Second Opinions Podcast

“As we’re looking into alternative revenue streams and new methods of delivering care, what happens is the innovation kind of takes over. The things that we have regulatory requirements around, such as Stark and then kickbacks, are things where the government or the required regulatory rules haven’t quite caught up with where healthcare needs to go for the future. You’re looking at these different contractible arrangements and working in these different capacities with partners and trying to decide, okay, from a regulatory perspective, how might this affect us?”

This is one of the many observations from Sheryl Vacca, Senior Vice President and Chief Risk Officer at Providence St. Joseph Health, a $22 billion organization with 103,000 caregivers across seven states. With over thirty years of healthcare, compliance, and auditing experience, Sheryl's responsibilities include oversight for compliance, audit, risk management, and information security.

In this episode of Second Opinions, Vacca talks about how healthcare compliance and compliance staff are changing across the healthcare continuum as the industry continues to focus on new methods of care delivery and embrace preventive care.

“As we mature as a learning organization, we have to constantly go back and check in with our customers, and we also have to be able to have very candid conversations around priorities and around responsibility, and hold one another accountable. It can't just be a one way street.” That’s the observation of Andrew Lawrence, the Vice President of Enterprise Learning and Personal Development at SCL Health in Broomfield, Colorado. Lawrence, who has over 30 years of experience in corporate education both inside and outside of healthcare, leads the learning and development efforts for SCL Health’s 17,000 healthcare associates. In this episode of Second Opinions, Lawrence identifies the ideas and concepts that have shaped his unique perspective on learning and development in healthcare.

In this episode, we are talking to Dr. John Yosaitis, the lead physician educator at MedStar Health’s Simulation Training & Education Lab. Dr. Yosaitis is responsible for the education program for the health system’s 36,000 associates. Dr. Yosaitis walks us through common pitfalls in how we have trained healthcare workers in the past and shares innovations in his team’s approach to adult learning. Assessments, experiential learning, virtual reality, micro-simulation, and right-sized learning are helping MedStar turn merely competent staffers into experts. He shares that “Education done correctly can have a huge impact on patient outcomes. Education done incorrectly, as it so often is done, does nothing but frustrate the practitioner. It takes time away and can give them a feeling that they are competent and stop them on their journey to expert or mastery.”

For years experts have spoken about the importance of analyzing and disseminating “big data,” especially in healthcare. Zach Gemignani, the CEO and co-founder of Juice Analytics, shares that many industries, ours included, are still stuck in the first phase of gathering data. He offers, “All of the data in the world does not help you if it’s not focused, if it doesn’t help you solve specific problems, and if it doesn’t guide you through the data in a way that is really easy for people to understand.” Gemignani and his company are focused on what they call the “last mile” in data visualization, where data is turned into action. In this podcast, you’ll learn how Juice Analytics is working with HealthStream to make customers’ data more accessible and easy to understand, to empower better decisions. Gemignani also challenges us to reconsider how we share data with our colleagues. He explains that having a point of view and creating a guided path through shared data can lead to better decision-making.

HealthStream’s partner Bunchball is pioneering the use of gamification to engage, influence, and motivate employees and customers. If you wear a FitBit, are a member of a loyalty rewards program, or use a retailer’s app to earn points or badges, you’ve experienced gaming mechanics firsthand. Major corporations like Toyota, Marriott, Universal and NBC are using Bunchball’s technology to inspire loyalty and engagement. In this podcast, Lea Sorrentino, a digital strategist with Bunchball, gives us a glimpse into how healthcare can use these techniques to impact employee engagement, retention, training, and development.

The success of nursing education programs has never been as important as it is now. An older, more chronically ill, and culturally diverse patient population coupled with new graduate retention challenges are compelling nursing schools to rethink how they prepare new nurses. In this episode of the Second Opinions podcast, we talk to Dr. Cathy Taylor, Dean of Nashville’s Belmont University College of Health Sciences and Nursing, about today’s nursing students and the future of nurse education. Dr. Taylor speaks at length about how training curricula must change to match the unique characteristics of the connected, digital millennial workforce, and how we need to set expectations with students about the rigors and demands of the nursing profession. She also addresses the changing demands of the nursing workplace and Belmont’s transition to concept-based learning aimed at producing flexible, curious, engaged graduates who are ready sooner to provide professional care.

Post-acute and non-acute care are changing dramatically with the transition to value-based care. Organizations must ramp up their attention to competency, care quality, and efficiency to establish themselves as the providers of choice to work with acute care hospitals. Employees are key to this change, and HealthStream provides solutions to help organizations invest in creating highly trained and competent staff. In this episode of our podcast, we spoke to Vickie Harris, the President and founder of QEC Partners, and the current board chair of the Middle Tennessee Council on Aging, about how post-acute and non-acute providers will need to adapt to survive in the world of value-based care. Listen to hear why Vickie has a reputation as an innovative and strategic thought leader related to care system improvement and integration that supports person-centered services.

It’s not often that we get to turn the vision for healthcare improvement into reality, but that’s exactly what HealthStream’s Living Labs is doing. From reengineering how annual training is delivered and identifying rising nurse leaders, to innovating how we care for our aging population, HealthStream partners with our customers to understand and tackle some of healthcare’s biggest challenges. In this episode, we spoke to Richard Galentino, who heads up the Living Labs program. Hear Richard explain why HealthStream decided to undertake these ambitious projects and how some of the findings are leading to real transformation in the practice of healthcare.

For healthcare, “HR in the future has got to be innovative… entrepreneurial… creative, but most of all they have to be talking about business impacts.” That’s the advice of Elliot Clark, Chairman and CEO of SharedXpertise Media and HRO Today, a magazine focused on Human Resources leadership. In this episode of Second Opinions, Elliot provides strong evidence why healthcare leaders must adopt the mindset of industries that see HR as an investment in the future and in better outcomes, not just a cost center and risk manager. In order to begin this transformation, Elliot says that HR needs to be able to talk the language of business, which includes understanding not only the traditional metrics of time to fill and cost per hire, but also the business impact of the cost of not hiring. “If you think of it that way, you automatically transform the concept of HR as an expense to HR as an investment.”

Bryan Warren is the Director of Healthcare Solutions at Select International, which helps organizations identify the necessary behavioral competencies of successful employees. Bryan says that in order to build a patient-centered culture that also values patient safety, you have to understand the personal attributes that will support that culture. He shares, “If we’re thinking about hiring people who are more prone to provide patient-centric care and who will thrive in a patient-centric culture, we’re looking for things like service orientation, adaptability, emotional intelligence, compassion, and collaboration. Candidates with those attributes are more likely to be successful.” In this episode, learn how behavioral traits and competencies can predict success at all levels of the organization—from frontline nurses and physicians to senior leadership.