Download the “Outcomes Rocket_Craig Richardville audio file directly.
Outcomes Rocket_Craig Richardville: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket podcast here at the ViVE event. Today, I have an amazing guest for you. His name is Craig Richardville. He is the Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Intermountain Health. Everybody’s familiar with the IDN based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, and you’ve heard many of their leadership team already here on the podcast. As a member of the enterprise leadership team, Craig’s responsibilities include leading all aspects of the health system’s information technology and digital services involving strategy, applications, operations, and many other things. He’s just an incredible leader, very much focused on the patient experience. And today we’re going to be diving into the work that he and the Intermountain team are doing, as well as what their companies are doing to improve the experience. So, Craig, thank you for being with us today.
Craig Richardville:
Thank you, Saul. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Saul Marquez:
And so before we dive into this patient experience work, I’d love to learn more about you and what is it that motivates you to do the work that you do in healthcare.
Craig Richardville:
It’s a great question. It’s a great way to lead it off. And for me, it’s truly about making a difference, making a difference to how we treat our caregivers, how we treat our patients, how we deliver care, how we help people maintain health. And for me and for the people that I’m here to serve and for the healthcare system, it’s about the contributions we can make also to the industry and influence so that we become one of the models, if not the model of healthcare delivery and health across the country.
Saul Marquez:
Well, you guys are very uniquely positioned at Intermountain. Vertically integrated health system, that really does open up a lot of opportunities. And let’s just face it, the risk is on you, too, right? So talk to us a little bit about how you are making an impact with the work that you do.
Craig Richardville:
First as a healthcare system, you know, as you said, being vertically integrated, we do have a payer, and that payer arm is our health plan called Select Health, and as part of that, we do go at risk in some components. There’s a whole chart of different levels of risk, and we’re pushing really hard toward the right to be fully accountable financially and clinically at risk for providing that care and maintaining health for the patients or the members that we serve. And with that, just comes a whole shift of how you look at prevention and early detection and be able to provide self-service. It’s very easy if you go back and you look not that many years ago within finance and you would go to your bank and you would pay things via check and you would go through a drive through and you would use your kiosk and the ATM machine, so great, and now those are all things of the past and everything is basically an app on your phone. And you’re able to communicate with anybody in the world, make financial transactions anywhere, talk to, interact with those, and that’s what we want to do with healthcare. It is truly, try to deliver health and healthcare to people right in their pocket so that it becomes part of their rhythm of life. And so when you get up in the morning and you have certain events that happen throughout the day, that there’s nudges or reminders, no different than if you had a fraudulent transaction on your credit card, you’ll get a text.
Saul Marquez:
Right away.
Craig Richardville:
Did you make this right? Same thing here. So if something comes up, we want to make sure, or maybe your lifestyles are changing, we want to make sure that we can quickly allow you to be educated and get back on the right path.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic, Craig. It’s about speed, it’s about self-service, it’s about having it at your fingertips. The way we get Starbucks, the way we get Amazon. You know, my son orders a package, or we order a package, he could literally follow the truck, and he’s waiting at the front door. Like it’s here, my Pokémon is here, right? Why can’t we do that with healthcare?
Craig Richardville:
It’s funny you say that because even like the Starbucks example, you still sometimes walk up to a Starbucks and there’ll be a line. Then there’ll be the person that walks through the door and walks straight to the counter, picks it up, and walks away. And it’s like, I want to be that person. And that’s what we want healthcare to be for you.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, that’s really interesting, Craig, you bring up that point, right? Because even at Starbucks, right, you have the early adopters and the slower adopters because not everybody does use the mobile experience, you know? right? And it’s about getting people access, the technology is there. So talk to us about what you and the Intermountain team are doing to get people to access what is already there.
Craig Richardville:
Yeah, well, access is a big driver within the system because that’s part of, what we’re learning is some people, if you don’t have immediate access, so there’s probably two things, let me see if I can explain it this way. One is, is it easy to make an appointment or easy to see a provider within the industry? And the answer is yes. You can make a phone call, you can send a text in some cases, you can go online to the app and you can do it. The second question is, though, is it at the time that you want and it is as early as what’s needed, or do you have to schedule that appointment ten weeks out, three months out, six months out? Although your provider may have asked you, I want to see you in a week or you need to see this other provider next week, you call it to schedule or you pull out your app and there’s no availability for 2 or 3 months. What do you do there? And that’s where I think the large part of truly looking at the data to understand when those journeys take place, because most of what we do aren’t a single transaction, it’s a journey of somebody going through some kind of a care protocol. And as those journeys take place, that we can help automatically schedule and set it up so that when that referral occurs, before you leave, it’s scheduled, it’s out there for you. And if there’s a dependency upon getting an MRI before you see the specialist, that’s done for you as well. So that whole journey is mapped out and automatically is serviced for you based upon your schedule and your availability and your convenience. It truly comes down to the experience that you have. And while we want to put the work upon the self-service that we described or talked about earlier, we’ve got to make it easy. It can’t be hard for you to do. It’s got to be something that automatically takes place. And we’ve got those journeys in place and we want to turn those on, prove them out, and the data will actually will show us. You know, the differences that we’ll make in terms of quality and outcome, and we talked first about speed and acceleration, if a lot of our care has to happen immediately or it has to happen at certain scheduled times, those times have to be available.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, Craig. And you know, when we talk about self-service, the coin has two sides, right? And we’ve been talking a lot about the patient, but there’s also the caregiver. Let’s touch on that. And, you know, on the topic of self-service and burnout and really helping our caregivers out, like can you speak to that?
Craig Richardville:
Within the industry, I was actually just talking to our chief people officer the other day, and within our industry, obviously, we have a difficulty with hiring. Our workforce is tight, it’s very constrained, it’s also, especially with the pandemic, people realize in some cases you’re kind of in a war zone. You’re going into places and treating patients that, you know, this is life and death type situations, it’s very difficult. And so as the market, the workforce has changed, part of what we want to make sure we put in place is truly what I would call a digital workforce, truly starting to automate some of the lower-hanging fruit. We’re going to start first with, and we have started first, with some of the back office type work, whether it’s allowing people to schedule appointments themselves, like I said, with the journey mapping, making sure that they can schedule multiple things if there’s dependencies in place, so putting all that in the hands will relieve our stress upon the workforce. And then you look at and there’s some new artificial intelligence coming out and sometimes artificial intelligence, to me, kind of means fake, right? It’s artificial sweeteners, not really sugar, but it’s kind of like sugar. Well, I call it more like advanced intelligence. It truly is intelligence that people can rely on, it’s real, it’s not artificial.
Saul Marquez:
I like that.
Craig Richardville:
And one of the things that we looked at is there’s a product called Ambient Intelligence that comes from Microsoft, originally from Nuance, and we have taken that to the next level. It is a large opportunity to save anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half a day of the administrative time of a physician provider.
Saul Marquez:
How does it work?
Craig Richardville:
Basically, it’s similar to us. So we’ll sit down to the, you have an iPad sitting down in the office in the exam room, and the physician and the patient have a conversation, and based upon that conversation, the machine then interprets that conversation, it weeds out all the personal stuff. How’s your son? How’s the baseball? How, it takes the relevant information, it actually creates the medical note. So it’s learned over a period of years with hundreds of thousands of transactions from a scribe, like from the conversation, of making it, of how, the machine now does that for you, and continues to learn. So when the provider then makes a correction, the next time that conversation or that sentence comes up, they’ll turn that into the proper medical note. So as opposed to seeing you and then dictating afterwards or creating that note, the machine has it already propped up for you. There’s your 4 or 5 sentences that summarizes the visit and it gives you then the appropriate billing codes as well.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great.
Craig Richardville:
That’s great, yeah, it saves a lot of time for our providers and now we’re taking that into the nursing environment and looking to see how we can help the nursing, which also has a tremendous amount of documentation and other things that are regulatory and necessary for care or the continuity of care and how we can automate those as well.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. And akin to the toll booth where you used to have the guy collecting your coins, patient vitals. We have an opportunity there too for automation. Do you want to comment on that at all? I mean, there’s a lot of talk about wearables and what potential is there.
Craig Richardville:
Yeah, I have one right now, right? So, we all do, right?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, we all do.
Craig Richardville:
Yeah, I guess there’s certainly opportunity to continue to take that information in. The important part is that we look at the exceptions that take place and we look at what the expected behavior that we want to have happen, and when people get out of those guardrails, that intervention can take place. And for the most part, if you do what you’re prescribed to do or asked to do, then the data just kind of keeps you, keep flowing every day. There was a situation where we had somebody on a heart success program where so they had to get in a certain amount of steps, and after their procedure every day, and then we found three days in a row, if they don’t hit the number, there is a contact that took place. And when that happened, we contacted the patient and their spouse was in the hospital. So the reason why he wasn’t getting the steps in was because he was there by his wife’s bedside helping her to get well. So after a short conversation of, you know, in order for her to get well or be well, you have to take care of yourself, too. So we mapped out, you know, in the facility, the, a place where he could get in his steps when his spouse was either having a procedure done or was sleeping and allow him to still be with his wife by her side when she was awake and available, and when she wasn’t, he could walk through and get his steps in. That wouldn’t have happened otherwise if we didn’t have these things in place. But there’s still perfection, you know, I think most of you may have seen in January or February when some of the New Apple Watch came out, there was this, especially around skiing resorts. There was a lot of 911 calls because somebody felt that that fall was a fall, that that actually needed to have a recovery, and obviously, when you’re skiing, those things happen, but you don’t need 911 so, but the machine, the watch automatically contacted that. But those things as we talked about earlier, we want that to be automated, we don’t want have that people think about it. Have it really take place, and let the machine, the data do the work for you.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great, thank you for that. The future is bright, especially with leaders like yourself working to make it better for all of us. And the lines are blurring, I mean, from providers to payers to businesses. And at the end of the day, we all have to roll up our sleeves and do something about it. You care to comment on that?
Craig Richardville:
Yeah, it’s complex, and like you said, there’s a lot of stakeholders in the financing of healthcare and the delivery of healthcare, pharmaceuticals as well as a big part of that. And the definition for us being a model is truly to drive down the cost. And what we’re doing is not only for ourselves, but is for our children and our grandchildren truly changing the way that healthcare is delivered, focusing more upon the value, taking clinical and financial risks. It puts us in the position to be able to manage that. And with that comes utilization, it comes the payer arm, pharmaceuticals has a big play in it. You know, we’re only one of a few countries that actually allows the advertisement of pharmaceuticals on television. So how many times do you or do others as a patient walk in and self-diagnose? I need, I want this medication. It doesn’t happen in other parts of the world. And so for us to be able to throttle that and make sure that it’s appropriate, that’s a big piece of what we do. So being that model will push us toward there. But then also just the experience side, and I’m really talking about just the patient experience or the member experience, but that caregiver or the employer or the associate experience. We want people to come into healthcare to have it be joy, bring back the joy of practicing medicine. There’s been a lot going on over the last several years, and many people have left the industry and some people aren’t. In terms of starting getting into it, there’s a lot of potential fear there. Well, that’s not something that we want to be able to solve, that’s something we do want to solve for. The people look forward to coming into our clinics, coming into our hospitals, being on like we are today, virtually being able to take care of patients, and then, like we said before, that whole piece of allowing patients to take care of themselves. I think it’s, the finance example is an easy one, but the most underutilized resource in healthcare is the patient. We got to put the patient to work and he or she certainly wants to do that, if we give them the proper tools, ease of use, ease of access, and allow that to take place.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic, Craig. Well, look, I really appreciate you spending time with us today. The points are clear. It’s the patient experience, got to make sure that we’re dialed into self-service, hybrid models of care, making sure we’re automating things, and let’s take advantage of this augmentation, not artificial intelligence. I can’t thank you enough. Where can people learn more about you and the things that you, Intermountain do?
Craig Richardville:
Yeah, you certainly can always go to our digital sites and find access, but I am Craig.Richardville@iMail.org. I truly want to learn, truly want to be able to educate where possible, and so if you have something out there, if you have a question and want to stay connected, send me a note. I will get back to you.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic.
Craig Richardville:
Well, thank you.
Saul Marquez:
Craig, thank you.
Craig Richardville:
Thanks, Saul.
Sonix has many features that you’d love including automated translation, collaboration tools, share transcripts, upload many different filetypes, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.
