Doubling down on the cloud

Welcome everyone to today's webinar innovation

and technology help transform imagings,

workforce challenges and revenue. I'm

Molly Gamble, Becker's health Care. Thank you for joining

us. Before we begin, I'm gonna walk

through a few quick housekeeping instructions.

First, you can submit any questions you have

throughout the webinar today by typing them into the Q

and A box. You see on your screen answers

will be provided via email following the

webinar.

Second, today's session is being recorded

and will be made available after the event. You

can use the same link you used to log in to

today's webinar to access that recording.

And then finally, if at any time you are having

trouble with audio visuals,

try refreshing your browser. You can

also submit any technical questions you might have into

that same Q and A box. We are here to help

with that. I am pleased to welcome today's

panelists.

We have Doctor Will Morris, who is physician

executive in health care and Life Sciences at Google

Cloud and serves as a subject matter,

expert author and frequent industry speaker

on the topics of A I and ML

in interoperability and innovation in the health

care Space.

We have Doctor Richard Bruce, Vice Chair

of Informatics with the Department of Radiology

at University of Wisconsin Madison. He

is dedicated to A I clinical integration across

the entire spectrum of clinical workflows.

And finally, we have Doctor Sonia Gupta, Chief

Medical Officer of Enterprise Imaging for Change

Health Care. She also works for Radiology

Associates of Florida, which is part

of radiology partners. So, panelists

welcome. Thank you so much for being with me today

and I'm looking forward to this discussion before

we dive in, I thought I would share just a bit of context

with our attendees for the topic we're exploring

today. Access and efficiency

are two of the most important topics in health care.

Right now, health care leaders are constantly

looking for ways to streamline workflows,

eliminate patient access challenges in all

areas of care including medical

imaging.

And many health care organizations are doubling down

on the cloud to streamline imaging by

giving providers easier access

to shareable and secure data.

Today, a panel of experts will engage in a dynamic

discussion on use of cloud technology

in medical imaging that can boost

it strategies reduce clinical care

burnout and increase cost saving efficiencies.

So will Richard Sonia, this

new digital transformation age really

raises the need for health care leaders to

constantly look for ways to better streamline

their workflows, eliminate access

challenges. Can you talk to us

a little bit about the challenges health care leaders

are facing? Right? Now. Well,

I'll turn to you first for your thoughts here.

Yeah, thank you, Molly and thank you to

Beckers for hosting this webinar.

I think you kind of led the witness

in your preamble. You mentioned the word workflow,

workflow is absolutely essential.

So technology needs to be done with

you, not at you.

And so I think that is something that you're going to hear

kind of throughout the next 40 minutes

or so that

um you know, it is the judicious application

of technology to enable processes

that drive value and value is a couple

of things. I think for, for

providers who are busy, we

know we're getting reimbursed less

to do more. And so that's how

do I actually deliver what I need

to do at the right time, at the right cost at the right

um

uh at the right value and, and

I think enabling technologies

um that support those things will be important

for payers as they get into the value

based care space. How

do we surface information that allows

patients or members to exceed,

you know, the best health for, for

uh themselves um at a cost

that's affordable and accessible.

Um So thank you very much for

the opportunity to kind of share.

Thanks will Sonia. What would you add

to? What will just shared?

I think there is a lot of excitement about

applying technology to improve health

care.

But uh there's been a little bit of a struggle

to identify the best way to do that. And

I think that goes along with what will said that

technology is being thrown at you and

it's not always built for you

as the end user. I think

that for our patients,

you know, they're able to schedule

a hair appointment on an app and

they can't always do that with a doctor's appointment

or an imaging appointment. For example,

you know, let's say they know they need to get an MRI.

And normally if you're scheduling

a hair appointment or something simple like

that, you might have a list of locations that come

up, you know, time slots that pop up.

We don't have that in a lot of organizations

and health systems right now. And

it's just some really basic

usability that our customers who

are patients want that we're not always able

to provide. So I'm really interested

in kind of going back to the basics and seeing how we can

apply technology for some

of uh the use cases that

might not be as exciting,

Richard. We're talking about challenges in this new

digital age as leaders are looking to

eliminate access challenges, better, streamline

workflows, your your co panel so far raised

a couple, you know, a lack of autonomy

with workflow changes happening to you.

Um Basic usability problems like

Sonia just illustrated. What else would you

add to this running list?

Yeah, I think the the the challenges

certainly facing the provider side

are, are equal or greater

than what they have have ever been. And

that really filters its way up, you

know, to the leadership within an organization.

So, you know, we're seeing uh very

high demand for health care

services across the board and I think that

is, felt very acutely, uh within

the radiology space. You know, I think

if you, uh, look out across

sort of the, the radiology landscape,

there's, there's lots of discussion about

workforce and that, that, that comes

from uh people talking about,

you know, burnout among physicians, about the

aging uh radiologist population.

Uh about the, the fact

that uh technology, while it

improves our ability to deliver care

also brings with it uh at times

increased complexity and much, much

higher uh image volume

and exam volume.

And the downside of being able to

sort of do work from anywhere is

that you're expected to do work from

just about anywhere. And so,

you know, some of those challenges uh

were really brought into

into stark contrast, uh you know,

in, at the beginnings of COVID and

we saw rapid changes

in in workflow and rapid

changes in the way that we adopt

technology. And a lot of attitudes

uh shifted uh quite dramatically.

And I think that the,

that, you know, that, that really expresses

itself for leaders

in that and that they see a very different

and dynamic uh health care delivery

space just today than what it

uh existed just a few years ago.

I'm gonna stand on that point and idea

Richard and I, I'm curious to hear we talked

about some of the macro challenges industry

wide. Um But let's narrow

down to how these are affecting medical imaging

at large. And then specifically

when it comes to burnout, like you mentioned,

Richard efficiencies, costs

Sonia. Can you give us kind of the broad view

and then also zoom in on some

of those specific issues as it relates to

medical imaging?

Yeah, we are having a challenge

with staffing,

you know, a lot of our sites and

you know, we focus a lot on the physicians, the radiologists

and imaging, but also our radiology, technologists.

Um we're seeing staff shortages there as

well and

you know, it's uh it's a combination

of factors and it's difficult to solve, you

know, there's burnout involved. We

are having uh a higher volume of

imaging exams and the higher

volume of imaging exams is more complex.

So over the years, you know, as our technology

has advanced with CT scanners and MRI scanners

and even ultrasound, each exam

actually contains more images than it previously

did, which requires, you know, more

time to evaluate those images

and to make a diagnosis.

And so, you know, our exams are

more complex than they previously were

at a time when we're having challenges with staffing

and dealing with burnout, which is

hovering around about 50%. Now

for radiologists specifically

and you know, to personalize the example,

I am previously an academic physician

and I like mentoring medical students and residents

and fellows. And what I've noticed that's

been somewhat alarming is some

of my mentees that have only been working for

2 to 3 years are already thinking

about how they can go part time or

potentially even retire. And by retiring,

they just want to leave the field of radiology due

to that burnout.

So what I want to do

is to focus on using technology

in innovative ways so that we can actually

retain, you know, our current workforce.

Because right now, our imaging volume

is growing at a pace where we just don't have

enough of a radiologist workforce to cover

everything that we're gonna see, you know, in

the next 10 to 15 years,

I might actually double click on that.

So, so we have two radiologists and a hospitalist.

So I'm a hospitalist. So I am uh either

your best friend or your worst enemy.

And it too is getting um

you, you mentioned this kind of culture

of expectation, right? Because before I had

to go down to the uh you know, reading

room and you know, if it was,

I won't date myself, but pull the jacket,

look at the film if I wanted to. But now I get this

experience where actually I can pull it up on my,

on my phone, but I want

that same speed and experience

with also the report. So there's this psychologic

expectation with technology that

says, hey,

um I can see the, I can see the dico

image. I also want the report, hey,

with that report, I want to automatically

triage. So I don't have to go into the record

and find out those incidental findings

or what else do I need to do but have it magically

surface and drive my workflow. So we have this

fascinating

paradox of,

you know, we have these beginning experience

that are digitally enabled, but we also have

kind of the old, old way of kind

of experiencing health care. And, and

again, I'm optimistic that we can

work collaboratively with

technology to, you know, at

the end of the day, get the right information to the right

person, whether it be the radiologist or the

ordering pediatrician or hospitalist or

even the patient.

Um

and, and to your point

um and how do we take this massive,

you know, data set that we're creating all of this exhaust

and make it actionable, make it

a utility, make it helpful

um to all all all members

of the care team

Richard. Are you gonna say something as well? Well, iii I

think that's where, you know, that's

where the promise A I you,

you can't go to any radiology or any

really event in, in medicine at all

without uh you know A I being

everywhere that you turn to. But that in part

is, is part of the allure of,

of what people are looking for from

A I is, how does that improve

our efficiency? How does that translate

downstream? So, you know, how does something

that we use and implement within

radiology? Uh make

sure that, that, that those

uh results and findings are communicated

to the right person downstream because

that's where value is really added uh to

the health system and to the patient's experience

overall is when you

impact workflows throughout the organization

and not just within the limited

silo of a given specialty.

Uh And, and you know, we've had integration

challenges, but you know, I I would

venture to say that the, that the concept

of sort of building an individual

technology piece today, uh

You cannot do that without

a more holistic view and, and how

that technology is going to connect and interact

and integrate and, and

provide some form of seamless experience

in either the way that that data moves

through it or, or in the experience

of the users themselves.

And so I want to look back to something you have said

it's not only that the volume of imaging

is increasing but also the complexity of

it. Any sense of what's driving that is

that there's more sophisticated options

for imaging available now or, or patients sicker

or any, anything to that story.

I think that comes from the, the

definitely comes from a lot of different

uh areas that the exams

in some ways we're our own worst enemies. As you develop

new uh novel ways to,

to do imaging, the imaging becomes

far more useful. And that's one of the

challenges when people can consider

medical imaging volume today versus some

time in the past and say, oh, you

know, we used to not have to

use all of this imaging. Well, the imaging

uh tells a much, a much

deeper story today. You can diagnose a lot

more. Uh it's used for prognostication,

it's used for staging there. There's

probably no uh cancer

therapy that doesn't leverage imaging

as as one of the primary markers

for the decision making. And so from

that standpoint, you know, as

as the indications for imaging grow

and as you know, we create better

and better imaging modalities, imaging technology

and all of these add on,

you know, layering on tools. Uh you

know, the the complexity really does grow,

but that's also represents the the opportunity

for technology because how can we take

that and take something that is

complex or large or high volume

and really distill it down to

information that's actionable.

Hm, thank you, Richard.

Um I want to move on a little bit. We've talked

about some of the the macro challenges at large.

We talked specifically about imaging. Where

do we need to go from here? Let's talk about the

path forward and how innovation

technology can really be a gateway

to transform some of these workforce challenges

we talked about and revenue, you know,

Sonia, I find the example that you share about your mentee is

so helpful and vivid. It really

puts so much into, into context.

Um What do you see as

next steps forward? I'm gonna turn to you first.

Yeah, I mean, I think another part of that example

is it costs approximately

$500,000 to replace the physician

that leaves the workforce and most organizations.

And so, you know that there is

actually a cost to burn out.

And I think searching before the return

on investment is the newest challenge.

You know, we know that in imaging and in medical

A I, you know, there are over 400

vendors out there that have FT A clearance

now and that just that number just increases,

you know, pretty much weekly

and

that maturity in the market, you know, trying

to figure out what actually is the return

on investment if we're being asked to spend

money on adopting a product that

promises some sort of artificial

intelligence that we can put into our workflow

or put into patient care, you

know, is there gonna be a health insurance reimbursement

to that?

You know, and are we gonna be able to

adopt it uh seamlessly, will it

become part of our workflow or is it actually going to be

something where it causes more effort,

more hassle, you know, people do

not react positively to

upgrades generally or changes in their

daily work flow, you know, there's

a learning curve to all of that and there's

a cost to that.

So figuring out, you know, is there gonna be a

decrease in productivity or an increase in productivity?

Is this actually gonna affect burnout? And

are we able to demonstrate any type of return

on investment for what we're being asked to

buy uh and implement

in the hospital? You know, how does the it

staff feel about this? You know,

our it leadership, do they have

uh the bandwidth, you know, to assist

with this type of adoption and implementation

as well? There's a lot of different factors

to consider that are economic

and seeing that maturity in the

field is really uh the

direction that we're, you know, starting to go in now.

Well, I'm seeing a lot of emphatic

head nods and

um no, II, I think I would

uh plus 10,000

to uh what what

Sonia had mentioned,

you know, from a technology company, I think

what we're seeing is the power

of collaboration and partnership. I don't think

there is, there's not going to be one Magic

app or vendor that, that, that

solves them all, but it's really a coalition

of technology

uh forward, you know, thinking

uh vendors who understand the space and then those

who provide the care because at the end of the day,

it's got to, you know, implement

and be integrated in a workflow.

Um you know, where we're seeing, you know,

a lot of uptake is how do you invest

in technology? That is future proof.

That is something that is a platform, not a one off

solution that builds a capability

but not just solves a specific problem.

Because I don't think we, we

know we don't know what we don't know. The

world has changed a lot now, everyone seems

to be, you know, a computer scientist

and understands kind of the transformer

and large language models. But look, look

at what's happened in the past, you know, six months,

imagine what happens in six years.

It's tough to understand but having

a platform of approach where

we take the best of scale global

technology, plus the best

of those who are practicing

in, in the weeds, if you will

um who can help surface

problems, not solutions, looking for problems

and then finding really, really skilled

um you know, software partners

like change health care that can help

kind of integrate, implement

at scale. I think those three things are

absolutely paramount.

So Richard so far hearing when it comes

to technology innovation decisions,

you know, a couple of things raised so far, a

calculating Roy, how difficult

that can be with A I at times making

best that the technology is future proof

tech that's relatively consistent and doesn't

require numerous upgrades, changes

and then also like will said is

scalable. What, what would you add

to this in terms of when you're looking at

technology and innovative solutions

to really help

reduce some of the pain and friction,

these workforce challenges can impose and also

look to show up revenue, what else is important

that's worth mentioning.

Yeah, I think uh well, within,

within our organization, uh

you know, I would say, I mean, the last four or

five years, we've seen dramatic

changes really in the attitude

towards how we look at and

evaluate different technologies.

And you know, and so the some of

the factors that that

uh well, to address

the those attitudes first, the

several years ago,

the

putting forth a solution as a cloud

based solution uh would have met

with a lot of internal resistance

for a whole variety of reasons. And

that has transformed completely

the other direction where the questions being asked

today are really what would

stop us or why should we not be

choosing something that's really cloud

native? And, and the

the reasoning behind that is

that as we have looked internally

and matured and, and

had more understanding of,

of really our own internal processes,

uh It's helped us to really appreciate

some of the internal costs. So,

you know, the difficulties that we face

with, with collaborating

and working with our partners, you know, remote

access challenges, security challenges,

the mundane, you know, how do we

update uh patch, uh

you know, upgrade all of those,

you know, types of day to day challenges

with, with internal systems and

So, you know, it's a, it's a very,

you know, we look intrinsically

as we alluded to much more at the functionalities

that something is, is given and,

and evaluated as, as

you know, what can this deliver uh and,

and provide in a way that we're not doing

it uh that we're not doing it

today. And so I, you know, I'll

give an example uh of, of my own,

you know, uh until, you know, probably,

you know, two years ago, I would have put myself

very firmly in the

uh non belie

camp for delivering medical imaging

from the cloud. And, and part of

that was based on, you know, on premise,

uh you know, we encounter our own internal

performance issues. And so the

thought of moving something

further away, you know, how is that

possibly going to improve performance,

you know, the the best performance that we can get,

uh why would we not be able to deliver

that when it's internal to our own

network? Uh And the transition

for me really

came from, from seeing

some examples of

the same type of medical imaging technology

but delivered built cloud natively

on top of cloud native solutions

and realizing that the perception

of performance in terms of the interactivity

with the user and how that could be delivered

uh actually results in a much higher

performance uh from the user interaction

standpoint and from the capabilities that

they're able to take advantage of.

I'm so glad you shared your story because when you had set it up

until recently, I was thinking five years

within the past 10 years, two years

for, for you to make this transition

to go from non-believer to believer, are, are

there any other points of resistance that your colleagues

shared that they also confronted, that

differ from what you had just expressed?

Uh Well, I've, I've a long

time been a believer in cloud technology

as a whole. The challenge as one of my

colleagues once described, it is medical imaging

uh is the uh is

the dump truck version of

of data movement. You need to move

lots and lots of data, you know, over

sometimes, you know, relatively short distances.

And so and so that, you know, how

do you uh how do you marry

the benefits of, of,

you know, uh the

control plane and optimization of how

you deliver solutions in the cloud

with the needs of moving very, very large

amounts of, of data back and forth.

And, and so that to me was the final

hurdle of we can potentially

have the best of, of both

worlds. I would say where we see

people who, who, you know, my colleagues

who still wonder about it. Um A lot

of the questions that they're asking are really shaped

from the perspective of how we deliver

solutions on premise today.

You know how you know what happens when

you know, when we need to support this

or, or when this is based on services

which we have no underlying control

over. Um, and sometimes

that's in the same breath as when they,

you know, they recognize that

the services that they're dependent on

are oftentimes delivered from the cloud

and are more reliable than,

than what we deliver uh internally

Sonia. If, if that was the, the thought

process of why you name it, change

health care because it is around change

management as, as much as it is is uh technology.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think another

big misconception that comes up around

these changes is uh related

to cybersecurity. You know, there's a common

misconception that our data is

safer if it's kept on prem.

Uh but actually, you know, it's more cure

in the cloud. And again,

there's a cost to these data breaches.

Uh the average cost is $9.3

million for a data breach

in the hospital system.

So, you know, there is a cost

to that misconception and

you know, our physicians don't enjoy downtime

procedures and kind of losing connectivity

or access to uh software

that we need to take care of patients and

to switch to another method for the period

of time that's required to do an update. And

so, you know, when we think about all

the cloud that's in our lives in different ways, if

you're using an iphone or Netflix, I mean, it's,

you're using the cloud in some capacity.

And when you think about how you don't really have

a lot of downtime or problems, you

know, you just turn on Netflix, play a, you know, play

a movie and it works. But unfortunately,

that's not always the case in the hospital.

And with some of the software that we're using,

it doesn't just work. And, uh,

we can't really take that for granted and that's

what, you know, these changes are about.

Well, I'm gonna turn to you for your thoughts

on this next question. You know, we're talking about

attitudes which can be an early hurdle

in, in overcoming those when implementing

the cloud and, and moving to the cloud.

But few things in health care really move

in a straight line. What are some other hurdles

to adopting this technology and what

best practices have you seen that

have really worked? And that can help organizations

clear those hurdles? Yeah,

I mean, I, I think that let me start off

with, you know, where technology goes

wrong thinking that it's, you know, technical

solutions is the, the Magic

F seven cure all. Um,

oftentimes we may deploy technology

over a broken process or workflow and,

and you know what I'd say is you just get

broken faster and more expensive.

You haven't, you haven't done anything to

achieve value, you've just added more expense

through a different lens.

Um So I think it's really, really

incumbent on all of us and again, all

of us being everyone who's around the table

to be thinking about the people processing technology,

because the worst thing that we can do is to

automate something that A doesn't need

to be automated or B

that we do it through, you

know, blinders that we don't actually enable

a workflow or process redesign

or optimization. I think the

physician in basket is the perfect example

of that where all great information

goes to die. And so with

the resolution of information only

going up exponentially. And

yet we don't think about the

unintended consequence of, you know, where

that goes to, you know, to be deposited,

bad things happen.

Um So, you know, for those who are

listening, you know, I think to me

the best kind of conversation is one

where we think about, you know, what

is the core problem statement and then

dissect out very carefully.

You know, is there a process issue? Is there

a a people issue? How do we actually get

top of licensure? How do we delight

them? Um And then only

then do you kind of figure out how technology

can find the right application

and enabling something that achieves

better value?

Mhm.

Well, is that essentially boiled down to asking

like 10 more questions to really probe

and dissect a problem at hand versus just

thinking it, go ahead. Yeah,

I I'd say 55 questions. 10,

10 is a lot. I think we can get there in five.

But but yeah, it is a dialogue.

It is a journey. Um anyone who's

not, who's saying no, we've got a solution

and it'll, you know, cure all. I, I think

you run for the hills.

It is about kind of really understanding

the problem and working judiciously. It's

hard work because it's hard work.

These are nuanced clinical work

flows,

you know, there's a lot of things that you don't

know, you don't know. And so it really is incumbent

on all of us to um you know, be

at the table

um to speak up, you know, to

voice uh opinions. Um

I am 1000% optimistic

that there is uh you know, there is

positive that it will come and the momentum

and, and the tremendous things that we've seen is

just the beginning.

Um but this is a marathon and that requires

a lot of kind of patients

uh focus and intention

richard what other hurdles do we need to

make mention of?

Yeah, I think some of them uh the

uh is just the

uh uh the number of applications

uh you know, within a health system,

you know, so, so outside of our medical

record system, there's probably, you know, many

hundreds of of applications

that are supported that, that directly touch the

clinical workflow

in one way or another. And

you know, taking uh a a

look at uh at, at how,

you know, why do those applications exist?

How are we using those, how do we

reduce complexity where possible

uh is is a useful exercise,

you know, oftentimes those applications exist

for very good reasons. Uh But

you know, the the, you know that

when we, you know, when we look at the medical

imaging arena, it's very parallel to,

you know, do we need separate uh systems

to handle, you know, very similar functions?

So can we utilize, you know, a single

imaging platform as the archive

or as the the workflow

engine if you will for, you know, for

all the different specialties? And so,

you know, looking, you know, looking

for things that are tangible

first steps that, that, that you can,

that you can take and evaluate sort of the enterprise

imaging uh strategy

and, and you know, as, as we said, you know,

looking at it from a workflow perspective,

looking at it from a people perspective,

uh you know, II I think those are

really the the the fundamentals of the

approach that uh that, that results

in the most benefit oftentimes

any anything in terms of best practices

or other hurdles that our attendees

should be mindful of or on the lookout for.

I think it helps to speak to their colleagues

at other organizations that might be going

through similar transformations

of technology uh to hear,

you know, what best practices worked for them.

What challenges did they have

a lot of our uh customers and partners

are at different parts of this cloud adoption journey.

So

you know, comparing notes can be actually very, very

helpful.

Well, let's talk about the financial

piece of all of this. Uh the CFO has come up

a couple of times so far, they find themselves

in a quite a difficult spot these days

and having to defend um various

budget choices and also look looking for opportunities

to reduce costs more and more.

We are also seeing the need to report on a total

cost of ownership with CFO S need

to report to their CEO if the technology and

innovation they've chosen is

hitting on the organization's long

term goals. Where

what are your thoughts on the total cost

of ownership approach? Um I

would, I would just like to start there and get a, a general

take from each of you and your unique perspectives

on this approach. Will, can I turn

to you first?

Yeah, I mean, so Cloud in general

and I think this is, this stands true for

beyond imaging, you know, it is

a it fundamental mind shift and financial

mind shift out of out of a capital

Capex kind of expenditure to

one of operations. It's an Opex spend

with cloud, it's consumption based.

So

again, I'll beat my partnership

drum is, is,

you know, as much as this is a technology

uh uh you know, conversation and clinical

one. It is also one of finance

and having um you know, financial

um cloud

uh modernization, I think is absolutely

essential. Now, with

that, how do you actually

manage that? What's the governance model?

How do you think about um

you know, turning on these services, ultimately,

it has to drive, you know, revenue

and decrease your expense.

Um And so having really, really clear,

OK, RS or objectives

in key metrics, I think is absolutely

essential. So not only do you hit your

objectives and you can report back to the CEO

and the board of the success,

the financial success

or the operational or the clinical benefit.

Um But you have agreed upon metrics

that achieves those outputs.

So, you know, it's the worst G

word is governance but having that kind of

upfront um is, is really,

really successful. Um when

thinking about a cloud migration strategy.

Mhm Thanks will.

So, so what would you add when we're talking about

total cost of ownership approach?

Yeah, what we're seeing is a cost savings

of approximately 20% when

organizations move to cloud native.

And you know, it depends on the organization

in speaking to some of my colleagues,

you know that sometimes there is an upfront cost

and because of that upfront cost,

uh certain organizations are not able

to, you know, think about the

long term cost of ownership. And so

sometimes that's been a little bit of a hurdle

uh with cloud adoption that

we've seen. But you know, when everything

goes the way it's supposed to, ultimately,

there is supposed to be a cost saving

and, you know, we've seen again about 20%

with some of our organizations and partners

savings of up to 20%

richer. What would you add? That hasn't been said so

far about this approach.

Yeah, I'll, and, um, I'll,

I'll, I'll use an analogy. Uh, so if we go

way back in time to when we were making the

transition from the

analog film days to the digital

age, you know, one of the ways that our organization

uh looked at and evaluated the cost

of switching to packs was by doing an

analysis where at the time, whenever a patient

had a clinic visit their physical

radiology jacket with all of their

physical, you know, images would follow

them to clinic. And so over

a period of time, they tracked how many

film jackets were sent out and came

back with the seal still over

the top of it. So in other words,

uh the film jacket had made the round trip

without anyone ever opening it or taking anything

out. And they figured out that they were spending

several million dollars per year just

transporting around film jackets that no one

actually ever opened.

Uh And that's uh I I use

that analogy because in many ways,

you know, the the transformation that we're

seeing from a fundamental technology

shift today is probably of

equal importance to the transition

between analog film to

packs. And so we're at the threshold

of the way that people think about this being

completely different. And so

when we've looked at our internal metrics

again, it, it made us

uh in a value,

you know what it would look like for us to

uh move our archive, move our medical

imaging to the cloud. It made us much

more aware of what we are currently spending

today internal on storage,

on compute resources on the personnel

that are required to support that infrastructure

on disaster recovery, uh on

cyber security. Uh All of those,

all of those types of things and some

of the things that we're doing today, you know, we

also it also such as that total cost

of ownership. So we still have a very

large volume of patients who

bring in physical C DS.

And that's part of the total cost of ownership

from a medical imaging, uh

you know, solution business.

And our estimates on that is for every CD

that comes through the door based

off of the number of pe people who have to

touch it, interact with it and are involved

in some way with a workflow. It's a minimum of

about $15 per

CD.

And when you add that up, that's a, that's

a, that, that's a meaningful amount

of money to the organization. And so

uh all of those, all of those are

just facets of when we look at this holistically

and you know, what, what tools does this

give us that will allow us to completely

change and transform some of these workflows.

Uh you know, so far in

in our journey, uh the

the the the ro I comes out in favor

of the cloud solution

and Richard, I'll stay with you as I wind

down. This is my final question and we'll, we'll check in with

so Sonia as well. But what would you recommend

as one step a clinician administrator

or a leader can take when

utilizing technology to help

imaging better address workforce

challenges and some of the revenue bottlenecks

and challenges that health systems and hospitals are seeing

right now. Yeah.

Uh So, um

I, I think that uh I mean, we're

an amazingly transformative time,

you know, there's all kinds of new technologies,

but I think, you know, bringing things closer

to home, you know, really uh looking

at what you can uh take advantage

of today. So, one of the things I touched on

was, you know, evaluating your, your

internal enterprise imaging strategy,

looking at things very much from a,

you know, a process, uh

you know, standpoint, how you can holistically

uh you know, look for areas where there

are are synergy and

when bombarded with all of the sort

of, you know A I solutions out

there, you know, I think really uh looking

at those uh and connecting them

to the organization as a whole. So

how does this result in improved

patient care and when we improve

patient care oftentimes those

result in a cost savings or

a reimbursement benefit uh to the

organization as a whole.

Thank you so much. And Sonia let me turn to

you one step, one action item that you would like

to equip our attendees with in closing.

Yeah, I mean, I think attending a webinar, like this is

a great step, but also just again,

uh emphasizing connecting with colleagues

about, you know, where they're at and

organizations that are different from yours and how

they're handling the same challenges. I think there

are a lot of learnings there. And

I also just really enjoy case studies,

you know, hearing what another organization

did and these are published

out there. Um You know, what their experiences were

pitfalls, you know, that's always very, very

helpful uh to kind of figure out

a blueprint for yourself.

Terrific. Well, that brings us to the conclusion of

our conversation. I want to thank Will

Richard Sonia for an excellent discussion. I'd

also like to thank change healthcare for sponsoring

today's webinar to learn more about

the content I was present and discussed today.

Please check out that resources section

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you for joining us. We hope you have a wonderful

rest of your afternoon.