← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
At Insight Global Health, we are dedicated to helping you and improving healthcare for everyone. That means building stronger teams and delivering sustainable solutions that truly make a difference. We offer a full spectrum of talent and technical services and deliver cross industry expertise to bring you innovative best practices to solve the problems that we face in healthcare. We're not just promising you results, we are delivering them. Visit us@insightglobal.com this is Hayley Rutger with.
- [00:28]
B
The Beckers Healthcare podcast and we are recording live at the Beckers 15th annual meeting. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Trevor Martin, Chief Information Security Officer at UW Health. Trevor, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [00:40]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [00:41]
B
Now, before we begin, can we have you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about your background and your organization?
- [00:47]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So again, I serve as the Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer for UW Health. We are an academic medical center in Madison, Wisconsin and we are affiliates of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And we are a multi hospital system with about 25,000 plus staff, 1600 plus physicians, et cetera, over 100 clinics and sites throughout Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. I have served at a variety of different healthcare systems throughout my career and in fact didn't start in the healthcare space, really just was in the IT space throughout my career. Over time, getting out of software development, the health care space really called to me, I think a bit gave me a sense of purpose and ever since I hopped over that fence. I've been here since that day and don't intend to look back.
- [01:39]
B
Well, thank you so much for going over your experience. Now I'd like to hone in mostly on the last year at UW Health. So what's an initiative that you took that you're particularly proud of and what impact has it made on your organization so far? Far?
- [01:54]
C
Yeah, it's. It's a good question. I think like many other healthcare organizations, we're trying to navigate the AI space. I'm sure that's a very common answer. And for us, when we really first started talking about this, the question, at least in the security and privacy realm, was what stance do we want to take? You know, do we want to take a very conservative approach where we can certainly stay secure and we can keep data locked away and really stifle innovation, or do we want to take a little bit more progressive approach? And so we decided collectively that it was in the best interest of our organization and our patients to take that progressive approach. The key to that for us was literacy and we have a very strong principle that you cannot govern without being literate. So an initiative that we really undertook was how do we get a little bit more creative in the literacy and education space that's beyond just, here's some annual training that you can take. Nobody wants to take any more annual training. So we started a bit of a Bit of a panel series in our AI world. And so I am a co host and moderator of that, along with our innovation senior leader. And we invite various leaders throughout the organization to really come and talk about what their experience is and what their desire is in the AI space, all the way from our clinical folks, our nurses, our physicians, our operational folks, our financial folks, really the whole gamut to give people an opportunity to really see a discussion about how we consider AI. So all of our staff are invited to join, and then there's a panel, there's a Q and A session at the end of that where anybody can ask any questions they want. And it's been pretty popular, I would say. So it's a way for us to get out there and sort of interact with people as opposed to just sort of making decisions in a conference room.
- [03:46]
B
That's fantastic. Now, what do you see as the most significant challenge currently facing the health care industry and how is your organization addressing it?
- [03:55]
C
Yeah, I think again, likely every organization is trying to address the problem of access. And, you know, where I serve is also the place where I receive patient care. And I can tell you when I or somebody in my family needs that care. And we have longer wait times or longer schedule times or reduction in availability or whatever it may be. That's a real challenge. And for us, you know, there's sort of. I sort of see a bit of a triangle of quality of care, access to care, and cost to care. And it's really difficult for any healthcare organization to get all three of those. Usually it's you get two, but you can't get the third. And you sort of play this game of which one is meaningful for you. And nine times out of 10, it's the access piece that suffers. So for us, we're really trying to innovate the virtual care. You know, we want to put more stock into telemedicine. We want to treat the virtual care and digital health space not just as a tool, but truly as another site of care, just like we would another building that we would build and trying to find creative ways to provide access, to provide patient care for folks in an avenue and in a mechanism that is appropriate and commensurate. With what they need. So if we don't need to fill our urgent cares and our EDS with people that don't need to necessarily be seen in person, how much would that reduce our overall load? And so we're really putting some energy and thought process into how can we best configure this in a way that gets our patients the access they need in a timely manner?
- [05:37]
B
Now I'd like to take the time to pivot the conversation just a little bit. So with employees growing expectations for flexibility and work life balance, how are you meeting their needs while driving efficiency?
- [05:49]
C
Yeah, so for us, I think ever since COVID most organizations in any industry saw a massive exodus of work from home. You know, folks were leaving office buildings in droves, setting up shops at home, and really became really acclimated to it. And to me it's working from home or office work is really no different than any other cultural change. The analogy that I sometimes give is it's sort of like CDs or tapes. Once upon a time, when you had a cassette tape or a cd, maybe, I'm dating myself, that was the only way that you could listen to music. That was it. Then digital formats came along, MP3s came along, streaming came along. And now the thought of going back to a CD or a cassette tape seems completely ridiculous. And so the distribution of music has changed, the consumption of music has changed. And so that's just one example. But no one would ever expect a backtrack into that lifestyle. It's just a complete culture change. Office work and in person work and working from home, I think in my opinion is very analogous to that. People have gotten used to this now. And so whenever there's a request to come back to the office, we really treat that as purposefully as we can. And on my team in particular, most of my team works from home, I would say the majority of the time. And we want to be able to provide that flexibility where we can. Being in the security space, there are absolutely times where we need people to be in office, sort of that boots on the ground, right. If we have a security incident or whatever it is, that we might need some folks there to, to do some work and everybody's okay with that. That's the expectation. But ideally, anytime we coordinate or schedule a group for at least my leadership team and our all of our team members to get together, it's very coordinated, it's very purposeful, there's an agenda. We all understand why we are there. It's there to do team building, to do Idea generation to effectively have a relationship building opportunity and bonding experience that sort of replaces the everyday conversations that you would have, but it's in a much more efficient manner. So we provide that flexibility. We want folks to be able to do what they need to do because that's just the way the culture is now. I personally enjoy that flexibility, I think, but it's important that we at least have those purposefully designed moments where we can get together and reconnect in person as humans.
- [08:19]
B
Yeah, a lot of companies are reverting back to that in office approach. And I'm sure your employees really appreciate that flexibility.
- [08:27]
C
They do. And you know, UW Health, again, is. Is an organization that we want to do what's right for our community and what's right for the organization. Organization. Not just because we're necessarily seeing other organizations do that. And so we're, we're very reflective. There's a lot of critical thinking. Are we doing the right thing? Should we be doing it this way? Why are we doing it this way? And so that progressive nature, I think, really puts us in a good position to support our team members and staff.
- [08:53]
B
Of course. Now, before we wrap up here, I'd like to know a little bit more about your leadership experience. So what is the biggest leadership lesson you've learned? And do you have any advice for emerging leaders in your industry?
- [09:07]
C
Well, I've learned a lot, I would say, and certainly one of the best teachers is failure. And I think what I often coach my new leaders, or if I'm mentoring new leaders, one of the things I sort of give them permission to do is to fail. And it's really important to be cognizant and reflective and embrace when you make a mistake, when you say something maybe you shouldn't have and you're reflecting on that, when you've made a decision that maybe didn't pan out the way that you expected it to internalize those, make an inventory and a registry of those. How can you use that experience to do right the next time? And for me, there's a few guiding principles that I always follow. Anything that you do, any decision you make, any communication you make, has to be in the best interest of your team and the organization. You have to make sure that whatever you're doing is building trust, that you've got transparency, that you have integrity in what you are doing. Because at the beginning of the day, none of us, regardless of what our titles are or what leadership positions we are in, we wake up as human beings and we really try to connect with our team members and our peers and our colleagues as humans first, our titles come next. So if we aren't, if we aren't clicking at the human level, then the professional level is not going to work either. So it's really important that we build our work around that. The other piece, I would say is that it's critical to ask questions. And we will do a variety of exercises where we'll do some almost role playing, a bit of a tabletop with new leaders, and we'll run a scenario by them. And I will say, you are only allowed to ask me questions. You can't make any statements, you can't give me any answers. It's only questions. And we will spend that entire interaction, that tabletop with them just asking questions. And it's to teach them and show them that if you are trying to lead a team member or a colleague to a specific area or to a thought or to maybe think differently, human beings are much more likely to accept that if you are engaging in thoughtful questioning as opposed to just consume what I'm trying to tell you. And those guiding principles, those sort of techniques has always served me really well. And that's usually one of the things, one of the many things that I try to teach our leaders.
- [11:37]
B
Yeah, I think it's so important to learn and grow an environment where you're not afraid to fail. Well, Trevor, thank you so much for joining me today. Again, this is Haley Rutger with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast, recorded live at the Becker's 5th annual meeting. Thank you so much.
- [11:51]
C
Thank you.