E65. Healthcare Ethics and the Future Role of AI with Joe Ivie

Expand your understanding of healthcare ethics and AI's future role with our guest, Joe Ivie, Regional Mission Director for Bay Care Health System in Florida, USA.  A life journey that began with a medic's role in the Army, spiraled onto the path of a hospital Chaplain, and culminated in being a Mission Director, Joe's story is a compelling testament of passion and purpose.

This episode sheds light on the intriguing workings of the Ethics Committee, discussing the profound importance of advanced directives and patient autonomy. Drawing from his rich experience, Joe explains the critical role of a surrogate in making decisions on behalf of patients, and how this interplays with the four main ethical principles. He highlights the intricate dilemmas faced in healthcare ethics and how the committee navigates these challenges.

As we strive to understand the future of healthcare, we delve into the impact of AI on the industry. Weighing the pros and cons of technology, we explore everything from precision in conducting x-rays and scans to the potential of AI replacing human jobs. We further delve into the pivotal role of privacy and the game-changing potential of AI in writing and education. Joe shares his expert perspective on these topics, revealing a fascinating glimpse into the future of healthcare. Listen in and expand your horizons about the ethical and technological dilemmas faced in healthcare.

Connect with Mr. Joe Ivie:  mrjoeivie@icloud.com or Alfred Joe Ivie on LinkedIn.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Looking for leader and team development for your organization? Contact us today!
info@belemleaders.org

Until next time, keep doing great things!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi there, welcome to Conversations where we seek to advance your leader in team excellence by discussing relevant topics that impact today's organizations. Welcome to the show. Hey there, and welcome to Conversations, where today we have Mr Joe Ivy. Joe currently serves as a regional mission director for Bay Care Health System. In his role, he provides oversight in the areas of spiritual care, palliative care and healthcare ethics. Ivy has completed an MDiv at Regent University and an MBA at St Leo University. Welcome to the show, joe. Where are you coming to us from?

Speaker 2: 0:40

So you know, I'm a Floridian through and through, born and raised here.

Speaker 1: 0:45

Right, that's unusual.

Speaker 2: 0:47

I left for grad school, left when I was younger for the Army, but always came back to Florida. You know, as I say, you can take the boy out of Florida, but you can't forward out of the boy.

Speaker 1: 1:01

That's right, so it does yeah, well, I'm happy to have you on today. We're going to talk a little bit about a lot of different things, about what you do and how you touch and how you serve people. Now it says here that Bay Care Health System. So where is Bay Care Health System? Where are the people that they serve? Is it just one area? Is it regional?

Speaker 2: 1:24

No, it's actually multiple counties throughout West Central Florida and along that West Coast of Florida, so think Clearwater, tampa Bay, all the way into Polk County, which would be Lakeland, winterhaven specifically, and then Bartho. They also recently built one of their newest hospitals in Westlady Chapel. They are an expanding health system, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:58

That's terrific. Well, I know that healthcare has been your passion for the last 15 years, but, as you mentioned, you were in the Army as a medic. So how do you go from being a medic to a hospital chaplain, to a mission?

Speaker 2: 2:15

Well, I mean, obviously, all that kind of starts, the call on your life, and I literally thought that becoming a pastor is that's what I was going to do. And you've probably heard tons of people say this tell God your plans. And he just laughs and says, okay, buddy, you're going to do what I say you're going to do. We did some church planting and served on plenty of churches as associate pastors and various things, and then my father had a stroke when we were at a church near Gainesville, florida, and so we wanted to get back closer to help my mother, and so I actually took a detour and started working in correctional chaplaincy, which I had never done institutional chaplaincy work, and so that's a whole different ball of wax working in the correctional system.

Speaker 2: 3:30

So I wasn't 100% sure that's where God would have me planted. But I was looking for a federal position because at that point I had already earned the masters in divinity, and so that allows you to expand where you can actually do ministry, and one of those is in the federal prison system. And in looking on the federal websites I found something called clinical pastoral education at James Haley VA hospital, and I'd never really even thought about healthcare chaplaincy. I'd never kind of connected the two together. My background as a medic my mother was the nurse for 52 years, just raised in that environment, and so I went ahead and applied for that as well, and it wasn't supposed to start until January, I think I applied for it in like June or July, and I was approved to do the year long residency with the VA hospital. And then I got a call from the CP supervisor at the time saying hey, we had someone drop out of the program, we need you to come in August, and so I really had to pray. So I'm in long story short. We ended up doing that about a year, and three months there, took a position as a PRN chaplain with Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa towards the end of that CPE experience and then, after working for Moffitt for a little while, I took a job at Winter Haven Hospital, which at the time was not part of Baycare, it was an independent community hospital and I was a staff chaplain at that hospital, and not long, I think only about a year and a half. They had made the announcement that we were going to go ahead and sell the hospital to the Baycare health system to become part of that system and the manager of the chaplaincy program had retired and so the operations director at the time approached me and said, hey, would you like to manage the chaplaincy program? And so kind of ended up in that position through a bunch of different circumstances.

Speaker 2: 6:10

And when Baycare came in they had a lot of community outreach. They had a lot of internal programming, the mission piece which is helping those folks in our community who are less fortunate through food banks and connections with those things. An ethics program, what we refer to as faith community nursing. A lot of hospitals don't have that, but those are nurses who use their faith to serve their faith communities.

Speaker 2: 6:44

So you think of a faith community nurse would be someone who volunteers their time to take their expertise in health care to their local church and be that connection between the church and those individuals to make sure that they're better taken care of when they leave the hospital. So that's a whole different thing. But in any case, baycare was having all these new programs and at the local level they didn't know where to put them and so eventually they just started putting them under me, so they would put faith community nursing under me and palliative care under me and in ethics and all these different things, and so they weren't things I didn't have experience in. You know, when I was at the VA hospital, I got experience in palliative care and experience in ethics, but eventually we had a new VP come in and say you know what you're doing is you're doing the work of a mission director, and so that position was created for the Polk area and that's what I've been doing for quite a while now.

Speaker 1: 7:54

Oh my gosh, what a journey. You know, God is funny like that, how he'll just, you know, kind of turn things around. And it's interesting how you started in healthcare and you're in healthcare now you know, yeah, so that's terrific. What a great story. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so you talked about hospital ethics committee, right? And that's part of what you do. So how about we talk a little bit about what the purpose of that is?

Speaker 2: 8:28

Sure, sure. So. So I can tell you that, you know, in bake here we have both a system ethics process and we also have a process at the local level. So our hospitals have advisory groups and these are multidisciplinary groups that you know. They include physicians and nurses, and maybe social workers, sometimes community members, chaplains, and what it allows the hospital to do, whether it be the patients or the healthcare workers or the families, it gives them a process for, you know, for seeking guidance and we call that ethical consultation. So that's part of what we it's like. It's like a stool with three lanes right.

Speaker 2: 9:23

So an ethics committee has three main purposes. One is to provide consultation so you know, anytime you have difficult choices on the line. It could be end of life decisions, it could be various treatment options that people are facing there are. There's tension between and I'll talk about this a little bit but there's tension between the ethical principles. There's four guiding principles and we'll go over those a little bit, but consultation is one of the legs.

Speaker 2: 9:57

Another thing that an ethics committee does is we're the ones who are looking at policies throughout the hospital and we either systematically review those, we're involved in the development of policy, and all of these guidelines are related directly to patient care.

Speaker 2: 10:16

They're directly to those ethical matters that are going to come up and you think about the benefit of a policy, right?

Speaker 2: 10:23

So if you look at a DNR policy or a policy around the end of life, these are things that are constantly happening in your hospital and so, instead of having to constantly reinvent the wheel, if you have a policy that addresses a specific area, then you can align it with ethical principles and you can take care of any legal requirements and you don't have to constantly deal with those issues because it's kind of in the policy.

Speaker 2: 10:51

And then the third thing we do is education and trainings. So you have healthcare staff and, whether it's around general ethical issues or informed consent or advanced directives or various topics, you're helping them to better understand the ethical concerns that are going to come up. So if you look at those three things that flow out of the ethics committee, they're very symbiotic, right, you're creating an education space where you're going to identify people who have a passion for ethics, so that feeds into your actual committee and then that helps you to train more consultants and then that helps you to review policy. And you know they all kind of interwork together. So it kind of makes sense if that helps.

Speaker 1: 11:40

Yeah, it does help. You mentioned about advanced directives. Did you want to talk a little bit about that here?

Speaker 2: 11:48

Oh yeah, no, I mean. So you know in the healthcare system what those are. They're specifically legal documents that what they're doing is they're allowing a patient an opportunity to express what they would or would not want done in the worst case scenario. So you think, right, what we would love? And you have to realize this right, all doctors want their patients to get better. There's not a doctor I've ever met who doesn't want their patients to get better. But we live in a world where that's not always the case. Right, we have death, we have disease, and we have to deal with the realities of that. And the thing.

Speaker 2: 12:35

One of the things and we were kind of going to talk about the ethical principles, I'll just mention one right now. It's autonomy. Autonomy is your ability to make your own decisions. Right, you have the right to come into a hospital and not only be informed about what's happening, but to make your own decisions, and so an advanced directive lets you express those medical preferences ahead of time.

Speaker 2: 12:59

So sometimes, what happens to individuals as they get sicker, they become incapacitated, and that's a legal term. It's also a term that we use in healthcare. That means that you can't make complex medical decisions, and it could be because of a physiological reason right, you're in a phasic patient who can no longer communicate because of the trajectory of your disease process. Or it could be because you're confused right, that you actually have to have a consult come in to evaluate your mental capacity right, and sometimes that can be a phycological in nature. Sometimes it could be a UTI or some other unknown infection could be medical. So capacity is something where it's always assumed when someone comes into a hospital, that is how we treat them. But they are a fully functioning, autonomous individual with capacity. Until there's a reason to question that, right. So it is something that's very important and the way that we protect that is, we use a couple of forms.

Speaker 2: 14:07

I mean, as far as people's decision-making, protecting decision-making we use a form called a surrogate form. A surrogate in Florida is another legal determination. We have surrogates and we have proxies. They do the same job but they're assigned differently. So if somebody comes into a hospital and they were a very sick individual and they're unable to make decisions, somebody has to make decisions for them. What we would prefer is to see that they had an advanced directive where they named an individual that would be their surrogate. If they didn't, florida law allows us to go down and order a priority to find out who would make the decision. So typically it's gonna be spouse, then it would be adult children, a parent, a relative. It could even be a close personal friend. But the problem with the proxy order is we have to follow the order. So that's why I think it's always best that someone has a surrogate.

Speaker 2: 15:06

You wanna name a person who could make decisions for you, somebody you trust. The other form we have is called a living will and that's more prescriptive right. You get to actually name in there, line by line, what you would or would not want, right, like if I had basically it's stating if I had a terminal illness, if I was in a position where I was not going to get better, like think things like the advanced stages of Alzheimer's, the advanced stages of HIV or AIDS, the advanced stages of cancer, things where I'm not saying you'll never find me saying that God can't do certain things. But medicine has its limitations, right? Doctors and medicine, they're human beings, so we're limited in what we can do. And so people wanna know that if I don't want CPR or I don't wanna be kept alive on machines, they can stay ahead of time, in those worst case scenarios, their preferences and that's their right, right? I mean, I get the frustration from somebody who's not involved in this all the time because you're thinking, well, why would you give up or why would you? But that's not really what's happening, right? I mean this is just someone not giving up but accepting the reality of their situation.

Speaker 2: 16:32

I've always said to people consider Lazarus right. When he came out of the tomb he was already gone. So God doesn't need a ventilator or machines or tubes. If it's God's will that somebody is here, they'll be here, and if it's God's will that they're gonna go home, he'll take them home. So we don't have as much control over when that time comes is sometimes we like to think we do.

Speaker 2: 17:01

So it's better, I think, for people to plan to really understand the healthcare system and navigate it, because the default of every hospital these are acute care centers. Their default is to treat. That's their default is to treat. So if you don't tell people what you want, they're gonna treat you. There's some other ones that attorneys do locally, like a durable power of attorney for healthcare. It's really the same thing. It's just all wound up together surrogate and then line by line like a living will. And then in Florida we also have a do not resuscitate order, and that one is specifically about CPR.

Speaker 2: 17:45

There are certain people who might have congestive heart failure or some of a chronic disease process. Maybe they do have stage four cancer and they've been living with just terrible pain and so they wanna ensure that when they're gonna go they wanna go A lot of times. Elderly patients right when CPR would result in cracking their ribs and just a lot of. If you've never seen CPR, it's a very violent thing. I mean it does save lives, don't get me wrong. But there's a certain population of people where medicine is. I've always said this medicine is like a double-edged sword. Right, when medicine is making you better, it is wonderful, it is God-given. But when medicine is no longer making you better, it can hurt you. We can continue to prolong suffering in people beyond what really we maybe should be doing ethnically in healthcare sometimes.

Speaker 1: 19:03

And, as you're naming all these things, it goes back to so, like the leaders that I work with, busy, busy people, and I think as a society, we really don't think about death that much or getting sick and having an illness and having to have these things in place, and what I'm hearing and thinking on is that we really, when we are well, we should be having these things in place for the time that perhaps they need to be used Absolutely that's the whole idea behind advanced care planning.

Speaker 2: 19:44

I mean that's the whole point. The point is I get it. I mean people that's not normal to fixate on death all the time, right, I mean people just don't do that right.

Speaker 1: 19:56

It's the reality.

Speaker 2: 19:58

Yeah, I mean, you know it's out there. Yeah, you know it's out there. I mean, some people they're a little superstitious, they're like if I talk about it, it's gonna happen, which that's not true. But people get like that. People are afraid to approach it with their parents because maybe they think that their parents are gonna think, oh man, they're gonna think I want them to die so I can get their money. Most of the time that's not true.

Speaker 2: 20:24

Now, occasionally you're gonna find people that are just uncomfortable talking about it, and so I recommend to them look, you should at least, right at a minimum, express to your loved ones what you may want in these worst case scenario. I'm not telling you. You have to write it down. I think that's the right thing to do. I think filling out a surrogate form is the right thing to do, but at a minimum, at least talk to somebody so that you know really if you think about it. You know I have five kids, five grandkids. My gift, right, I think, to my children, to my adult children, is not having them feel like they're making those decisions, that they know what I feel about it, so that really all they're doing is respecting my wishes, and I think you're gonna help your own children when they have to deal with the reality of your death, which is gonna happen.

Speaker 1: 21:28

So it's like what you were talking about policy before, and it's, you know, our own personal policy. This is how we want things to go, and I know my mother-in-law is currently moving out of her home and into a facility and we were asked all these questions and it's these are the things that you know in the conversations. It's in my head. I'm thinking to myself, yeah, these are really needed. And so, knowing that you were coming on and I know Florida's different right it is, it is so people would need to take a look at their own state.

Speaker 2: 22:08

So you know they are pretty reciprocal. You know across the 50 states. You know most of them, including the territories, are going to respect your wishes coming in from another state. But it is important if you're living in a different state that you look and see what's available in your state Because it may not be exactly the same as what we have here.

Speaker 1: 22:32

Good stuff, yeah, all right. What else did we want to talk about? Was there anything on ethics that you wanted to share that we didn't get to?

Speaker 2: 22:47

yet I mean, I'll just say so, yeah, so an ethics committee. I'll explain this. So it's different depending on the hospital that you work with. You know we happen to be a connection you know, bay care, a connection of community hospitals and Catholic hospitals, and so we have a real mission connected to everything we do, which means in our ethics committee we have appointed chairs, and so the mission directors, which we have four of them in the various regions that serve the hospitals and the communities. They chair the ethics committee, and so that ensures that you know the missions and the goals, the guidelines for the committee, the direction for the ethics committee is the same right. So no matter what hospital you find yourself in within Bay care, you're going to get the same good ethical care, and all of our hospitals have those underlying principles. So I kind of mentioned that a little bit. Let me go ahead and just name them off real quick. So I talked about autonomy, right, and that is the respect for the patient's right to self determination. They use an individual. You get the final say as to whether or not you do this or that in health care People.

Speaker 2: 24:17

So back in the day, doctors were very paternalistic. It started that way, where you were like the child, and they were the parent. And there was a woman in New York. There's a famous case where the woman was visiting, I believe, from California to New York hospital and she had pain in her abdomen and she went in to see the doctor and she consulted with the surgeon and he said well, I believe you have fibroid tumors. And she said well, you can, I want you to evaluate. You know they had to do an internal evaluation, but I don't want you to remove them. She wanted to go back to California. Whatever she wanted to do, she was directing the doctor what she didn't want done. This was at the turn of the century, so it was a long time ago. But they put her under ether. He saw that they're tumors and they were big and he removed them. He did exactly the opposite of what she because he believed that was what was best for her. And so when she awoke, of course she was angry and she went before the judge. She actually sued the hospital and won, and so that was kind of the beginning of the idea that really patients have the same over their own medical treatment.

Speaker 2: 25:44

And so autonomy is a high principle in ethics and we want to respect people's autonomy. There's two bookends we talk about. One of them is beneficence. Very simply just means to always do good, right, everything should be to the benefit of the patient. And then the other bookend is non maleficent. So that just means to don't do harm. So do good, don't do harm, don't give people interventions that they don't need, don't do things that are violating someone's autonomy. And then the last one we look at is justice, and that's just to make sure that all people are treated equally and fairly within the health care system.

Speaker 2: 26:26

And so, when you take those four principles, a lot of times an ethical dilemma is when those things are butting up against one another, right? So maybe the family's disagreeing with the physician, or the patient doesn't think the treatment is going the way they think it should, and so that's part of the role is to make sure that our consultants are always prepared to offer that advice to our health care system, to our patients, to our families, and it's important that people know that ethics committees when they come to a decision, it's not law, we're not telling people, we're only offering our advice on the situation. Ultimately, there's a lot of decisions really that the patients need to make or the doctors need to make, and they're seeking some guidance on that. So that's what we do.

Speaker 1: 27:21

So, as a committee, do you have people coming to you, or is it that the consultants are the people that?

Speaker 2: 27:30

perhaps. So you have a larger committee. We have about 12 people, 14 people on the committee. Not everyone on the committee is a consultant, and so the consultants will work in the hospital. They're normally individuals that have the time, because we have a four quadrant model that they walk through and they look at the case itself, they review the medical chart, they meet with the patient and the family and the physician, so it is involved. Right, if you're going to offer some advice, you need to know what you're advising on.

Speaker 2: 28:06

So not everyone who serves on an ethics committee serves as a consultant, but anyone on an ethics committee may have a consultant reach out to them, right, to talk about a particular case. Right, because they may have some expertise. Like, for instance, we have someone who is over our infection control person, right, so you know she's spent years doing infection prevention within hospitals, so she may be an expert, you know, in certain areas. And then, of course, physicians offer really good advice, you know, from a little bit. Now, we don't necessarily have physicians serve as consultants, and that's just because there might be a little conflict of interest, right, not that they couldn't do it, but it turns out better if you have someone who is disconnected from actually being able to write an order or just correct it with a snap of the finger. You know.

Speaker 1: 29:09

No, that makes sense. Oh well, I'd love to talk a little bit about AI and ethics.

Speaker 2: 29:16

Everybody does. I mean.

Speaker 1: 29:18

I know it's like it's out there and you know I myself am trying to you know, just learn as much as I can from you. Know various people and aspects. There's a lot of conversations. You know both. You know positive and negative and some people landing in the middle, depending on what it is and how it's being used and who's using it and what not I'd love to hear your thoughts and maybe how your committee has or hasn't kind of touched on it.

Speaker 2: 29:51

So, like I said, you know, so we have a local ethics committee that covers the hospitals, you know. But I, as an ethics chair of that, you know we're not dealing with AI, but it is something at the system ethics level, which I'm part of that group, right, and we have a system ethicist as well. So I can promise you that Baycare has a seat at the table. You know, when it comes to the implementation of AI, they've put a lot of ethics to have a seat at that table. So you know what it's gonna look like. You know it's so hard to say.

Speaker 2: 30:27

I mean, like you said, there's positives and negatives. I mean I just think about technology in general, right, I mean things that has been, has been like helpful, right, like it's not always harmful to have word processors, so I'm glad that I don't have to lug a typewriter out, you know, out onto the patient floor. Word processors, cell phones, right, I mean we have this whole suite of software called PatientSafe that connects all the nurses and ethics and everyone, and it all just worked so smoothly. Just the idea of an electronic medical record you know, when I started in healthcare we were still writing our stuff in paper charts, I mean, and stuff was just being, you know, stored in a gigantic warehouse.

Speaker 2: 31:19

So you know AI, I think you know it is gonna be helpful. I don't think it's always gonna be a bad thing. We have an initiative in Baker called Zero Harm, where obviously you know you wanna aim that everything you do does not harm the patient. And so when I think about Zero Harm, when I think about preventative health right, preventative medicine I imagine AI is gonna be a good thing. Right, it's gonna be precise, like, think about x-rays and scans and things like that where you're trying to identify a disease. Right, maybe you need it. Earlier you can identify it, the better, and you know we're gonna have better patient outcomes as it gets integrated, we're gonna have less inaccurate diagnosis, right.

Speaker 2: 32:11

So it's a tool. We just went through a pandemic, right? Would it be used to be able to predict future outbreaks? You know, if we have a large enough database, if we have enough resources in there, can we look at waves of demand and healthcare. So there's lots of like things on the horizon, but you know, I don't wanna be the Pied Piper of AI. Right, I mean, there are negatives. There's things. We have to look at both sides of the coin, right. So we just we talked about technology being good. I mean, hey, at the same time, we have an entire generation that does not have a spell because we use word processors. You got too much screen time, you know, for your kids, everybody's face is stuck in a phone. We rely on copy and paste too much, right. So we have all these technologies, but things that are legitimate concerns One of the big ones in AI I think that we've talked about at a higher level is gaps in privacy.

Speaker 2: 33:11

Right, we take that very important. You have private health information and it is your information, and so, as we give greater access to these systems, that's gonna be a challenge. That I don't know, that we have figured that out yet, right? So I don't think we're gonna march directly to just creating these gigantic databases until we look at what are the real concerns of people's private information remaining private. Another thing I thought about is AI is never going. I don't think AI will ever be able to duplicate the insight and empathy of a human being, and you know, I think that people bring that to their decision making, and so there are nuances in healthcare. So AI as a tool can be helpful, but we don't want to rely on it. And then another thing that we talk about and I think this is a legitimate concern is job replacement. Right, we have a lot of jobs in healthcare that are routine and task, and do we really wanna replace humans, you know, with technology?

Speaker 2: 34:26

and at what rate, and so those are real things we have to consider. I think we talked about this before. I think I kind of said and I wouldn't first say this but we're like lying to plane while we're building it, because AI came on the scene so fast. But I can assure you that, at a system level, ethics has a seat at the table before we implement this type of stuff.

Speaker 1: 34:52

That's good to hear, because that is one of the areas where, you know, I'm kind of itching my head about is like, okay, you know there's a lot of good, but there's a lot of you know whose hands it's in and what it's being used for, and that makes it kind of, you know, piques my interest into thinking about it more deeply. Sure and even-.

Speaker 2: 35:17

I can't even imagine being a high school English professor right now. I'd probably be pulling my hair out.

Speaker 1: 35:22

Yeah, well, that's you know, I adjunct. And one of the things is it's like when all of a sudden somebody's writing is just so pristine where before it wasn't you know, I kind of have to say, okay, is it because of my wonderful feed forward feedback that I'm giving you, or-.

Speaker 2: 35:42

Right, or did a computer writer for you, but it's still, to this point, right and maybe this will change. I still think there's nuance, there's humanity that I don't know, that they can duplicate that.

Speaker 1: 36:01

No, I mean we each uniquely made, you know, and we are creative beings and of course you know it's helped create these.

Speaker 2: 36:10

You know crazy things that were Look everybody has had a curiosity went on a chat GPT and put a command in there. I think I put in there one time to like I have a comedian I can't remember his name but there's a couple of comedians I like I think they're pretty funny and I said write a joke about a particular subject in the style of this comedian. And it was not funny, it was awful and it was nothing like them. So now we're not quite there yet.

Speaker 1: 36:44

Well, speaking of chat, gpt, you know there's so many others. That's the one that everybody talks about. There's many out there now and that have been coming and then, all of a sudden, you know, with opening eye, that's really been the one that people talk about. But I was in the car yesterday and they were saying that they were actually talking about CPR and they had said how, you know, don't rely on you know your voice, you know asking how to do CPR, because I think it was like nine out of 20 didn't say automatically call 911, you know, I always want to be doing that, and so there are some downfalls, and if we as a society are constantly relying just on that, I think we're going to be a law society.

Speaker 1: 37:32

We need to still have our thinking caps on, as my mother 100%.

Speaker 2: 37:37

I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 1: 37:41

Oh well, joe, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you and your knowledge, your wisdom around ethics and you know the good work that you're doing within the hospital system and, gosh, just really good. Was there anything left that maybe we didn't touch on that you just want to share?

Speaker 2: 38:01

No, I mean, I think I think we got most of it. You know, I think you know AI is a good thing to end on because it reminds us that you know you're always going to have to have the human touch. You know, and as long as this whole world is spinning around, my thoughts is you know, whether it's ethics or whether it's patient care or whether it's AI, is something simple, always apply. So I always think the golden rule right Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you can keep that just simple thing in focus, I think, any of the challenges we face in life or in healthcare if you remember that, that you need to always treat people with dignity and respect at the core of what you're doing, because you know we have values that underpin everything we do in this health system and I think if you can keep those values, you can always do things well.

Speaker 1: 39:05

Absolutely, Absolutely. That's a great note to end on Connect with you. Maybe it's like, hey, I want to know how he does what he does. This is an interesting you know field maybe I'd like to get into, or something like that. How can people connect with you?

Speaker 2: 39:22

So they can always drop me an email. That's fine. So it's mrjoeid at iCloudcom. I don't mind sharing that. So, mrjoeivei at iCloudcom, or they can find me on LinkedIn. It's under Alfred Joe Ivey. I think that's where we connect. It's with LinkedIn where everyone connects. But you know, drop me a message and I'll be happy to respond.

Speaker 1: 39:53

Yeah, I mean, maybe there's a medic out there who's like hey.

Speaker 2: 39:57

I'm going to go. Hey, you never know.

Speaker 1: 39:59

I want to be a missions director.

Speaker 2: 40:02

You never know. We're always planning for who replaces us, hopefully.

Speaker 1: 40:08

You're feeding into the next generation. All right. Well, you keep doing great things and we'll see you soon, all right.

Speaker 2: 40:14

God bless. Good talk to you, bye, thank you.