I Don't Care

As the evolution of healthcare and its landscape rapidly evolves due to technology, regulatory changes, and the ongoing global pandemic, staying up-to-date with the latest trends and developments is a necessity for industry professionals. With a shortage of doctors and increasing healthcare costs adding to the complexities, conversations around effective healthcare management are gaining prominence. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the U.S. could see an estimated shortage of 54,100 to 139,000 physicians by 2033, underscoring the need for immediate interventions.

In this critical context, what are the emerging trends in healthcare, and how can healthcare leaders navigate through these challenging times?

In the latest episode of “I Don’t Care,” our host, Dr. Kevin Stevenson welcomed Scott Becker, the founder and publisher of Becker’s Healthcare, to discuss the evolution of healthcare and its future. The episode explored various elements of healthcare management, looking at how the industry has evolved over the past three decades, and some of the challenges it currently faces.

Some of the main points Dr. Stevenson and Becker discussed from the episode were:

• The growing disparity between the power of payers and the strength of health systems

• The increasing costs for providers and hospitals amid static reimbursement rates

• The urgent need to revolutionize medical education for greater efficiency in producing doctors, particularly specialists

Scott Becker is a renowned figure in the healthcare industry with an illustrious background as a lawyer. Over the past 30 years, Becker has transformed his small-scale newsletter and conference operation into a leading media company in the healthcare industry, which includes Becker’s Healthcare. He is particularly known for his forward-thinking approach to healthcare news and his expertise in healthcare management.

As the healthcare industry grapples with substantial personnel changes, 85% of nurses are considering a new employer within a year, with nearly half of healthcare workers planning to exit the field within 3 years. How can the industry adapt to these impending changes? Will hospitals need to start recruiting retired nurses to fill the gap?

In the latest episode of I Don’t Care, host Kevin Stevenson sits down with Dr. Katie Boston-Leary, director of nursing programs at the American Nurses Association (ANA), to explore the Models of Care Insight Study’s results. In their conversation, they expand on the implications of various roles and programs and the gap between leadership and the frontline.

The two also discuss:

1. The need for improvement in the current care delivery models, particularly with respect to telemedicine

2. The noticeable gap in acceptance of the LPN model in the acute care setting, largely driven by unfamiliarity and fear

3. Mentorship and coaching programs interest leadership, but front-line workers remain skeptical.

Boston-Leary makes it clear that "the American Nurses Association … thinks about you, we care about you, we appreciate you, we love you, and please know we're fighting for you."

Dr. Katie Boston-Leary is a recognized authority in nursing, holding several key positions in the field and at the ANA. With her background in nursing programs, she provides an essential perspective on these imminent changes.

The path of many healthcare workers, such as physicians, is a long one, but filled with much celebration along the way. There are the celebrations of getting into medical school, passing the boards during medical school, graduating, landing a residency, and completing a residency. But the path to becoming a healthcare hero is also emotionally daunting, with exposure to extreme human suffering, long hours, frustrations with insurance, and physical demands contributing to emotional fatigue.

So, what are some ways healthcare workers can keep their emotional bank full and help fill the emotional banks of those they work with?

On this episode of I Don’t Care host Kevin Stevenson, is joined by Quint Studer, Co-Founder of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group, Founder of Studer Community Institute, and author of The Calling: Why Healthcare is So Special, to talk about the uniqueness of the healthcare industry, how emotional health differs in healthcare workers compared to workers in other industries, and how burnout issues can be addressed.

Healthcare is one industry where there are severe issues with emotional burnout. Surveys of more than 20,000 U.S. physicians showed almost a 50 percent burnout rate over a three-year period.

Studer connected this to the origins of his book. “I think employees, leaders, any organization in healthcare, we start with a pretty full emotional bank account...but I think unfortunately, in healthcare, if we don’t replenish it all the time, there’s so many more withdrawals than deposits. So, the book was really meant about how do we replenish ourselves, and then if we replenish ourselves, how do we replenish others?”

Stevenson and Studer also discuss...

The inspiration for Studer’s publication

Employee engagement and how healthcare workplaces can tackle issues that contribute to burnout

The importance of belonging in healthcare

Studer stated, “I think in healthcare, we’ve got to narrow that scope of what we’re asking managers to do right now because of the experience level. And maybe, someday, we can go back to a lot of stuff. But today, we call it ‘less equals always.’ And we do something always, we get the consistency.”

Quint Studer is an experienced founder who has worked in professional training and coaching. He is Co-Founder of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group, Founder of Studer Community Institute, and Owner of the Pensacola Blue Wahoos. Studer is also author of The Calling: Why Healthcare is So Special. Some of Studer’s past positions include CEO of Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago and Senior Vice President of Business Development of Mercy Hospital in Wisconsin. Studer has a B.S. in Special Education and Teaching and an MS in Education, both from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

“Healthcare has become an expensive, impersonal system that is not serving the best interest of either the nation or the people it purports to heal.” – Dr. Henry Buchwald.

How does one measure good and bad healthcare? A quick look at world health statistics ranks the United States at the highest in total health spending per capita yet last in life expectancy in a group of 15 OECD member nations. Is that the best measure between good and bad?

Technology innovations in the U.S. healthcare space are doing their part to improve healthcare outcomes, patient access to care, and health equity. Still, are these solutions enough to fix a system many Americans view as broken?

Healthcare Upside Down: A Critical Examination of Policy and Practice is a new book that looks at the U.S. healthcare system and the changes over the past fifty years that led the nation to its current challenges. The author of Healthcare Upside Down is Dr. Henry Buchwald, professor of Surgery at the University of Minnesota. His career in medicine extends beyond those fifty years. He’s experienced those changes firsthand. Buchwald spoke with Kevin Stevenson on the I Don’t Care podcast and tackled measuring good and inadequate healthcare.

“There are about fourteen international statistical measurements of healthcare,” Buchwald said. “I’ve got fourteen chapters in my book, and in the first, I go over these statistics, and the main statistic is life expectancy. Our life expectancy in the United States is well below every Western country, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. We have a life expectancy of about a third-world country. We have the lowest rating for diseases that could be curable, and all these other nations are all doing much better.”

Stevenson and Buchwald’s discussion includes the following:

• Why the U.S.’s life expectancy is lower than so many other Western nations

• Shifting dynamics in physician/patient care

• Deterioration of communication between doctors, staff, and patients

“If you call a doctor’s office today, first of all, you speak to a robot,” Buchwald said. “And the robot gives you another robot after it tells you to call 911 and go away. Eventually, you get a disinterested person who is an interrogator. Where were you born, what do you want, etc.? It takes a long time to speak to anybody.”

About Dr. Buchwald

For 62 years, Henry Buchwald, MD, Ph.D., professor in the Division of Gastrointestinal and Bariatric Surgery at The University of Minnesota, has been educating, mentoring, and pioneering breakthroughs within the Department of Surgery, and developing historical advances in metabolic care. Dr. Buchwald has written several notable research publications and is the author of Healthcare Upside Down: A Critical Examination of Policy and Practice.

Patient safety is one of any healthcare institution’s primary concerns and goals. In a surgical setting, it’s paramount. Training and maintaining a well-trained staff are often challenging in healthcare, and an understaffed hospital could impact patient safety. Despite all precautions and best efforts, preventable medical errors during or after surgery occur at an estimated 4,000 occurrences per year in the United States. From wrong surgery performed, wrong surgery location, and unnecessary injury during surgery, every mistake is costly to the patient and the healthcare institution.

How can healthcare reduce the number of surgical errors? Can technology and AI play a role in improving patient safety?

Kevin Stevenson, host of I Don’t Care, took a closer look at the issue with his guest, Yeshwanth Pulijala. Pulijala is the Founder and CEO of Scalpel, a UK-based healthcare technology company taking a unique approach to improving surgical efficiency and patient safety through automatic identification and classification of surgical inventory without tags.

Pulijala, trained as a dentist, saw many patient safety issues during his time in healthcare and decided to do something about it.

“In my journey, I’ve seen things going wrong in hospitals,” Pulijala said. “Sometimes it has to do with simple logistic issues like bringing the wrong patient into the operating theater, but other times not having the right implant in the operating room. I was heavily driven by how we improve patient safety in surgery. With that mission, we started Scalpel in 2017 here in London.”

Stevenson’s conversation with Pulijala includes the following:

• How Scalpel is solving patient safety in healthcare surgical settings

• The economic value of Scalpel’s platform to the hospital and health system

• How healthcare systems partner and engage with Scalpel

“We don’t depend on any physical tags on surgical equipment,” Pulijala said. “We identify a surgical instrument based on how it looks, so it’s a computer-vision-based approach. The kind of technology you would use every day on your phone to look at and unlock it. Your face recognition is working that way. Similarly, this is an instrument recognition and object detection technology. That means we need to ensure we have the data set that identifies the instruments within your unit.”

About Yeshwanth

As the Founder and CEO of Scalpel, Yeshwanth Pulijala leads a passionate team of engineers and medics who build AI tools to enhance patient safety in the operating room. Trained as a dentist, Pulijala has over eight years of interdisciplinary experience in healthcare and technology (virtual reality, augmented reality, and computer vision). He previously built a startup (Open Simulation) to provide low-cost surgical simulation using augmented reality. In his doctoral research, Pulijala designed and evaluated one of the first immersive virtual reality training tools for oral and maxillofacial surgery.

Technology is in a constant state of change, especially with new innovations in healthcare happening every day. But it’s not always easy to know what’s out there, or to get your product to market. In today’s connected world, it has become more important than ever to have a community that you can chat with, learn from, and bounce ideas off of. Networking is in.

But how do networking events in healthcare bring value to the industry?

On the latest episode of I Don’t Care with Host Kevin Stevenson, guest Hays Waldrop, Founder and President of the Institute of Healthcare Executives and Suppliers, discusses the foundation of IHES and the importance of networking in the healthcare field.

Waldrop’s ‘Aha!’ moment came when he was working with a start-up in healthcare that had a product catered towards those with learning disabilities. While the doctors and healthcare professionals loved the product, so too, did schools. So when he saw the superintendents and leaders of school districts gathered to network and chat about different products, he had a realization: why wasn’t this happening in healthcare?

So, over the course of 20 years, Waldrop networked to form a conglomerate of healthcare professionals. “We’ve got a CEO group, I’ve got a supply-chain group, and also a pharmacy group, and so we come together and it’s a live-event business and we connect providers and suppliers in this environment.”

The two also discussed…

1) The different events IHES holds and how it creates a positive learning environment

2) What type of sessions and networking events there are and who attends

3) What the criteria are for adding in newer suppliers and start-ups

“You know, if you’re just the same old ‘me too’ commodity, that’s not real attractive necessarily, they’re necessary and yeah we clearly have those…but it’s always cool when you have a new technology, something different that the executives perhaps have not seen before or maybe they’re doing it just differently…,” said Waldrop.

Hays Waldrop has over 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry, having first started working in Territory Sales for Biomet, an orthopedic implant company. After working with a few start-ups around the dot com boom, Waldrop formed IHES, a group of three networking and learning platforms for healthcare executives and suppliers. He is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The path of many healthcare workers, such as physicians, is a long one, but filled with much celebration along the way. There are the celebrations of getting into medical school, passing the boards during medical school, graduating, landing a residency, and completing a residency. But the path to becoming a healthcare hero is also emotionally daunting, with exposure to extreme human suffering, long hours, frustrations with insurance, and physical demands contributing to emotional fatigue.

So, what are some ways healthcare workers can keep their emotional bank full and help fill the emotional banks of those they work with?

On this episode of I Don’t Care host Kevin Stevenson, is joined by Quint Studer, Co-Founder of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group, Founder of Studer Community Institute, and author of The Calling: Why Healthcare is So Special, to talk about the uniqueness of the healthcare industry, how emotional health differs in healthcare workers compared to workers in other industries, and how burnout issues can be addressed.

Healthcare is one industry where there are severe issues with emotional burnout. Surveys of more than 20,000 U.S. physicians showed almost a 50 percent burnout rate over a three-year period.

Studer connected this to the origins of his book. “I think employees, leaders, any organization in healthcare, we start with a pretty full emotional bank account...but I think unfortunately, in healthcare, if we don’t replenish it all the time, there’s so many more withdrawals than deposits. So, the book was really meant about how do we replenish ourselves, and then if we replenish ourselves, how do we replenish others?”

Stevenson and Studer also discuss...

The inspiration for Studer’s publication

Employee engagement and how healthcare workplaces can tackle issues that contribute to burnout

The importance of belonging in healthcare

Studer stated, “I think in healthcare, we’ve got to narrow that scope of what we’re asking managers to do right now because of the experience level. And maybe, someday, we can go back to a lot of stuff. But today, we call it ‘less equals always.’ And we do something always, we get the consistency.”

Quint Studer is an experienced founder who has worked in professional training and coaching. He is Co-Founder of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group, Founder of Studer Community Institute, and Owner of the Pensacola Blue Wahoos. Studer is also author of The Calling: Why Healthcare is So Special. Some of Studer’s past positions include CEO of Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago and Senior Vice President of Business Development of Mercy Hospital in Wisconsin. Studer has a B.S. in Special Education and Teaching and an MS in Education, both from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

When people take stock of their lives, do they consider their accomplishments remarkable? Or is the word remarkable reserved only for those with unique talents and wondrous deeds? Maybe remarkable isn’t a word others use to describe a person; perhaps it’s a code to live by. Today, I choose to be Remarkable! Capitalize that R and add an exclamation point to it. That mantra comes from a man who made it his mission to live his life on purpose. To be remarkable, Dr. Randy Ross says, choose to be Remarkable!

Inspiring and influencing others is a key differentiator in leadership, and motivating teams can make a good organization great. Dr. Randy Ross is a bestselling author and CEO of Remarkable. He brings his dynamic communication approach to organizations such as Delta, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Panasonic, and more to help strengthen team development and organizational health.

Ross spoke with I Don’t Care’s Kevin Stevenson about his career and his love for working with organizations and leadership to improve them. Ross, a pastor for many years, felt a new calling the more he worked with business leaders.

“I fell in love with the boardroom,” Ross said. “I felt called into corporate circles because I saw this interesting disparity, this paradox if you will; so many organizations struggled to embrace this idea of culture in a profound way. They knew the importance of it, but they didn’t know how to craft it.”

Stevenson and Ross discuss the following:

• Connecting personal passion with corporate objectives

• The concept of “anchored by hope”

• Dr. Ross’s book Relationomics

“I wanted to write a book that would be a practical ‘how to,’” Dr. Ross said. “We kind of built the framework for the principals, but now how do you do this? How do you put it into practice? So, Relationomics is a book I wrote for managers and anybody who gives oversight to others. And it is a lot of practical things that you and I might say is common sense, but I can assure you it is not always common practice.”

About Randy:

Dr. Randy Ross is the bestselling author of multiple books, including Relationomics: Business Powered by Relationships, Remarkable!, and Hope Rises: Making Your Life, Love & Leadership Soar. Ross works with known brands to inspire and enable countless people to find new passion and purpose in their work, work better together in teams, and have more significant influence and impact. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Baylor University and a Doctorate from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.