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Podcast Interview with Craig Richardville, Part 1: “The Crisis Has Allowed Us to Disrupt Ourselves.”

June 18, 2020

“We’re doing things a lot differently. We’re thinking about a future that looks a lot different than in the past.”
It’s a statement most, if not all, healthcare IT leaders can relate to, but it can take on various meanings. For Craig Richardville, Chief Information and Digital Officer at SCL Health, it means acting less like a healthcare organization and more like a technology or retail company. It means paying close attention to where the disruptors are going and integrating it as part of your strategy.
Recently, Richardville spoke with healthsystemCIO about how the pandemic has served as a catalyst for digital health – at least, for those that had a solid infrastructure in place; how SCL Health has benefited from working with startups; and how they’re leveraging data to move toward value-based care. He also shared his take on the importance of being agile, what Covid-19 taught the industry about vendor partnerships, and why he will admittedly “steal every good idea.”
Part 1

* About SCL Health (8 hospitals in 3 states)
* Preparing to meet the demands of a potential surge – “A lot of good learnings have come from this.”
* Building blocks for remote work – “We had hardened and strengthened our virtual capabilities”
* Continued focus on digital services
* Leveraging chatbots to manage communications & analytics for decision-making
* Role of “clean data” in moving toward value-based care
* Becoming disruptors – “You’re a tech company.”
* Vendors vs vendor partners

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Bold Statements
It’s a bit of a juggling act to make sure we don’t kind of move ourselves to a single way of doing things because all of our environments and many of our communities are different.
Analytics has played a big part in how we understand what’s happening in our country, in our state, in our communities, and how we’re going to use that to drive our decisions.
As we come out of this, we’re seeing that volume isn’t as dependable as it was in the past. You have to learn how to run a business with lower volumes, and that means moving into the value proposition we’ve been talking about for a decade.
The crisis changed a lot of that. Now we’re doing things a lot differently. We’re thinking about future that looks a lot different than it has in the past, with the acceleration of that new world coming sooner rather than later.
We were really able to distinguish between vendors and partners, which has always been very important to me. People who are more about a commodity product or service are vendors, whereas those who are partners really want to join you in the fight.
Gamble:  Hi Craig, thanks so much for taking some time to speak with us. Can you start with an overview of SCL Health?
Richardville:  Sure. We are a $3 billion healthcare system. We are faith-based. We have 8 hospitals in three states and approximately 600 employee providers and about 4,000 providers practice at our facilities.
 
Gamble:  Where are you right now in terms of the pandemic?
Richardville:  A few weeks ago, we started scheduling electives, primarily same-day procedures and things of that nature. We’re starting to see a little more growth in our clinics and into our hospitals.
We’re also reserving capacity for the potential of a surge moving forward. We’ve changed a lot of processes, workflows, and patient flows in order to accommodate demand during a crisis, and be prepared if, for whatever reason, one of our states backtracks in terms of their progress.