at skills, their certifications, their capability. And let's mix it up. And so we're seeing a lot of that I'm seeing it here. I'm seeing a mixture of not only clinicians, but innovators and entrepreneurs, and CEOs, all in the same conversations, really thinking together on how we solve these challenging issues for healthcare. And so as you said, this is opening up all of this conversation, and at the same time that's happening in organizations, employers and employees are having those conversations to say, how can we best use you? Where do you best fit? And then where do I best fit in your organization?
Chas Fields:One of the things that I've witnessed and this may sound so simple man is before the executive leadership kind of Hi, yes, right. Yeah. And it's not just in healthcare, but they kind of hide, they sit around their tables, and they make their decision. But one of the things that I'm starting to see, is breaking that stereotype where they're in meetings that you wouldn't expect them to be yes. And it kind of goes back to people finding their purpose in the work that they do. And their contribution. Also think that it's executive stepping out of that stereotype that the will and witnessing Oh, wow, like, man's in this meeting? Man's not normally in this meeting is something going on? What is our executive team learning from those individual contributors? I was in a meeting just last week, where we had three EVPs, in this meeting that executive vice president, executive vice presidents that aren't normally in those types of meetings. And I thought, wow, that's the fourth time in a row, this is happening, what is changing, and I think you highlighted it. It's not just a contribution from the employee, but our executive leadership witnessing that there's more to contribute in ways that they may have not been in the past.
Nanne Finis:Can I just give a example. I worked at a hospital for 25 years in Chicago, and, you know, one of the administrative fellows studying to be and was soon thereafter a CEO of a large academic medical center. He said, How do I start walking the halls? I don't know. I don't know what I don't know, how to write what if someone asks me a question, what am I going to do? So, you know, the stereotype that we hold? You know, I wonder if that's as valid as we make it out? To be? Sure. Sometimes there's just a, you know, an ill sense of ease or unawareness. But I can say that with technology, with the data insights we're delivering in these organizations, they will leaders and staff will learn about the hot points in the organizations, you know, what's happening, what's going on in a real time basis? Where should we put our priorities as a leadership team, let's look at this data. That's what it all becomes real. And so you don't have to kind of walk through 25 units to say, I captured that little essence or that little essence, right? We have to do that to validate what we're seeing in the data and to, you know, converse about that. But it shouldn't be telling the story, we already have the story, if we are to use our data, our insights and our AI appropriately in the future, if
Julie Develin:we have good data, and we have good data out. But the other thing is that, you know, having these conversations or executives having these conversations, it's going to give them a better insight into what, like you said is going on in the workforce. And that executive that was wondering, how do they walk the halls? How do you do it? Yes, one foot in front of the other, right. But I think that that conversation for for all workplaces. executives need to understand that their visibility is important. And it's not just about meetings, it's in general, and if that visibility can't be there, on a in person basis, at least having a place a hub where people can go to see a message from the CEO or from vice presidents or you know somebody some money that's, that's on an upper echelon of an organization. Just having that visibility is important. And that goes to the transparency conversation. Because we all know that transparency in healthcare is extremely important. But transparency in general, especially from the C suite, and oh, by the way, especially on how the company is utilizing AI, because the workforce Institute UK, G, shout out workforce institute.org did a study on AI and AR. Yeah. And how organizations are utilizing it. And there's a disconnect between how organizations are utilizing AI versus what employees know about that. So there's another AI conversation that we need to have. Yes, agreed,
Chas Fields:Julie, so named as we start to wrap up here. Is there anything that you want these folks to know that you're like, Hey, be on the lookout, here's what's coming. And then Julie will wrap?
Nanne Finis:Well, all I will say is, as you mentioned earlier, Chas, we in health care and in other industries have gone into this work, because of our desire to give back to people, to relate with people to communicate with people, those relationships are continuing to be key to improvement, technology will enhance that it will propel change, it will make things happen more rapidly. But at the core of this is the relationships with people. And that's why I'm that UKG that's why I'm here. That's why I've been in healthcare for 45 years. I have relationships from all aspects of healthcare, it is what keeps me aware, innovative, what keeps me creative and energized for the future. And, and I see that all around here as well. Amazing,
Julie Develin:man, amazing. We're so thankful to have you on the people purpose podcast. And you know, you mentioned people at the heart of everything. And that's what we do at UT G. Right. Our purpose is people and we want to build great workplaces for technology built for all Yeah, so Okay, Chad, we're gonna wrap it up from him. Thank you for a few reminders before we leave, don't forget to Like, Subscribe, use the hashtag people. People purpose pod on social media. Give a shout on on LinkedIn or Axure. Wherever
Chas Fields:the social media
Julie Develin:plays. Yeah. And check out workforceinstitute.org for the latest research and insights. You know what Julie? We didn't do? What's our purpose?
Chas Fields:What did you find your purpose in today?
Julie Develin:90 football field.
Chas Fields:What did you find your purpose?
Nanne Finis:I think the st. Julian, I'm telling you.
Chas Fields:I found my purpose in being able to sit next to people like your dad that we've learned from and grow and we're so excited to see what you and your team put together here in the near future for for not only healthcare, but for all of our customers. So we appreciate you so much. Thanks for joining and thanks