Welcome everyone to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. I'm Ryan Mohammed, writer and moderator with Becker's Healthcare. And I'm thrilled to have with me today, Golshan Mehta, chief digital and information officer at Blanchard Valley Health System. Sir, welcome to the podcast. We're very excited to have you join us today. To get it started, would you mind telling us a bit about you, the health system, and kinda what makes it unique? For sure. Good morning, Mariah. Again, just like you said, my name is Gulshan Mehta. I'm the chief digital and information officer at Blanchett Valley Health System. I've been with the organization a little over a year at this point. I've spent much of my career within healthcare technology. I feel like I've had a front row seat over the course of the last twenty plus years in terms of the digitization of health care, and, the innovation that it has brought about within the industry in general with a good part of my time that, I spent at Cerner. And over the last seven years or so, I've had IT leadership roles within healthcare, you know, health systems, pediatric healthcare for the first six years of those, within, you know, in Washington, DC, as well as the last year or so has been within community healthcare over here within Ohio. The organization I work with is Blanchard Valley Health System, and, it is a, medium sized, regional health system out here in Northwest Ohio. Serves roughly a eight county region here. It's about an hour south of Toledo, about an hour and a half west of Columbus, Ohio. It is truly a special place because, I know you mentioned, what's the uniqueness of it. It, being medium sized, it kinda has the, you know, the size and the scale and the ambitions of being able to drive innovation. So it kinda thinks big when it comes to the use of technology and being able to leverage innovation as a strategic asset. While at the same time, it also affords the ability to be more nimble with the size, and being able to be more adaptable to change that innovation and transformation, especially related to health care, can bring about. So it's pretty neat, in that sort of a sense. It, punches above its weight when it comes to, the breadth of services that it, offers within the region. So from a standard, you know, wellness and ambulatory care services that it has, along with the inpatient care, as well as post acute care services that it offers within the region. It kind of serves as the primary health and wellness destination for those that live within the community. It's extremely community focused, you know, prides itself in terms of, a very high touch and, high quality care, which is why it continues to get rated, you know, in the upper quartiles when it comes to patient experience and quality of care. So, it's, it's indeed, you know, a very exciting, health system in terms of, what it offers to the community. And, you know, it it nothing beats the fact that, you know, you can, you can kind of walk down the street over here and see the impact that it makes just in terms of, the, you know, the fate that the community has within the services that it offers, as well as, you know, the longevity that it has within the, within the area in terms of, the population that it has served for, so well. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. As an Ohioan and someone that, went to Ohio State and the Columbus community, it was very nice to hear some of those things. Is there an accomplishment that you would think that you're most proud of for the last year? Yeah. So like I said, I've been here a little over a year, and, we as an organization, as well as our leadership team, we saw it as an opportunity to, get back to fundamentals, if you would, from the IT organization. So as we look at what we want to build on going forward, we needed to do an assessment of where we are currently in terms of the capabilities that we bring to the organization. You know, there is a certain inclination of maybe bringing greater speed to value in terms of, new work that could be introduced. But at the same time, I think that was a realization that let's make sure that we build this on a foundation of trust. So making sure that reliability was front and center, before we started talking about the scalability, if you would, going forward. So, much of the work that, we've accomplished over the last year has been, again, goes back to, fundamentals mindset of, improving our IT service management and delivery capabilities. So putting in place the right people, process, and technology, the right structure of the organization that allows us to be successful, along with the right service management mindset that allows us to provide, more predictable and reliable service to the organization. That's been a keen focus on information security, making the transition from being defensive, alone to being a little bit more proactive as well in terms of, the work that we do. You know, the controlling the controllable side of things and being able to infuse that within the culture of the organization as well. And, road mapping, planning, and governance has been an essential part of this. So I think there was, a little bit of a sense of, lack of direction, if you would, in terms of what can IT truly do over what period of time. And, I think this was an opportunity for us to rebaseline in terms of the capabilities we can bring forward, in a more predictable fashion. So being able to start with a visioning exercise that allowed us to have the right balance of, you know, fixing the foundation while also, you know, working towards innovative solutions and innovative means of improving care delivery as well as efficiency. We created a road map, that was, that's something that the organization has had a chance to review and buy into, which now sets us up well for what the future holds. So those are, some of the, some of the more important things. You know, when it comes to tech, I mean, I think it's, it's really important to realize that it's not always about systems and tools. It is important that, we kind of ground a lot of this in trust, as I mentioned earlier. And, IT is seen as a partner. And I think when that happens, you know, with that partnership within the business community, as well as the clinicians over here, good things usually happen and progress follows. So that's our ability to, you know, kinda serve as launching pad going into the future. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all of those things. Are there, any big challenges that you're anticipating for this year or, let's say, the next four to five years? So with the opportunity for progress, as I mentioned right now, it also comes with some of the challenges, if you would, and we we keep a keen eye for that. One of those is obviously, related to just overall the workforce and their ability to adapt to change, and adapt to new technology and transformation, just because of, you know, where the industry itself has been maybe over the last four or five years since the pandemic. Burnout is real. You know, overwork is real. And, staffing related challenges continue to, pose a threat, if you would, in terms of, the adoption of some of the technology. You can only go so far without the right response from, from the staff, you know, in order to adopt some of this technology and make it actually successful and within the workflow. So we we manage this really well. It's a challenge, but, you know, this is this is something that we've mitigated through effective change management within our organization. So, you know, not only in terms of transparency for communication. So we talked about, you know, how we would build out the capabilities, you know, in terms of the road map and what we would deploy at what point. So having the appropriate communication is really important, and and being able to bring transparency to that is is really vital. But also, at the same time, being able to be as inclusive as possible as far as decision making goes in terms of what we work on and how we work on it in order to reduce the friction for the clinicians and the business in general is really, really vital for us. So I think that's one of the big challenge. You know, we can talk about the industry again at large, and we're probably not immune from it. Although, you know, we've been we've been able to weather the financial headwinds really well over the course of maybe the last couple of decades. But, right now, with the margin compression that's going on, I think there is a there's a keen realization for all of us that, you know, new projects and new solutions that we implement have to be grounded in a yield on that investment. And we're putting the right thought process in place in order to make sure that the the tools that we're implementing are going to yield us, you know, in the near term as well as in the long term in terms of some sort of a quantifiable benefits, especially knowing that, you know, we don't really have, too many, too many mulligans over here when, when it comes to, you know, being optimal with the deployment of our financial resources. And then, you know, cybersecurity and information security is always on our mind. We've made a lot of investment in that, not only in terms of processes and people and culture, but also in terms of tools and technology, and, you know, being able to stay ahead of the curve in terms of, what can sometimes be a very, very intimidating proposition, of, being able to keep the, keep the environment safe and secure, is a constant, is a constant in our mind, and we continue to, you know, work on it as as best as we can. So those I mean, that's, that that's maybe the perhaps the the outlook that I probably put in place in terms of, you know, what we think the key challenges might be. Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense. I definitely heard, some executives say something remotely close to, you know, what you're talking about. What is the number one thing you're doing right now to set up your organization, for long term success? Yeah. I, I'll give you, I'll give you maybe two. And I think they're sort of related, in a certain sense. You know, we've, as I mentioned earlier, there is work that we're doing in terms of fixing the foundation, but we're also looking at innovation. And on the innovation side, some of it is along the lines of AI and automation. We've had some early successes just in the last year or so in terms of work that we've done within with the use of, you know, some sort of automation, within the radiology and the radiologist workflows. We've had some recent success in terms of using AI effectively effectively for clinical documentation through the ambient listening tools and such. We're working on the next set of priorities beyond that where we think we can build on some of this momentum. We've built some of that trust from the updating of the foundation. We talked about. We've built some credibility with some of the new innovation and the tooling so far. We're gonna build on top of it with more, automation of administrative tasks. And I think that's going to be important for us not only next year but into the years going forward as we use that to learn, and, and continue to evolve. The second piece of it is, informing the organization and the leadership, but also everyone, you know, that that even is at the front lines with easy access to data. I think there's a lot of friction today in terms of being able to get access to analytics and being able to derive the necessary insights to not only run operations, but also help in strategic planning, what to do next. And it's my team's role to make sure that that friction, is, you know, removed as much as possible. We wanna make that whole process of being able to get to data more and insights more effortless. So I think that's the idea behind the work that we're doing right now is we're building out a centralized enterprise data warehouse solution that's gonna allow us to kinda serve allow it to serve as, as a single pane of glass, if you would, that everyone would have access to in terms of clinical quality, operational revenue cycle, and data in general to go out and make decisions into the organization. I think that's an important part of the data driven transformation of the culture that we're affecting over here that is, that's gonna serve us well, not only now, but also into the future. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for sharing those, those final thoughts. It's definitely been a very informative discussion. So, again, I wanna thank you so much for coming on Becker's health care, especially for the first time, and I hope we have you back. Thanks, Mariah. I really enjoyed it and, appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.