Ben Resner serves as Vice President of Solutions for Hospital IQ.
On Saturday, September 23, Mr. Resner will give a presentation at Becker's Hospital Review 3rd Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place September 21 through September 23 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Mr. Resner's session, click here.
Question: Looking at your IT budget, what is one item or expense that has surprised you in terms of ROI? How so?
Ben Resner: One surprise is the limitations of EHR systems to deliver true ROI. Providers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on EHR systems, only to struggle with unlocking the ability to make critical business decisions from those systems.
With the rise of predictive analytics tools and a new focus on data as a business asset, providers are finally able to leverage the information within those EHR systems to identify and optimize critical operational areas like operating room block schedules, inpatient beds and staffing. Data is at the heart of driving significant hospital and health system operational efficiencies, which provide greater patient access to care and, in turn, enable hospitals to realize the full ROI of their IT investments. It’s exciting to see data finally get its due.
Q: Finding top tech talent is always a challenge. Say a CIO called you up today to ask for an interview question that would distinguish the best candidates from the mid- to low-performers. What question do you suggest he or she ask?
BR: My favorite interview question is: "Tell me about a really hard problem you had to solve.” In most tech interviews, candidates are asked to do a coding exercise or solve a word problem in five to ten minutes. But in the real world, the problems we ask programmers to solve take weeks or even months to solve. They’re often messy, poorly-defined moving targets that may not even be solvable in the manner presented. And because we can’t realistically ask candidates to invest the time into solving one of these types of problems, the next best thing is to ask for a narrative on something they’ve tackled previously. I want to hear candidates talk about issues that help me understand their thought process and approach to problem solving. Good responses address issues such as build versus buy, when to seek help, when to push back on the requirements and even when to simply acknowledge there may not be a solution.
The best examples that are shared are not necessarily technical in nature. One of the most productive programmers I’ve ever worked with talked about his strategy to overcome extreme shyness. In typical engineering fashion, he crafted a very specific plan or program where he purposely put himself into social situations with a goal of speaking to a certain number of people and then rated himself afterwards on his performance within key areas. His disciplined approach included diaries and charts of his progress. He brings this same problem solving style to his programming challenges.
Q: We spend a lot of timing talking about the exciting innovation modernizing healthcare. It's also helpful to acknowledge what we've let go of. What is one form of technology, one process or one idea that once seemed routine to you but is now endangered if not extinct? What existed in your organization 2-5 years ago but not anymore?
BR: I think the reliance, or over-reliance, on intuition for key operational decision-making is quickly becoming a thing of the past. I’ve worked with clinical people who know their hospital organizations cold, down to having surgical block schedules memorized. But oftentimes, when presented with actual data about those areas, long-held beliefs can be quickly dispelled. Intuition and hunches are still absolutely critical for knowing where to look, but the actual decision needs to be backed up by data. Furthermore, the evaluation of success or failure of the decision also needs to be backed up by data. How else do we know if it was the right call?
Specifically, humans tend to focus on edge cases and their associated narratives. But in practice, these are rare and don’t impact daily operations very often. I call these "conjoined twin" situations — they're very rare, and they get a lot of attention. Hospitals need to be set up to optimize the most common patients they see daily, not the patients that get written about in the press. Seasoned hospital leadership understands it requires both data and intuition to craft the best decisions.
Q: Tell us about the last time you were truly, wildly amazed by technology. What did you see?
BR: My "technology amazement" moment was realizing how poorly hospitals utilize technology as part of their mission to deliver better patient care. Merely computerizing patient records and not going the final mile to leverage the data for decision-making is a huge lost opportunity within the industry. When I describe what Hospital IQ does to friends and family outside of healthcare, their reaction is almost always: "I just assumed hospitals already did that!" If there’s a doctor or nurse nearby, they’ll turn to him or her and ask, “Is this true?” Most people outside healthcare have a hard time believing that a multi billion-dollar health system is just as unprepared to bed a patient coming out of an elective surgical procedure as a patient being wheeled into the emergency room.
My background is in consumer products, where every decision from manufacturing, marketing and sales is heavily influenced by data. While hospitals arguably now have a lot of data, they don’t have the tools to turn data into actions that support their mission. Hospital IQ is a purpose-built software platform designed to turn their existing data into accurate insights and actionable recommendations that they can use to improve their financial performance and drive great patient access to quality care.