Episode #3: How Intermountain Healthcare is Pioneering a New Value-Based Healthcare Model, with Craig Richardville

Craig Richardville, recently named as the new Chief Digital and Information Officer and Senior Vice President at Intermountain Healthcare, is a force in healthcare innovation. Craig dishes on the recent merger of SCL Health and Intermountain Healthcare, and his ambitious plans to transform Intermountain from a health system providing digital services to a digital company delivering health services. The key ingredient? Moving from being provider-focused to patient-focused. Tune in to catch Craig’s “bullish or bearish” bets on emerging technologies, his prediction of the next big trend in healthcare, and invaluable career advice for aspiring healthcare leaders.

About Craig:
Craig Richardville is the Chief Information & Digital Officer for Intermountain Healthcare, a leading health system with 33 hospitals and roughly 60,000 employees. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer for SCL Health. His responsibilities include leading all aspects of Intermountain’s information technology strategy and operations, including enterprise systems and applications, and digital transformation efforts. Craig has been successfully navigating the merger between SCL Health and Intermountain Healthcare since April 2022, and has been decorated with the 2021 National CIO of the Year Healthcare ORBIE Award, the 2020 Colorado CIO of the Year award, and the 2017 Carolinas CIO of the Year Award.

Show notes:

• Follow Craig on LinkedIn >> https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-richardville/
• Read more about Intermountain Healthcare >> https://intermountainhealthcare.org/

Chapters

• 0:00 Professional Background
• 3:02 SCL Health and Intermountain Merger
• 7:05 Craig's 4 F's Strategy
• 8:39 How Intermountain is Leading the Shift to Digital in Healthcare and Solving the Digital Divide
• 12:33 From Provider-Focused to Patient-Focused in Healthcare
• 17:00 Measuring the Success of Digital Patient Experiences
• 20:04 Craig Places his Digital Bets on Emerging Technologies in Healthcare
• 29:17 Let's Get Personal: Craig's Career Advice and Industry Trailblazers

Transcript

[00:00:00] Liat: Today we have a very special guest who I was lucky enough to meet in person at Beckers this year. Craig Richard will chief digital and information officer at Intermountain healthcare. Craig, it's great to have you with us today. 

[00:00:10] Craig: Thank you. It's great to be here. So 

[00:00:11] Liat: Craig congrats on your most recent award, the 2021 national CIO of the year, the Orbi award you also won 2015 chime CIO of the year and 2017 CIO of the year.

[00:00:21] Liat: And I can go on and on. You've also been nominated as a true thought leader by several of our previous guests on this show. So how does it feel in general? 

[00:00:28] Craig: It's actually very humbling. I, I just I think probably the key for me is. loving what you do and just having fun at it. And we seem to be making an impact.

[00:00:36] Craig: So building a great quality team and putting them to task. And it's been a lot of fun. 

[00:00:42] Liat: It's a blessing to love what you do and do what you love. Craig, an interesting fact about you is that you actually had your own consulting company for innovative startups. Addition to all of your, roles in the fields of tech, analytics, BI and AI machine learning.

[00:00:54] Liat: So let's backtrack and just have you briefly tell us about your journey in healthcare and how you got to where you are? 

[00:01:00] Craig: Oh, yeah. Great. So if you go back, you gotta go back a few years, but I started my career at ProMedica healthcare, which is just a fantastic organization based in the Midwest. My last couple of years there, we actually got into more entrepreneurial type of work.

[00:01:14] Craig: So they had a Vanguard health ventures. And I was part of that with a couple other really close friends of mine. And we ran really that, that organization, which was more on the for-profit side for a couple of years, which was really fun. It was innovative. Then I got the opportunity to go down to atrium healthcare down in Charlotte, North Carolina spent 21 years there including being the chief information and analytics officer.

[00:01:36] Craig: And that was part of my journey. That was great because when I got there, we were three hospitals. And when I left, we were 42. Wow. So I was in almost every size organization. You could think of with many different types of relationships from mergers to acquisitions to lease, to manage. That really gave me a great perspective on how to network and manage relationships and really learn how to deal with different aspects of our industry.

[00:02:01] Craig: And then I had the opportunity then to come to SCL health faith based organization. It was my first faith based. So it really brought you down to the. Of what we truly are here for that was really humbling and touching and just a nice aspect of healthcare that sometimes we lose.

[00:02:17] Craig: And then with the recent merger with Intermountain, healthcare been very blessed to be selected, to be part of this new team, which is a fantastic organization that truly has a vision that is quite inspiring. What's been the biggest 

[00:02:28] Liat: learning experience during this whole merging of SCL health and Intermountain.

[00:02:32] Craig: The biggest thing for me is truly you start. Peel back to different onions of both organizations. And you realize that maybe in your organization, you thought you maybe had some things at a certain level and also in the new organization, maybe things were thought to be at a different level, but as you continue to peel back, you start seeing where the opportunities are.

[00:02:51] Craig: The nice part is you really have the ability to bring it that together. And and the change the organization in a very material way. Very short period of time, so that we started with some of the planning aspects as we were going through the negotiations and the talking that were happening at the highest level.

[00:03:08] Craig: Some of us really got engaged with some planning pieces and as we started to plan and started to look to see where the opportunities were, that the impact that you can make is quite measurable. So we're really gonna have fun. Like for example, within the first 30 days we converted 20,000 of our caregivers.

[00:03:25] Craig: One platform to another platform, just kinda earth shattering speed with a high level of success and preciseness and continuing to grow the team to be confident, to do more heavy lifting and really make the changes. So that part to me is really gonna be over the next couple of years. Just quite impactful and fun, really for everybody.

[00:03:43] Craig: Speaking of 

[00:03:44] Liat: fun more red tape, less red tape with this merger. 

[00:03:47] Craig: When, in terms of red tape and that kind of stuff, some of the processes we have in place many of those are there for obviously a good reason, but when you look at the alignment of the organization and the new leadership that was put in place, really for us to March forward into.

[00:04:02] Craig: Look forward to our division of the organization. This integration of our two to become one is really top of mind on everybody. So there's really no red tape or things that are holding you back. It's more of prioritization of the work, making sure that the resources that you have are there to support the operations that are there to deliver the care, promote health.

[00:04:22] Craig: So it's really one of those things that it's kinda like one plus one equals three. It truly is that. Great synergy. The thing that I have always instilled with my team is is truly the need for speed to get things accomplished. And the nice thing about this integration about this work is bringing the two cultures together and some of the differences that we have and really kind reconciling those differences and taking the best of both to create what I would say would be the new culture of the organization is certainly for my area of responsibilities.

[00:04:52] Craig: And one of 'em is the preciseness. But also speed sometimes to be precise people the whole classic of you analysis paralysis and admiring the problem. And you have to quickly make decisions. Then you have to execute against those decisions. At the same time, continuing to learn, be agile in your approach, but more things are becoming your way.

[00:05:13] Craig: The things that the thing that you find out is the more successful you are in deliver. Your services, the more ask that come your way. And that's something that is quite it's a gift. It's a pleasure. It doesn't mean that all of a sudden your plate is empty. More things start coming your way because of the ability of the team to execute.

[00:05:29] Craig: And it's the combined team. We're just one piece, you know of that. And when you look at the operations, the change management. All the things that come into play, the measurables that we have in terms of our performance board and our key performance indicators, all those different things will continue to have us focus and refocus and move forward with these kinds of changes.

[00:05:49] Craig: But from my standpoint, it is really. Plowing through this very quickly, cuz our intent is to continue to grow, continue to develop. So the things that I know that I have to do, I need to get those done because there'll be other things that I can't even forecast or see right now that will be coming my way and I need to create that capacity to get that accomplished.

[00:06:07] Liat: You spoke about the four Fs in a previous interview. And I loved that could elaborate on that for our audience as well, because that was, some insightful tips for other 

[00:06:15] Craig: CIOs. Yeah. And so the four S originally started as three Fs from one of my mentors to be fast. To be fluid and to be flexible.

[00:06:24] Craig: And then as that kind of continued, another mentor of mind said, you should add a fourth, which to be focused. So we talked a little bit about speed. So be fast is certainly is a way to go to be fluid. It's gotta be smooth. They're not hard shifts and turns and ups and downs. It's really gotta start to flow and get people comfortable with that aspect of it.

[00:06:44] Craig: And then when you look at. Flexibility things change, our environments change the people change, the mission, change the things outside of our control change. And we have to be able to adapt to be very agile with that. Then the focus thing is really to focus on the big things. Let's not make sure that, if you looked at some of the, like cubies thing in the past where he looked at putting in the big rocks and the medium rocks you put in the sand, and then you.

[00:07:07] Craig: You know the water at the end. If we focus on that going backwards, we won't be able to work on the big stuff. So it's really to be very focused to make sure we understand the 5, 6, 10, 12 big things that are gonna have a material difference to our organization. There's always gonna be all the other requests and the demand of your services coming into play.

[00:07:26] Craig: So it'd be very focused on that work and making sure that you are investing and those that have great returns for your patient quality cost outcomes, et. 

[00:07:35] Liat: speaking of focus, what is the most important project you're working on today at Intermountain? When it comes to the digital patient experience?

[00:07:43] Craig: Oh boy. Great question. Cause there's so yeah, we are starting to become an industry, where digital is first, almost like a digital industry that delivers health and that delivers care. So that transition is big. We've seen it in banking. We've seen it in retail. We've seen it in all other aspects of our life.

[00:08:01] Craig: And now healthcare is primed for that. So really it's kinda not one big thing. It's a whole thing around digital. If I had to look at how we looking at wanting to measure ourselves, I would say there's probably a few things. Let me name a couple. One is likelihood to recommend that net promoter score is just critical to.

[00:08:19] Craig: After they receive the experience from us will they go back and recommend us to their families, their friends, somebody they run into et cetera. And I think it's really important. That piece brings all these other components together, allows us to be able to understand that there's a lot of leading indicators, lagging indicators, other measurements that you have to put into play, but truly at the end of the day, when they look at the experience, the quality.

[00:08:44] Craig: The cost of the service, which is the value equation is taken experience equality and dividing it by cause will they recommend us? And that is, that's a big thing for us. When you look at the pieces that we're doing we're working on two focuses of the digital experience. One is that will look at our patient that will look at our consumer.

[00:09:02] Craig: We look at our member, whatever different hat that they're wearing externally and how do we make it easy for them to access our. To understand to, to put more of the tools into their hands. If you look at historically how we used. Deposit a check. We'd go in piece of paper, sign our name, walk into a branch, deposit it in give it to a clerks.

[00:09:24] Craig: You would process it. And then we would walk out. Now you just take a picture with your phone. That's the type of difference that we need to have in healthcare. It really take all of the different historical ways of how we process healthcare and process the delivery of healthcare, and really make it very intuitive and easy to use.

[00:09:41] Craig: And a lot of that's gonna be on the digital. So that whole experience that we're looking at moving the work from like in the banking example from the clerk over into the patient's hands, he or she wants to do that work. You want to do the work I do when I want to E check in when I want to do a refill, when I want to look for maybe some early diagnosis with some symptom.

[00:10:03] Craig: Let me pull out my phone at three in the morning and do that, that's how I can process my bills. So why can't I do that in healthcare? So that kind of shifting and changing in it's way that other industries have done in this case, we will be doing that. But also we'll be leading that, the last thing I, we really wanna say in this topic is it's really important that we understand too, when we're looking at the digital experience and digital transformation and all that work there is a equity.

[00:10:28] Craig: Issue within healthcare that we gotta make sure that we solve. And part of that equity issue is the digital divide that everybody has access to the same things that maybe you and I have access to. So how can we take that same affordability accessibility? Great experience high quality outcomes and bring that to an environment that may not have the tools and the connectivity that some of us have and put that all into play and make sure that we can either bring those tools to them or that we can morph for our tools around to help them to build, provide that access.

[00:11:00] Craig: And that's something that think is is critical for us to be successful. It's not just to treat those that have the ability. Get treatment, but those that are the underserved, the poor, the vulnerable, and truly would bring equity into healthcare. 

[00:11:13] Liat: Are you have spoken about goals to become the Amazon of healthcare, and so providing that same consumer experience in healthcare, what makes it a bit harder in healthcare than in other industries to implement all of your visions? 

[00:11:27] Craig: Yeah. When you look at maybe how things have been legacy and healthcare it's. The industry has developed to be more provider focused in the past.

[00:11:38] Craig: And that has certainly changed over the last, decade or so, but there really years, all the way through, up till, the last 10 years or so, it's really been very provider focused. So I'll give you a simple example of why are office hours from eight to five, right? Because that is typically easier for the provider.

[00:11:56] Craig: However, for me as a patient, That's the hardest time for me. Cause I'm probably working during this. You wanna go on it? 3:00 AM. just as he or she is that's right. So that's been all provider focused and you starting to see that shift to be patient focused. And that's where you started seeing urgent care centers come into play now, virtual coming into play, but really you have ubiquitous access.

[00:12:19] Craig: Seven 20. To a caregiver who can help resolve or to diagnose you, put you on the right plan, et cetera, and putting more of what's convenient for me. And to the example at three in the morning, if that's what I need somebody at three in the morning to assist me in that process. I can buy a shirt at three in the morning.

[00:12:38] Craig: Why can't I receive healthcare at three in the morning? So you're starting to see that shift to take place. And the digital experience is really what kind of drives that shift to be. Patient focus, more member focus, more consumer focus, really putting the hands and the tools into those different personas, that we defined and bring that back into us.

[00:13:00] Craig: So really it's a transition that we are here to serve and to be in order to be a servant. other people have to be the ones that are dictating how we move forward and that's gonna be our patients and our members to have it be that way. The one piece I do wanna comment on is the whole aspect of healthcare.

[00:13:17] Craig: And historically the financing of healthcare has been very focused upon the care side. You're sick. I take care of. Less on the health side. And so one of the visions of Intermountain Healthcare is to be the model of the future of healthcare within our industry, and to allow us then to teach others so that they can continue to move forward with that.

[00:13:38] Craig: And that becomes more around value based care. Where we talked about at the beginning of making sure that it's accessible, it's affordable, you're taking the experience and the quality of the outcome and you're dividing that by the cost to be able to create what the highest value is. And that's gonna be the alignment of going at risk for clinically risk, financially risk experience, risk, and really making sure that you know that for us to have the financing of he.

[00:14:04] Craig: We have to deliver on all three of those components. And that's a big shift for our industry, which is still typically volume based and focused on the care side. So as you move to the value based care my goal is to keep you healthy to keep you well give you the tools that you can do things at home at your convenience but still follow proper protocols.

[00:14:26] Craig: So I can send you nudges or reminders. To go ahead and do something or maybe not to do something when the opportunity is there and really help guide you along that. And what I would say that becomes the rhythm of life of what you do. So your behaviors and your tendency. So you might get up in the morning, look at your phone, check your social media, maybe check some text, maybe glance through some personal and professional emails.

[00:14:52] Craig: Where is health in all of. What I wanna be able to do is have you come up and say, Hey, here was my sleeping. Here is my nutritionally. Here's my workout routine. I've got coming up today and just kinda getting yourself prepared to keep yourself healthy and well, and or if you have a disease, how do you manage that chronic disease?

[00:15:09] Craig: And we have the ability to provide you those tools to keep you out of the most expensive. Care side of healthcare and keep you more on the healthy side of healthcare. 

[00:15:19] Liat: How is Intermountain becoming the model of the future? What tools are you using today to enable this access for patients and how do you measure the success of this type of initiative?

[00:15:31] Craig: This is where I think it becomes fun because there's two sides to the equation. There's the patient or the member side, the customer consumer side. Then there's also the PA or the provider. In terms of the physician, the caregiver, those that are actually delivering the service. And in many cases, obviously there's a payer arm that kind of in between that that coordinates between the two aspects of that on the financing side.

[00:15:54] Craig: However, the thing that I would say is the big difference for us and the way that we're moving toward is truly getting the engagement. So it's not only the experience, but it's the engagement of that. Of that member of that consumer involved. And that's gonna be part of knowing who you are being very personalized not customized, but very personal for you.

[00:16:16] Craig: What's what are those different social determinants of health that you have? Yeah. Do you have transportation? Do you have housing? What are the different aspects of your life that you have that I may or may not have that are gonna be different? What are the, your behaviors or tendencies understanding that if you look at healthcare, people will say that maybe 20, 30% of truly the length of life and the quality of life.

[00:16:41] Craig: Has revolved around medicine revolved around the care things of your health behaviors, alcohol diet, exercise, tobacco use social and economic factors that so social determinants of health, whether your education, your employment income, do you have family support, et cetera, in your physical environment, those are all the other aspects of your life.

[00:17:02] Craig: So part of all we need to do is we need to underst. What it is about you, that allows us to be able to get you engaged in all aspects that will lead to having a long and high quality life. And that's gonna be gathering data and information from different sources that we don't have it today. And we talk a little bit about on the clinical side and interoperability and some of those things, which is absolutely critical, but.

[00:17:28] Craig: That may be 20, 25% of the data that I need. And the other information is potentially more accessible or should be accessible to me to allow that if you look at what you look at on the financial side, when you, somebody looks at you and gives you a credit score, they are able to look at many aspects of your financial, whether it's your income or whether it's your ability to pay.

[00:17:50] Craig: If you had any bankruptcy, are you late on making your payments, all your different aspects of your financial. Going to play in order to make your, to give you that score. We need that same similar type of information within healthcare, your nutrition, your behaviors, et cetera, in order to say, what is special about you and how should I be treating you on the healthcare side of things?

[00:18:12] Craig: So access to data is gonna be really important. And how do we digitally engage people to become part of. To help improve their overall health score. We're 

[00:18:20] Liat: gonna play a fun game now, Craig, you're gonna be placing your digital bets. I'm gonna be naming a technology in healthcare. And then you're gonna tell me if it's bullish or bearish.

[00:18:30] Liat: You ready? Yep. All right. Number one, 

[00:18:33] Liat: telehealth. 

[00:18:34] Craig: Bearish. 

[00:18:36] Liat: Why? 

[00:18:37] Craig: It's interesting. Many people would probably say bullish. And the reason why is, I think telehealth, depending on the definition, needs to move to be online care. Telehealth to me, the definition of it is connecting like me and you. Now we're having a teleconference where tele there's two humans that are involved.

[00:18:56] Craig: And it reminds me of the banking example of me going through the little drive. And I would take my check and I'd put it at pneumatic tube and send it over there. There's a clerk on the other. But we don't do that today. We online bank, we don't Telebank. So I think the definition of moving from telehealth to online health is really, I see, as a transition where telehealth was a phase, hopefully a transition into online health or online care where truly there's a machine and intelligence in the background that's pro processing and interacting and engaging with you, not just a human on the other side, where there's a tele connecting to people, but letting the machine do the work for.

[00:19:36] Craig: okay. Bullish or bearish, wearables, 

[00:19:39] Craig: Polish. I, I I just did some things at the Rocky mountain national park and just in a beautiful part of the country and with my son and and he shared with me a number of steps and heart rate and a bunch of other things. He had access to that I didn't have access to.

[00:19:57] Craig: And then really nice to know all of that. Now the good news is for most of it. We were side by side. There were parts where he surpassed me very easily. So I can't say that, that we had the exact same ex physical experience, but he was able to share things with me. And I think that's a part of what we wanna do moving forward.

[00:20:15] Craig: It's kinda like the monitoring of your car, without having all those monitors in place to know when something might be going bad or. Something might be wearing out before it actually breaks. You get the ability to go in there and maintain it and keep it healthy and well, and more of that I think should be coming to us within healthcare.

[00:20:33] Craig: I think we will be wanting more of that in order to allow us to be able to not only monitor progress that we're doing what we need to do, but before something breaks, maybe something will go ahead and send a signal. That'll allow us to say, Hey, by the way, maybe should go see this. 

[00:20:48] Craig: They're saying there's a lot of data coming out of those, but we're still not sure in healthcare exactly how to utilize 

[00:20:52] Craig: this for maximize that.

[00:20:54] Craig: Exactly right. 

[00:20:55] Liat: Yeah. Okay. Bullish or bearish conversational AI. 

[00:21:00] Craig: Oh, very bullish. I think I think that's a big piece. We're putting in big fan of a Microsoft company called nuance that we are deploying within hundreds of our providers today. That will take a conversation and turn it into a medical.

[00:21:14] Craig: Create the billing codes and allow us to get appropriately compensated for the service. And that's something I think is really important. It removes some of the bureaucratic processes that happen within many industries, not only within healthcare, but allows that to take place. It's so natural for us to have a conversation, but then to have that machine.

[00:21:35] Craig: But really is important outta that conversation and be able to pull that out and be able to document it in our case and, or take action, whether that's ordering something or making a change to somebody's care based upon the conversation that we're having. So I'm a big, really big fan of that bull or 

[00:21:52] Liat: Barrish, we're almost done remote patient monitor.

[00:21:56] Craig: yeah, there's two pieces. I would say I'm bullish on that, but I'm really more bullish on hospital at home. There's a piece where, I'm monitoring you, at a home or at some setting or, being able to going back a little bit to some of the wearables or some of the things that, people will have access to, but truly moving people from a care setting of a hospital into a home environment is I think is really important for us.

[00:22:16] Craig: Not only. Cost perspective, but also just from a getting healthy and well again, being around family and friends and being in your home environment certainly a different way for us to heal and to get better than being in a very cleanse white, very sanitized environment within a hospital.

[00:22:33] Craig: Those different settings I think are important. And if I'm able to provide you the similar types of care and services, are you being in a more comfortable setting? Not only lowers the cost. It also will improve the healing and the wellness of you as an individual. So I think that's really important.

[00:22:50] Craig: So as opposed to, or maybe in addition to remote patient monitoring, we're still going on your daily life and I'm keeping track of you. That truly is I think, a piece for us to transition. So when you look at some of the post-acute care services and we saw that with the pandemic are still feeling it today, people that were in nursing homes.

[00:23:09] Craig: Other types of post-acute type services. There's a labor shortage that hitting them very hard as well. There's a health aspect of being maybe in those types of communities, some positive, some not so much. So if somebody has the means and the capability for us to treat them at home, versus putting them into some other kind of a care setting, that would be the place for us to focus on and really, truly to have the hospital be for more of the more acute tertiary care type services and continue that transition to moving people to home.

[00:23:39] Craig: So the 

[00:23:39] last 

[00:23:40] Liat: one is augmented reality. 

[00:23:41] Craig: Augmented reality. I find I'm probably just in the middle with that one. I I think it's something that we still need to learn more about. I need to learn more about, I think the industry needs to learn more about, we need more applicability of augmented reality and truly seeing if we can create that type of experience.

[00:23:59] Craig: I think it's probably leaning a little bit more on, on the bullish side. However, I think there's. A lot more for us to learn on that before. I would say I'm a betting man. I'm gonna put my money on or not on it. So that, so 

[00:24:11] Liat: I'll have you back. I'll have you back in five years and then you'll place your bets when we're a bit more famous.

[00:24:19] Liat: okay. Speaking of these emerging technologies, I really wanna know, and I'm sure a lot of CIOs wanna know what Craig, Richard bill thinks about this. Okay. If you had a hundred billion dollars to spend and no red take, how would you spend it in your role?

[00:24:31] Craig: I would spend it probably first and foremost on people, on making sure that we compensate the talent that we have here, that we can keep that talent within our industry, that we can take that talent and put it to good use. Cuz they're the ones that really make it happen. So the things that we're talking about, where, whether it's the, the digital experience, whether it's.

[00:24:52] Craig: Artificial or augmented intelligence or reality, all these different things that we wanna focus on. We need people in order to do that. And we need people to move themselves away from doing maybe some of the mundane tasks that we have. And really focus on them doing the things that either their certifications or their licensing things that only they can do and have 'em focus on that.

[00:25:14] Craig: So I'd rather invest into people in order to make these types of changes moving forward. And then what I would do is really focus on becoming a digital company that delivers healthcare. If I was starting a new business in many other industries would I do some of the physical plans? Some of the things, certainly there's a piece that is required for that, but there's also a legacy piece that we probably wouldn't do.

[00:25:38] Craig: So how do I transition and move myself away from the legacy aspects of how we were doing things in the past to be, if I was a new co coming in, how would I tackle it? How would an Amazon tackle it? How would a Google. Tackle it, some of these companies that come in with a different perspective, I think it'd be really important to have us to not transition, but truly transform by removing those legacy pieces.

[00:26:02] Craig: And we talked a little bit about some of that, like moving people to be in, in the home, putting the power of the patient and their pocket with the smartphone, these types of transit. I think we'll continue and they'll continue to accelerate. And part of that money would be investing then into just the rethinking of how we're doing in order to move some of the maybe expensive and not value added physical plants that we have into those that are more modern and progressive that would meet the need and exceed the needs of our certainly ever demanding in changing populations that we.

[00:26:35] Craig: nice 

[00:26:36] Liat: answer. I wish I could send you the check myself, but I don't have it yet. the next big trend in healthcare? It, 

[00:26:44] Craig: I really think it's artificial intelligence. and, I think this is the piece that I'm a big fan of. We have enough data in order to create this and artificial sometimes is not the right word.

[00:26:57] Craig: good colleague of mine. Russ Braswell told me that he calls it advanced intelligence for AI. And I agree with him. I think this is, it's not fake, it's real intelligence and it's very advanced. And so it really is using the combination of the machine and the. In order to make decisions quick.

[00:27:14] Craig: To make decisions more accurate to continue to learn from when you make those decisions or when you make mistakes. So your probability factor continues to improve every time that happens. So that piece to me is probably the the biggest thing I would put my money on is having it.

[00:27:29] Craig: It's like your GPS system, it's we use it so much in other parts of our. I can't go anywhere now without my GPS and whether there's traffic problems or something else that allows me, it reroutes me, takes me to the right place. It takes me to the fastest place. If I don't want to pay tolls, takes me down that route.

[00:27:44] Craig: There's all these different things that it does for me, where historically had a map and I'd file this map. . But now that truly is that way. And you see it with Netflix and other things that you watch, it brings up to you, the things that are probably you're gonna the things that they recommend for you because based upon your experience, it continues to learn based on your usage.

[00:28:03] Craig: And so I really think that artificial intelligence is gonna be a big thing for us in healthcare. 

[00:28:08] Liat: Interesting. So Craig you've won many awards, many notable awards. You've led many organizations. You had your own consulting firm. You've done a lot. What is the best career advice you've been given that has helped you as a CIO and as an individual along the way?

[00:28:28] Craig: Yeah. It goes back to one of the old things that, God gave you two years and one mouth really to listen, to listen to others. Don't always be the first to speak. Don't always be the loudest to speak. Certainly there may be times and places where. Needs to happen, but those are typically only like in a crisis kind of a mode.

[00:28:46] Craig: And in most cases, just to listen and learn from others, you'll see people with different perspectives, different experiences look at things that'll helps you in order to make a good decision, a a great decision. Then at some point in your career, I would say you start to become kinda like in my personal life where I'm.

[00:29:04] Craig: You become more of a parent, you're there to teach and to grow and to, bring new people in and have them be better than what you are. And I see that in my children, all three of my boys surpassing me in many aspects of my life, and I'm really proud of it. And professionally the same way.

[00:29:20] Liat: Can you walk into a room of a hundred new CIOs entering the health system? What is something you 

[00:29:25] Craig: tell them? To be very open. To learn from other industries to look outside of your peers and to look at yourself first as being a leader, period and then to be a leader in healthcare, and then to bring the CIO or the C D I, or the CDO into play.

[00:29:44] Craig: When you come in playing that card first Hey, I'm. CIO the C D the CDO that's the wrong way to play. You really have to come. And that's a tool belt that you have that you've earned over a period of time and been able. Add value to the table, but you gotta be a leader first. You gotta be a leader within healthcare first, and then you can bring a certain aspect of that.

[00:30:08] Craig: No different than maybe somebody who's the marketing or the CFO or the other members of the C-suite there's a certain level of expertise and detail that you have that maybe they don't, and they have the same thing on you and other aspects of it. So you've got to really ensure that you're part of the.

[00:30:26] Craig: But when we're all focused first on leadership then we all win. Love it. 

[00:30:30] Liat: I'm right. I'm taking notes for myself as well. Craig, who do you view as a trailblazer in the industry making an impact that you'd like to nominate as a future guest? 

[00:30:37] Craig: Yeah. There's several pieces of it. First and foremost, certainly for our industry.

[00:30:41] Craig: I think one of the leading trailblazers is my current CEO, Mark Harrison. What I've learned from him in just a short period, I've been part of his team is just phenomenal, the way that he sees and views things. And he's very bold and he and he's very knowledgeable about all aspects. Of the business and to bring that into, and he is also a provider it's just an amazing how he wants to change things.

[00:31:05] Craig: The things that other people might admire within healthcare, he doesn't admire as much. And he is really focused upon, equity and focus upon changing the industry, like turning it upside down. The second one I would say is our chief strategist, Dan lo. He comes from out of industry when he gives a different perspective on things.

[00:31:25] Craig: The things he's not limited by maybe some of the experiences that others are he's coming in from a very entrepreneurial business focused, big thing focused. I think that's really fun. And then from a peer perspective, I have always admired Chris Ross out of the Mayo clinic and Matt Cole from the Cleveland.

[00:31:43] Craig: Both of those are just great people that I would nominate as well to, to beyond this. 

[00:31:48] Liat: Thanks again, Craig. I'll let you go about your day and hope to talk to you soon. 

[00:31:52] Craig: Thank you. Have a great day. 

[00:31:54] Liat: Thank you for listening to patient journey. Pioneers brought to you by highroad subscribe to our podcast on your favorite listening platform.

[00:32:00] Liat: See you on our next episode.