We take a quick break after our first two episodes this season to do a recap of the interviews thus far, Aaron and Jason present the news segment where we discuss recent headlines, and then an update on interviews coming up. In case you did not listen to the first two episodes, we recap the great information shared by both Congressman Buddy Carter and Mayor Karen Williams.
We also touch on the recent Change ransomware attacks, Best Buy layoffs, and impact both may have on providers. We then highlight the exciting interviews lined up for the remainder of the season. So, join us again for our new episode on Wednesday April 17th.
Guest: Jason Crosby, VP Network Integration & Strategic Planning
Jason currently serves as the Vice President of Strategic Planning & Network Integration for Strategic Healthcare Partners (SHP) of Savannah, GA, with whom he has been employed for 13 years. With SHP, he oversees the Clinically Integrated Network activity, as well as the Business Development and Strategic Planning function.
Prior to joining SHP, Jason served as Finance Director for Georgia Emergency Associates, Decision Support Manager at Memorial Health, and as a Finance Lead with Gulfstream Aerospace.
Guest: Aaron Higgins, Data Manager & IT Strategist
Aaron Higgins has worked with SHP since 2019 as the Data Manager and all around Quality Payment Program expert. In 2021, his role expanded to include IT Strategy to help SHP navigate the changing IT landscape in a post-COVID workplace.
Prior to working at SHP, Aaron worked in various private practices starting in 2008, where he typically held dual roles as both the Health IT Administrator and Meaningful Use/PQRS Manager, and in 2015 he moved to the Savannah area to oversee the Quality Payment Program for a private practice.
Every year, since coming to SHP, Aaron has provided a webinar series updating QPP eligible practices on the proposed & final rule changes coming to QPP (recordings of which can be found on the SHP website).
Transcript
Aaron:
Hello and welcome to the podcast. On today’s episode, jason and I sit down and we review the last couple of podcast episodes, where we interviewed Congressman Buddy Carter and Mayor Karen Williams. Then we jump right into the headlines where we dive deep on some truly troubling topics. Finally, we tease you a little bit about the upcoming episodes in this season, season 4. Are you ready for this vital conversation? Let’s get started. Welcome back everyone to the podcast, to Season 4. And I know you’re probably going well wait, we already have two episodes of Season 4. You’ve already listened to two episodes of Season 4. Yes, you have. We’re doing things a little bit different this year, but welcome back everybody.
Jason:
You know it is. I like it. Hey yeah, unique perspective. We wanted to try something new for Season 4, didn’t we?
Aaron:
And I like how we started with a couple of episodes and now we’re kind of taking a breather and introducing the rest rest of the lineup. So hopefully the new format is something folks will like. Speaking of our first two episodes, I want to talk about them a little bit because, even though I was there for them, I really enjoyed this format. It was a little bit different and in one case we were actually live. Some folks may have noticed that the audio sounded a little bit different than it normally does because we actually went on site. We went to City Hall to talk to Mayor Williams, but, jason, I guess to interview you a little bit. What’s kind of some of your key takeaways, particularly from Congressman Carter’s or Mayor Williams’ interviews?
Jason:
Yeah, First of all, they both were just so welcoming to the conversation which we haven’t had with them before.
Jason:
First of all, congressman Carter having come from Pooler, having served as mayor of Pooler, being a pharmacist, being a business owner, all those kinds of perspectives and a lot of the legislation he’s kind of been involved with of late, I thought was just a very unique perspective versus just a legislative update or you know someone that’s in the industry. So I really enjoyed the time, which was an open time. He was very welcoming and so very much appreciate him and his staff accommodating us on that and so very much like that perspective.
Jason:
And then to your point about mayor Williams. Same thing. First one we did on site. I felt like I was in your house there at city hall. I know you spend a day or two there, not you know too much, so that was just fun. But mayor Williams, who’s newly elected mayor, she’s got a perspective. She’s lived there all of her life. She’s a consumer. But what I found interesting, Aaron, was, given all that, she’s not in our industry. Right, we get so caught up in people that are in our industry, but what about those who are consumers and yet have to help sort of legislate or build relationships, and so I found both of those first to be very unique perspectives, something we haven’t done, and just very welcoming conversations.
Aaron:
Another kind of key takeaway is how hungry both of them were for feedback. Good or bad, they want to hear it. Now I’ll put my councilman hat on here for a second too. We want to hear from you. We do want to hear, and I know Karen has she expressed a little bit of frustration that she doesn’t ever hear from doctors. She hears plenty from her constituents, the voters, which is important, but doesn’t actually hear from the healthcare industry themselves. You know, what could they be doing for the community, or what could the city be doing for them, community, or what could the city be doing for them to help improve access to care?
Aaron:
And I thought that was really interesting that again, someone who’s not in the industry I kind of come from this tainted perspective of having spent most of my career in healthcare to be thinking about healthcare first. And she’s not. That’s not her job, she’s never been in healthcare before and she’s not. That’s not her job. She’s never been in healthcare before, and yet this is something that is also on the forefront of her mind. So I thought that was. It shows that there’s an issue there that needs to be addressed and it’s not just one level of government that is able or willing to address it Kind of to your point Jason, about hearing those two perspectives. I’m really hoping and spoiler alert for our listeners I’m really hoping that we can get some additional perspectives out there. You know we have a few requests out there. Hopefully they’ll respond before the season’s over. But I kind of like this outsider’s perspective, as said, you know, those not in the industry and what they think about, uh, health care needs from a, from a governance level the governance.
Jason:
Exactly. To hear her perspective, when she came out into council it was during I believe it was during the pandemic.
Aaron:
Yeah, we were sworn in two months before the pandemic hit.
Jason:
So talk about timing, but, as she mentioned, not just the timing of it, but she’s a grandmother, right, she’s been in pooler all her life and yet what I sensed from her perspective was a lot about access to care. Of course, that’s a common theme we all talk about, to all the headlines, but from her perspective, in terms of access, it was about relationships, as her very growing suburban town relationships with the providers in the surrounding areas, the tertiary hospitals and the relationships with those facilities, and just trying to open up that door of communication, felt like that’s what she saw as the most pressing need, which I found to be, you know, somewhat alarming, yet, I thought, a great perspective. Again, we’re so worried about other aspects. We talk about telehealth, we talk about all these other things, but to her it it was. We need to just extend the relationship out, you know, to the surrounding areas and and given her perspective, again, as a consumer, I think was very valuable to do that yeah, no doubt, and kind of going back to buddy.
Aaron:
I think a lot of us grew up with schoolhouse rocks, right? how
Aaron:
is a bill written into law and in seeing how the process works, at least a little bit. He peeled back the curtain and he talked about several bills, in fact, and what I found refreshing for one is that it wasn’t the partisan politics right. These bills all pass with huge bipartisan support, and we tend to get caught up in the partisanship of DC, and it was refreshing to see that there are good things that can be coming from DC, with both sides of the aisle working together to make it happen, and he rightfully so had a lot of pride in that. Getting the republicans and democrats working together at that end of itself as a feat. So, uh, it was nice and refreshing to hear that that Washington’s not at a complete standstill.
Jason:
There are still good things happening up there you know, and hopefully our listeners, as they saw this come across in the e-blast or social media and they saw politicians and said wait, wait, wait. These were not, I did not feel like at least political discussions whatsoever.
Aaron:
To me it wasn’t.
Jason:
It was insightful, Like you mentioned. You know, congressman Carter, talking about the More Transparency Act, the Saving Our Students and School Act. Those are not political topics and neither conversation felt political whatsoever. And so to talk about meaningful legislation that impacts all of us and, to your point, schoolhouse Rock, that’s actually good. How does that occur for those that maybe don’t keep up with such, yeah, great conversation, great, insightful conversation?
Aaron:
Yeah, okay, folks, we’ll be right back with our news headlines.
Jason:
Welcome back everyone. We appreciate you joining us again. Next, let’s talk about some recent headlines that are out there. Most recently, what caught my attention. Aaron, you and I have talked quite a bit over various seasons here about disruptors, right, and one of those we constantly read about and talked about was Best Buy. Well, unfortunately, we have recent layoff with Best Buy laying off the Geek Squad, the tech support employee portion of the company, to sort of help shift the focus a little bit more to healthcare, and the staffers recently released that just in the last few days, unfortunately. You know, if you’re a part of the february earnings call, you may have gotten some, some hint in terms of the corporate redirection of resources, but when you hear that, after all the talk we’ve had about disruption, how do you feel about that, knowing what we’re trying to get behind in terms of all these disruptors?
Aaron:
I. I was surprised, so I don’t think our listeners know this about me. At one time I was on the Geek Squad.
Jason:
It shouldn’t come as a surprise really.
Aaron:
But I worked for Best Buy. I worked for the Geek Squad. Many, many moons ago were selling VHS tapes, so it’s been a minute, and now Best Buy doesn’t even sell DVDs. They made a big deal about that over the Christmas season in 2023. That was their last season of selling discs. They weren’t buying anymore, and so every time you’d go into the Best Buy, there’d be fewer and fewer discs on the shelves, and now they’re all completely gone, and so Best Buy is changing, and I think it was about two years ago when we first heard about this Best Buy Health initiative and it was surprising, but now it’s starting to make sense. So, yeah, I’m still kind of baffled by this in some ways, but I don’t know. It seems like everything has gone digital. Now Computers are less virus-prone although we’ll be talking about that here in a second we’re seeing less of a need for physical media and physical presence for the electronic world. So it’s not a surprise that Best Buy is trying to pivot into something that certainly we need physical interaction for, and that’s healthcare.
Jason:
Yeah, I’ll be curious what that pivot looks like. They mentioned more focus and dedication towards areas like AI, which is an interesting take. And then, of course, they bet a lot early on, you know, at home or in home care via remote monitoring type of solutions. And so it’ll be curious if they’re projecting that further growth in 25, is it going to be more in the AI development arena? Is it going to be more in the remote patient monitoring arena? What that’s going to look like? But I guess more to come there.
Aaron:
But yeah, little headline there to get us started as we talk, kind of rehash some of this other disruption we’ve talked about previously and and we’re 15 months or so since the launch of open AI’s chat, GPT 3.5 and then about a year out from version 4.0. So it’ll be interesting to see how AI evolves alongside these other companies like Best Buy playing in this space. So there’s certainly more to come on that regard. So, pivoting off of that, getting rid of Geek Squad more or less so. Geek Squad isn’t gone. I want to make that clear. It’s just there’s massive layoffs within the Geek Squad more or less so. Geek Squad isn’t gone. I want to make that clear. It’s just there’s massive layoffs within the Geek Squad. All the stores were slimming down the number of employees. If you don’t know their shtick, it’s all like spy stuff, so they call them agents and yeah, so massive layoffs across the company.
Aaron:
Which IT security and things like that are still really important, even amongst home users, which is what Geek Squad was aimed at, not really business use, but certainly in all the headlines these days has been the change healthcare hack. We’ve heard about that and shoot. You may be directly affected by the fact that Change Healthcare couldn’t pay you. We have a lot of our clients and I know a lot of our listeners suffered greatly during that outage, but this came in across the news desk that there is another hacker group, a second group who claims that they have four terabytes of changes data and they are currently reaching out to extort more money out of Change Healthcare. So that’s interesting. Quarterly Change paid more than Change about $22 million to the original hackers, the original ransomware game. These other hackers, known as Ransom Hub, are demanding an unknown amount, or at least an undisclosed amount so far. And, Jason, that shows that sometimes paying ransoms and we hear about this right, If you pay ransom you show that you’re a mark. May not always be the best idea.
Jason:
Yeah, well, you know it takes me back to one of our interviews earlier on with Seimitsu. I believe it was where we talked about a lot of just sort of corporate security blocking and tackling right. And you know, with this recent headline, looking at what the American Hospital Association recommends, again, it kind of goes back to some certain basics. So when I hear that, I think of a couple of things. One is what corporations should do regarding help desk security protocols. It also recommends initiating video calls.
Jason:
That you know, some of those ABCs that maybe we all forget as employees under those circumstances, forget as employees under those circumstances. But I tell you, another aspect that I saw of it was just the financial strain it puts on vendors and providers. Right, physicians, for example, lots of them were having to take out lines of credit, you know, while there was payment stalls occurring while change went through this situation, and so what that cascading effect is going to have, in particular on the smaller providers who were impacted, that’s probably going to linger for quite a while, and so I’m sure we’ll hear more about this, the financial downfall going into 25, 26, I would imagine.
Aaron:
Oh yeah, well, and think about too. So you talked about lines of credit that folks had to open. I think we can think of a couple of our own clients who have had to resort to those sort of things. So there’s fees and there’s interest that they have to pay now simply just to keep their doors open while they’re waiting for change. So I saw in passing I haven’t read anything beyond the headline it looks like the Senate is going to be calling UnitedHealth Group to a subcommittee to testify about this. So we should be hearing some more about what happened, what were the failures and what should they have done to protect things better.
Aaron:
And that kind of pivots to another article and you kind of hinted towards it there about how can people and what should organizations be doing to protect themselves. Obviously, change stopped payments and that can harm patients vis-a-vis providers, not being able to pay their bills and limiting access to care. But then what happens when the practice is hacked or the hospital is hacked? And so right now, the American Hospital Association is warning healthcare systems of all sizes that cyber criminals are specifically targeting IT help desks, pretending that they are finance employees so they can divert payments away. So change healthcare is just finally getting stood back up again. Payments are just starting to flow. Now there’s this new threat that could further destabilize organizations. We’re going to put this in the show notes so you can see what recommendations are being made here, but they seem to be relatively common sense, don’t you think?
Jason:
Yeah, yeah. In particular, you know just to further add a couple of your comments there as well the claims that are still coming through. You know, I keep reading where, while the majority of them, 90% or so, something along those lines, are flowing through, they’re still facing much, much higher, 25% to 40% rejection rates. Vendors have to adjust, new vendors are coming into the provider settings and then the providers must adjust to those new vendors and there’s gonna be claims issues. And so now you put just a bigger concern or workaround on the rev cycle portion of things and so it kind of dwarfs the IT concerns as we start looking at the revenue cycle portion. That’s just going to continue to linger.
Aaron:
Yeah, it’s. It’s kind of funny cause the ONC, just the office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, or ONC for short. They just put out a call for and feedback on their strategic plan. It’s a six year strategic plan that’s starting this year, through 2023, and so, kind of in light of all the cyber crime that’s going on, you have change. And then, of course, these various and sundry attacks.
Aaron:
We have this ONC strategic plan that says more IT, more interconnectedness, more of these good things which they improve care, right, they improve care coordination, they improve outcomes. But we cannot stress enough, we cannot forget how critical it’s going to be to have good security in place and excellent security practices. So this is the time to invest in. It security is before you’re broken into, right. It’s like buying locks, buying really good locks for your house. You buy them long before your house gets broken into. If your house is already broken into, who cares of what locks you had? So it’s important to think about we’re getting more interconnected here. We need to be better about our IT security.
Aaron:
Welcome back to the podcast, jason, in this final segment here, I wanted to talk a little bit about the future, the future of this season. Actually, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from y’all, and one of the things you like to be notified about is what our upcoming episodes are going to be. We have the privilege of interviewing some really great folks this season, so, jason, why don’t you let the audience know what our lineup looks like?
Jason:
Yeah, I’m really excited about these next few episodes, just like the first couple. Next up is Dean Rottinghaus. Dean is Chief Clinical Officer for Qur Health and Infinity Care Partners. We just talked about AI. Well, what Dean’s gonna highlight for us is virtual smart care, in particular, how the AI platform that Qur Health has launched with Dean’s assistance, in particular as it relates to staff shortages and patient care. A great conversation we had around how to best assist with that staff shortage problem that we have in the care management function by utilizing their AI platform. So good stuff there with Dean.
Jason:
We then have Matt Usher. Matt, you may recall we had on last season. We’re going to do kind of a halftime report, if you will, on health plan assessment. Right, whether you’re small business, medium-sized business or what, have you that perspective, but also as an employee, just some what’s happening, some trends, things he’s seeing, some recommendations. Again, just a good halftime report by Matt.
Jason:
And then lastly is Sherry Roussarie and Kelly Macken-Marble. We haven’t had either one of those ladies as of yet. We met them in the Indiana market a few years ago. Well, these two very experienced, successful administrators also wrote a book, and so we’re number one, We’re going to talk to them in our first episode just about their experiences in the industry and what they found as challenges, how the industry has changed. They have both been CEOs for numerous practices, and successfully so, as well as orchestrating a merger between their practices, so we’ll go and talk to them about their experience. But then the second portion of that is about their book Two Rivers, the Power of Collaboration and Other Leadership Lessons. It’s a very good book, Aaron and I, we both have read it, as well as several others at SHP recommend you as well, so we’re going to talk to them about their book. There’s a very strong personal aspect of it as well, and so very exciting discussion with more to come.
Aaron:
Looking forward to it and, like we teased in the earlier segment, we hopefully can get some other perspectives outside of the industry, from the government perspective, so hopefully those are going to be able to pull through. It’s been some scheduling conflicts. As you can imagine. Scheduling with elected officials can be a little difficult at times, but stay tuned there. I’m really looking forward to hearing all of these episodes. We haven’t recorded them yet, so I don’t know. I’m with the audience right now.
Aaron:
I don’t know what’s going to come, but yeah, I think this is going to be a great season, jason.
Jason:
Very excited. Like we said at the beginning, different format, different perspectives. And again I just want to reiterate what you said earlier, eric. Please email us, contact us however you see fit. Social media we’re active there. Let us know any other topics or subject matter experts you’d like to hear. We would certainly line them up. But love this season. I think we’ll have a very exciting and insightful end to our season four.
Aaron:
Alrighty folks. Well, thank you for joining us and we will see you all next week. Thanks, Aaron, thanks everybody. This has been an episode of Beyond the Stethoscope Vital Conversations with SHP. If you enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to rate and share it with your friends. It sure helps the show Production and editing by Nala Wiebe.
Jason:
Social media by Jeremy Miller.
Aaron:
And our co-hosts are me, Aaron C Higgins and Jason Crosby. Our show producers are Mike Scribner and John Crew. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time. So, Jason, I have a question for you what’s your favorite Easter candy we’re just coming right out of Easter and certainly, certainly, there’s. There’s this, there’s the normal ones, there’s the favorites, there’s the jellybeans, what, what must you find in your easter basket?
Jason:
Oh, you know, my wife and I uh, put some aside. We’ve got, well, we’ve got two older kids. We still do the Easter basket thing for them and so naturally it’s kind of like Halloween we put some aside for for mom and dad. Right? It’s without a doubt, give me the eggs with good old peanut butter in the middle, just chocolate covering peanut butter.
Aaron:
Oh, I, I like Cadbury original eggs and aka the British ones, the American ones that are really made by Hershey’s. Not a fan of those, but there’s, there’s a British pantry store, um, not too far from my house, and they carry the real McCoys brought in from England, uh, to their their little store here and uh, yeah, those, those are the real ones there. That’s where it’s at.
Jason:
I like that that’s original. That’s original, very respectful.