[INTRODUCTION]
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[EPISODE]
Christopher Habig
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Healthcare Americana. I'm Christopher Habig, the CEO of Freedom Healthworks. Today, we're diving into the world of healthcare data, one of my favorite topics ever because it is such an expansive couple of words put together and it means something different to everybody. Historically, data and healthcare has been just another four-letter word where everybody runs for the hills when they hear it. But today's going to be a little bit different because throughout my career, I've always been searching for data that is actually, well, it's usable, it's actionable. And so when I met our next guest here today, this is one of those people, I'm like, this is a story worth telling. This is data that we can actually use. This is data that we're actually forming insights with. So please welcome Brian Wikle, a veteran healthcare analyst, population health, data integrity, working with big systems, doing big things.
Brian, welcome to Healthcare Americana. It's a pleasure to have you.
Brian Wikle
Thanks, Chris. Happy to be here and look forward for the conversation.
Christopher Habig
Now, I think what really grasped my curiosity to get to know you better and get to know your work better was how nonchalant you really were about, yeah, here's this data that we're doing, and with it, we can help really transform the healthcare landscape and get ahead of it so that we're not just reacting to patient needs, we're actually anticipating them, and darn it, you've done a really good job building a system that's able to do that.
Brian Wikle
Well, you know, and that's the challenge, right, is understanding. And a lot of times, if you look at your family dynamics, for example, you know that if you have a child or if you have a parent or a grandparent that has certain issues or challenges or diseases or, you know, as they get older, obviously morbidities and chronic illnesses start to...
creep in a little bit. You know there are certain steps that you should be taking personally, right, to make sure that that person stays in that lane and doesn't really get out further into more serious issues. And so currently what I do today is I represent the Johns Hopkins Adjust Clinical Grouper. And so I have the, I guess the lack of a better term, the fortunate
responsibilities to sell their intellectual property and to the provider market, to the payer market. A lot of times I work with state health information exchanges and really everybody that wants to understand their current population of people they serve. Right. And that's the biggest challenge. We're out there talking care coordination. We're trying to, how do we help, you know, health disparities? How do we help
those folks in various areas that may need additional services? Well, if you follow the guidelines that Hopkins has built, really a foundation over the last 30 years, you really get to understand that there's a premise to it. There's a methodical step-by-step process that helps you understand if somebody is pre-diabetic, and you understand that they live in a certain area
they might have some food challenges within that area. They may have transportation issues within that area. They may smoke, they may be a little bit more overweight. You're trying to make sure that that individual, both from a resource perspective and both from a cost, because when you're talking into the provider space and the physician space, those two things go hand in hand. You've got risk, you've got cost,
and you've got resource issues. So if you can understand those various elements, then that individual that may be pre-diabetic gets the care, gets the education, gets that knowledge so that six months, a year down the line, it doesn't have full-blown diabetes. And then because of that, dovetails into maybe a second chronic disease. So...
It's fun to do what I do and it's interesting to try to peel back the onion a little bit to say, you're sitting on all this information, how do you better utilize it, right?
Christopher Habig
Now, I think the number one question from the audience is saying, all right, well, that sounds great, Brian, but you just said you work for Johns Hopkins, which very highly recognized, and I don't think anybody would disparage the work that they do there. But at the same time, a lot of our conversations are around incentives in healthcare. So I imagine the wheels are turning in my audience saying,
well, that's awesome that you're able to identify trends or anybody who might be at risk of something, but is that in your client's best interest to actually intervene? Because don't they make more money the sicker people are and they keep them kind of in that milking parlor. No hospital is incentivized to actually come out and heal somebody.
Brian Wikle
Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And really, you know, and I'll break it down a little bit more from the perspective of Hopkins, right? So I'm able to sell the intellectual property. So basically I'm providing a predictive analytics platform to providers, physician groups, and payers. So I provide the platform, they provide the data, they provide the input. So none of that comes from Hopkins. It's just a pure platform
that allows that input to go into it. And the reporting that comes out of it is tenfold when it comes to really understanding the people that you serve. And you make a great comment because I've worked, being in a space for probably closer to 30 than 25, you hear a lot of different stories. And there was a gentleman that I was speaking to that we were talking about the platform and working with a,
a big health system in another state. And he said, how do I compete against those folks that have the blinking billboard sign on the side of the road, two miles up from the emergency room going, hey, stop in. It's only two minute wait right now. How do you compete against somebody that says, I don't like that method or that formula that somebody has sniffles
and is coming into my emergency room when I have a car crash or depending on what part of the city or the country it is, I have somebody that gets gunshot wound. So I don't want those people cluttering up my ER, but then you also have people with the billboards flashing, come all, come as many as you want, come as many times as you want.
That's the issues that I see within healthcare today. You have the group of people that really want to minimize that risk, right? They wanna really take care of the ones that really need taking care of. They wanna educate. You don't come in for sniffles and scrapes and if the bone's sticking to the skin, I'll use an analogy. Sure, obviously we need to take care of that. But if you sprain your ankle,
probably not a whole lot we can do about it, you know, rest it, elevate it, stay at home, call your primary care physician and deal with it that way. Don't clutter up our spot. Because again, from a risk standpoint and a resource standpoint, that's costly. And those centers have to mitigate, you know, the resources that they have on time because they don't know if something really bad is happening five blocks away and all those folks are gonna come in to the ER. So I see both sides.
Christopher Habig
Yeah, totally. And I've always been in the opinion that hospitals should exist and need to exist and really focus on the emergent care side of it. Everything else is just a collection of physicians operating under one building and very expensive and whatever the anti-lean principles are, it's bloat, bloat, bloat. And so freeing up the emergent care, freeing up the ERs to be able to handle...
something really bad coming in, trauma, car accidents, like you mentioned, a million examples. But again, in your example, it sounds like even their own marketing is going against that principle of, hey, we want to take the life-saving stuff and leave everything else off, but we'll show people there's a zero weight. And when they have to wait three weeks to get in their primary care, who can handle the cuts and scrapes and sniffles and sprained ankles, there just seems to be...
do as I say, not as I do type of mentality when it comes to these hospitals across the United States.
Brian Wikle
Yeah, well, if you think about it, look at the apps on your phone. If you work for an organization or business and you get the emails from whatever pay organization that that company represents, that kind of flows down to the employee. Hey, here's some wellness tips. Here's what you could do to keep healthy. But then at the other end, you're like, come on in.
You're probably healthy, but Hey, we'll treat you and we see it all the time. And so I think, again, and I mentioned this to a lot of people, some of the same conversations I'm having today are unfortunately the same conversations I've had seven or eight years ago. And it's frustrating, you know, from my perspective, because you, you would think you'd be farther along in the game a little bit, but when you still have data that siloed
in a health system that has seven locations and you're at one location, but yet you went up to this other location two or three times over the last year and they can't get that information to the main location where you happen to go in for a really major clinical event. For example, you know, I'm trying to do everything I can possibly do to have those conversations and give them the technology if I have it at the time to at least expose it to them to say it doesn't necessarily need to be that way.
Christopher Habig
And that's one thing when, you know, why don't we open the show, you use the word individual a few times. And I think that's what's really neat about, you know, what you do in your methodology and what you're looking for. Again, as you learn more about, you know, the righteousness of direct primary care, and I'm smiling behind the camera here, you know, as a way that these physicians are incented to actually care for people and catch those things early. In what...
amazes me about what you're able to do again, and I'd love to hear just some overall figures of some of the studies you've been able to find and that you and I have shared with. But being able to apply population health metrics, but then able to grab individuals and intervene on an individual level is game changing.
Brian Wikle
Absolutely, absolutely. If you think about, you know, the pyramid, and I use this in a lot of my presentations. So the bottom pyramid, for example, are the ones that, you know, really over zero to nine months
probably not going to be a lot of change. Sometimes we, as an example, we use a pregnancy. So it's a, it's a, it's a usually a finite time. It's a nine month period of, of, of healthcare. Typically, depending on the type of pregnancy, not a whole lot needs to really occur in those nine months. If it's a little bit more of a difficulty, obviously more, more visits will be seen. If there's, if there's any kind of, you know,
aspects of the pregnancy don't go exactly the way they should be. Obviously there's follow-up and there's post-pregnancy. But it's in a finite area where that pyramid starts to really get crowded is, and again, I kind of go back to the Hopkins premise and their premise is by clustering morbidities and bringing that information and data together, it's a lot better…
you have a lot better chance of determining health outcomes as opposed to just looking at straight diseases. And I think over the years where I represented different technologies and software services, for example, within the healthcare community, that's a unique premise that I have not seen in other types of technologies because again, coming out of the academic
aspect of the School of Public Health from Johns Hopkins, it has to be evidence-based, it has to be use case, it has to be documented because you just can't say, hey, if you do A, B will work. You have to prove it, right? And so I think over the course of 30 years that they've been doing this, through that pyramid, you can escalate those types of needs. And as you get to the top, that's obviously,
I think we color-code it sometimes as the red tip. Those are the ones that really need those extra hands and everybody on deck because those are the people that have multiple, multiple issues that are gonna really take the resources, take the time and effort. They may end up kind of transitioning out of a normal primary care setting.
Could possibly go to hospice, but probably prior to going into that direction. So those are the real critical areas. And when you get into and you start breaking it down in statistics with patient need groups, that's when you can really start to block those types of individuals to understand the percentages that make up your population. That's where you can really start to get into those figures.
Christopher Habig
How accurate is this type of a system? How accurate can you say, okay, this person is in from a scale of one to 10, based on what they need from, pregnancies can be kind of in the middle like that, like you said there, and then the ten are to kind of the hospice, the ones are, this is might as well be Superman over here, because they're invincible type of a thing, if that even exists, it's more of a mindset than anything.
How accurately are you able to predict and then intervene in order to make sure something doesn't get worse?
Brian Wikle
Well, you know, it all gets down to the data, right? So it's only as good as the data that you have available to you. So if you have a well-rounded opportunity to have clinical, pharmacy, EMR, medical data that you're driving through there, if you can also have the ability to have access to the socioeconomic, what I call the referential data.
into that bucket per se, into the platform, you're going to get pretty strong upper 90% in good quality output of that data. You're really going to find that those numbers are really going to sing to the end user. If you're only limited to
a couple various aspects of the data, then obviously you're not going to be able to give the full picture. So the more data, the more different data elements that you can bring in, the more robust and the better it's going to be.
Christopher Habig
And that seems self-explanatory. So let me follow up with this one. How really intrusive is that to a doctor seeing a patient in order to get good clean data for you to use? Because I think that's always the other side of the or the other shoe to drop, basically, is saying I can give you as much data as you possibly need and it's perfect and it's clean if you give me two hours with a patient.
Brian Wikle
Well, you know, and again, it probably depends on if that individual is with that physician solely, right? And a lot of times that probably doesn't happen. So if they have the opportunity to have API connections set up between various other centers that that physician might work with, typically the ones I'm familiar with work at are associated with a specific health system, for example.
And again, I'm talking to the larger health system overall, a lot of times to the CMIO or the population health director. But it's going back and we can dovetail into the other aspects of good quality slash poor and or poor quality data, other elements as well. But if they're able to set up those API connections to those various other
data points, then it's very, very simple. And it's not really so much that the physician has to capture that information, because it's already being captured in multiple different ways, probably during that visit or during that opportunity to see that individual. If there's blood work done, there's going to be a trail, right? And so again, all that information is really should be collected within the patient record. And that's a whole other topic that I can go down a big old rat hole on when it comes to
patient data and, and identity within the patient data as well. Cause I spent a lot of years in that too. So it all, it all goes back to, to the quality, right. And being able to have aspect of, can I get ahold of it? You know, how reliable is it? How much? Can I get it in real time? Is it batched? You know, do I have to collect it over a month or so? How viable is that?
Christopher Habig
And it all comes down to is this a hindrance to that doctor-patient relationship? In my opinion, right, understanding where we are in the in the DPC world. We're talking with Brian Wikle, a veteran healthcare analyst, exploring population health data integrity. Now, I want to I think we have a good foundation of what you've seen in your career and how you're helping draw these different insights. Let's talk about some of the findings and some of the results in this one. What are some of the most eye-opening examples of analysis and this kind of finished product where you say, wow, these ER statistics are crazy, let's start doing something about them.
Brian Wikle
Yep. Well, and I'll say a line here and sometimes it comes across and I think I mentioned it earlier in our conversations, but it's probably a line for me that really helps that C-suite really understand and really take notice of data, right? And I had somebody, I was sitting at a dinner one time and a CEO leans over and says, hey, what do you do? And I...
Again, it's kind of an open-ended question and you could talk for probably 30 minutes on some of the things that I do, but I just kind of honed it and cut it to the very common denominator. And I said, I keep your name out of the newspaper. I keep you from writing big checks and I keep you from killing people. So out of those three, what interests you the most? And I usually get a huge, you know, kind of setback reaction because of that. And he's like,
what do you mean by that? And I said, well, and I can break down each individual aspect of it. But I said, sitting in the C-suite, you may not want to comment on the latter part of it, but you probably know and blink. If I'm saying the right thing, a lot of times it just blink once for yes and two for no. But you've probably written some checks. Unfortunate things happen.
You know, you've signed a few NDAs. You know, certain things that should have been on the left side have come out of the right side. You know, things like that happen in the course of time. And again, it's not a negative or a declaration against somebody trying to do something bad. It's the fact that how do we do better?
And how can we make data better so those things do not happen? Because some of the statistics that I can tell you is that, you know, really, and it's still true today, that from what I hear is that basically one out of five of the patient records, you know, have a potential of being wrong. Well, if you live in a family of five, who do you want that to be? You don't want it to be anybody, but it could be your grandmother, it could be your wife,
your husband, it could be your kids, it could be, you know, aunt and uncle, brother, sister, it could be anybody like that. And you don't want that to happen. So when I'm in the private setting, and I'll talk to people and what do you do, what do you know, all that kind of stuff, I just say, hey, you know, and I think it's a generational thing
where if you're probably above 65, and of course I'm getting closer so I have to up that age a little bit more, so if you're 75 or older, you may just trust, hey, you're a physician, you went to school, you're knowledgeable, you're well educated, you've practiced a long time, whatever you say, I'm gonna take it 100%. You know what, and it's not.
against the physician, but that physician may not be working with all the information at that given time on that individual. And that's how I like to preface it.
Christopher Habig
We always go back to this, you know, the practice of medicine is where art and science intersects. And I think we lose sight of that. We lose sight of that with, hey, we need so much data and numbers to tell a whole story. And then we have AI who's passing medical examples, all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's great. But medicine is not a black and white world. Like, this isn't just, oh, this is this symptom and this is this disease state, right? There's so many different things that go into it where I'm leading into that relationship, right?
And I think we've just denigrated that doctor patient relationship as a society because we're saying, look, anybody with a stethoscope and a white lab coat is all the same. You know, MBs and DOs and MPs and PAs, and this is all your healthcare team. It doesn't really matter which one you see. And, you know, I firmly push back against that. Like everybody has a role to play and everybody's very, very important in making those decisions. But you got to ask questions. And if you don't know the doctor sitting across from you and the doctor doesn't know you, then
the more questions you're going to ask, the better. You know, from your standpoint, arming that physician with the data outputs and you know, you talked about the different geographies that go into this kind of thing and how nutrition plays a major role. And again, this isn't just lip service. This isn't some politician coming up here and saying, well, if we had better access to fruits and vegetables, then our lifespan would be higher in
you know, very rural or deep urban, you know, sets. And I always say deep or deep rural or deep urban or, you know, very rural settings because very similar socioeconomic statuses of the people that live there and a lot of the same kind of like medical issues and life issues and that kind of a thing. So when you look at people who in your mind need that doctor patient relationship,
is there a group, or did I just say it, is there a group that stands out that you're like, wow, you would really benefit from just having a doctor or somebody to call that isn't the ER, that isn't the hospital?
Brian Wikle
Well, you know, and I'll reference this story. This story was told to me a number of years ago. And it was a, it was a health system, not a very large one, but outside of, outside of Cleveland. And they didn't really understand the readmission. They couldn't understand why they, they had the issue of the readmissions that they, that they did. But conversely, when I say readmissions,
people automatically think, oh, they probably showed up more and more times in the 30 days. Well, no, this one's unique enough where they did not show up after when they should have, or more so when they should have. They showed up way past when they should have.
Which causes them again to go back to what I was saying earlier, puts them in more of a potentially chronic situation, which is going to be costlier, more resources, more detrimental to the end patient. And they did an analysis of this geographic area and they found out the population that they were serving, that the bus that ran
in that neighborhood stopped about four blocks from where that center was. They had not done the analysis to understand the community or the 10 block area. And really, when you get into the census information around what Hopkins does, they've got a component called GeoHealth. And it's very, very cool from the standpoint that they can take a census data
and have that built onto the platform. And it really gives you about a 4,000 population view. And that's about a 10 square block area of a community. And you can really drill down into that socioeconomic area. And you would have known that if transportation potentially could be an issue, which it always is, you know, and we look at health equity issues and things like that and social determinants along the way.
They would have known that, but they did not know that for the longest time. And so unfortunately those people just, they never showed back up again and the community got sicker and when, almost when it came to too late, you know, they were having multiple, multiple issues. Now you take that 4,000 population area and what you just said earlier, okay, how do you expand that to the rural areas? Well, sometimes 4,000 people that makes up a county
in various areas of states. So how do you best understand that? What's the difference or the distance between the care that can happen or the mobility of a physician or physician groups to say, I'm not going to be over here because it's 30 miles away. I'm going to try to navigate and meet them halfway because really my population I'm trying to serve isn't going to make that extra
15-mile jaunt for this ailment, this and that particular disease or whatever. So it's fascinating when you break it down. And to me, it just seems to me like common sense and it doesn't seem like brain surgery per se, staying in the medical analogies, but it's just surprising that unfortunately,
the IT projects that are on the docket. Sometimes you're like 10th in some of these areas and you're not the top two and it takes forever for something that's five or six on the chain to move up to three and four because there's a lot of heavy lifting going on and other things that they see as important which...
You know, again, I'm biased, but I wanted the patient should be somewhere in the top three of all times, depending on what you're doing.
Christopher Habig
they're spending $4 million a year on EMR. It sounds reasonable that they could do something like this. And Brian, listen to your story there. I appreciate you sharing it, but tell me that I'm oversimplifying this. I might be a romantic at heart, but I'm thinking if a nurse or a physician had just reached out to those people rather than just being completely reactive, that's a different story altogether.
Brian Wikle
Oh, 100%. And that's all it takes in a lot of times. But what I've seen over the last number of years is, and folks that I've dealt with in like the HIN department, for example, revenue cycle, a lot of those people don't even work in a hospital setting anymore. They're remote. And so then you get into, you know, internal resources. Who's reaching out? Who's doing the follow-up? Do we have...
the technologies in place that allows us to understand who needs to be reached out to. And so those folks, and a lot of that came out of 2020. So a lot of those dynamics has changed. And so they're pushing telehealth, for example. Hey, that's a great way to do that. For some, it is.
Some a little bit technically challenged, probably not. Some of the older, and again, I say generational, because there's no way my father, who is, you know, at the time in his eighties, would have been able to do anything, A, with a cell phone, secondly, with telehealth, you know, it would, I would have just said, well, let's just hop in the car and I'll go drive you, because it's a lot simpler for me to figure out how you get you to work the telehealth and take care of it in 10, 15 minutes.
So I think it's going back to that root cause of why we have that kind of a disconnect, I think.
Christopher Habig
Yeah, absolutely. And again, going back to what you just said there, being proactive in a patient's healthcare is huge as far as not letting people wait or not leaving it up to them thinking, I don't know, I got a little sore shoulder or some chest pain. I'm sure it's nothing. I'll call the doctor in the morning and it turns out to be something major, right?
Like, just breaking down barriers and that's what we get to do every single day. And so, you know, as we talk, my gosh, the wheels in my head are turning. Like, imagine a direct primary care physician who is armed with the type of insights and type of knowledge that we've been talking about to say, wow, here's an email in my inbox in the morning that says, here are the people I need to reach out to about these different situations just to make sure they're compliant. If they're not
let's figure out a way to get them seen or just a phone call or something along those lines. I mean, to me, that is the future of healthcare. It's not a robot, it's not AI. Maybe they can assist down the line, but it's taking those trends and applying it to the individual side of it. But then also having somebody who gives a s**t, who's able to reach out and say, hey, Chris, it's your doctor. I can see that you're a little overdue on this kind of stuff. I need to see you today or else we risk being susceptible to ABCDEF conditions.
Brian Wikle
Well, and I think it breaks down even more so because it's like, are we asking the questions? How do you best, and other companies do this, how do you best like to be reached out to? I mean, if somebody's delivering salt to your house or the cable guy is showing up or...
You know your landscaper or whatever. Hey, I'm gonna call and let you know when I'm coming You know 30 minutes before I get there, you know, some people like text some people like to be to be called some people like an email. You know, there's various and then also connecting down to the chain so if you have a parent that you're taking care of
making sure that phone number comes to you, making sure that text comes to you. So you're the second voice to say, hey, you know, grandpa, you've got this, such and such on this, such and such a day. And if you missed it, you know, depending on his, his ability for technology, you've got it covered. But, and I, and I think unfortunately, and, and I, I see this a lot too. We, and it's, and it's again, it's not the physicians fault. It's, you know, I don't know where there's not really anybody you can
put blame in against, but it's the time of registration. It's collecting all that upfront information at the time of registration. And again, there's only so much because of rules. There's only so much you can ask. You can verify, but you can't really probe and ask. But then part of me as an individual goes, I can probably tell you a half a dozen people what their life story is the last month because they put everything on Facebook.
So it's like, you're putting everything on Facebook. I know when you're traveling, I know when you're out, when you're home, what you're eating, doing all this other stuff, but yet you won't give me a secondary contact when you come to registration at the hospital. So I just, that drives me crazy. It just absolutely drives me crazy and I don't know how to get past that.
Christopher Habig
Yeah, you kind of beat me there, but I'm sitting here thinking, I think one of the biggest problems as we're talking about this is that Target, Amazon, and Google know if you're pregnant or sick before your doctor does.
Brian Wikle
Yep. Yep. Oh, absolutely. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. If you could just somehow tie in registration to their search engine, I think we'd have all the information collected and probably be good for the next millennial. I think we'd be 100 % correct.
Christopher Habig
It's, yeah, maybe that's our new jump off point. Maybe that was like our lightning moment here, a light bulb moment that just says, hey, grabbing all this EMR data is great, but if we're not gonna connect it to consumer behavior and search engines, then we can only get so far into it. But again, going back to just emphasize that relationship between a doctor who says, hey Chris, I know your dad, your dad had XYZ conditions. You didn't list it here on your history.
What's up? Let's talk about it. And gosh, not to pick on my parents, but I'm sure there's a lot that they don't tell me, that I think most parents don't tell their kids, as far as family history, all this kind of stuff, that you need that multi-generational type of relationship to really experience what really good quality healthcare means and then being able to use modern tools to drive the whole thing. I mean, that's kind of the perfect healthcare system in my mind.
Brian Wikle
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, because if you don't, if you don't grab that information, that's lost. That's information lost. You can't grab that. And then now you're only working in the, in the, in the near future. And so now you're getting back to where we kind of started with the conversation. Now you're getting back to predictive because you don't have a lot of sound information
necessarily on an individual or a history of that individual or the family history. So now you're predicting, okay, at this age, you're getting this, this and this, this is starting to show, this is starting to pop up. This could be next. How do we, how do we deal with this? How do we mitigate that risk that you're currently experiencing? So yeah, it's challenging times.
Christopher Habig
I think there's a lot of people out there, yeah, amen to that. I think there's a lot of people out there that just refuse to believe that their genetics influence the vast majority of their medical issues out here. And it's like, sorry guys, this is it. Like that's what the good Lord gave you. And I thank mom and dad, but there's stuff we can know about it and try to get ahead of things.
Brian, the giving the last word here, you know, an opportunity to absolutely blow our listeners minds. What's been one of the biggest eye-opening things that you've seen in your career as you've been along this path?
Brian Wikle
You know, again, I kind of go back to really the patient record. I think that's probably the biggest thing I've seen over the last seven or eight years is really a lack of technology that allows those patient records to become better.
There was a time that I had probably the strongest technology out there on the planet, I think, for patient matching. And I could guarantee you, because it happened over and over again, I would go into a health system and they're like, well, we have, you know, Epic or we have Cerner, we have, you know, Athena, you know, just whatever, you know, they, whatever they had as their EMR, but I could, and they're like, no, so we're fine, you know, we're fine.
And I say, well, I will guarantee that I could probably find over 15%, probably closer to 20 % duplication within your patient records. And if somebody were to allow me to do that, and a couple of them did, always came back way over 20%. And it's a scary situation. Now, the interesting thing is you talk to the HIM director, they'll tell you. It's probably not good
but they're working this crazy, crazy hours trying to make it happen. But again, inside politics, gotta maintain, tee up to rev cycle. It all goes together. It's a common thread. And I've always said that it's a common thread is the identity of an individual. It's the physician, hits the HIM, hits rev cycle, hits the patient. It's all the thread, hits all the various departments it touches if something's good or if something's bad.
And so that's what I've seen is just whether it's an HIE, whether it's claims data a lot of times, whether it's provider data and clinical data and labs, unfortunately are one of the worst out there, is human error is human error.
And so you've got, even if you have the best technology out there, you still got to have a set of eyes at the end of the day, because nobody's 100 % sure, right? There's no technology out there that's 100 % foolproof. So you've got to have a set of eyes that's well-trained, knowledgeable to make that final decision. But holy cow, we can be at 99 .9 % as opposed to 75 or 80 anytime.
It just takes effort and it takes somebody saying enough's enough and we've got to make this change.
Christopher Habig
I know I said that was the last point right there, but what you're talking about reminds me of some of the parallels between the aviation industry and then the healthcare industry. When an aviation accident happens, there's a full-on investigation, every little thing, whether it was a very small plane or a very big plane. If there's issues, everything's under investigation and fixes are implemented immediately across the board. Imagine if the same was true for the healthcare world or even...
one system, one hospital, or one physician's office. We had one problem, let's go ahead and fix it. Let's make sure that this thing, if it happens again, because somebody screwed up, but let's make sure that doesn't happen again from a technology or process standpoint ever again. So lots of room to improve.
Brian, when you mentioned that there's like 20 % or more record duplication, break that down for us. Just give us that an example in plain English.
Brian Wikle
So years ago, when ATMs came out and the financial industry, and I always kind of equate healthcare should be more like the financial institutions and the financial technologies, because if you were flying to Paris and your name's Bill Smith, for example, and you had to hit an ATM and you took 20 bucks out of your account, but unfortunately it came out of Roger Smith's account and not yours, that...
ATM and that banking institution would get a phone call immediately. And once that information started to permeate across the country and the wires that if you fly and you go somewhere else and you're trying to get your money out, it may happen. It may not. It may impact somebody else and not you. And somebody else is getting into your pocket. That would change immediately. And I think that's the kind of fear.
and course of action I think that healthcare needs to take. It needs to be more immediate and I think it has to be more reactionary from that perspective.
Christopher Habig
Now I have to ask a follow-up question. Do you think that is because it's dollars or because we have extreme visibility into our bank accounts that does not exist in our healthcare records as individual patients?
Brian Wikle
Well, and see now again, as we're talking about patient rights and we're talking about having more access to our own patient records, that's where we can really step up and start to take ownership of our own healthcare needs along with our personal care physician. Because now we see the records, we have the records, we own it. Years ago, you couldn't get access to it. Now you have access to it and the unfortunate thing is,
there's probably a fairly large segment of the population doesn't care. And so you got to flip that mindset as well. So you've got to get people to care about their own health. But again, that kind of goes back to, you know, why somebody, you know, smokes all day long and then can't understand why they have lung disease, you know, in their 50s. But, you know, there's a certain behavioral pattern that needs to change. But I think
we have the ability in today's society to take ownership that we didn't have, and I think we have to do that. And I think that'll help in the end.
Christopher Habig
Brian, I want to thank you for coming on the show, sharing your expertise with us. It has been an absolute pleasure.
Brian Wikle
Oh, absolutely. I appreciate you invite me and always willing to discuss it anytime I can, Chris. Thank you very much.
Christopher Habig
And to our listeners, another big thank you for tuning in to Healthcare Americana. We hope today's episode has shed some light on the critical role of data and shaping the future of healthcare and really how we can intervene on a person-to-person basis. I think that's what's always very, very important because all healthcare is local. Remember, informed decisions lead to better health outcomes. Feel free to share this episode with anybody and everybody you think might enjoy it and benefit from hearing it.
Once again, I'm your host Christopher Habig wishing you good health and clear data. Until next time.
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