Is it possible for a hospital to turn a small cybersecurity incident into a full-blown crisis based only on the words used and the approach to communicating about the event? What about the opposite – is it possible for a major incident to be mitigated and minimized with little reputational damage…just through effective communication?

The answer to these rhetorical questions is, obviously, yes.

That’s according to cybersecurity with Barry Mathis. Mathis is a principal at PYA where he draws on three decades of experience as a chief information officer, chief technology officer, and other roles to help healthcare clients plan, develop and implement complex IT solutions.

As part of that work, Mathis spends a lot of time advising healthcare organizations on how to reduce risk and avoid – or worst-case scenario, minimize – the fallout from cybersecurity incidents. For this conversation Mathis joined Dan Schlacter, a vice president in the Jarrard Inc. Health Services Practice and lead on much of the firm’s cybersecurity work, to talk about the best practices and the role of communications both before and after an incident.

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Can technology really augment and streamline healthcare operations and make the work of healthcare workers easier? Can technology help provider organizations actually manage their workforce more effectively?

The answer to both of these questions is obviously, “Yes.” And despite significant progress over the past few years, it still seems at times that technology and digital tools complicate and confuse as much as they help. The reality hasn’t yet matched the promise.

Still, there are tools and platforms that are accelerating the progress. And, helping provider organizations communicate and engage with their workforce in ways that can help those caregivers find even more satisfaction on their work while smoothing out the bumps of staffing shortages.

Greg Allen Ahrens is an advisor for ShiftMed, a new type of staffing platform. Delivering easy to use an innovative tools that help providers streamline their day-to-day operations and optimize their show rates.

Courtney Kelsey is an associate vice-president and strategic engagement and development expert in Jarrard Inc’s Academic Medical Center Practice. In her work, Kelsey applies her deep background in team optimization and people focused change management to help healthcare leaders enhance the entire employee experience.

In this conversation, Kelsey, Ahrens and David Shifrin talk about how technology can augment and support healthcare leaders, staffing, and engagement efforts, and how a new wave of tools exemplified by ShiftMed can save huge amounts of money while increasing job satisfaction and professional growth among healthcare workers.

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Physician and nurse burnout.

It’s an issue that has been studied at an increasing rate over the past few years. It’s a ubiquitous topic in any discussion about challenges facing healthcare today. Addressing it is a moral and operational imperative – caregivers need to be cared for, most importantly for their own health and wellbeing and also for the sustainability of provider organizations.

So, how healthcare leaders move from knowledge to action when it comes to burnout?

In our latest podcast, we work towards some answers.

Dan Shapiro, PhD, is a partner at Chartis and the director of the Chartis Center for Burnout Solutions. In that role, Dan and his team assist leaders of multi-hospital systems in their efforts to reduce burnout and the turnover of high-value physicians, nurses, APPs, and other staff. Dan’s background includes a PhD in clinical psychology and a postdoc at Harvard where we focused on medical crisis intervention.

Shapiro joined Kevin Kearns, a vice president at Jarrard Inc. and expert in organizational development strategy, to talk about some of the issues underlining the rocky healthcare workforce landscape. They also dig into some of the best practices for organizational design and employee support needed to address burnout.

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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Amazon is a sprawling, complex company rife with prominent leaders, disparate initiatives, investments, plans, problems, things that work, things that don’t, with all those discordant messages playing out on the public stage. On the regular.

Sound familiar?

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Healthcare is playing Moneyball. It's a model that comes from baseball and uses a ruthless focus on analytics to help teams build lean, efficient squads that outperform their higher-spending rivals. But healthcare, like baseball, is science...and art. It’s the powerful combination that creates the care and the experience we all want when we seek care. The pursuit of efficiency can't lead down a road where no one wants to live.

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Health systems have enjoyed the benefit of the doubt for a long time. That time may be ending. On one side are those who say, hospitals are “on track for their worst financial year in decades” and “will be forced to take drastic measures to reduce costs…including service line closures if not closing altogether.” On the other are those say “hospitals test the goodwill of Congress” as they endlessly ask for more federal dollars, even though “the industry has not been scrutinized as much as other health groups, despite being the primary driver of rising medical costs.” In this formulation, “some facilities would be just fine without lawmakers’ help."

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Between regulatory hurdles and financial imperatives, getting a hospital merger or acquisition across the line is hard enough. But that’s just the start. A common aim of healthcare mergers is to integrate the organizations involved, yet bringing everyone together is its own jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces are there on the table, but how to bring them together, undergo the difficult change management and create the big picture? Kim Fox and Tim Stewart sit down to discuss the challenges facing mergers and acquisitions after the transaction is closed, the role culture plays in bringing organizations together – or keeping them apart – and how healthcare leaders can best lead through the process.

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Lee Aase is a digital healthcare pioneer and a social media expert. Now, he's a healthcare entrepreneur as co-founder of HELPCare Clinic, a membership-based direct primary care clinic. His current work is particularly relevant for this conversation because we talk about why there hasn't been an episode of DigitaLee recently: Lee's recent back surgery. We discuss how the referral process went, the seamless handoff from his primary care physician to the surgery team at Mayo Clinic. Plus, thoughts on where digital comes into play with a good streamlined care continuum.

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This week's conversation was prompted by the ongoing discussion in healthcare about what constitutes "Charity Care," as well as President Biden's recent reluctance to define the current economic environment as a recession. The issue in both cases is not that President or hospital executives are wrong about their respective definitions. Instead, it's that definitions don't always feel accurate even when they may be technically correct. Kim Fox and Tim Stewart discuss definitions in the context of hospitals and healthcare, politics, baseball and more.

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Relatively recently, CMS, U.S. News & World Report, Lown Institute and, just this week the Joint Commission have signaled that how your organization is addressing health equity will be part of their dashboard for measuring and comparing hospital and health system performance. It’s a big push, long in the making. Energy has been building. According to a survey from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in 2019, one quarter of U.S.-based healthcare leaders surveyed identified health equity as one of their organization’s top three strategic priorities. In 2021, that percentage doubled to 58%. We seem to have reached a critical mass, a turning point, a moment to activate that energy. Doing so is integral to our collective missions. These steps add operational and financial urgency to today’s social crisis.

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