Modern Healthcare's Healthcare Insider Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Robert Meyer joined Phoenix Children’s in 2003 and is credited for the rapid turnaround of the hospital’s finances and its successful growth under his leadership.

This year, Phoenix Children’s opened a second hospital and plans to open a third next year.

In this new podcast, Meyer shares the strategy for Phoenix Children’s including:

• Unique aspects to expansion in the booming Phoenix area
• How the health system is leveraging partnerships
• Big risks that paid off during his career

Healthcare leaders often see utilities as a cost center. But what if they can be a source of savings?

Trane’s Christy Fetsch, Healthcare Vertical Market Strategy Leader in North America, joins the podcast to discuss how building upgrades such as automation can help hospitals reduce utility expenses while enhancing patient safety.

Fetch explains that HVAC, which represents about 65% of the utility spend in a hospital, is one area with massive potential for cost savings.

Additionally, she shares how one hospital network realized $4.7 million in energy savings by committing to vital infrastructure updates, ultimately freeing up resources to invest in patient care. 

Most technology innovation in healthcare has so far focused on clinical decision-making, overlooking operational functions. As a result, hospitals and health systems still face inefficiencies and waste, leading to financial constraints, poor patient health outcomes and high staff turnover.

In this podcast, featuring Rom Eizenberg, the chief revenue officer of Kontakt.io, we discuss how healthcare providers can leverage technology to unlock the patient journey — and everything else — to achieve operational efficiency.

Eizenberg will share why understanding how patients navigate the health system is fundamental to true transformation and the role of technology in realizing this goal. 

Direct sourcing has emerged as an effective staffing solution for hospitals and health systems as they continue to face labor shortages, competition for talent, and financial pressures. 

In this podcast, Richey Brownfield, vice president of enterprise solutions at AMN Healthcare, describes: 

• The key tenants to successful implementation of direct sourcing
• How to integrate direct sourcing into your organization’s current workforce management strategy
• Common challenges providers face when building out their direct sourcing solution and how to overcome them. 

In the year ahead, the value-based care landscape is expected to be more challenging for healthcare providers as new regulations from the federal government take effect.

A key strategy to manage and thrive in this increasingly complex environment is leveraging technology.  

In this episode, Dr. Matt Lambert, chief medical officer of Curation Health, will detail best practices for healthcare leaders to implement technology that will help ease the transition to value-based care, describing how automation and other applications can significantly help with risk management, care coordination and data. 

In addition, Lambert discusses the overall value-based care landscape and his predications for 2024.

Attracting and retaining quality clinical talent will remain a top focus for healthcare leaders in 2024.

In this episode of Healthcare Insider, Robert Crowe, founder of Matchwell and executive vice president of per diem and local workforce strategies at Medical Solutions, outlines strategies to better utilize the existing workforce while appealing to new local professionals.

He delves into considerations for leveraging AI in the hiring process, meeting candidates’ needs and creating a positive workplace culture, starting with recruitment. 

Listen to the full episode below. 

Value-based care programs are not immune to the challenges the healthcare industry experiences with data, as providers overwhelmingly struggle to leverage the right data, at the right time to realize better patient outcomes at a lower cost.  

To solve this issue, healthcare providers should take a data minimalist approach, which focuses on seamlessly presenting frontline caregivers with only the relevant, actionable data they need at the point of care. 

In this episode, Kevin Coloton, founder and chief executive officer of Curation Health, shares how providers can achieve data minimalism, describing the needed technology investments and collaboration with frontline workers. He also explains success stories from providers working towards data minimalism.

Today’s healthcare consumers expect a seamless experience free of confusion, frustration and delays -- barriers that affect not only the patient, but payer and provider employees as well.

In this episode of Healthcare Insider, Robert Connely III, healthcare market leader at Pegasystems, and Jennifer Zellinger, vice president of product development at enGen, share how they proactively engage patients and members across all channels of communication. 

They also discuss the potential for adaptive AI to help create customer-centric experiences with fewer operational silos, better care outcomes and lower costs. 

Automation and artificial intelligence can help healthcare organizations navigate staffing shortages while maximizing financial outcomes – if personnel are trained and skilled appropriately.

In this episode of Healthcare Insider, Susan Gurzynski-Wells, director of product management at HealthStream, discusses opportunities for AI to be leveraged in revenue cycle management, along with strategies for ensuring the workforce is prepared to use these technologies most effectively. 

She also shares critical insights about operationalizing AI in revenue cycle management, ensuring the smooth integration of new tools, and helping the next generation of professionals achieve their career aspirations.

Innovations in technology have enabled the creation of point-of-care ultrasound, which allows clinicians to gather images at the first patient assessment, improving care quality by reducing wait times for diagnosis.  

Despite the benefits of point-of-care ultrasound, wide-scale adoption hasn’t been achieved, with many providers still using traditional standards of care — for example, the chest x-ray for lung assessment. 

In this episode, Dr. Davinder Ramsingh, vice president of clinical research and product development at Butterfly Network, shares:

• The main barriers to widespread adoption of point-of-care ultrasound. 
• Clinical specialties that would benefit the most from point-of-care ultrasound including improvements to quality scores and patient experience. 
• Strategies to successfully adopt point-of-care ultrasound at your organization.

This podcast includes forward-looking statements regarding Butterfly Network’s standalone educational app, ScanLab, that is not yet available but will be coming soon to Butterfly users in the United States.