What happens when your most critical imaging system — the one that touches 70% of emergency patients — is running on a 23-year-old platform that keeps going down? Oliver Galicki, Vice President of Clinical Applications at Memorial Hermann, knows exactly what that feels like, and he joined Success in Chaos to share how he navigated one of the most complex infrastructure decisions a health system can face.
The Chaos
Technical debt in healthcare IT is not just inconvenient — it is operationally dangerous. Oliver describes a legacy PACS environment built on 250-plus servers, spanning three different solutions across radiology and cardiology, where stability had become a daily battle. When the system went down, staff spent six hours merging studies while patient care waited. Meanwhile, COOs were calling to request workarounds involving separate C-arms for different vendors, and physicians were navigating tip sheets instead of workflows. The challenge was compounded by the fact that enterprise imaging touches nearly every patient encounter, yet replacing PACS does not generate new revenue — making the ROI conversation especially difficult in a constrained financial climate.
The Leadership Approach
Oliver applied a pragmatic, partnership-driven philosophy. Rather than leading from IT, he assembled governance groups that included radiologists, cardiologists, and operational leaders — many already engaged from their recent Epic implementation. He focused on transparent communication, leveraged existing committee structures, and let clinical voices drive the selection process. When cardiologist engagement proved harder, he used trusted academic radiologists as bridges. His guiding principle: if IT is leading and dragging people along, adoption fails and costs more than the status quo.
The Success
The result was a 12-month vendor selection cycle — far faster than the industry norm for enterprise imaging — that moved from eight RFP respondents to a signed contract. Four radiologists flew across the country for site visits, demonstrating deep organizational commitment. Oliver secured funding, selected a vendor, and signed a contract for a seven-plus year partnership built on a hybrid cloud model with improved disaster recovery. The foundation is now set for future AI-enabled imaging and clinical workflow improvements.
Why Listen
This episode is essential for any healthcare leader weighing the unsexy but critical choice between fixing foundational infrastructure and chasing innovation. Oliver provides a clear-eyed framework for making the case, building consensus, and moving faster than you thought possible.
Episode Chapter Guide:
1:30 Oliver’s journey from intern to VP
4:30 Technical debt explained — the 23-year-old PACS problem
8:00 “If your house is on fire, you can’t innovate”
11:00 Building governance and physician alignment
17:00 Streamlining decisions — 8 vendors to 1 in 12 months
22:00 The ROI challenge for foundational IT
28:00 Leadership style — authenticity, transparency, and speaking both languages
32:00 Upskilling IT teams for the AI era
35:00 Book and podcast recommendations
Full Transcript
AI-generated transcript. Accuracy may vary; please excuse any transcription errors.
Angela Adams: Welcome to Success and Chaos, a healthcare podcast where each episode is dedicated to unlocking success amid change and uncertainty. I am Angela Adams, the CEO at Inflow Health.
Kandice Garcia: And I’m Candace Garcia, CEO of tungsten QI partners and the QI director for the ACR Learning Network.
Angela: Our guest today, we are so excited to have on Oliver Galecki, Vice President of Information Services at Memorial Hermann. From starting his career on the hospital floor configuring laptops to leading multi-million dollar enterprise decisions, Oliver brings a grounded pragmatic perspective on governance, technical debt, and building resilience, digital infrastructure for healthcare. Welcome Oliver.
Oliver Galicki: Well, thank you very much, Angela and Candice. I’m very excited to be here and looking forward to a good conversation today.
Angela: Absolutely. Thanks for sitting down with me at Vive. We had a great conversation, had a lot of fun. So let’s get right into it. Talk to us a little bit about your background. I love these stories from healthcare. We’ve had several guests on that started in one thing, worked their way all the way up to the top. It sounds like you’ve done something similar. You started touching every laptop in the hospital as an intern and then that kind of early ground level experience shaped you and how you lead enterprise initiatives today. Walk us through that.
Oliver: Yeah, absolutely. I like to tell people that I stumbled into healthcare IT. I think like many undergraduate students, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I did have an aptitude for computers. I had been exposed a little bit to the healthcare system. So an internship opportunity with the health system that I near in Jackson, Mississippi, where I actually grew up and went to college, opened up and it was really one of those other duties as a sign. It wasn’t a normal internship. It was one that was sort of on the fly. Here’s work that we need done. And as you can imagine, even for a single facility, Hill system was one of the larger ones in Jackson Metro. There are a lot of devices. We all like to think we know where our laptops are at any given time and all of our assets are nice and controlled. But they basically gave me a thumb drive at the time and an instruction sheet and said we are changing our SSID. We need to touch every laptop or device ultimately that connects to the network. And the best way to do that is just the old fashioned sneaker way. So let’s go and go find them.
And truly though, that gave me the best intro into healthcare that I possibly could have ever asked for. I think from the basement, central supply, receiving to a behavioral health unit, acute care floors, you’re going everywhere. You’re asking people for devices they haven’t used in four years in some cases and doing a little bit of reconciliation. But the teamwork, the connectedness was all really apparent to me then, even when I was doing something, I say not super technical, but learning people, meeting people. And at that point, I was probably you know, 20, 19 or 20 years old, I thought I found where I was going to work the rest of my life. And like, this is it. I loved it.
Angela: Talk about success and chaos. I’m sure you saw a lot.
Oliver: Yeah, we won’t take it away. It’s okay. It’s in the drawer, that drawer, it’s at your house. I think things that whether they should or shouldn’t happen, probably debatable, but that’s reality. I think they’re in healthcare and people trying to make everything work and take care of the patients.
Kandice: Oh my gosh, you’re making me think, I think I actually still have an old laptop from an organization. I never came back. Just sitting in my drawer. Yeah, I think that’s exactly how it happens.
Oliver: Yeah. The street value is relatively low, unfortunately.
Kandice: Now you said, I think we talked about like technical debt. Can you explain like what that is and what have you been working on? What does that mean?
Oliver: Sure, sure. Technical debt has been an industry term cross industry in the IT world and just like you might have debt in your household or you made some bad decisions with the credit card when you were younger you bring that debt with you forward we might as an organization have made good decisions but then for whatever perfect reason over time you don’t keep that technology optimized and as efficient and cost-effective as it possibly could be so I think when I think about it at least from an application perspective which is where I spend most of my time I typically think of there was a very strong best of breed era on-prem best of breed. So you ended up with a point solution with physical servers that became virtual servers, but all on-prem. And then ultimately you’ve seen especially larger systems, but really now systems of all size start to look for how can we get the most bang for our buck with a central EMR that does most things really well, maybe not everything. And then you shift your need. And then obviously now with SaaS based solutions and AI tools, it shifted some of this debt. It’s more contract management than server management. But that technical debt just hangs around. It might be the most reliable system in the organization, but it might not be developed anymore. In my space, we had a PAC system that at one time when it was implemented 23 years ago, I had multiple people on my team who were rad techs when it came around as a clinician and now they work in IT and have seen it over the years. The platform didn’t get the investment it needed long term, not necessarily from Memorial Herman, but from the vendor and the ecosystem started to change around it. And so for me, the imaging world connects to almost every single patient that we interact with. If you come through the ED, the chances are, and I don’t have my scientific research to quote here, but you pretty much get something imaging related.
Angela: I think it’s 70%.
Oliver: That’s very, yeah, very believable. And then if you expand that to this concept of enterprise imaging and you think about EKGs and more than just traditional x-ray, it probably goes up from there. So we had this system which was around, was not the most stable. Both us and our vendor partner were working tirelessly to make sure it was stable and stayed up. But at some point you’ve reached that point. You can’t keep every single vehicle alive forever. You don’t drive every car. You don’t keep a house exactly as it was 25 years ago and expect it to bring the same features as a new house. It doesn’t mean you go out and just willy-nilly buy a house, but you have to have a plan to either renovate or find a new house. And so that’s what situation we found this with, particularly in our imaging world. It wasn’t just one. It was actually three different solutions that we needed to ultimately take a look at.
Angela: In hospitals today, like the rethinking of systems in general, I feel like we are in an era of technology speed and absolutely AI kind of entering the picture within the last five years. And we are able to do things so much more quickly now than we ever were. Some of these older technology vendors, are not necessarily taking advantage of the technology advances. So how are you personally, Oliver, rethinking how systems work today? Because there’s so much changing and so many moving parts and blocks happening. Like how does it now look in your brain as we move into the next three to five years?
Oliver: I think a lot of it goes back to the concept that if your house is on fire, you really can’t innovate, you can’t go build an addition to your house, you can’t upgrade anything because there’s a fire in the kitchen. And I think when it comes down to it, the pragmatism to say, we can’t go and do all the cool imaging related AI in the world if we feel like we’re fundamentally, our resources are going to be constrained maintaining 250 plus servers in our enterprise imaging stack today. And that’s just one example of the software, but the thought process really is what foundation do we need to prepare us for the next, I mean, I’ll say five years, even that’s challenging at the pace things are moving, but three to five years where we know this decision is a partnership and imaging is probably one of those when you think about. Core EHR, ERP, your enterprise imaging system, your document management system, those are things you don’t really go and just swing around every few years to save a buck. It’s longer term partnerships. And so I think of this as a pillar where we know we can get something stable that meets our clinical needs, that provides increased disaster recovery. Those are fundamental things. And then it gives us the ability to take some of the new, faster technology in a way where we can actually put resource on it. Right now it’s kind of that we want to do this thing that actually has value, but how do you find resources to do that knowing if you stop working your work queues and the server goes down, you’re going to all be on that call for eight hours trying to get imaging back up as a system. So fundamentally, I apply that to every decision. It’s patient monitoring. Telemetry is another area that I have responsibility for from an IT perspective. And it’s the same thing. If we can’t fundamentally do things like demographics at the telemetry central monitoring station and people are typing in demographics in 2026, we have an opportunity to go fix that. And that’s more important to me right now than a new digital app that sits on top of that. It’s fundamental. How do we make the caregivers lives easier and safer for the patient? And so I think that helps. It doesn’t always sell the ROI story, which is probably one of the first questions that we are guilty of asking when we talk to a different vendor partner, but at least setting that stage to have the right tools to build on top.
Kandice: Yeah, this seems so important, not just for organizations who are trying to optimize and move forward, but we’re seeing so many organizations buying up other hospitals or buying up other clinics and you come in and now you have this mess, this patchwork of electronic systems. How do you decide, you know, I love the analogy that you use to buy new or renovate. Like, what does that even look like? Is there like a committee of people who get together? Like, how are these decisions made?
Oliver: Yeah, I think at least as an IT leader, and I would say almost any organization works like this, but certainly at Memorial Hermann, you want and you really need the direction of the operational and clinical leaders who are going to be the users of the platform every single day. And so for us in this enterprise imaging journey, really happened. It was starting to happen before our enterprise epic implementation, I would say in 2022, where there was the writing was on the walls that this didn’t seem super sustainable for us. Epic came and that was the critical focus for the organization over the next two years. And on other side of Epic, what we started to notice in our command center, truly still manning the command center. And we were hearing complaints and challenges with our procedural areas that were becoming more image enabled. So hybrid ORs, cath lab, and neuroendovascular interventional radiology, and the tech solutions that we had, there was not one great answer. I was becoming, you know, I had a COO calling me, they wanted to buy a new C arm so they could have one go to one vendor of our PAC solution and then have another C arm that was dedicated here based on physician preference. It got messy very quickly. And that was sort of the catalyst to say like, we need to pull the group together and actually ask some questions. Are we going to continue to band-aid this with workflows and tip sheets and trying to have success that way? Or do we take a bigger swing? And that was early 2025 when we really got up and running and I have a memory of I was on the other side of epic trying to be healthy and exercise again, but I was out on a jog when it kind of came to me and was like, we can’t do this anymore. Like this is, now I’m not jogging as much anymore, but we are moving forward on this project now. So something has stuck. And it was that, which is a good hope. It’s a good thing. But from there, we really started assembling who are the loudest voices who are the most influential voices? Who are those who really want to be engaged? How do we create this vision where it’s not replacing radiology packs, which was our, I would say the squeaky wheel. It’s how do we consolidate our cardiology, radiology, some of our image sharing tools and to an actual platform to move forward. And so the work group got going, everyone wants to do it, everyone’s on board, they all saw the vision. I think the challenge though is funding and then actual selection of only one solution, knowing that not everything aligns nicely today, it’s not a one for one. So that was then when the effort started.
Angela: How did you guide, we also have been in a, let’s call it a delicate balance between radiology and cardiology before, and both very important functions for the health system, we know that. How did you go about getting alignment and consensus between that group that you feel like led to the success? Because you did have a successful outcome.
Oliver: Yeah, certainly. I would say yes. I mean, in this day and age, a successful outcome is certainly getting funding approved, selecting a vendor, signing a contract. And I’m happy to say all those things are done for this project. Now, I say the real work begins. Now, the technologists working with operations, we have to go and execute and hold ourselves and our vendor accountable for this implementation. To get back to your question, communication, communication. I mean, we saw this, I think we did ride on the coattails of the EPIC implementation a bit to say we have really engaged governance groups. Yes, they’re tired after two years of doing an implementation and really transforming everything to EPIC driven, risk driven work listing from radiologist perspective, structured reporting moving into EPIC. So they were all very engaged, had just gone through this change with us. So we really just kind of continued that, but then shifted the focus to enterprise imaging governance. And we have a couple of committees and I think most organizations would say you find the people who are on committees usually are the same ones who are on lots of different committees. And so we tried to take advantage of those folks who were already getting together and we said, hey, this is our enterprise imaging investment council where they actually buy imaging equipment. It was many of the same people that I needed for this work group. And we just added a few people to it and said, hey, here’s our steering group for selection and review. Cardiologists proper, more challenging to engage. We have on the radiology side the advantage of four different reading groups. And I say advantage because three of them read on their own packs. So the voice really comes down to one radiology reading group because they actually use the technology every single day. The others care about the reliability because ultimately they need the images, but it’s really that one group. So we knew they would be key in this decision. On our cardiology side, we have employed, academic, and community at all of our campuses spread across the system. And so that’s hard in and of itself to govern cardiology. We really focused on those that use the current tools and had a vision for how it could be better. And I’ll be honest, in the cardiology side, that was a harder path to engagement. We leveraged a lot of our team’s knowledge as well. And some of the radiologists on the academic side were close with the cardiologists, the influential leaders on both sides, and so using them to go together without us in the room was super helpful on that front. And then we had great engagement from our service line. I do think it’s going to be a multi-year journey to rebrand PACS and enterprise imaging as not-radiology and then not-radiology and cardiology. It’s really beyond that. I mean, we have our sights set on having a single platform where we can get out of some of this madness of storing images on shared drives, secure shared drives, et cetera.
Angela: We talk about this process all the time on the podcast about we’ve seen kind of two types of organizations today. You’ve got the type of organization that doesn’t have real firm governance around decision making and decisions can take, I will say, 12 months to 36 months on something like this because there’s really no defined path. And I think what a lot of health systems have realized of late, maybe the last two years is the faster and more agile we can be in decision-making, the more we can be responsive to the needs of the organization, balancing between like, we can’t switch technologies all the time, but at the same time, like you said, if we build like a foundation structure and have these very agile partners that we work with, then many times we can kind of build the new things as we move forward. But talk to me about streamlining governance. Is that something that you’ve heard a lot of these days is how do we shorten decision making? How do we either say yes, say no faster? How do we iterate? Because technology is like the linchpin for almost everything in the health system today.
Oliver: It is, and I think there’s a meme about a squirrel. You see a squirrel and the dog runs after the squirrel. It’s very hard. And I try not to do that as well, but sometimes I know what’s on our list and I see something that will either create a level of efficiency or cost reduction or quality. While quality is important right now in the financial climate, efficiency is really, really paramount. If we have an opportunity to do something that’s medium lift and generates a medium or higher return, like we should really work with our operators to say, hey, this is a great idea. And some of those come from IT organically being out listening to the industry. Others come from the operators, which I think it’s been a change for us to say we should listen because things are coming at such a fast pace. People do get targeted directly. We try to funnel those back into a collaborative IT group with operators. And so we’re not out there solutioning two different things for the same problem. So that still happens. It’s not perfect, but we really try to communicate and open up those channels. And I think from an IT perspective, it’s changed how my team operates. We try to go out and just talk about things we’re working on because you might either learn someone else will benefit from it at one of our other campuses or they’re already working on something that’s further along and maybe better. That would help what we actually got, what we received as a formal project request. So there’s definitely an art more than a science to that in terms of governance, but I will say we were able to, I would say the sales cycle was way shorter than I anticipated. I think my aspirations were start this in March and I gave the team like, let’s see if we can sign this thing by the end of December. So I thought that was crazy. It was probably not going to happen, but that was kind of the big goal, like, let’s see what we can do. We ended up going from eight vendors in this particular example, answered an RFP down to three on-site clinical and operational demo days down to two, I’ll say two vendors we did site visits for. We did multiple site visits for those two vendors. And I like to talk about, we flew around the country. I could not believe we had four radiologists literally flying around the country from Minnesota, Oklahoma city, San Francisco, and to do these site visits and investing their time was very meaningful for us as an IT team and I think they felt the same on their side. But ultimately we got to December. We made a selection in December. Then it was that administrative contracting, vendor vetting. We had kind of started that in the background, but I said, there’s no, it was an artificial deadline. Let’s take our time and get this contract right because it is probably, if it works the way it should, a seven plus year partnership from this vendor. So we ended up signing in March, so just a couple of weeks ago, but a 12 month sales cycle really. We had the vendor go look at when they first sent me an email and we had it hemmed in 25. Pretty impressive. I would say the group and the problem statement was so severe for us that this is not sustainable will ultimately have to do something. The vendor was our incumbent. They were innovating, they are doing something, but it’s a new platform. It’s just like, it’s not really a renovation. It’s buying a new house just made by the same home builder. And we weren’t, and their development timeline did not 100% align with where we needed to go based on our problem statement at hand. So that all fed into the why, but I do think dollars are scarce. You have to go and articulate a case. And I mentioned the challenges with imaging replatform, it doesn’t intrinsically bring you new business. You don’t put in a new packs and people just come to your door knocking because you have a new packs. I think it’s a much more nuanced conversation around provider and an operation satisfaction. It’s a reduction in OT because when the system is down for six hours right now, someone has to merge all those studies. You still scan the patients, but it delays everything ultimately reaching the referring provider and the patient themselves. So we also are certainly have a gap in our current disaster recovery that this strengthens for sure by moving to a hybrid cloud model. So all of that was not the, this is a brand new building. It’s going to generate new revenue for the health system and expand our service area. It was really a fundamental, but it was in line for funding with everything else. So you have to be able to tell that story. And it is not always an easy one to tell. Current climate, any climate, probably any health system today.
Kandice: Yeah, it’s so interesting though, because those are the hard decisions I think so many of our healthcare providers are facing right now. Am I building for the future? Am I streamlining what we already have? Or are we getting new innovation and we’re moving into another area like screenings or these more revenue generating programs? How do you understand where your organization is at and what they want to do. Is it typically driven by IT? Are we partnering with our C level? Are we partnering with our frontline staff? How do we know what we are as an organization and where we’re going?
Oliver: Yeah, think, I mean, we do have a very structured process for requesting dollars and things that come along with that but everyone ultimately has strategic plans that we IT try to align with and bring together things that either conflict or we know we won’t be able to do all of these things and then bring back the conversations. I certainly do not want to cast it as an IT led effort. I think the biggest compliment I’ll ever get is hey, you guys are great partners. If I hear that then we’re doing our jobs. If we’re leading then we run the risk of, if we’re leading and bringing all the ideas and then bringing people into dragging them along with the journey, we run the risk of having no adoption of the solution and it costs more money in the long term than even status quo. So it’s a nuance and I’ve had plenty of ideas that have come that it’s like, it’s gonna have to be an Oliver or Oliver’s team thing if we do this. And that doesn’t feel right and that’s probably not the priority from our operations. And then we shift and morph into that. It’s not perfect. There are things that, let’s just say something with faxing, moving faxing to the cloud, which is not something we’re actively doing right now, but that’s not a project that operations is lining up to say, let’s move faxing to the cloud, but you have to do it at some point. Very different than, hey, this is a wifi network refresh. That might not be the complaints and the end user will come from operations. So there’s easier buy in on that than something that’s more backend.
Angela: I feel like there’s so many sexy products right now that some of the core foundational things are what needs to be fixed in order to bring in the sexy product. But that’s a hard sell, right? You already talked about ROI like multiple times. It’s on your mind because it’s constantly kind of pushed down on us from above from the standpoint of like, well, what ROI is a new PACS going to get me? It’s not going to get me more patients, right? And so making those decisions, but there is a lot of like sexy tech out there right now. And I feel like the, I do not envy the health system or technology leaders with the amount of just people coming to them daily with like, I found this thing. I heard about this thing. We’re using this thing like, and there’s so many widgets and components out there that there just seems to be a lot more noise than ever out there in the technology world, which is tough when you’re talking about like, well, we just need to fix this faxing problem to the cloud. You know, like nobody’s like, well, that sounds like a really fun project.
Oliver: And no, 100%. And I think the difference now versus 10 years ago, eight years ago is the claimed speed of implementation. So you just turn this on, you do a pilot, we’ll just connect to Epic, like plug and play. And some of it is legitimate with the right focus from the health system side. I think where we can still do a better job is say, I truly, like I have been in conversations and I truly believe the timeframe being given from the vendor, but it’s only if I actually can get the resources from IT and operations to go and do and do nothing but that. And that’s where sometimes we run into this game where this was supposed to be a six month pilot, but it’s taken us three months to even get it running. And like, well, it’s the same team that does all of the other work and the operators are running the day to day. And so there is definitely a balance with the perceived, sometimes accurate, we’re going to do a connection or not implementing a server in many cases. We’re not doing what we used to do. And also the fact that it’s in some systems, the low capex high opex model works kind of the more subscription model where it’s like, yeah, pay for it for three months. If it doesn’t work, turn it off. We still prefer more traditional capex models for larger software purchases. It’s becoming the minority, obviously, in the industry for all the reasons that we all know, but it still helps in terms of we’re going to make an investment and then pay maintenance over time, but we’re not just adding to the bottom line, committing per case, per study, per book. That is where things start to get out of control quickly and it changes the dynamic of things. So we at least try in our negotiations with our larger platforms to try to understand all the licensing flavors and models out there so that we can make sure we’re taking care of the finances and in the future years the best we can. But it’s every day and it’s every week and I’m guilty of it. There are cool things that I see. I’m really like, hey team, let’s do this. Let’s get some operators. And again, it’s, I have to, because I feel like, I do feel like on the flip side, if you shut yourself off as an IT department and you just stay like, here’s what we already have, we’re going to do an upgrade every year, you can miss out on things that are out there. And I also think the same is true. If you’re too much on the other side, you’re going to miss what your core vendors are doing with at maybe no cost at all. So there’s, you’ve got to be very middle of the road on that. You have to be able to play on both sides.
Angela: I so totally agree. Let’s switch a little bit to your leadership style. You have led teams for a while now. When you think about driving success and chaos and you specifically, what is your leadership mindset that has helped you move complex decisions forward with all of the momentum that you have?
Oliver: Well, I think some of it just, it all starts with just being authentic and understanding the space, understanding the problem, understanding your team. I think if you can be open-minded to solutions that might not be your own, might not be IT’s, might not be the vendor’s, have those conversations that helps set the tone for how you’re going to partner with someone, how you’re going to implement, how you’re going to work with operations. I think where I’ve seen this go a different direction is you can lead a great IT team. But if you don’t listen, if you don’t have the perception of what’s going on around you, you can miss the mark and you don’t even realize it. So I think for IT, it’s more critical than ever to be able to speak both languages, speak technical, speak operations. I would even argue for a lot of our applications, the technical is becoming less technical. It’s really configuration and mastery of different software solutions and problems we’re trying to solve. And so that’s changed the way we have to approach things. It’s not wait for the ticket. It’s how do we improve the workflow? What’s the problem we’re trying to solve in that particular space? So I think that sort of fundamental understanding and trust of how are we going to do this, like your priorities of today might not be the same priorities of tomorrow because something in our world or that business line’s world legitimately might change between now and then and being able to be transparent. I think that’s another thing that I’ve had in my career is I’ve always had very transparent leaders and I value the same thing is I like to understand why. I like to ask questions. I like to make sure and I think being a leader that has been a relatively young leader when I started managing teams and had truly four different generations of teammates that were reporting to me, you have to learn but also at the same time you’re sort of defining your leadership style through all that. So being able to work with different people in the workplace and then obviously the shift to remote has changed that for all of us but that’s a little bit different and more nuanced as well.
Angela: You just brought up something in my brain. Last week, I was at a CEO advisory meeting and Google presented and some of the executives with Google. And a lot of the work that they’re doing, unlike what you’ve described here. They’re looking for helping health systems kind of look at platforms as a whole, look at feature and functionality that’s already built in, look at maybe systems that they’re paying for that now have become obsolete in a way because technology has moved so quickly and it’s already included in another platform. But one thing that they really spent a lot of time on was helping health system technology leaders upskill their teams for today’s demands for technology. And they were talking about like going into health systems and meeting, you know, like teams of data engineers or teams of clinicians that all they did was create reports or and now you’re moving into a new era where like you could literally talk to an LLM based thing about, well, can you just like make this report for me? So you would never have to have these swaths of team not to get rid of these folks, but to upskill them in different ways. How is your brain thinking through all of that?
Oliver: I think it’s becoming more front of mind to me than ever before. I would say honestly going to and talking to peers from a Vive perspective about some that maybe were a little bit ahead in their journey or where they were in their org chart, they were more tasked with that directly of what is the future, the re-skilling of the IT workforce that’s necessary. I think it depends on what position you are in the IT ecosystem. I think there’s some positions that will see less change right now than others. But generally speaking, I’m heavy on the upskilling and re-skilling. And I think we have proof here, although slightly different, I would say we were relatively IT FTE neutral from our previous EHR through our Epic conversion. We were a mature, although many, many applications to be rationalized IT organization. But when you did the math, we really saw FTE neutrality, roughly. There were some functions that we used to outsource that we insourced because we outsource professional billing for our physician network. We didn’t have an IT team that supported them. So those type of functions came in. We didn’t have principal trainers. It wasn’t a function. We really had training content everywhere. So we made some intentional, these are new positions, but generally our core Cerner, HealthQuest, XYZ analysts all converted over and got certified and are now Epic Analyst for the most part. So we did that intentionally. In my opinion very thoughtfully to make sure that people were, it was transparent. Not everyone wanted to make that transition to be clear, some said I will help until a certain point and then I’ll work as a certain consultant I’ll go and retire if there were some of those decisions that happened but we were very transparent about the process and that your seat on the bus might change. You might be a Pharmacy FarmNet analyst and you might become an inpatient QuinDoc analyst because that’s the seat on the bus that’s there depending on when you come over. So I think I’m at least mentally thinking about this transformation the same way. If you just sit there and pretend like nothing’s going to happen, then your team doesn’t get the skills. We’re not taking advantage of all the tools that are out there for leveraging this. And so for me, at least at this point, it’s very much a point where, okay, we have a new project. I’m working on something with automation of EKG reconciles. So that’s the first foray into this space and kind of this quasi clinical administrative space for my Cupid team. So they’re stepping into that world learning, not saying go and become an AI wizard, but we’re saying this is reality and then the value of this will change your world because we won’t have to answer 50 emails a week about why are these EKGs not reconciled? Why are the charges held up? And then you can actually do more meaningful work that makes a difference. So that’s the level we’re at right now, but I do think there’s a broader, as we get more core platforms in the AI space, I think as people naturally turn on more of the Epic native features, they’ll get really involved in understanding that, learning how to validate are these things working? That’s the other thing. It just can’t be the responsibility of our data science team. That’s a relatively small team. They’re not looking at every single AI solution every single day, just waiting on something to drift. We have to build that competency and education. So it’s awareness, then it’s the actual skill, and then it’s okay, well how does your job fundamentally change? I think we’re not there yet, but I think that’s the conversation at hand.
Kandice: Yeah, I love that every piece of IT implementation is a transformation like you were saying with roles and responsibilities and processes and not just digitizing the process that we had but you have to rethink the entire thing. I feel like I have a thousand more questions for you, but we will be respectful of your time today. Can you before we drop off? Can you tell us any good books podcasts things you’re listening to that you can share with us and our audience?
Oliver: I would say, yeah, from a book perspective, I read a lot of books to my two toddlers. So I am doing most of the reading. Right now, I’m not necessarily for my own, it’s enjoyable, but I wouldn’t say they’re IT heavy. But generally, what I found very helpful, I like the Harvard Business Review, which is really healthcare agnostic, technology agnostic. It’s really more leadership centric, which they have podcasts and articles that I like to listen to. So that’s one I really go back to. It’s not new, but it seems to be steadfast in that front. And then I honestly though, the in-person network and conversation from different groups. I won’t pick out any particular one, but there’s so many different ones. We’re just understanding that we’re of course way more similar than we are different. That’s always the most valuable. And I feel like I have many names that I reach out to for random ideas about how are you handling this. It might not even be in my space, but just to get the connections made. So I still find that to be the most valuable use of time and energy is that line of networking.
Kandice: I love that, a true theme of partnership and relationship. I think that’s kind of what we think as well. It is so nice to meet you and have this conversation with you today. Thank you for joining us. It has been a pleasure.
Oliver: Appreciate it.
Kandice: And thank you, Angela, for being here every single time. And thank you to our audience for joining us on Success in Chaos. Be sure to like, follow, and share today’s episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And a special thank you to the Inflo Health team for their production support.
