In Carahsoft’s new podcast, Digital Transformation and Lessons Learned From Our Healthcare Providers, our special guest speakers from the VMware Healthcare Industry Strategy Team discuss how the COVID-19 Pandemic is forcing dramatic IT Transformation, and the new ways that healthcare providers are delivering care.
Tim: Good afternoon and welcome to today's podcast focused on digital transformation and lessons learned from our healthcare providers as they continue to fight COVID-19. We are joined on the podcast by VMware's healthcare industry strategy team led by Chris Logan and accompanied by Jason Bray, Rob Marty, and Ed Deming. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.
Jason: Thank you.
Chris: Thanks for having us, Tim.
Tim: Well, it's fantastic to have you all on the podcast today. It's December 3rd, we've been living in the COVID-19 world for the past eight or nine months, and our healthcare providers have been dealing with the recent spike in COVID-19 cases across the nation. I'll start by asking how the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing dramatic IT transformation and the way that our healthcare providers are delivering care. Chris, do you have any thoughts?
Chris: Yeah, I sure do. Thanks Tim, it's a great question. I mean, we've seen what COVID did in the beginning with a lot of uncertainty, a lot of healthcare systems trying to figure out how they're going to sustain and even just take care of the patients with the unknown and variables that COVID brought to the forefront.
As time moved on, some of the big things that we saw from a VMware perspective where we helped our customers the most was really in a couple of different use cases. Taking proportions or pieces of the staff and moving them into new work environments. So a lot of work from home had started to take place. Looking at it from the lens of what we would call non-essential employees, but we know they're all essential employees in healthcare because billing is required to be done, coding is required to be done, but those could all be done from different locations, so really changing how people did their jobs on a day-to-day basis.
Also the advent of reaching patients, where they needed their care most in a telehealth situation. So actually bringing technology services into the patient's home or wherever they needed to be in their care delivery, in their care journey. And then, we've also seen a spike of this opportunity to change how healthcare is being delivered and focusing much more on a consumer-based angle and really looking at it from the lens of healthcare demanding or driving new digital channels to reach customers where they are.
So not only on top of solving the problems for vaccination development, solving the problem for patient care, isolating where we can and treating the virus where it is in place we're seeing healthcare shift with how they're delivering services and meeting patients where they are in their care journey. So big, significant changes for health care, which is very much always been a siloed, legacy-based type of infrastructure and architectures to be much more consumer focused, consumer first and consumer friendly, looking at how applications are developed and leveraged to meet that patient where they are.
Jason: Yeah, and I'll second that. When this crisis first hit, healthcare systems were just trying to keep up with demand. How do we immediately have pop-up clinics, pop-up triage units, pop-up hospitals? How do we extend our services to the parking lot, to these areas? And one of my favorite things that VMware did during this time, I mean, right off the bat when it entered the United States, was that we helped these folks with the pop-up clinics, hospitals and triage units. We extended their capabilities, their capacity to be able to do that and we donated those services so that things could happen so much faster and care could be given to those folks.
Triage was huge because patients and providers didn't really know what was coming in, what the symptoms would be, and so separating those folks as quickly as possible to handle the most critical cases was vital, and we help them do that through extending that capability and capacity into, a lot of times, the parking lot of the hospitals.
Tim: Jason, that's a great point. And now that we're heading into the winter months, and it seems like it's going to be a long winter for our healthcare providers, do we have any best practices on ways our providers are handling triage, updating their protocols or supporting some of the remote work that Chris was talking about?
Jason: Oh, absolutely. A lot of what providers were dealing with was getting to the patients that had the issues. Like Chris said, there was a lot of communication problems that needed to be fixed. We've been doing this now for eight months, a lot of providers that were looking remotely at patient issues just to help out with the overwhelming numbers. And storing forward with diagnostic imaging was huge. Being able to diagnose 24 by seven over tele-medicine was huge and being able to get that information back to the hospitals, to the clinics, to the patients, to the patient's family was a really big win.
Tim: Fantastic. Providing care at the place that the patient needs to receive care has been a huge success for our healthcare providers over the pandemic. Something that is very interesting, and that seems to be popping up all over the country in the provider space is that artificial intelligence, AI, and machine learning, ML, are driving improvements in patient care, health care outcomes, and cost savings. Is there an opportunity to implement AI and ML in the fight against COVID-19?
Ed: I think from a perspective in healthcare and leveraging AI and ML in regards to healthcare on a daily basis and more importantly, impacting COVID as we move forward. There's a couple of ways from an operational perspective, the ability to leverage those sort of technologies to improve your day to day efficiency of how you manage your infrastructure. If you look at it from a bottom up perspective, which then allows you to... You can use the systems to manage your platforms, which gives you the ability to focus your knowledge resource on solving other real problems that come up that you may not have experienced before.
But on the other end, when I think about it, and we look at the... I think of the digital transformation or the digital experience as we drive more to that digital healthcare, we've seen that rapid transformation that we as healthcare consumers are seeing, whether it's through tele-health or other digital platforms. AI and ML are a big part of that, so many of your bots and the ability to ask questions and interface, provide an additional interface, was a big piece of it.
Then as you kind of go in between, I think the ability to leverage those technologies to and whether it's quality reporting in regards to payment reimbursement, whatever it might be, as well as from the opportunities to leverage it for diagnosis is another piece and actually helping the clinicians execute their job more efficiently and provide more time with patients.
Tim: Thanks, Ed.
Chris: Yeah, those are all great points and one thing that I want to add in there also, AI and ML is predicated on something very important, data. So data being key and central theme here to improving those outcomes or improving those operations, we've seen a lot of healthcare organizations really start to fine tune or hone in on the data necessary to take advantage of that artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some of the more promising things that I'm seeing for the future state is being able to help diagnose without human intervention. Things like chest x-rays to identify a potential pneumonia, allowing the machines to understand what that x-ray should look like, how it's supposed to look and what a potential outcome could be for something like that.
That could help us predict in the future, some of those health outcomes that are necessary to take care of populations. And it's really, again, I can't stress this, enough ground in that data. So freeing the data, getting it centralized and into a repository that can be used by everybody is critical, not just for AI and ML, but for the business of the entire healthcare center.
Tim: Yeah. Great point, Chris.
Jason: I completely agree with those guys. My last hospital stint, we were a big AI shop around diagnostic imaging and the biggest benefit that we saw was a 75% reduction in providers documentation needs, which does a lot of things. One, it allows the physician to see more patients. Two, it allows for better quality because when the information of the patient is put into the system, the AI capabilities say, "Okay, we've seen this thousands of times in this exact way and here was the treatment plan for that patient. If you agree great, accept. If you disagree because of other circumstances, please input that."
So the AI machine learning could continue, which speeds up care and allows, especially during these COVID times, the physicians to be able to see more patients.
Tim: Yeah. Thank you. Jason, Ed and Chris. I'm glad to hear that the AI and ML could really reduce some of the challenges that COVID has produced for our providers. It seems that there's been a lot of rapid use cases and development to use AI and ML for our providers. What are your gentleman's thoughts on Cloud and its role in the post-COVID world?
Rob: Hey Tim, this is Rob. I can take that as it relates to Cloud. I think we're really seeing healthcare organizations really adopt Cloud in a meaningful way. Really looking to leverage Cloud in ways that help speed their ability to consume new native services and to stand up technologies that really can help support their operational goals. The benefits of Cloud really are speed, speed to market and reducing operational burden on internal teams.
Tim: It seems to me like Cloud will be another tool that our providers can use to support the change and the digital transformation that is being required to respond to COVID. In the AI and machine learning world and freeing up that data, can Cloud help with essentially the transfer of data or ensuring that these platforms that the providers are using... ?
Jason: Absolutely. That's actually one of the areas where we have the biggest problem is in the data center, is that capacity storage creep and when you're talking about AI, like Chris said, there's a huge amount of data that it consumes and so to be able to keep up with that capacity, it makes way more sense both structurally in the data center, as well as moving for future increases of data to the Cloud, to be able to keep up with that capability and be able to analyze that data in a real-time fashion so that providers would be able to supply to patients and their families what's going on to the best of their capability.
Chris: I think we talk about Cloud like it's some kind of destination. Cloud is not a destination. Cloud is a part of your everyday operating model now, and providers need to embrace this idea of Cloud computing as an extension of their current operations to simplify. One, to simplify how many hands they have on keyboards or how much processing or microservices they could take advantage of to solve patient care or business problems. But more importantly, there could be also a cost opportunity for these folks at the same time. When I think about common use cases for the Cloud that we've seen, and a lot of folks, and this is well before COVID when we started talking about this, was availability of systems is critical. How do you measure that if you're only putting that system in one single data center? You're creating an opportunity for risk that is beyond measurable and you can't solve for it.
So when you start to think about changing your operating model and including Cloud, you're now able to shift some of the risk, shift some of the cost, shift some of the day-to-day operations. You're giving yourself flexibility as a provider now to take advantage and ensure that the applications are ready for your consumers to build new applications also that are scalable, that meet the demands of your customer and change how you're operating and your clinical environments to take advantage of tools like AI and ML, potential IOT, potential new data type services or even those advanced services that Ed had talked about earlier, things like chat bots, and how do you get more into line with what your consumer needs?
This is now opening the playing field for healthcare, which has been very siloed off in the past, to take advantage of these emerging technologies to provide a better product. And that product in this case happens to be patient care, but we can do it better at a fraction of the cost, provide a better quality output and meet that patient or give them exactly what they're looking for. That's what the Cloud is truly offering for healthcare providers today.
Rob: Yeah, and in this world of COVID, we really saw a real adoption or need for services that didn't necessarily exist onsite or would take too long to get onsite. So these organizations were able to provision services and link those back into their data centers or their providers to be able to consume the EMR, regardless of whether they were in a tent or parking lot, which really enabled the providers to meet the needs of the communities that they serve in really interesting and unique ways and in ways that challenge the traditional delivery of healthcare IT.
Tim: Fantastic points, Rob, Chris and Jason. We kind of touched on it a little bit in the operating model and also identifying some potential cost savings opportunities. We all know that providers have had real challenges with lost revenues due to COVID this year. Is there some cost savings opportunities that our providers can look at, whether through the Cloud or some of the other technologies that we've talked about today?
Rob: From my perspective, VMware is known for helping organizations reduce costs and manage to a new normal. If we look back at what VMware did from a virtual machine perspective in taking that physical server and being able to leverage it more than just for a single application, being able to fully utilize those resources, saving organizations tens of millions of dollars in the process. That we look at that, if we push that model going forward into the network with the network virtualization and really even security with our intrinsic security model, we really see opportunities and storage, which the opportunities to replicate those savings that we've been proven to realize for organizations over the last 20 years into the next 20 and beyond.
Chris: I think there's one important point here also, Tim, if I think about this and I put on a different hat for a second. Nobody adopts technology because it's the cool thing to do, technology adoption is done for specific reasons. So when organizations are looking at the adoption of technology to solve something that's mission critical for them, where we stand at that crossroads, when I look at this, if I'm going to adopt a new technology, I'm going to make sure it meets the letter of what my needs are to solve my business issues and one of the factors that is a consideration is cost savings.
But in and of itself technology adoption, isn't just for cost savings. Anybody that walks into it just saying, "Hey, I want to save some money here," you're kind of missing the point at the end of the day. At the end of the day, if you're not solving some pressing problem and cost saving becomes an output of that problem you're trying to solve by the adoption of technology, I think you're doing it for the wrong reasons.
So where we see the biggest value from a VMware perspective is that we've always been focused first and foremost on solving those pressing business issues. Cost savings has always been an output for everything that we've brought to the table of solve those business problems.
Jason: Well, and helping providers, on that note, Tim, telehealth is going to be a huge area where they can make up some of that lost revenue. The reason why telehealth previously wasn't as popular, I mean physicians, number one, are taught in their first year of medical school that history and physical, the physical capability is so important. Secondly, reimbursement just wasn't there through COVID and a lot of the reimbursement capabilities increased. So the government really stepped up during this crisis and allowed physicians and mid-levels to be able to offer that service with a reimbursement factor to it, to help patients where they are through virtual applications.
What's going to make that even stronger is the 5G capabilities that are currently being implemented throughout the United States. The federal government is also stepping up there with grants to get 5G implemented faster with the carriers, but they're also stepping up with grants to the providers and to the patients because really where 5G is going to have an impact through telehealth is going to be in rural America because they don't have the capability or the time to travel two and a half hours to a metropolitan to get the kind of care that they may need.
And through that telehealth experience, providers can help them at least be able to triage the symptoms that they're currently dealing with until they are capable of making that journey.
Tim: Jason, you bring up a great point about new technology and how 5G is going to impact our providers and their ability to deliver care. You touched on it, their ability to connect with the rural areas of the country and provide diagnosis and prescribe treatment via telehealth. What other impacts will 5G have on telehealth?
Jason: I think there's another component to 5G that I haven't covered, which is SD-WAN and what SD-WAN brings to that equation is quality. And the second thing that a physician has issues with historically with telehealth, is quality. Being able to see the patient in a clear manner and SD-WAN provides that software capability to provide to those end users, a quality encounter so that physicians see everything that they need to see to be able to provide a quality diagnosis.
Tim: I think that's such a good point, Jason, is that there still seems to be that stigma or just a preference from physicians to always conduct appointments in the facility or in-person versus via telehealth.
Jason: I believe we're working towards providing the technology, the foundation, to physicians so that patients can have that good telehealth experience where telehealth now becomes the norm for delivering care. Absolutely.
Chris: Yeah, and I want to add one thing here, Tim, and I think this is a critical component. If you think about what our healthcare system should be, and I'm just going to talk about the United States for a second, we need to create a level playing field when you create this concept of health equity. An even playing field for every citizen of this country so that they can get the services that are necessary to take care of a population.
What I believe 5G brings to the table and further indoctrination of the telehealth services across the country, it's going to start to dispel the myths around certain types of care. So if you think about, I look at the post-COVID phases, I'm beyond COVID at this point, to where's the fallout to the healthcare system? It's going to be all of those care episodes that didn't get taken care of during COVID. It's going to be that undiagnosed case of cancer. It's going to be the behavioral health issues of what has taken shape by isolating populations of people. It's going to be a lot of things like substance abuse treatment.
There's going to be so much fallout from what we've seen with the lockdowns or the COVID effect, where if we had greater access to healthcare services, whether they're behavioral, just to be able to have a conversation with somebody at the right point in time, dispel the myth about what that means to people or how it makes people feel, it's going to change how we can create a healthy population.
So by enabling telehealth and making it better with the advent of 5G, we're now going to free the healthcare organizations to reach the most at risk populations to deliver care, to prevent bad things from happening. Not to get on my soap box, but we all know, as we all have come from the healthcare delivery organizations, is that we always take care of the sickest of the sick. When? When it's normally too late. We need to change that model and get in front of healthcare problems, be much more preventative with healthcares being delivered. And technology is going to unchain that, it's going to allow us to reach the sickest of the sick before they become the sickest of the sick and allow them to take advantage of preventative health services before it becomes a real detrimental problem in their health care.
Tim: Chris, you bring up such a great point and we've seen that transition over the past several years to be more of a preventative care type delivery system. You touched on what the power of technology will be and how it's going to shape our journey to being more preventative and taking care of patients before they're sick or chronically ill. Before we wrap up, what does your or a patient's ideal hospital experience look like when using technology?
Jason: So let me describe how we see this going forward, at least how I see it, and then let the other guys jump in. So if my son had had a broken arm, what does he go through? First of all, before we even get to the hospital, the hospital knows what has happened, what the issues are and how far out we are from the hospital, whether that comes from us directly, as patients through patient portals, through the EMT information systems to the hospital.
Once the hospital gets it, they are preparing for that patient in whatever manner that may be, either through the emergency room or if things are crazy because of COVID type situations, they triage them to another area of the hospital. The provider communicates very well and I think throughout this process, that that's the key, is communication. And technology really provides that capability as a seamless capability throughout this process.
So from the provider to the clinicians that will provide the care, they see the patient. The clinicians then treat the patient and before the patient is discharged, they have the information that they need going forward, the education that they need going forward before they even leave the hospital. They already have their follow-up visits, the clinic visits and things of that nature so that they know timeframes when they need to come back to their clinician.
Ed: Jason, those are good points, and when I think of this and that whole experience, I think it's a piece in healthcare that we see happening but we forget in many cases, especially with the provider relationship, is the responsibility and the ability to support from a payer perspective, that initial experience. So I view it from a point of view where you might be someplace where you have this event, and we're seeing today where health plans are building true digital health plans, where it's digital first, it's an experience in leveraging technology. It can actually tell you where to go and who to call and what to do.
It may even make the call and I see more of that technology being driven from the payer perspective in conjunction with providers to create that integration, because a payer is going to bring more of that data and information to help make more of that patient's true experience. Imagine if you were in Disney, for instance, and you're traveling and this event happens. Well, that facility you're going to might not have all the information, but now you have a partner that's bringing that information to make going into that event and getting to the point of, "Hey, I just want it to work," more seamless and more readily available.
Chris: Jason, Ed, great points. Rob, Chris, want to weigh in here in our closing thoughts?
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's going to depend, right? If you think about what my health care experience is going to be versus maybe yours in the future, it's all going to depend. But I do know that technology is going to be at the center of it and I think it's going to be much more consumer friendly and consumer focused. I think what the experience layer that Ed's talking about is going to be critical for the success of healthcare moving forward. I think that monitoring people in their health status, in their healthcare journey, is going to be critical as well, to ensuring that we're keeping populations healthy and then getting those services where they're needed most.
I think that the beauty about technology adoption, if you think about what's happened with COVID and how quickly we've turned corners to develop vaccines, to contact trace, to look at how we're interacting with other people, is that we're creating a new community to think about what healthcare means to them.
And if you look at healthcare from the past, we never really cared about healthcare as a society, at least in this country, until you got sick. Now, there's much more of a laser focus on how do I keep myself healthy and protected, so people are thinking about the preventative side of medicine a lot more, and you're starting to see a lot more consumer facing IT assets, personal assets, enter that journey with these people who are patients.
So I have a smart watch, I have a smartphone, they work in conjunction. I'm looking at my blood pressure, I'm monitoring my heart rate. I'm looking at my pulsometer readings to make sure I'm getting enough oxygen. I'm now an active participant in my own health care, whereas before I may not have been. So for lack of better terms, technology has really helped us round the corner. I think the pandemic has really helped us round the corner to change how we think about our own health care and then where we get those services. Making sure it's the right experience for us and that we're getting the best quality outcome at the end of the day.
Rob: I agree, Chris, and I'm really viewing this from a little bit different lens, moving more from this hospital experience back up the chain, the healthcare value chain, and back into the community. Today, we largely look at the hospital experience through an acute situation, like Jason was describing, around a child with a broken arm. Really see technology pushing the healthcare or really the community experience around health, back to the local community and really engaging folks in the same way that they're engaged in the rest of their life.
Technology is an enabler. It democratizes data and decision-making, but in the end, really we're talking about improving the health and the life of the peoples and the communities we serve and technology is the glue for that. But at the end of the day, we really believe that moving this care experience from the chronic care and hospitalization or even outpatient care, really to the home and to the community via technologies like telehealth and 5G, but these are really more just enablers of a process of connected people.
Tim: Gentlemen, this has been a fantastic discussion. Thank you to the VMware healthcare strategy team and a special thanks to Chris Logan, Jason Bray, Rob Marty, and Ed Deming. If you would like to learn more information on how Carahsoft or VMware can assist you in digital transformation, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at vmwarehc@carahsoft.com.
Thanks again for listening and have a great day.