Every health system has an AI roadmap. Far fewer have a runway. Vendors sell the destination. Getting there, on time and on budget and actually live, is the part nobody demos. Scott Raymond, former CIO at Nebraska Medicine and a longtime health IT leader who still holds an active nursing license, gets specific on virtual nursing, predictive staffing and scheduling, the workflows you have to solve first, and why the gap between promise and production is where most AI quietly stalls.
Scott Raymond, MHA, INF, BSN, RN,, CIO, CDIO Strategist, Prinicipal, Rouleur Healthcare Consulting
Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live
00:00:00 Intro: Welcome to Digital Health talks. Each week we meet with healthcare leaders making an immeasurable difference in equity, access and quality. Hear about what tech is worth investing in and what isn't as we focus on the innovations that deliver. Join Megan Antonelli, Jenny Sharp and Shahid Shah for a weekly no BS deep dive on what's really making an impact in healthcare.
00:00:30 Megan Antonelli: Everyone has an AI roadmap. Almost nobody has a runway. Vendors love selling you the destination. The part nobody demos is getting there on time, on budget, and actually live in production. Welcome to digital Health Talks. This is Megan Antonelli, CEO of Health Impact Live. And my guest today knows that gap is real. Scott Raymond is the former CIO at Nebraska Medicine, and he came up through nursing before he ever sat in the CIO seat. So he never loses sight of who's on the other end of the workflow. Scott and I go way back from his days at Centura and NetApp, which means between us, we've watched a whole lot of epic go live, and we know exactly where things get hard. Today, he's going to get specific about what speed to value in healthcare AI actually takes. Hi, Scott. It is so good to have you on the show. It's been too long. How are you?
00:01:23 Scott Raymond: I'm well, thanks. How are you doing? Yeah, it's been way too long for sure.
00:01:27 Megan Antonelli: I know. You know, it's amazing to think back to those days that, you know, I guess it was NetApp and, um, you know, just the beginnings of it. But I always, I think when you came to health impact and when we talked before your background, then as a nurse, sort of sitting in the it spot that you did at Memorial and everything was such a big part of kind of your story and the conversation you brought to it. And what's great now is I think we've seen, particularly with AI implementation and of course, with virtual nursing, There are more nurses at the table in this conversation, but I'd love to hear from you. You know, kind of your background and how that that came to the decisions and the work that you've done in the health tech space.
00:02:11 Scott Raymond: Sure. So I've been in health care. I hate to admit this. Hopefully I don't look this old, but almost thirty years now. Uh, as you mentioned, I started as a nurse. I was a pediatric ICU nurse and about five years at the bedside and kind of progressed through nursing leadership was a house officer, was a manager of pediatrics. Um, and then memorial care started their epic implementation, uh, really starting to look at replacing, uh, their system that we had, uh, in about two thousand and four. So that'll give you some context of where we were. Uh, we ended up contracting with epic. We were, I think the third inpatient install. I got trained in epic as a doc person, Back in two thousand and five, so there wasn't any big epic campus back then. Uh, it was in it was in downtown Madison at a, at an elementary school. Um, and kind of progressed through there. So we implemented epic at six hospitals. I moved from kind of at the elbow support for physicians to leading physician informatics, which is kind of interesting for a nurse to lead physician informatics. I had a team that just focused on physician adoption, uh, physician proficiency in epic, uh, and trying to get them set up before the actual go live date at each hospital. Uh, very successful epic kind of adopted that model. And then kind of at the end of that implementation journey at Memorialcare out in Southern California, uh, I went to our last hospital to implement the site. CIO went to another hospital, the CEO of the hospital, very nervous about getting someone from the outside. So I was asked to do both jobs, so implemented epic successfully again and then stayed on as the site CIO. And then kind of progressed in there. My last position there was executive director of innovation and technology for the system, and we built Innovation Lab. We did a lot of cool things. Uh, from there, I went to Centura Health out in Colorado, uh, as their associate CIO and CTO, um, and big organization, eighteen hospitals, uh, a ten star epic organization, really successful there, implemented ambulatory, continued our ambulatory journey. I think we had four, um, community connect hospitals as well. And then I got the opportunity to take over health care for NetApp and be that kind of, you know, advisor, someone who had sat in the seat, uh, to help, uh, transition this new technology, the new data technology infrastructure. And then from there, I got recruited to the CIO and chief innovation officer at Nebraska Medicine, and now I'm on the dark, dark side doing kind of consulting and helping some startups and stuff. So, um, but maybe looking to get back in the game, we'll see what comes across.
00:05:12 Megan Antonelli: But well, it's such a great perspective. And I know, I mean, we've seen through the years, so many people go from the hospital seat to the to the vendor to the dark side to the consultant. And, you know, I think so much of that is how you kind of partner within those organizations and what you see. I mean, I think what you guys created at Memorial, um, you know, I remember seeing Scott, Scott, Jocelyn speak about all of that and all the work that's gone on. Um, and it is, it's pretty impressive, you know, because it memorials, you know, they're a great hospital, an amazing hospital, but not, they were really kind of on the cutting edge. And, and, you know, now that I live here in Southern California, you know, Cedars and UCLA and you hear about them all the time, but even then, they're not. As you know, it's not the same as kind of the northeast kind of, you know, academic tiered, you know, medical centers trying to push, push and for memorial to kind of be at the forefront of innovation at that time was always pretty impressive to me.
00:06:07 Scott Raymond: Yeah, I think the challenge in Southern California, you kind of mentioned it, there's so much competition and the margins are so low. Um, and the capture zones or the geography is so wide and broad and they cross over each other tremendously. Right. So, um, academic medical centers have a little bit more, I don't know, academic horsepower or bandwidth or even money a lot of times. Right. And then in Colorado, the margins were a lot better. And so we had a lot more money to innovate, right? So I think, I think Memorialcare was innovative because we were doing all that innovation and, and pushing it on, you know, two to three percent margins, which, um, not a lot for when it is asking for millions of dollars. So.
00:06:53 Megan Antonelli: Right. And I mean, I think I remember at that time and, and it, you know, it was really about sort of the, the hospital of the future and kind of the beds and the connectivity and IoT. And, you know, that's of course why NetApp fit in very well and all that. And of course, now we're sort of in this new period of innovation around AI and AI adoption and how that basically touches every single thing within the health system. So tell us a little bit about, you know, what you have been doing, what you've been seeing in terms of that, you know, kind of AI roadmap, either with what you did at Nebraska or even what you're seeing with the the partners and, you know, in your consulting work now.
00:07:33 Scott Raymond: Yeah, I think I can give you a broad perspective. I think it's pretty interesting. And I think, you know, people have been talking about AI, um, a lot and, you know, you bring up AI, it's like, yeah, AI is like, people don't even want to hear it anymore, which is kind of funny. Um, but I think what the value is in what I've seen. So we implemented a lot of AI tools in my last organization. We did virtual nursing. We built the innovation design unit and put a lot of new technology that had an AI backbone on it. But if you look at kind of the LMS and the documentation benefits to that, we implemented Microsoft Copilot. We we tried a bunch of the other ones. We went down the road when we did our RFPs. Um, and then we implemented kind of what I consider is the new frontier of AI, which is kind of taking the data, which, you know, epic is a fantastic EHR. I'm a big epic fanboy. Um, but it's not, it's a great documentation tool and it's a great place to find the data and manage the patient data. It's not a great place to get deep insights. They have great reports, they have great dashboards. You can build all those out. And now they also have an AI offering. So you buy their AI and you can infuse it into a lot of different operations, clinical workflows. Um, but I think where I see the value is having a real sophisticated, um, database that you can, you can put data in and query in different ways and then adding the AI on top of that to create these agents that can glean different parts of the, of the record, different parts of the workflow and pull those together. An easy example is like the clinical and the business side of it. How do you glean insights based on the clinical care and how you're reimbursed, how the referrals are working? Um, and so having a predictive analytics platform that you can leverage and then not sprinkling, but adding that AI layer on top of it, I think that's the value. And you know, you can hear companies like Palantir, they're, they're creating These steps like first, get a single workflow, find the data, add AI to it, and glean insights. Then kind of this adding other workflows like that financial side I mentioned. And now they're going into agentic workflows where they're, they call it swarming the data, and they swarm multiple data points from multiple systems to get some insight that you can't always get out of a single system. So if you have a separate financial system, you have a separate, uh, imaging system. You have a separate, uh, scheduling system. Your maybe your ambulatory is on a different AI EHR. How do you swarm that data to get deep insights? And the, the easy value is on the business side. So at my last organization, we implemented Palantir and a lot of it was around throughput of the hospital. How do we get patients, um, out of the ER into beds? And how do you get patients out of beds into tertiary care or home in the in the most efficient manner. And, you know, hospitals have been in this business for a long time. And there are a lot of experts in health care. But you walk in a hospital and some departments don't talk to other departments, and the data is locked in other systems, and there's nobody that really has the expertise to pull that data and, and glean the insights that that adds value. And I think the speed to value is what we really focused on. Um, epic does things really well. And you know this, Megan, you've been in this business as long as I have. They, they will find a workflow that they may not use and they will build it and they will probably do it better at some point, but it takes a long time. Right? So there's, we used to always laugh. So epic is great at, at showing what their roadmap is. And they have documents, a roadmap and what's coming next and, and how it's going to benefit you. But the runway to implementation and more importantly, in my mind, the runway to value is long. A lot of times and you have to wait and wait and wait and then organizations are stuck. Do we do something now because we need to get value? We need to get better reimbursement. We need to get better patient outcomes. We need to get better patient throughput. Or do we wait for epic to to do it? And so that's the balance. Like, and I always had this kind of three year window, right? If it's kind of three, eighteen months to three years, I'm pretty, pretty sure Epic's going to do it. I'm probably going to wait unless I have a lot of pressure. But if it's eighteen months or three years, you probably want to implement something else and sign a three year contract, right? And get and get the value out of it. And then transition when you know, because epic, you know, their licensing is expensive and it's, it's better to stay in the epic ecosphere than to go outside of it. Right? Unless you can't get value.
00:12:47 Megan Antonelli: Right, and unless that time frame is long. I mean, I think it takes me back. I mean, hearing this, it's like, you know, meaningful use, right? It was get to meaningful use. And when, when we actually launched Health Impact, our tagline was meaningful use to meaningful impact. Like, because just having the data and using it was one thing, but getting value out of it is an entirely different thing. And that was fifteen years ago. And here we are. And, and as you said there, you know, there's one EHR. Yes, epic covers almost everything, but there are many, you know, many people have different, different EHRs for different systems and, and obviously other systems that have to play in. And, you know, epic doesn't have the best reputation for playing with other systems and all of that. And so, um, it totally makes sense why you would look at a tool like Palantir or others to kind of overlay to all of that.
00:13:41 Scott Raymond: Yeah. Microsoft Copilot is another perfect example doing, you know, voice generated notes with an AI on top of it that you can query and ask to look at other things. Um, Microsoft was ahead of that. You know, they, they leveraged Dragon. Uh, so nuance became part of Microsoft and, and they had a head start, right? They had a database of all these physicians, their workflows, their, their voiceprints really. Um, and, but epic is in that space now. And so do you sign a, if, if I was looking at it right now, I would look at how quick I could implement Epic's LLM on top of my documentation. And if I again, I would apply that same measure even now and then. The one last thing I would say is an organization's tolerance for new technology. Because sometimes that tolerance or that ability is low for whatever reasons there might be, you know, a community or a rural hospital or critical access hospital, they don't have the internal horsepower to even implement an outside thing. So I think that that weighs on the advancement of technology. And, and can you adopt AI and, you know, can you even implement epic? Right. And then Palantir is another thing. Can you afford this huge engine that has a lot of value if you don't have the people and if you don't know, like, what are you going to get out of it? Do you have you done the research to see what, what pain point or what workflow you should go after first? And I think a lot of people struggle in that because they think, oh, they go to a conference and they hear this great technology, they might even sign a contract, and then they go, well, what are we going to do with it?
00:15:22 Megan Antonelli: Right.
00:15:23 Scott Raymond: So you should know ahead of time what you want to do with it.
00:15:25 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. Well, in let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, you know, I think the it's like when you hear with Ambien, it's like now for the last two or three years, it was like the docs wanted it, the nurses wanted it. We want it, we need it now. Epic has it. But some people were early adopters because the demand was there. But with some of these other things that, you know, actually do kind of have more of a maybe measurable impact like throughput and, you know, scheduling and things like that. Tell us. Tell me a little bit about like where you were able to use that tool and kind of see that value.
00:16:01 Scott Raymond: Yeah. So we implemented, I'll just use Palantir as the example. When we implemented Palantir, we were really going after the operations side first, right? Because we had other, you know, we had epic, um, initiatives and we had epic technology. We're implementing, you know, constantly. And I think most sophisticated or mature epic environments are doing that. Um, but on the, again, kind of back to my earlier statement, how do you, how do you affect operations and is the information in the EHR? And if it is, can you, you know, pull it in and massage it and glean insights in a, in a manner that actually changes things? And I, you know, you mentioned meaningful use, which I think, um, properly to think about this meaningful use was great from a patient perspective, meaningful use was awful from an operations perspective. The EHR was millions and millions of dollars to implement. Even though you got money back from the feds, it didn't make up for, you know, how much time your clinicians were out in training, how the teams, the epic teams you had to you're talking hundreds of people at some organizations, right? My last organization, we had almost four hundred IT folks. So like the cost of implementation was heavy and the operational value out of it wasn't there yet. And it's still, you know, in some organizations not there yet. Right. So I think if, if you're looking really at margin and margin depletion, you need to look at the operations and how do you improve it? And is do you have a platform? Do you have the data scientists? Do you have the analyst to do that? And if you don't, what do you do? I think you have to go outside and find someone that has a very sophisticated platform that can ingest that data quickly and has the analysts, the experts that are doing the data, massaging, meeting with the clinicians and creating those workflows and the speed to value. You had to get value out of, especially like in a Palantir perspective, if we weren't getting value out of it in a month or two, we were failing. And if you don't put all your resources into doing that, like you're just spending money for no reason. And I kind of looked at it like if we spent five million dollars, let's say on Palantir, did we get five point one million dollars of value? If you did, that's one hundred thousand dollars you didn't have. And then it seems worth it. And then if you can build on that and get a million dollars worth of value in a couple years, then it's really worth it. And if you can start creating, um, you know, a buffer to that margin erosion or even increase your Margins. That's what I think most organizations are going after. And then there's, you know, the clinical side, there's the research side, there's physician satisfaction side, there's patient satisfaction side. Like the platform is malleable. You can do pretty much anything in it because it has that sophisticated predictive analytic layer built in. Like that is the, the foundation, which they call it foundry, which is funny, right of that system. Right.
00:19:05 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that that data integration piece is kind of, as we talked about, what meaningful use and the promises of all of that, you know, I mean, we thought, oh, we, we'd have so much data. We'd be, you know, making treatment decisions and R&D for pharma would, you know, and all of that stuff really never, you know, it hasn't materialized yet. It's only we're beginning to see it now because while epic collected the data, streamlined some operations, did improve, you know, things around patient safety. It didn't necessarily integrate data in the way that we thought it would. So, I mean, when you think about the roadmap and kind of what Epic's talked about, but also what the other tools you're seeing out there, what do you think, you know, where do you think that's headed? How long, you know, what's the time, time frame? We're going to see that.
00:19:56 Break: You're listening to digital health talks. When we return, we'll continue our discussion on how technology is revolutionizing healthcare delivery. Stay with us to hear more insights on creating sustainable, patient centered digital health solutions.
00:20:15 Scott Raymond: And in fairness to epic, they're they're like, they have cogito kaboodle. They have a data warehouse, um, which is, you know, is composed of those elements. They are going into staffing. They're going into other areas, ERP they're going into other areas to pull create that same database they did for a patient record for the, for the financials, for the scheduling and all that. They're getting there. And, and I think you can build in their data warehouse and glean insights. I think in my opinion, and I haven't touched epic, I haven't logged into epic for a little bit other than my own portal for my own patient record. But, um, I still think the, the opportunity is to build that very sophisticated predictive analytic layer, right? And, um, and again, I think they'll get there if you look at like what they did with cosmos and combining, you know, a patient record across the entire, um, epic ecosphere, right? So you can, you, and you as a researcher, you can say, I have this problem or this patient diagnosis or this patient, um, presentation, and you can query millions and millions of records to get insights. I think if you could do that within your own system and gain insights from the patient journey, the patient access, the patient satisfaction, the financials, the reimbursement for the hospital. Like think about all the things you need to do, um, with a health system and just that patient journey through the health system from, you know, first contacting in the ER to disposition and then their billing, how they get billed, how they pay for it. How's the insurance interact contract, like you think your head just starts to explode. That's why health care is so complicated in this country. But I think if you have a platform that you can have multiple streams, um, and you can, you know, this whole concept of data leaking and all that, I'm not, I'm not a data scientist, so I'm not going to, to geek out. But if you think about, you know, streams coming into a lake, and if you're pulling in multiple streams from different places, you have the data in a lake and now you have the ability to analyze that data and more importantly, throw a problem at the data and come out with an answer. That's kind of the, I think the goal of all of this.
00:22:31 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. Well, and I think, I mean, you talked a little bit about, you know, implementing on the on the virtual nursing side and, you know, the operations challenges and kind of picking, I mean, if you're sitting as a CIO right now, how do you pick where you're going to see that that value and whether it's whether it's an epic or Palantir or Microsoft, like, what do you think the the CIOs need to be looking at right now to kind of make those moves where they're going to see the value?
00:22:59 Scott Raymond: Yeah. Now now we're going to get some we're going to get some deep politics here. Um, so I think if, if a CIO is good, they're partnering with the senior administration and partnering to identify what is the problem we're trying to solve. If you don't know the problem you're trying to solve, you're on a fool's errand, right? You're not going to figure it out. Um, so you need to find what the problem you're trying to solve. Um, you need to understand what success looks like before. So understand the problem, understand what success looked like. Then you start searching or looking for technology to solve that problem. Um, a lot of organizations buy the product without knowing what they're trying to solve with it, and they certainly haven't clearly identified the problem. So for virtual nursing as an example, we had a, we had a problem. We had not enough nurses. We had a lot of contract labor, the contract labor, you know, from a nurse, the nurses that watch this. I know our nurses are going to watch this. Megan, I don't know.
00:23:59 Megan Antonelli: Absolutely.
00:23:59 Scott Raymond: Um, they know like there's a, there's a finite amount of nurses and we have contract labor that, that supplements that the contract labor is very, very cyclical. Right. Because no one, no one wants to go to Alaska in the winter time. People want to go to Southern California or Florida in the wintertime. But where does Nebraska or Wisconsin or Idaho do in that situation? And so and there's not a lot of new nurses coming. And the sad fact that they're the biggest deficit of nursing is there's not enough nursing professors or instructors to train enough nurses. So we're looking at other countries bringing people in. That creates other problems too. So the only way you can provide safe patient care is to get more efficient from a nursing perspective. So we started looking at how do we leverage virtual nursing, where you have kind of almost like a command, almost like a air traffic control in the sky that can manage multiple patients and intervene and then call a nurse in or call a doctor in when, when, you know, parameters go out from the monitoring or the patient signals or just, just visually observing them through cameras. And so virtual nursing became a tool, but it wasn't just virtual nursing. We looked at team nursing like, you can't just say, oh, virtual nursing will solve everything if you don't have the infrastructure or the team structure in place. Virtual nursing is going to fail and you spend a lot of technology for no reason, right? And you've seen that there's multiple examples of hospitals implemented virtual ICUs or virtual nursing, that they stopped using the equipment or stopped using the care. Right. So that's a problem we had. We didn't have enough nurses. Uh, we were out of ratio, which, you know, Nebraska didn't really have ratios like California, but we, we didn't have enough folks to take care of the patient in a safe way. So that's why we looked at it and we implemented it in a unit that was a brand new kind of hospital of the future unit to do that kind of work. Uh, and that was very good because now you had a, a defined playground or defined space. You could do this innovation in and test things out before you implement it across the organization. Because again, implementing virtual nursing across, you know, two hospitals in two thousand beds when you haven't proven it out and you don't know the workflows, it's just going to cost you a lot of money and maybe create patient risk or danger. Right. So, um, so that's an area where you use technology and AI plays in that, right? Because you can set parameters. And if and if the cameras are smart and they can identify stuff on their own and alert, that helps too. But all that has to be proven out because at the end of the day, there's, there's a body in a bed that could have harm for, you know, there's a million ways to get harm, right? IV gets infiltrated, they get out of bed, they fall like, yeah, I don't need to.
00:27:10 Megan Antonelli: You know, I mean, I think it's really interesting because we talk about it like, oh, it's, you know, it, it solves a staffing issue, but it doesn't solve a staffing issue until it's running perfect. So, you know, and, and there is a lot of, you know, it takes time to get there. And, you know, and I also think there's a patient perception, you know, challenge with it too, which is, you know, when we think about it, when I see it on, you know, trade show stands and, oh, this is amazing and it's going great. It's great. It's not, you know, it is an added, you know, it's, it's meant to be additive to cover where gaps currently exist. But that doesn't mean it delivers savings. Right. It's it delivers improvements. It delivers value but not necessarily savings. So to your point around what problem are you trying to solve and what does success look like? I think this is an area where the perception, you know, because you hear it and you think it's going to solve this problem, but is it going to be less expensive or better care? Or, you know, what is it, you know, at the end of the day, what is that? So in your experience, certainly coming from your background, what do you think the the gaps are? Where do you think the systems themselves could improve? Or is it more not a technology problem and more of a implementation, you know, sort of doing it at the right, right time, right place?
00:28:34 Scott Raymond: Yeah. I think it's all I think, um, you know, if you're looking for technology to solve your issues, again, you're on a fool's errand. Like you need to understand that real, that, that problem you're trying to solve and the value of that problem. And I kind of mentioned the virtual nursing side, but what I didn't mention is what, what you need to do ahead of time, like you need to optimize your schedules, whether you're using Ukg, you're using epic scheduling or using Palantir to do the scheduling, you need to understand who your workforce is, what, what, um, certifications do they have? Where are they can float to? Do you have a float pool? You know, how, how are you staffing? Are you, are you giving preference to nurses? So they're happy and they want to work for you and stay there. And to do that by a human or the staffing office using spreadsheets, you're never going to get there. And I used to work in the staffing office. I used to do staffing. Um, it's the worst job in the hospital because you never like you're calling people at four in the morning to come in. Even when I was a charge nurse in the PICU, calling people at four in the morning to come in for the seven o'clock is there's no way. So now you're trying to, like, beg people to stay over. Like staffing is the worst part. And nursing staffing is awful because a lot of organizations have eight hour nurses, ten hour nurses, twelve hour nurses. They all have different pay schedules. They have different certifications. You know, a nurse can't float to the adult ICU because they're missing some needed skills. And, you know, so having a database where you can pull your nurses, pull their skills, connect it to the HR system, know what they're certified in, know what their preferences are, talk to the managers, whatever spreadsheet they keep about, you know, nurses loves to only work every other weekend like those preference and load it all in there and let it let the machine do it, because the machine can do it twenty four sevenths, three hundred sixty five and not complain. Right. And so from a virtual nursing, like look at the staffing first. Yeah. And if you build that staffing engine, then you could start applying. Okay, where's the deficit? Now I think virtual nursing can fill a void after we've already smoothed out the schedule, optimized it. What else do we need? And I think that's what's needed. And I think people they don't really it's going to sound awful. They don't understand the problem they're trying to solve.
00:30:56 Megan Antonelli: Right. Well, and and the thing about health care and the complexity of it is, you know, you can solve one and realize quickly that there's actually another one underneath it and there's another one underneath it. So peeling the layers of the problems and simplifying it out. But that, you know, there is this promise. I think what I am optimistic about with what I see AI being capable of, as you said, is that ability to kind of keep doing it. I mean, I find myself doing it. You know, and it, it, it sometimes feels like an endless, you know, like a fool's errand to keep continuing to try to fix it. But if you do get to that core layer and smooth things out, you know, instead of building poor workflows on top of stupid stuff we shouldn't be doing. You know, you get to a place where things can begin to run smoothly. And as we talked about before, actually improve patient care and, and, you know, the clinician satisfaction and even maybe see some value on the bottom line for the organization. But it, you know, it's like the stars have to align quite a few times to, to. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, we, as we have a segment called five good things, we always sort of end and ask our guests, what is the one kind of bright spot? What is the one good thing that you're seeing out there that you're like that makes you optimistic that we're going to see that change and We like it to be related to technology, but it doesn't have to be.
00:32:26 Scott Raymond: Yeah, I think so. Number one, I think there's a desire to change healthcare. Um, there's a desire to improve patient care. There's a desire to provide the best, uh, medicine and care, uh, in the United States. I think I've worked at enough health systems to know that they're not in it just for the money. Um, you know, the money's important because they have to stay afloat and they have to be able to expand programs and, and all that good stuff. But there is a desire to help people. And that's why I stayed in healthcare and that's why I kept my nursing license. I do have a desire to help people. And I think the, the good news is, I won't say all health systems, but most health systems have that desire.
00:33:11 Megan Antonelli: Yeah.
00:33:12 Scott Raymond: I think two, we're starting to get sophisticated in healthcare. And I always used to use this example with, um, with folks when I would present on the business of healthcare, like grocery stores and department stores. And a lot of, you know, other industries adopted barcodes a long time ago for inventory management to understand how things move across, um, their business, including, you know, not only just parts, services, equipment, but how their people move across. It was fifteen, twenty years before healthcare implemented barcoding. And, and so we've been behind, I think that's changing. I think healthcare is getting sophisticated. The way we manage the data, the way we manage our data centers. Um, I don't think healthcare organizations should be in the data center business. That's just a personal thing. But to number two, like we're getting more sophisticated and the technology is there.
00:34:15 Megan Antonelli: Yeah.
00:34:16 Scott Raymond: Uh, three, I think AI has a big play in how the future is going to unfold. Um, and you could look at it in a dystopian way where it's going to be, you know, the, the robots are going to take over and kill us all. Um, I don't think that's going to happen because I, I think keeping a person in the loop is the only safety factor there is, but AI is getting, um, sophisticated enough and being and from a healthcare perspective, being able to apply it. Right. Um, I don't know, I guess I from a roses and thorns prospect, maybe my last two will be, uh, negatives. If that's okay with you, that's okay. I think we really need to look at how we fund healthcare because you can look at and this I'm thinking of like the flyover states and rural, how important rural healthcare is and how fast those are disappearing. And if you have, you know, if you have a acute appendicitis and you have to get in your car and drive two and a half hours. You might have it burst, and you might die of sepsis in a day or two or a week. Right, right. And so how do we change it? So we can we can fund that and we can supply. And again, the nurse in me screams out like, how do we do that? Right. Um, and then lastly, like, I just my first three were about the technology and about the care, but how do we make sure that that stays on a positive trajectory and we're not going down some, you know, AI rabbit hole or, you know, data rabbit hole where we, we put ourselves in a hole and can't get out of it. Yeah. And I know that's, I don't want to end on a negative, but I should have put him in the reverse order.
00:36:07 Megan Antonelli: I don't know if we can do that in editing, but.
00:36:10 Speaker 4: But I am optimistic. I think we're I think.
00:36:13 Scott Raymond: That we have the tools. We have the technology. We have the people. Um, and if we can create a healthcare system where nurses want to be nurses and want to go to nursing school, doctors want to be doctors and go to medical school. Um, and we change the, the downward decline of clinicians because we could have the best technology in the world if you don't have the people to do it. Um, heart surgeries don't happen by themselves, right?
00:36:40 Megan Antonelli: So yeah. Well, I think your point, yeah, your first point on, you know, when there's, you know, there's sort of this, there's a will, right? When there's a will, there's a way and the, that sort of mission and vision. I mean, I think your other point about the rural healthcare, there's a lot of, you know, initiatives, programs, money going to it right now. But a lot of that money is about, you know, sort of digital solutions that does not solve an acute incident that takes two and a half hours to get to. Right. So funding and access in, you know, urgent situations is something that still will not be solved by, you know, no matter how many remote and virtual nursing we have. So it's, you know, it's a very, um, you know, it's a, it's an important problem that it's hard, you know, because of the funding often doesn't, doesn't get the attention it needs. But I do think that there is a will, there is an interest, there's an awareness that that has happened particularly, I mean, to, you know, negatives, but with silver lining since the pandemic, right? That has brought us to this place where we recognize, you know, the whole world recognizes the need for these improvements in health care, both for the clinician and for the patient. Um, and that if the health system can't stay in business or stay afloat, you know, we, you know, can't, can't get it done, but it is, it's an interesting time to be in it. I guess it always has been, even from the innovation days. But it's a lot happening now. Tell our audience how they can get in touch with you. And, uh, you know, what's the best best way?
00:38:11 Speaker 4: LinkedIn or yeah, LinkedIn is the best.
00:38:14 Scott Raymond: Um, I'm kind of again, just consulting right now and just, um, looking for kind of my next new adventure. Um, I want to find a place where again, kind of going back to beginning of this conversation where I can add value. Um, the one thing I'll say, last thing I'll say, um, I think if healthcare focuses on the business of healthcare and finds good partnerships, whether that be, you know, Microsoft, epic, Palantir, these companies and leverage that partnership, but it's a two way street. These companies have to partner and they have to realize that healthcare is not like a rocket business or, or an aircraft business. It's, it's taking care of patients in the in the margins are different. And so the licensing models need to be different and the partnerships need to be true and two way and not just sign the contract and leave. Um, I think health care organizations struggle on that. And that's why they want to like bring things in. But again, like kind of my data center, uh, example, we're not good at it. So find somebody that's good at it, but you need to find somebody that's good at it, that also understands healthcare and wants to partner with you.
00:39:19 Megan Antonelli: Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point. I mean, as we see so many of these companies that come into healthcare, you know, the patients required to see that value, even though our, our talk is kind of about speed to value. But the understanding of the complexity and time it takes is so important. So yeah, um, you know, and the partnerships that need to happen to make it, make it so, you know, are just as important. So. Well, thank you so much, Scott. It was so great to reconnect and see you, uh, to our audience, you know, reach out, uh, like subscribe, share. Um, this is Megan Antonelli, the CEO of Health Impact Live. And this is digital health talks. Let's keep fixing health care one conversation at a time.
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