Healthcare Is Losing Its Best People | Provider Burnout, Trust & Ethical Leadership in AI with Poonam Patel

Healthcare AI and ethical leadership must give time back to clinicians, not take more away — Poonam Patel on AI strategy, provider burnout, and trust erosion in healthcare.

Provider burnout is pushing clinicians out of healthcare at an unsustainable rate. In this episode of The Signal Room, Chris Hutchins sits down with Poonam Patel, a pediatric nurse practitioner turned healthcare strategy advisor, to examine what happens when the system built to care for patients stops caring for its own people. From pajama time documentation burdens to the erosion of trust between patients and providers, Poonam shares what she has witnessed firsthand across clinical and operational settings.

What We Cover

• Why provider burnout is a workforce sustainability crisis, not a wellness problem
• How pajama time documentation burden erodes the patient and provider relationship
• Where clinical AI and ambient clinical intelligence are actually giving time back
• Why healthcare interoperability is still the biggest structural barrier to useful AI
• What empathetic leadership looks like in healthcare organizations under pressure

Key Takeaways

• Trust drives adherence, not dashboards. Patients follow clinical guidance when they trust the provider delivering it. Systems that erode trust erode outcomes.
• Giving time back is a survival strategy. Efficiency gains from AI should flow back to the clinician, not into more patient volume per shift.
• Empathetic leadership has to run through every layer. Front-line supervisors need empathy training as much as the C-suite. Burnout is solved in the middle, not at the top.
• Solve one problem well. AI initiatives fail when they try to fix everything at once. Pick one workflow, fix it end-to-end, and consolidate inside the EMR.

Timestamps

• 0:00 – Welcome and the shared mission behind the conversation
• 2:33 – The multi-lens view: clinician, operator, and program builder
• 6:45 – Pajama time and the intangible ROI of giving time back
• 8:25 – Trust as the through line for patient adherence
• 13:19 – The emotional toll on pediatric and frontline providers
• 18:19 – Burnout, raising your hand, and why clinicians cope alone
• 25:07 – Solving for the human component first
• 28:32 – The workforce shortage and the incentive to enter healthcare
• 32:00 – AI scribing, diagnostics, and early detection that actually helps
• 36:28 – Interoperability and why AI has to live inside the EMR
• 39:24 – Trust erosion and the case for empathetic leadership
• 44:03 – Consolidating patient information and family navigation
• 46:58 – Empathy as a management training requirement, not a poster
• 49:21 – Closing thoughts and how to reach Poonam

About Poonam Patel

Poonam Patel, NP, is a pediatric nurse practitioner turned healthcare operator and co-founder with 20 years of experience across clinical care, consulting, and healthcare innovation. As Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of a care management and remote patient monitoring services company, she led o

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Are we solving the right problems?

SPEAKER_01 0:02

My heart goes out to patient care 100%. But my heart goes out to providers 100% because they are the ones in the interaction leading the care and building trust and needing to build trust for adherence, for hope, for families to have faith.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

But it's still an issue that we've got to figure out how to solve for it. It's not easy. Kunam, welcome to the signal room. I was so excited to have you on. I I think we've had some really interesting exchanges over the last couple of weeks, and uh it was clear that we there's just a lot of things that we're we share our common passion for. So thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Yeah, thank you for having me. You know, I'm I'm really grateful to serendipity and giving us the opportunity to connect and finding alignment and in things that we are passionate about is always something very exciting and motivating to meet others. So I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Well, it's it's been a really wonderful career for me having the chance to work with with providers and just being around the interactions within the healthcare setting. And for me, it's been really a lot more about the interactions with between human beings than it was really is about anything else. But what's really probably the most meaningful to me was when I have a conversation with someone like you, you're wired in a way that everything is all about who the person that's in front of you, who you're taking care of. And I can't say it enough about the commitment that it takes to do what you do. And I really want to dig into some things today because I know we've been talking about AI and governance and a lot of stuff like that. Innovation's been a thing that's been talked about forever, digital transformation, you know, buzzwords are us, basically. But what it really comes down to is are we doing the right things? Are we solving the right problems? And I don't know that we do such a great job with that, but we're we're at a point right now things are moving very, very quickly. So I think it's a great opportunity for us to kind of take a pause and really take a look at what we're doing and what should we be doing and where are there better opportunities maybe that we're not paying attention to because we're distracted. It's a long, a long way to go to say, I really would love to hear you talk about what's top of mind for you. And if, you know, if we can tag team and figure out what one or two meaningful things we could tackle together, like soon, right away, bring in more people, whatever. What would some of those things be for you?

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah, you know, I think thank you again for the I speaking of my my experiences. You know, I think first being a clinician, being a provider in multiple environments, inpatient, outpatient clinics, building a program within a hospital system, and then going and scaling another business for virtual care. There's a lot of lenses that as a provider I was able to see. As an operator, I was able to see. And I really kind of saw things outside the box that I'm like, oh, you know, maybe there's a solution for this, or hey, maybe I can make this a lot easier for providers where they get more quality time back, right? Like there was always something in the back of my mind every day I was in the clinic, like thinking, how can we do this? How can we do this? How can we do this? And I think that we are in a space and in a time where there is opportunity to really look at the workflows, the huge admin burden that providers are facing every day and their staff every day. And my main goal with where I'm at high level right now is because I've been in these different systems, I've worked for a big healthcare company, building clinical programs for very big companies. There's a lot of line of sight that we have in immersing ourselves in these specific environments. And my goal would be to utilize and leverage these amazing technologies when used correctly, solving the right problem, filling the gap. And my goal would be to provide time back to the human, to human interaction. I think a lot of times we have to remember what we're doing and who's doing it, right? Like my heart goes out to patient care 100%, but my heart goes out to providers 100% because they are the ones in the interaction leading the care and building trust and needing to build trust for adherence, for hope, for families to have faith. You know, a lot of times we're focusing on adults. I'm a pediatric provider and I saw what happens to families and to parents and how overwhelming it could be, and how overwhelming it can be for a provider to string care together. And so there are opportunities in the wealth of data that there is. There is a lot of data. And for a provider to put a story together, it is very taxing, very taxing when you are seeing a new patient. Even if you're seeing a patient you've been seeing for years or months, whatever it may be, there are opportunities, but people who are in it are able to help you say, This is what I need. This is what I want. This is where I wish I could have more time. Right. And so, my experience, what I'm trying to do is add a voice to the people that I worked with, to the people who were the warriors taking care of all of the patients that we were taking care of. I give all the credit to them in the worlds that I grew up in, the amount of compassion and empathy that I learned from those individuals above me when I came into the world 25 years ago, to my peers, to the nurses who taught me, to the doctors who taught us. There are amazing people out there taking care of our people. And so my goal is to utilize the data, problem solve and analyze it, and provide ways to give back to the human component.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

If I'm giving you a general summary, you're talking about what's been the top of mind for me as well. And we we have to think about how do we give time back. And whenever you talk about innovation or AI, things kind of come around to efficiency, inevitably. While you know, I understand that there's a need for an ROI. I think that there's an intangible that is not really put into the right category as an ROI, but absolutely is. We already are starting, we're starting from a place where there's a deficit. Yeah. We have consistently, year after year, taken more and more time away from the patient and the provider encounter. But even worse, we've crept into an area where I've had mentioned this term or with a couple of folks recently, and Dr. Mark Gendro told me uh mentioned to me, and just casually he say again in the evening, it's really pajama time. We're like, wait, is that a thing? And when I started to understand just how far we have crept into, like even family life, time where people should actually be sleeping, even we've gone in the opposite direction. And so giving that time back really is a big deal. But you know, maybe you can help me to think about what do we need to communicate to leaders, executives, uh you know, in in healthcare organizations. What's the right messaging that we're that we need to get to them? Because we've got to reinforce the need to give back time, I think.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Yeah, I mean, there's multiple ways you can kind of approach that. You know, one of them is the through line is always patient adherence, right? And preventing readmissions or preventing bigger complications because of non-adherence, which is a patient behavior, right? You're you're depending on patient behavior for that outcome. And in order for that outcome to happen, the only way humans are adherent to things is if we trust it, right? That's one of the components. Now I'm not talking about social determinants of health, and I'm not talking about the complications of the fragmented care they get. I'm talking about the one thing that through is it's a component that's really important. When I had patients who really felt that I cared for them and the families knew I was there for them, they would do 99% of the things I asked them to do. Do this seven days, do this three weeks. I need to see you back in four weeks. Okay. And when they would feel that compassion and empathy and trust, they were more likely to trust me, which then trust my facility or hospital and then put trust into the system, right? And so when you have providers who are spent, as a leadership team, you have those. There is no, I'm not sure anything. I I can probably say that providers are all spent and a lot of them are doing pajama time. I was one of them. I would put my babies to sleep and I would tart till 12:30, 1 a.m. And the goal of that was not really the true patient care for me to document. It was for me to do the checklist for what was required on the administrative side of things to get that visit paid for, right? And so from an executive leadership team or a leadership team, it's about do the providers feel cared for? Are they being seen as people? Are we saying, hey, we want to put in technologies, not build something and then intervene and put it in and it not be done and then cause more confusion and chaos. It's we want to take some time to understand where your administrative burdens are, where your time supps are, where you're being spent in places rather than in your human delivery. We want to go and study those. We want to understand that. And then we want to go look at what technologies are out there, if any, or is there something we can do within our own systems and supplement and enhance what we already have to solve those problems? Right. And then we're gonna have a rollout to add the intervention with your insights as providers to put it in place. And we will reiterate it. Now, the downfall of that, and most people are probably not gonna do what I'm saying because we are in a race. The downfall to that is that it requires organized structure and time. And that's where I feel that there is going to be friction because the leadership teams have their own goals to obviously hit numbers for the business, you know, not be in law, whatever it may be. And the providers and the clinicians and the nurses and the MAs, all of those individuals are on the flip side of that, are having to meet those demands, right? And time, unfortunately, somehow time has become our enemy. When in actuality, I think time can actually be our friend because we have less you work and less money spent on fixing things that were implemented too fast if we just thoroughly executed the plan. You know what I mean? So again, it may not be realistic what I'm saying, because of the way the world is racing right now with all that is going on, but I really do feel the people that are getting lost in this race are the ones who are delivering the care and the ones who are receiving the care. And that's a problem.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

That's such an important thing, too, because we talk about this stuff so sometimes like it's just mechanical. Right. We completely lose the lose our our perspective when it comes to the people who are delivering the care. Yeah you work in the pediatric space. Do you are you not supposed to feel anything when you're taking care of children? I think you do, right? I mean, that's gotta take its toll, and there's just more and more pressure. And then you step into a room and you're looking at a young child who needs care.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

You have to sit with that for a little bit, right? And like really breathe into what that means. And you know, we're not when I see providers, one of the things that gives me hope is that the good of humans is still there. No matter how much pajama time a provider has, the majority of providers are still gonna do their best in their hands to take care of the child, for example. But the other side to that is our elderly. We're talking about elderly as if they don't mean anything. And I'm generalizing what I'm saying. But you know, when we talk about like the technology is gonna scale and it's gonna have thousands of people on it. And like at that point, what you've done is you've diminished the sheer amount of individuals who have paved the way for us to all be here and the wisdom that they hold, we're discounting and we're overlooking the fact of who they are, right? Because we're in a race. And when you're talking about elderly, you're talking about somebody's mom, somebody's grandmother, someone who may have taken care of others' children's, someone who may have moved four continents to come here and has figured out, you know, paved a way of a life for generations to come. I mean, this is what I'm talking about when I mean the depth of human connection. There is a space for technology. No doubt, I think that there is a space for technology. I just don't want us missing the point of what we're doing. You know, you're talking about diagnosing a child with cancer. I am sure there are lovely ways and amazing innovative ways to diagnose that cancer, to stage it, to find it, you know, all the things. And that is incredible that we can do something like that. But in the end, we are still talking to someone's child. We are still going to cut a human being, and we're still talking about really putting in a massive stressor in a family system, in a world that is already stressful. And so these are just like different components that I give all of the credit to providers and nurses and caregivers in the hospitals, in clinics, in surgery centers. They are pouring their heart out, especially when they're tired. And that's something that really drives my passion. That are there ways that I can help that? Are there teams that I can go help that have the technological know-how, but don't know where to start in the clinical workflow? Let's go solve that. Let's go give that time back. And that's kind of where I ignite a little bit in the in the advisory roles or in the strategic roles, or even just starting from ground zero. Where do we start, Bunam? Chris, what do we do with this data? And putting our heads on that and creating an idea to solve. There's so many ways you can do that.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Yeah, you're you're so right. Never was there a more transformational period of you know for me in my life, honestly, was being in New York going through the pandemic. And you know, I'm sure people have heard this before you know from many angles. You know, you saw the best and the worst of humanity uh in a situation like that. You know, fortunately, I've never met a clinician, yourself included, who was not a hundred percent on on the same page when it comes to the reason for what you do, the sacrifices that you make. It's all about the individual that you're in front of. And you're trying to do something to help someone get well, prevent them from being sick. But I think the the the human aspects of this when it comes to the emotional side, I think that's the piece that concerns me a little bit because not only do we not talk about it um in the context of the people who are delivering care, but just in a general sense, we're living in a world that's going at Mach 10 with some of this innovation, but there's a lot of other things, a lot of other factors and stresses that people are dealing with. And they don't really, in many cases, have the skills to to know how to even navigate it. Yeah. So, you know, we you and I talked a little bit about this, but I'd like to explore it with you, if you don't mind, you know, what are some of the factors that make people feel uh in a proof, you know, from a clinician standpoint that the burnout that they're dealing with, and what are how do they determine whether they should raise their hand and say, I need some help? I mean, how do how do they deal with it? How do they cope? And are the things that we should be doing to try to put things in place to help that?

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Yeah, um, it's such an interesting space and it's a much needed space. You know, when I uh after I finished my education, I went straight to the children's hospital where there were children dying, right? I mean, they were dying because of chronic illness, terminally ill, birth defects, whatever it may be, but they were dying. And we didn't learn how to do that per se. No one really taught us the ways to maintain that and then turn around after your 14-hour shift and come back for another one. Like, you know, it's it's one of those things. And what I credit for me to get through that, I credit the collective family that I had that I worked with in the hospital. Those nurses, those doctors that were on the floor with me had been there, some of them two decades. I mean, they were there for a very long time. And I have to give sight and gratitude to the idea that there are armies on those floors who hold each other up when they lose patients and they become a family. You know, we would cry together, we would hug families together, and we would have times of quiet, you know, where we would all need space to really accept what just happened. But I was fortunate because I was in a time where I had that. I don't know if everybody has that. And right now, what's happening is I mean, as a provider, I would cry by myself, honestly, because it was too much. It was too daunting to say, oh, you need to see more patients. And in my mind, and all of us were thinking when, where, and the hospitals were trying. I'm not discounting that they were not. I think that it was being done as a kind of like a general layer, like, oh, we have mental health services, oh, we have counselors through your benefits. But when you're burdened in clinic and you're working pajama time and you're working on your weekends, who's going to look for a therapist for you? Who how are you gonna have time for that? Because you don't even have time for your own children, right? I mean, I see doctors who are racing to soccer games. And my biggest fear is that someone's gonna get into a car accident on the way there, right? And so there is a huge burnout, there is a huge exhaustion of the administrative load. To be honest with you, if you can decrease that, the the um digesting and accepting of the things that happen to your patients, it becomes a little bit more manageable to grieve and to feel because you're not grieving in exhaustion, right? Like that compounds on itself, quite honestly. And so before, you know, doctors would hold the hands of patients, they would fight the idea that you need to hurry up. But I worked with uh physicians who would sit on the patient beds and hold the patients' hands and hug the ma's and hug the dads, and it didn't matter how late it was going to be for them to go home. That is just what they did. And so there is opportunity to help nurses, there is opportunity to help the clinical assistants and medical assistants in these hospitals and in these facilities. They are the ones who are touching the patients, and they're going home, not equipped to turn that off and then go be in home. So, yes, massive opportunity to help support, to help recalibrate your system. I mean, you're just in stress a lot all day. Right. And then you go home and you're another kind of stress, right? And so the mental health component is compounding and we're we're having health issues because of it. You know, providers are not always able to maintain their physical and mental health. Nurses are having issues with that. When do we work out? When are when do we have time to eat healthy? And we're over we're overlooking these things. It's it's a it's a complete system, right? I can't solve all that by myself, but there are there are things that can be done to help support individuals so they don't have the mental strain as much.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Yeah, and I think that there's a an acceptance and a normalization of things that I think we've we've allowed uh with all the pressure and all the the race to innovate. And it's just it it's something we've got to try to really kind of step take a step back and realize what we've done and fix this because this is not just a small issue that we can course correct with a a a cool workflow. It's just not that simple. We we really do have to focus on creating that space for an example and leaving one exam room and going into another one to see another patient. You're already behind schedule. Yeah. How when are you going to have a moment to reset? Right. That's the basic thing. You know, we're just not we're not designing anything that that really helps with that. And I I think there's a lot of opportunities for us. And I love how you're thinking about it. And I hope that we can find some some other uh people. I know there's there's a handful that I've that I've met, and I'm sure that you have too, they'll probably be excited to to find some things that are really meaningful. But for goodness sake, enough with the cool tech. That's not what this is about, right? Yes, we don't do cool things, but it's really gotta be aimed at, you know, improving the human experience. It has to. And that's not just one side of it or another, it's just all of it. Um, if you're gonna do technology stuff and you that make that floats your boat, awesome. Let's let's put our heads together and do something that's actually going to help the people that are needing care and the ones who are able to deliver the care. But yeah, you know, impeding it by throwing more layers of administrative tasks on it and heaping more pressure, it's not a solution we could keep doing. To people, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Yeah, I 100% agree on that. And you know, a part of me is excited because of the out-of-box thinking that unfortunately I do sometimes, or a lot of the times, what it comes down to is that it can be done using the end goal, which is giving the human component back. And a lot of times when I'm building something or if I'm advising on something, or if I'm problem solving for something, my end goal is I imagine that it's like my parent or my child. What did they need? What do I need in those components? I'm solving for that. I want that to be the image in my mind all the time because that is what is happening. We are solving for someone's child, parent, aunt, adult, grandparent, whatever it is. In the end, we are solving for humans. And the care component is not going to go away. We have to deliver care. The health of the nation is still the health of the nation, disregarding how fast the technology is moving. We still have a baby boomer population. We still have a middle generation coming. And so I'm excited to see how AI can help with those things, you know, help kind of with preventative medicine. And like hopefully in the next generations, we can have less healthcare load. But we still have the reality of our own problem today. Right. And I do feel like, you know, I'm like a little kid in a playground because there's so many things that you can do. And if you love technology, what I would say as an advice is pick one problem, one problem in the workflow, one goal, one thing. Because if you try to go solve everything, there's too much to solve, and you get lost in the universe of things. And so let's say you're going to focus on, I'm going to help my families navigate their care, or I'm going to help families consolidate their information so that if they ever go to a provider, they can give it to them. And it's a consolidated view of my health so that my new provider can spend time with me, getting to know me with full-on information, right? So I think being very focused on what you're wanting to go and fix. You know, there's companies out there who are working on claims. I think that's a great place to start, right? Like chasing claims, chasing pending claims. Why is it pending? Get the information, use AI to go collect it. That's amazing. So that's one that's one component of the whole thing. So for me, it's like I'm kind of focusing on the human side of things. And where is it that my mind can help in the technology to then give back that? Right. And so, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

Yeah. That's actually that's something that just you just dawned on me when you're saying that there's a strategic side of this that we gotta we have to think about too. And if you're head of an organization and you know that you've got some burnout issues, and they're both in the nursing area as well as the the uh, you know, pre all clinicians essentially. There's probably other support staff that are dealing with it too. But we also know that there's a global shortage of nursing. There's also a shortage in a lot of specialties. If people are seeing this kind of load, what's the incentive to want to go to school to become a clinician? Yeah, we have to think differently about this. This is not just, you know, how fast can we get the technology in there? Can we be more efficient? Can we create, you know, make things somehow more tolerable? No, we we're talking about a an ecosystem that's been eroding, basically, because we've just been focused on the efficiency stuff and the in the in the technology thing. I mean, that's not I want to oversimplify it, but I think you understand where I'm going with it. Yeah. Why would someone want to go into one of these professions if this is the way it's going to be?

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Yeah. And you know, it's funny because I saw some chatter, someone had posted, like, oh, AI can help some, you know, help a therapist see five times more patient or five, yeah, five X patients in a month. And the chatter was therapists responding, like, who said that we can see five X patients in a month, right? Do I agree that it will help us be more efficient from the administrative things that we do? 100%. I think that there are lots of ways to help that. What I don't think the goal is, it's for people to see more people so that we can get more revenue and so that we can, you know what I mean? And so I think that again, the goal and the mission of what the initiative is needs to be realistic in the sense of like, is this really gonna help my providers? Like, is this really gonna help my clinicians? Like looking at that, because I'm gonna tell you the burnout is real. And if we start losing amazing clinicians in our healthcare spaces, we will not deliver care the way that we've always known how we do. And and there is people out there doing amazing health care and providing services. But if we don't plan for that, we're gonna not have those people and they're gonna leave, right? Or they're gonna retire early, or they're gonna, I don't know, go figure out another way of giving care or figuring out another way to make an income. Because people's passion when they come into this space is not just money. It is really, it it takes special people to do what they do. And I'm I'm not even including myself. All the people that I worked with, all the people that I watch now, all the people who are doing surgeries, all the paramedics, everybody who is giving themselves to help others. It takes a very special passion and calling to do that. And we need to build systems that honor that because if we don't, it's going to diminish and we'll lose kind of those angels that are that are in the world to to help bring light to those who are needing it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

Yeah, I don't want to I don't want to make people feel horrible. I know some of this stuff is a little bit heavy that we're talking about, but I think it's important though, just to have the context and the understanding of what the what's really going on so that we are really start to d dial in our thinking around what are we really going to solve for and what's really going to be meaningful. And, you know, from that perspective, there's a lot of things to be optimistic about. And I know I've seen a few things. And they, you know, I I love to, you know, hear from your perspective some of the things that you've seen that you know that that are exciting that maybe we haven't um paid enough attention to that we should be.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

Yeah, you know, I really think that there's a a lot of companies out there who are doing this AI scribing, which has been a thing before, and but now there's like layers on top of that that like help summarize information, pull out pertinent data, display information for a provider so that they can, you know, consolidate that and have a summary while they're talking to the patients. So they're not typing as much, right? Because they are actually able to look at the patient and speak instead of sitting at a computer and like typing on the screen and the patient's kind of behind the computer, you're not really looking at them.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

So I think that's myself.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Yeah. The diagnostic things. I mean, I'm super excited about the fact that they're using these technologies in diagnostics. I mean, the amount of people that you're gonna find who have something that may have been overlooked and like can actually speed up their care and speed up the way that they can um recover. Like those are all, and this is why I'm excited. I I am very excited in the idea of using these technologies to get ahead of things, to catch things earlier, to not have stage four cancer. Can you imagine a world where like patients don't have stage four cancer and we catch it at stage one? Like, those are all very exciting things, and there's so many things. I mean, you have GI disease, you have endocrinology as a whole sector in itself, you have metabolic disorders, you have cardiovascular, the amount of opportunity there is in order to help kind of the outcomes of patient care and patient outcomes for the nation as a whole, maybe the world as a whole, that's really exciting stuff. Like I'm really excited about that. I think where we have to focus though is you still have to have delivery of care if that's the way we're going. And we're not gonna use AI to like talk to patients because I have a feeling that my 80-year-old grandmother may not talk to a robot openly, and I may be wrong, but she may not talk to an AI openly if she had a human. She might, she's gonna pick the human probably because that's what they've known. That's how they've grown, that's how they've generationally done things. So the it's just, I think the through line is just not forgetting that we're solving who we're solving for, why we're solving for it, and what are we doing? Like what are we doing it for? Right. So I do have a lot of excitement about it. I mean, I'm playing all the time to see how it is that we can make it better. What really is serves, and something that just popped in my head, one of the things that's very difficult is that, you know, I can come up with a lot of ideas to solve the gaps within a clinical workflow, for example. But I can't throw five apps at a provider who has 50 patients to see in a day that has to do 50 charts in an EMR and then go sign into another platform and do one thing, and then go sign into another platform and do one thing. And so if we can move into a world where it can be consolidated with an EMR, there are compliance rules that allow those types of things, that would be very helpful, right? And so that goes into like regulations, compliance. That's a whole nother world. But do the EMRs want that type of help? Do those companies want to open the gateway and say, yes, we like these ideas. You can implement your software within our universe of EMR. Maybe that will happen. Maybe it's happening now. But consolidating the use of the technology in one system that the providers are using or the clinicians are using would be very beneficial.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Yeah, it's it seems like we've been talking about interoperability for a very, very long time, but it's been very, very slow, to say the least. Yeah. You know, there has been, you know, there certainly has been some legislation and appending for quite a while now that would at least force the sharing of information if you know, at least when it comes time for treatment. Right. So that you know the data would be made available, you know, the the minute you are if you're a physician, the minute you're gonna be treating a patient, you should have access to all that information. That's the premise of it. But it doesn't seem to be moving at the clip that it should. I I kind of thought that maybe they made a mistake even talking about it because it sounded like the right thing. Right. But it but it it is a it's still an issue that we've gotta figure we've gotta figure out how to solve for. And it's not it's not easy because there's so much there's so much red tape and yeah, there's regulatory things that are different in every state. Uh there's just a lot of barriers. But that's why people like us need to put our heads together, yeah, walk arms, find some more people, and really go after this hard. Like you said, remember why we're doing it. Yeah. Because there's a lot we can do. We just we have to apply ourselves to the right things. Right. And we're some of that means that people are gonna have to push on some leaders, honestly, because there's this is this is too important. You know, I talked a little bit about the erosion of trust and that's that it exists. I mean, everyone knows inherently today, if you're if you're paying attention, there's been trust breaking going on for a long time, and it's not on not something that we think about deliberately. It's just that the environment that we're in, it's just been so overrun with technology that people aren't relating to one another like they used to. And so, you know, you you're you're just being lulled to sleep a little bit, and all of a sudden you realize that, oh, I thought they trusted me. No, they they don't. You know, if you're a CEO, the stats are not pretty uh and your engagement scores might be really, really good. But what I look at in the middle of what I was looking at the when I look at engagement, I don't worry about the stuff on the top end, because of course you all you all want to hear the positive or people want to deal with the things that are on the bottom end too. But the piece that's really, really frightening to me is when people don't have or not motivated to even move the needle to give you a positive or a negative. And and that to me is that that's really the part you want to be paying attention to, because if you have a lot of space in the middle, you've really got to uh dig into understand why. Yeah. And a lot of it comes down to people need to be able to trust. Yeah, it's it needs to happen at every layer when it comes to how an organization runs. But if you want to do technology things, you want to do these kind of initiatives and also make sure that we're supporting the mission, we really need to remember that this is this is entirely about humanity and in caring for people. It's gotta start there and it has to stay on that. And we have to apply ourselves to the things that really undergird the you know the mission of patient care. And you know, we first do know her, right? And that's not that's not something we talk about enough uh uh outside of a you know a clin a clinical care type of perspective. But I think as a non-clinician, I need to take that to heart too. I mean, are we building things that are helping or not? And if it's adding more burden, more layers, that that's that's not a good answer. So a lot we can do there, and we we need to do better.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

Um we're we're kind of getting getting uh close to the time uh um on this on our show today. But if we can look ahead, uh maybe in the next you know few months, you know, thinking about some of the things that you've been working on or that you may be aware of. I'd love to hear and hear your thoughts around what what do you think we could tackle reasonably. If we can some smart people together who are actually passionate, what could we do? And then maybe talk about where you see things over the next 12 to 18 months as well. I would go further than that, but the technology is accelerating so fast it's probably things we can solve tomorrow that we don't even know we could.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

Yeah, I think um, you know, to touch on a little bit what you were talking about about the trust erosion, I think there is opportunities in coming back to empathetic leadership and starting from the top, empathetic leadership. When I came into the clinical world and what I was seeing um when we were in training is that the leadership was present, the leadership was around, the leadership was open to questions. They were very involved because they had done the work before. They were clinical, they had had their hands in there, they had seen the long days, they had seen, you know, a patient code at the end of your shift, and you had to stay till 11 o'clock at night, even though you were at the hospital at 6 a.m. They had seen all of those things. And there was always an a layer. And again, this is I'm talking about my experience where I grew up as a clinician and provider, but there was a layer of empathy that kind of ran through the creation of goals and the driving of goals. And now, more than ever, because of the burnout, because of being tired, because people are overwhelmed with noise of information and the fear that's happening, empathetic leadership is necessary. And we have to build trust again. And that's and that's another component that I would love to have my hands in. As a leader, I was very firm. These are what the things we have to do today. These are your goals for the week. You will not be late. You know, there are certain pillars of trust that you have to meet in order for me to give you autonomy to go and do your job. And that empathetic leadership is required. Revisiting your mission statement and your assuming or assessing your culture more than ever is needed, more frequently than ever, because the world is changing, just like you said. And so I think there's an opportunity right now to go back and build that empathy again, remembering why we're doing it and what we're doing it for. And my outlook in the next, you know, 12 to 18 months, and where I kind of get excited is like projects that will help my mind kind of goes to consolidating information, presenting information in ways that's a summary style for families and providers. So it's kind of like your kind of pocket of this is me, this is my health, I'm having these issues right now. And so the provider or clinician doesn't have to call a PCP's office and call the OR and call the ortho specialist to go get all of the information and then build a story. That is kind of where I think is where I kind of find passion because I I've been in so many scenarios and so many experiences as a provider, as a mom, as a daughter, a daughter-in-law, now a niece. You know, I'm helping my aunt navigate cancer right now. And it is a beating because I'm a clinician and reading all the notes. Yeah, I can't imagine a 75-year-old individual reading six notes from six different people with six different directions on what to do on what day when. It is quite frankly overwhelming. And so where I see myself in the next few months is working with teams who are maybe thinking about doing something like that so that I can help kind of put in the little seeds of like these are the things that would be very helpful, right? And in 12 to 18 months, I think that there's gonna be a lot of individuals who are gonna create some cool ideas and hopefully have the sandbox to help implement it and test it. And I'm hoping that like more and more cool things like come out that way and the exhaustion and burnout kind of diminishes a little bit and the trust and empathy starts coming up. And I think there is a world for that. We just have to do it properly.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Well, yeah, I I can speak for myself. I I'm happy to tag team with you and help you be supportive in any way I can for what you're what you're doing. I think it's it's incredibly important. And just to reinforce your your point on empathy, two things I'll say. There is some really cool technology that has been developed by some some really brilliant people and clinicians out in out in California. And I'm sure you and I will talk a little bit more about it because I think there could be some fun things that we might be able to do to help bring some of that technology to places where it's not likely to get if we can't solve for things from a financial standpoint. But that's a whole other thing. But the empathy thing I really want to just order encourage people to think about this because we're not talking about just you at the C level. There are people that are managing your teams at the very first level, a supervisor, whatever their title is, that's not the important thing. We need to make sure that your management training actually has some sections and components in there that are really teaching how to be empathetic and what are the signs that you need to do it when you're working with human beings. It's just really important. I think it gets overlooked a lot, but there's never been a bigger need for that right now than there is right now, at least from what I'm sensing. And I would I I don't know if you agree with that.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

I agree with that. And I, you know, the way I always lead, it's I always look at somebody and I and again I go back to the same thing. Like it is somebody's mother, it is someone's daughter, it is someone's sister. And more than looking at what they're doing wrong, it's understanding what they're doing, number one. Yeah. Taking the time to understand, is there a knowledge gap that they just didn't understand it? And really teasing out these critical questions, right? Are they not doing it because they're stressed because their child is sick and like their child is a babysitter that they just found on the internet the night before because they were desperate to find somebody for a shift? These are the types of things, especially, I mean, this could go anywhere, but in healthcare, especially, you're talking about a let's say, let's take the example of a nurse. You know, you're talking about a nurse who's coming to take care of four of four or five very sick patients in the hospital who left their sick child at home who may not have found someone that they 100% trusted, but they needed to take the shift, right? Right. And so I always remembered that I'm with individuals who have the same stressors that our patients have. And so we have to be very mindful of these things. We have to be mindful of the noise. We have to be mindful that people are overwhelmed right now. And we really need to take a pulse of where our team is individually, not just collectively. And that takes time for a manager. You have to take a lot of the admin lift. They have to regularly meet, they have to regularly report, right? So there is um empathy is something that if we can have tools and workflows, and I don't even want to say workflows, but opportunities to inject empathy again into these spaces, it will tremendously bring an advantage to what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

Yeah, it it's it's so needed. I mean, it it really is. You know, you don't have to take too many steps outside your front door, or don't you can't turn on social media or or a television and not see that there's a need for this. So yeah. I really appreciate your attention to that as we're wrapping up our conversation today. And again, I can't thank you enough. I really do appreciate that you you took the time to come on and have this conversation. And um excited to talk more with you because I think there's just so much more that we can do in certainly conversations that need to continue to be pushed so that the the clinical and human views, both of those things stay in focus, and we don't let this just be a technology thing. And and maybe, maybe we can actually have the kind of impact that we we intend on the technology will serve humanity the way it should. Should not the other way around. So again, thank you so much for coming on the show. And I look forward to working with you again. And let's find some things we can tag team and we'll we'll rally some troops and we'll do some good things together.

SPEAKER_01 44:12

Yeah, let's do it. You know, I'm I'm hopeful. Maybe I'm, you know, too much in the rainbows and unicorn world. I but I do feel um the good, the spirit of us will collectively do good. And so we can use the technology, we can create things and ideas. And I and I do have a lot of faith in the fact that we can do it. And there are ways to do that. So my intention is to help as much as possible and to increase our empathy and really look at what we're doing and take care of everything in the sense of our providers, clinicians, any staff that is working in these places that then deliver our care. It is a very big spectrum of folks. And there, I would love to continue conversations of how we can create ways to help that innovate and utilize technologies to take off burdens. Yeah, I will welcome those conversations and ideas, you know, strategies anytime.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

Uh we'll I'll make sure that you you have all the information that you need in the show notes to be able to reach out to Phnom if you want to have one of these conversations. There she's not uh lacking in passion or ideas. Uh I think if you're somebody who's looking to solve some real problems, I think this would be a smart move for you to reach out to Phnom. And that's gonna do it for this episode of the Signal Room. Really appreciate you all for listening. Stay calm, stay human.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 45:39

That's it for this episode of the Signal Room. If today's conversation sparks something in you, an idea, a challenge, or a perspective worth amplifying, I'd love to hear from you. Message me on LinkedIn or visit Sigma Room Podcast.com to explore being a guest on an upcoming episode. Until next time, stay tuned, stay curious, and stay human.