Episode 29 : Nurses as Innovators:

SCTS_Rich Kenny: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

SCTS_Rich Kenny: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Intro/Outro:
Welcome to the Smart Care Team Spotlight presented by care.ai, the smart care facility, platform company, and leader in AI and ambient intelligence for healthcare. Join Molly McCarthy, former CNO of Microsoft, as she interviews the brightest minds in healthcare about the transformational promise of AI and ambient intelligence for care teams.

Molly McCarthy:
Too often, technology makes caregivers' lives harder, not easier. It's time for smart technology to empower care with a more human touch. I'm excited to share a little bit more about our guests today, Rich Kenny. Rich is the SAAS Healthcare Industry executive advisor. A nurse first, his prior office used to be the back of a helicopter for Duke Life Flight, where he gained experience in just about every type of hospital and care setting. Seeing the blurring line between healthcare operations and technology, he pivoted his career into informatics with a master's of Management in Clinical Informatics from the Duke School of Medicine and postgraduate coursework with the Duke School of Nursing and the Fuqua School of Business. Rich has led operations at Duke Health, one of the oldest flight programs in the US, and has consulted for the world's largest healthcare systems in cancer centers with PricewaterhouseCoopers. At the onset of the pandemic, Rich returned to Duke to create their Hospital at Home program and lead remote patient monitoring programs before his nonlinear career brought him to SAS in Cary, North Carolina, where he now serves as an entrepreneur to drive the development and adoption of analytics and AI into care delivery and operations. Welcome, Rich.

Rich Kenny:
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be on here with you, Molly. Thanks.

Molly McCarthy:
First of all, thank you so much for taking time to speak with me and share your story with our audience today. And I look forward to seeing you in person, actually, later this week when you're in DC at a conference. First and foremost, you describe your career as non-linear, with a very diverse set of experiences in many clinical settings, and your last role at Duke creating the Remote Hospital Program during COVID. I would love for you to share with our listeners a little bit more about your career journey thus far, from clinical nurse to consultant, and especially your last role at Duke creating the Hospital at Home program and remote patient monitoring program.

Rich Kenny:
Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I love about being a nurse is that no two career journeys are the same, right? Every nurse that I've had the opportunity to meet, and no matter what phase they are at in their career, tell their story in unique ways. And so we've got this profession. That part of the richness is the diversity and the variation in career paths we can take. And if we get tired of doing any one thing or we think we've maxed out our skills here, it's so easy to pivot and yet stay within the same profession doing something completely different. So that's why I like to talk about these non-linear careers. In part, I think it also might be a bit to pushing back against this, maybe some this context around career ladders, right? Because we think of career ladders as linear, like something that I learned a number of years ago is how do we start thinking about those as being more dynamic career progression models? So little callouts being maybe a little subversive to some of those concepts. But yeah, I guess to spend a little bit of time just talking about my career journey started as a nurse, and when I graduated with my bachelor's of nursing degree, I wanted to, I actually met a flight nurse. And so that's where I decided, hey, that looks really cool. I want to pursue that, and then we'll go from there. So started in an ICU as a new grad nurse, went from the ICU to the ER. And then started at Duke in the ER there, and then very quickly joined the flight team at Duke Life Flight. I was very fortunate enough to become the youngest member to join the team and was on the team for close to six years, and we were a team that took care of kind of cradle-to-grave type model. So I learned how to take care of neonates, and we were one of the first programs to start doing to start patients on ECMO and then transport them over to Duke. So got to see a lot, and I think part of what you had mentioned is that's also meant I've gotten exposed about every type of care setting, from the large academic systems to the small rural hospitals here in North Carolina to pre-hospital scenes. So you just really getting to see that breadth of our healthcare system, and again, that's one of the things I really appreciate being a nurse is I feel like we really understand when we talk about systems thinking and understanding how healthcare works as a system. Nurses get that, I think, better than any other discipline. So, from there, I became the manager of the program. I was fortunate enough and led the team. I was privileged to lead the team for about two years, and that's really what started my pivot into informatics. If you think about this was around 2012, 2013, everyone was really in full push to implement their new EMR systems. Flight is really left out of that. Still, we have our own EMR systems, and I was managing that, and it would take me an hour to document what would happen in a 15-minute flight. When I became manager, I thought, okay, we're doing collecting all this data. Surely, we can do something with it. And you can probably guess that we're collecting all this data and it's very difficult to do anything meaningful with it. And so I'm thinking, okay, we have a usability problem and we have an analytics problem. And that for me was okay, that's this, what this new field of informatics is supposed to be about solving. So went through a couple programs, the Duke School of Nursing, and the Duke School of Medicine and Fuqua School of Business also have this joint program called a Master of Management in Clinical Informatics. So it just carries a little bit of that business component as well. And I'm laying a little bit more of this story out just to we're talking about the non-linear careers. And my guess is you were listeners and followers are probably going to be picking this up at multiple stages. So, hopefully, this is helpful. But pivoted there and then started applying and using that and ended up leaving the bedside, as we say. I need to come up with a better phrase for that. But we started doing consulting for PricewaterhouseCoopers. So did a couple things where I really was just trying to get as much experience as I could, right? This is just like in nursing how we would do our clinical rotations, or we'd get exposure to all these different units and care settings. I was doing that just at an executive health system level, so I was getting exposed to health systems like HCA and Ascension and MD Anderson and Mayo and the like, and loved that, did that for a few years. Came back when my third kid was born, and I started just doing some fractional stuff for some startups. And then the pandemic hit, like you mentioned. And at the time, the goal was, I was just going to come back to Duke, and I wanted to just pick up some moonlight shifts as hospice nurse, ironically, because that was really deeply bothering me, how we were handling death and dying through the pandemic. But they said, hey, you've got all this like digital transformation type experience. Can you help us with that? So I had a fortunate opportunity to come back and help them with the digital transformation initiatives, where we designed and launched a hospital-at-home program in seven days. Actually, I think it might have been six days technically led their all their evaluation for like remote monitoring strategies and that kind of stuff, and loved that. But what I had realized coming back into industry is we still have this gap around analytics. I've got a couple problems, right? If we think about the hospital at home, you wanted me to touch on two problems. One being, how can I identify patients that are appropriate for that model of care. That's an analytical problem or something I could solve or use analytics to help augment that decision making, right? The other one is remote patient monitoring. And you've had a lot of exposure to this and worked in this space as well. The problem that I continue to hear and see is that we've got all these devices we're trying to hook up that are generating all this data, yet it's still really hard to distill that signal from all that noise. And no one wants to dump all this data into the EMR for many reasons. That we could dive into that again is an analytical challenge. And so SAS founded this industry of analytics software close to 50 years ago. I started uncovering their technology and their platform. And my reaction was like, Holy crap. Like, this is exactly what we need in healthcare. So let me go and see what it's like working for a technology company and seeing how I can try to help shift and shape their influence on an industry as well. So that's what I've been doing for the last three years.

Molly McCarthy:
Great! And you answered the first part of my next question, and what motivated you to move from the clinical setting into your current role. And I hear you; I've worked in industry and bedside more industry than bedside, but I understand that the desire to try and help solve these challenges that really are age-old, so to speak. But before we go into SAS, I just want to highlight a couple of points you made for our listeners in terms of the career ladder. I love how you talk about the non-linear and more dynamic career because I think that's important. I know, for me, when I was a new nurse, it was, you had to go work in the hospital for a year. You couldn't, if you wanted to do academics, you had to go a certain route, and those were the two routes that most people took. And I think that today, there's so many more options and choices and really just to create based upon where you see the challenges and opportunities, so kudos to you for doing.

Rich Kenny:
I think part of that is.

Molly McCarthy:
I also.

Rich Kenny:
I was just going to comment on that. And you've pioneered this, by the way, as we think about what a healthcare leader of the future needs to look like, that's, part of what I was seeing as I was sitting in my manager chair, recognizing the influence and impact technology is having on not only our profession but our industry as a whole, and that healthcare leader of the future needs to be able to bridge between operations and technology. And so that's been part of my hypothesis that I've been driving towards, is what I felt like that was going to need to look like. And so I actually think, thanks to you for helping pioneer that.

Molly McCarthy:
Oh, thank you. That's nice. I have to say that hearing you talk about flight nursing early in my career, I was at a crossroads and I was, I really wanted to do flight nursing or go back to business school.

Rich Kenny:
All right.

Molly McCarthy:
Yeah, we see what I chose, but I do, I feel that kindred spirit in that adrenaline junkie feeling. And I worked in NICU, so we had huge transport programs. Congrats to you for following through. So really talking about your role right now that you've been in for the past three years as a healthcare advisor, executive advisor to SAS. You talked about SAS, what it does in terms of being around for 50 years, data, and analytics. I would love for you to share with them a little bit more about how you got connected with them and then what your every day looks like.

Rich Kenny:
Yeah, so I'm laughing because I'm trying to think how to tell this story. I've shared this openly, and I haven't gotten in trouble for it, so I think I'm okay. When I was in, people who know SAS in healthcare think of it as a statistical programming language. That's what SAS used to stand for: statistical analytic softwar. And people, i think, in healthcare, you really only know of it if you are a PhD biostatistician publishing clinical research. I had only gotten exposed to it when I was in my master's program, and we did some decision modeling on us, like a CAD, relegated it to this legacy programming language, and moved about my day and thinking there are other ways for us to solve the analytical challenges. What I've come to appreciate is SAS has been innovating and stayed ahead of the curve in how they how their R&D has been developing the new technology. We've just seen it come to fruition in other industries that are more, we're operating at that more enterprise level. When we think of, honestly, a lot of government agencies, when we think of life sciences, are heavy users of SAS, we think of finance and retail, and some and manufacturing is huge. Aerospace, they have, are using SAS, those types of industries that are generating lots of data that arguably we can talk about how it's probably a little bit easier to integrate some of those data than healthcare data, but they found ways to do that and develop models that are running in real-time. We're talking thousands of models, and they're doing all that by orchestrating it through the SAS platform. And how I got connected with SAS is they honestly reached out to me about this position. And so at me doing a little bit of due diligence. So, I had that domain expertise. So, as nurses, that's what we cultivate, that understanding of how the systems work and be able to apply that domain expertise. That's what SAS was needing, and so they were reaching out to me about that. I was doing some of my research about what SAS is and has, and that's where I said let's yeah, let's link up. Let's figure out how I can help inform our strategy to bring this technology that's helping evolve these other industries and really try to apply it to the healthcare provider space. So that's been the focus over the last three years is doing that. We talk about the role that the EMR has played in, better or worse. Maybe that's another episode, but what it has done is it has allowed us to consolidate a lot of different solutions into coordinating that information at the point of care. I still think of it as a single data source, though, right? We're talking about that production system for that. There are all these other data sources. We mentioned the remote monitoring and the like as well that we need to orchestrate. And what I hear so often still today, and it seems like increasingly so with all this push in AI, is everyone, all our administrators are being point solution to death. And so, how do we orchestrate that again? So, I'm thinking that other platform is really an analytical layer. And the only thing that I've seen capable of really doing that would be the SAS Viya platform. So that's what I've been trying to put my bets on over the last few years.

Molly McCarthy:
Yeah, that's great. I know I could have used that. I started my PhD a few years ago, five years ago, six years ago. And I remember taking statistics and I'm like, I know there's got to be a technology or software program that can do this. This is not my expertise. But I think that's important to just call out that we're still in an era, I think, of multiple-point solutions and how can we integrate and ensure there's interoperability really for two people. One is that clinician who's providing that care and then the patient. Our consumer, and more and more, I'm actually hearing from consumer friends who are incredibly frustrated with healthcare in terms of all the just the disparate data sources, that they have a procedure at one place, they need to go take their CD, DVD, whatever it is with the images, and I had to explain why that is. But it's continuing to be a challenge, I think, within our system. So I fully support what you do, and also the fact that as a nurse, really understanding where the obstacles are in the process and the work streams, and that you can have those conversations both with the clinical workforce and then with the technical. And I've always considered myself somewhat of a translator negotiator between the groups so that, at the end of the day, it's a win.

Rich Kenny:
Yeah, exactly, yeah. That role of a translator, I think it goes a long way, at least in how I define what we all have different definitions for informaticists. But that's how I prefer to understand this discipline, or at least where I think we should be heading towards as an informatics discipline, as being that translator. And I think to your point, we can sometimes either try to draw a line between nursing administration or that operational leadership, and then we've got maybe more of the information technology and product silos. And informatics sits on the IT side of the house. I think it really, truly is that blend and understanding, you know, both of those fields.

Molly McCarthy:
Exactly, yeah. Like you said, the blurred lines here, and I don't it's not going back. So I think if we have more people that can understand both areas. My next question: I want to talk a little bit about an article you wrote in 2021 entitled Can Data Analytics Rescue Hospitals from a Healthcare Workforce Crisis? And recognizing now, almost three years later, that our workforce challenges are not going away anytime soon, can you summarize for us what you meant back then by that question? And in your opinion, if we're any closer today to being able to answer that question?

Rich Kenny:
Yeah, first of all, I'm thinking it's 2021. So that meant, without beyond a shadow of a doubt, like I did not have ChatGPT help me write it. Right now, we see all these articles come out, and that's usually what's in the back of my mind is okay, did this person write it, or did they have ChatGPT or Gemini or Lama, whatever model of choice, right, that for them. So, this is pre-generative AI days, at least in my writing at the time as we think about rewind to 2021. We're coming, they're starting to come off the heels of the pandemic, and we just, we burnt out our workforce. And I often think back to my days as a manager. So at one point, I had over 70 nurses and medics that were reporting to me. And I will still say to this day, the toughest job I've ever had was as a nurse manager. And so we're managing these workforces and we're putting managers in place to manage significant numbers of direct reports, and they can't maintain situational awareness as to what's going on with such a large workforce. Again, that's part of my hypothesis, is that we are collecting all this data on our people. How can we use that for good to help identify those flags or those signals that something's changing, whether or not we're detecting a shift in the sentiment and how they document or detecting, even if it's a subtle change in the times that they're clocking in or clocking out, there's all kinds of little signals in data, often the data exhaust or that metadata, the stuff that we typically don't think about or that's front and center that I think could give us some really rich insights. And if we could do that in a way that allows us, that manager, to be much more proactive and engaging with that, with their direct report, we could create more stickiness. Because I'm also thinking on the flip side, right, people who resign, they get burnt out, but it's often because they don't feel supported by their supervisor. We know what we hear from all the management research as far as the number one reason that people leave is because of their boss. And so we have to just connect that into what's going on in the healthcare environment. Even in some of the most difficult times when I know, when I knew I had somebody who had my back, like I was good going into the trenches, it's when I didn't feel like I had someone who had my back that I got concerned, and I think that's what people were starting to experience. And so how could we leverage this data just to give that nurse manager that leg up, that even if it's just a little bit of that prediction to say, I need to focus on Sally today, or hey, it looks like something is shifting with Dan his. He looks like he's a little bit more of a risk for burnout or whatever it might be that we're tracking. Let me prioritize to make sure I focus on him. We've started thinking about that in terms of care management with patients, right? We look at care pathways. Ways and protocols and all that, and look at who's adhering and who might be slipping to say, okay, I need to prioritize that patient. Let's just do that with the workforce. So a lot of these concepts I think of, I was like, okay, we've spent so much time and done a lot around patient experience. You know, I say done a lot. I, to your point, we could probably argue as far as how well that's been implemented, but we at least talk about it. How easy would it be for us to shift those same concepts? And whereas we've been focusing it and literally focusing our vision on the patient, where we just focus that on the nurse or on the clinician, on the caregiver, because that other hypothesis I always have is we want to solve for patient experience. Let's solve for the clinician experience, and the patient experience will take care of itself.

Molly McCarthy:
Now I couldn't agree with you more, I think, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there, but I think you're spot on. And when you think about the creation of the triple aim and how it's evolved over time, with now you better lower cost of care, better outcomes, better patient experience. Someone critical in that circle really is the clinician. So how are we addressing clinician well-being and addressing that through similar technology or programs I think is important. And then obviously the fifth part of that now with health equity, which we won't necessarily get into today, but I want to talk to you a little bit more about the evolving technologies, and especially since you're in a company that plays in many different industries, which I think is really important. When I was at Microsoft, you get to see in your role finance, you get to see oil and gas, and you get to see other industries and how they're doing it. I want to combine technology with your clinical experience. And what do you think about rapidly evolving technologies like virtual inpatient care? I know you did a lot with remote monitoring, etc., but thinking beyond just that monitor or that camera at the bedside, but thinking about ambient monitoring, artificial intelligence, smart technology that can really inform not only the nurse but the patient and their family or whoever's involved in that care circle.

Rich Kenny:
Yeah. So the other concept I like to talk about quite frequently is we'll know we will have implemented technology well, if we're not actually interacting with technology, right? Like it's when it disappears into the background. And that's sometimes hard, I think. And I think nurses intuitively get that. But it's also easy to get distracted because the narratives, the people who are pushing the products, you're right. Everything is about the technology. And I think even just for us at Human Nature is that we are beings that are infatuated with the complex and the complicated, and that's what draws our attention. And so when we see something new and fancy, like we're going to be drawn to that naturally. And so then it takes the work of thinking, okay, what does it mean to be human? What are the experiences that we want to really foster in our humanity and just in how we live out life? And particularly when we were talking about the care setting as nurses, like we're meeting people when they're most vulnerable, people are reaching out for help when they're hurting. And as hopeful as I am about the ways in which we are creating robots, and we're utilizing AI to to mimic empathy in some of those things. And at the end of the day, we want to and we desperately need to be able to connect with another human being. And so implementing technology looks like where we're doing that, and it's disappearing into the background. So that's what gives me hope and gets me excited about these advances and these more sophisticated analytical technologies or advancements. And I'm trying to be more intentional about my verbiage because we now just say AI to mean there's a whole host of anything. And so we often talk about, okay, we need so much education about what AI is, what it's not, and the like, but those types of technology isn't necessarily about putting a device in between the patient and the caregiver. We can actually now remove the device and have something ambient to your point that's sitting up on the wall, and that's being able to understand or interpret what it's recognizing through its sensors and form the caregiver to augment them, to let them know that a patient's starting to exhibit some movements that might put them at a more of a risk of a fall, those types of things. And yet, ..., as big brotherish as having a camera that's constantly monitoring me. So there's other interesting things about that. I was just having a conversation with a colleague of mine this morning, and we were talking about some advancements around being able to look at EKG and that correlate with potassium levels. His area of research is around the dialysis units and the frequency in which patients code in the dialysis unit, and yet how poor we deliver basic CPR care in those settings, and how easy it would be to avoid those if we just checked potassium levels before we started patients on dialysis, which when I learned that we don't do that, I was shocked, but that's not standard practice today. So, the ways in which we can leverage these things that give us the analytics that are can be proven out through the research with that allows us to improve the quality of care, but without this whole technical interface in between. So that's what excites me about where the direction that we're headed.

Molly McCarthy:
Yeah. No, I think those are all great points. Especially you mentioned the specific example of dialysis and having that data and information to go back and say, what could we have done? What should we do? And not having to wait 17 years from bench to bedside to change practice, I think, is really important with technology. And I'm not saying it's all Pollyanna, but I think thinking about how we can utilize it, like you mentioned in the background, to really improve our care. Or, as you mentioned, you talked about an example within as a nurse manager, looking at the health and wellness of his or her staff is critical, too, because that ultimately impacts patients. So thinking about that and where your brain is going right now, I would love for you to share your vision for the future of nursing, specifically within the hospital. When you think about change management, as care models are reimagined, and the role of technology will play to empower bedside caregivers, managers, as well as patients in new ways. And we talked a little bit about some of them, but any other insights?

Rich Kenny:
Yeah, oh, the other thing that we've touched on the hospital-at-home, and the thing that gets me excited, another thing that gets you could probably find it. There's a lot of things that get me excited, but I love it. What I love so much about that program, and I'll continue to try to advocate for it. And there's a lot of still up in the air with how the regulation went falling and a lot of programs trying to reevaluate that, the ROI on those things. But fundamentally, shifting that care into the home environment is the right thing to do. It turns out patients don't actually want to be in the hospital. Who knew? So the outcomes are better, right? All that research is showing that's a better model of care. We've got to figure out and make sure that the ROI works. And it does work unless we've got these big, expensive, empty hospitals that we've got to figure out how to justify. How do we look at these as systems of care that are oriented around the patient? We bring the right resources to the home, which also means helping the family caregivers that are really burdening or shouldering the majority of that burden. We're bringing up all these topics. We could have a whole episode on this and on that. Yeah, but those models of care I'm really hopeful for, and I think of anything that where we're we're getting back to where we're going to the patient we're meeting. We always talk about meeting them where they're at. We want to meet the customer where they're at. In this case, we want to meet the patient where they're at. That's not historically been the model for many years in healthcare. We started having everybody come to us, come to the doctor. So, meeting them where they're at, even if that means meeting them in their home and caring for them in their home, right? And I think we're as that pace of change continues to accelerate. Not to be all Pollyanna, as you mentioned, we do have to be smart about this, right? And so I'm also involved in the coalition for health AI, which is thinking very critically about how we implement the ethics of AI and ensure that we're doing this in the right way. And so when we talk about the future of nursing, the biggest thing is that nurses got to have a seat at the table. Let's not repeat what happened when we implemented all these EMRs where nursing really wasn't at the bedside up front. I want nurses at the bedside, which means that the onus is on us to make sure that we're educated. It doesn't mean we all have to be AI experts, right? But at least have some awareness to be able to ask the same questions that other people ask. Because I'll tell you what, a lot of us are faking it till you make it. Like we're all trying to figure this out as we go. But if we can just rediscover that willingness to just engage in open conversation and civil discourse and recognizing that there are things that we all don't know, but we want to figure it out together, set aside the egos, right? A lot of this comes back to, okay, how do we just tackle change management and try to get everybody on the same page? We would like to focus again on the technology, but more and more, it's about the people and then the processes. Let's focus us on those elements first and make sure we have identified the right problem that we want to solve, and then we can go match up the technology to it. Right now, especially with all this generative AI, we've got this new shiny toy, and this is how this is going to solve this and that. And it's got some values, no doubt. I enjoy using it. I probably use it every day in some capacity, just even if it's helping me think about something or be a bounce back of some ideas. But it's not going to solve every problem. And so we've got to start with that problem identification. And I think nobody can do that better within healthcare than the nurses who spend the majority of time with patients.

Molly McCarthy:
Well, a couple nuggets that I just want to make sure I pull out again from our for our listeners; from what you just said, one is the hospital-at-home and even thinking about what patients will make good candidates for hospital-at-home versus which ones will not, based upon many different aspects of their care or their diagnosis or their stay within the hospital, and we can use data and analytics to help make an informed decision. So that, I just want to highlight that. I think that's important. Another way, rather, is what you talked about before in terms of using that data to guide nurse managers or nurse leaders or even the leadership within the health system. The other point that I heard you make that I always beat the drum on, so I will take the opportunity again. But being nurses, being at the table, and I'm a real strong proponent of having them not just at the table but in the discovery period, because they understand what the problems are in the design, in the development, and the deployment. Really thinking about a multi-faceted stakeholder group across that continuum. And then, with that in mind, and I you've given so many great nuggets of wisdom here, but I want to remind you that our listeners are CNOs and CNIOs and their teams. And given that you've had such an amazing, unique experience within healthcare, I would love for you to share just one tidbit of wisdom with our listeners. So what would be your single most important, practical piece of advice for them as it relates to being tireless advocates for their patients?

Rich Kenny:
Oh, you said practical, and the thought that came to mind. I would just say how we can weave this together. But I always talked about nurses being the MacGyvers of healthcare. You give a nurse a roll of tape. What we can do with a roll of tape is mind-blowing, and I don't know how I weave that into kind of a practical piece of advice for CNOs and CNIOs. But probably, you know, something I feel like maybe is a common thread that we've touched on is this notion of the systems think. Like, in the same way that maybe that piece of tape represents so many different things that we can do, and we understand how the world of healthcare and how these systems are held together, recognize that understanding that we have as nurses, and understanding how all the different departments work together, and interface and understanding better than anybody else what that patient journey actually is. And so we talk about systems thinking, we talk about human-centered design thinking, I would say as far as practical advice, spend some time, if you haven't already, learning and digging into those disciplines. Because if we're talking about having a seat at the table and if you don't have one, bringing your own chair, I think that chair looks like the education and knowing how to show up in conversations and ask the important questions. And so we can ask better questions if we are thinking in a way that is human-centered, and that is in that more design thinking type approach, right? And these are all these kind of concepts start to blend together a little bit, so I'm bringing them all up. But I think that's an area of discipline that we would do well in to try to bring in. And that's also, and we talk about that in just the nursing process, and we call it different things. But it might be that we need to get a little bit more comfortable with the language that our technical our administrative counterparts are might be a little bit more familiar with or have heard to be able to translate that. And so that problem definition, that kind of design thinking, if we're talking about the patient journey, it's still fascinating to me how few health systems I work with that can articulate or have a visual representation and an understanding of what their patient journey is, and map out all those touch points. Because until you can do that holistically, it's really difficult, I think, to pick apart any one of those touch points and say, we're going to fix this one without an understanding of how does that affect the process overall, that might be the same as practically think and reflect and build that critical. Thinking muscle around systems, thinking, design thinking. And I think there'll be ways that you'll start to discover how you can apply that and how we're thinking about care model redesign and applying these technologies and the like.

Molly McCarthy:
I love that I know the patient journey, and just following a patient from before discharge to home and then looking across the care continuum is really important. And I'm just going to add in there, since we spoke about it, just thinking about the clinician journey too. And where are the points where within the system that we can alleviate some of the obstacles and the challenging workflows with that technology? But you can't really do that when I'm hearing you saying it. Just you need to understand the whole system. And who better to do that than nurses?

Rich Kenny:
I think so, starting to understand what everyone's role is in these redesigns. Like I've got some great physician colleagues, I need them when we're talking about the physiology and pathophysiology and the disease process and diagnostics and those pieces. But when we're talking about kind of patient flow and journeys and treatment, the nurse, that's our area to own, we need to be stepping up and advocating and providing that voice.

Molly McCarthy:
Well, Rich, I just want to say thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate your perspectives, and I look forward to hopefully meeting you later this week when you're in DC. So thank you.

Rich Kenny:
Likewise, this has been a pleasure and I've enjoyed it. And yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity to chat.

Intro/Outro:
Thanks for listening to the Smart Care Team Spotlight for best practices in AI and ambient intelligence and ways your organization can help lead the era of smart care teams. Visit us at VirtualNursing.com, and for information on the leading smart care facility platform, visit care.ai.

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