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The Vurge
The Vurge Podcast brings together trailblazers, experts, and industry disrupters to explore the future of tech and innovation in the healthcare industry. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or have just begun your career, this podcast will bring you thought-provoking ideas and opinions sure to bring value to all who listen. Join us in our latest episodes to stay up to date on the innovative changes that are transforming healthcare as we know it.
The Vurge
Go-Live Leadership Lessons with Oliver Galicki
We talk with Oliver Galicki of Memorial Hermann Health System, who transformed a football injury into a thriving career in healthcare IT. Listen as Oliver reveals how the leadership skills he developed on the field are now essential in guiding Memorial Hermann's Epic implementation. He shares the importance of teamwork, communication, and maintaining focus as Memorial Hermann approaches a critical Go Live milestone.
Oliver shares the strategies that helped overcome resistance and manage employee concerns, and we delve into the unique dynamics of managing a remote IT team, maintaining employee satisfaction, and the benefits of structured in-person collaboration weeks. Tune in for a compelling blend of leadership, sports, and healthcare IT wisdom.
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Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Verge. Today we have Oliver Galucki and he is with us to talk all about his go lives, his football injury and how he has come about playing sports and using his leadership skills in the role he is in today. So welcome, oliver.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me Happy to be here and talk all things implementation and football.
Speaker 1:Love it, I love it. Can you give us a little career journey summary and let us know how you got to where you are today?
Speaker 2:Sure, absolutely so. I have been in the healthcare IT space for my entire career about, I would say, 10 to 12 years now. I started, really as an intern at a community hospital a large single facility hospital in Jackson, mississippi, about a 500-bed facility and fell in love with it, fell in love with hospitals, fell in love Mississippi, about a 500-bed facility and fell in love with it, fell in love with hospitals, fell in love with healthcare, and certainly the technology, which was more of my academic training, was part of it as well. Eventually moved into HL7 interface development, application management and then departmental leadership at different hospitals and health systems and ultimately have landed here at Memorial Hermann in my current role, leading our epic implementation across the system.
Speaker 1:So you played football, right, I was a gymnast, so sports and everything we learn from sports is greatly integrated into how we are formed as leaders today. Can you talk about how you use some of your leadership skills and football skills to combine? You know sort of help. You run your team and hopefully you're not having them do push-ups in the end or something crazy like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I probably should have certainly added in that I think football was a big part of my life growing up, high school into college. Actually, an injury in college is what. Although it ended my football career, it let me have more time to go and do internships and other work activities during the school year and really led to that role in the health system which sort of launched my career off in the health IT space. But certainly, thinking just day-to-day leading a team we have around 200 people on our implementation team across Memorial Hermann and just to have everyone work as a team every single day for something different on the project is really, I think, underscores team sports and sports in general. There's very little you can do alone. Even in an individual sport. You still have people behind the scenes who are helping coach you, train you, et cetera. A team sport even more visible to everyone.
Speaker 2:We're in the middle of a very big team sport right now and everyone is really unlike football where you're all working for one goal. We have many, many different goals that are all ultimately the same thing. So just keeping that in mind and reminding us we're all a team. So just keeping that in mind and reminding us, we're all a team. I think in IT, probably in every organization, there's always a little bit of technology versus applications, training versus the build team, and so there's always that natural competition or a little bit of differencing different of opinion, differing of opinions but, I think, reminding us we're all on the same team, we're all here to improve the care that we give to our patients as a system and streamline our technology across the board. So I think that level of just high coaching, keeping everyone's eye on the ultimate goal here, even though it's a long, long journey to get there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it helps you in your career now with sort of stress management and helping all the players that are running around in different directions, right, I mean, I think football is a good analogy. Now, I am no expert. I I know I'm told that I need to be a Patriots fan and that's like sort of where I draw the line. But football has, you know, you go and look at the graphs and like watching everybody go in all different directions, it does feel similar to an Epic Go Live, does it not?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does. It does and I think every. I would say we're now in the regular season, headed for the post-season, if I had to make a probably a not so great comparison. But we are exactly 39 days away from our first Go Live here at Memorial Hermann for our ambulatory care sites and it becomes more real every day and I've told the team every day we go forward. The more users we train, the more training open registrations we open up, the more of an audience we have.
Speaker 2:So everything we do is being looked at Training and the technical dress, rehearsal, touching all the devices out in our facilities. Those are the most visible things people see. That's what they will remember. It doesn't matter about the flow sheet right now and how well it's configured. It's really around. Did we schedule and come to work? Did we do what we said we would do? Did we train everyone appropriately and give them the base level of knowledge? So I feel like the spotlight is there for our team to do great things and we're trying to grab that by the, by the, by the horns, and keep going.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, okay. So I'm going to stick with the football analogy. And I just watched an awesome documentary because I've been flying all over the country and it was all about football and showed the back like the backside right, not just the game, but like what's happening behind the scenes, and they're watching the videos and the coaches, the multiple coaches, all communicating to their players and so transitioning that into how it relates to your Go Live. That's coming. What are you all doing in terms of communicating, over-communicating all the steps so that you have the buy-in of your team players, right?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I think. So from an internal team perspective, we're trying to keep the messaging very clear so that our IT team, our implementation team, all has as much information as they can to help answer questions, to help feel confident in what they are doing when they interact with our end users. So we have a pretty regular team meeting cadence, both with our leader team and then how that cascades down to our overall implementation team monthly, I would say on a broad scale, at least more than any other organization I've been a part of, we have tried to over-communicate from the beginning. So we have a concept of site change readiness and leadership team. So really we've got operational groups from our different business units that have come together and we've tried to essentially arm them with everything we can from the project perspective. It is overwhelming at times. We've heard feedback it's too much, but yet we can't do more meetings because everyone still has other things to do. So it's really trying to extend our reach as a project team and hold people accountable at their business unit to cascade the information down. So certainly there are still questions that come in that can be mind-boggling, like how did we miss this? How did we not communicate this piece to every. How do we not reach everyone? But by and large, we've made Epic such a focus and I think that goes all the way up to our CEO and his executive leadership team to make sure that every stage we get on. Now we're talking about something with Epic, whether it's training registration, whether it's an accountability message that it's not the IT team's job to make sure your employee goes to training, that we all have a responsibility to go to training or to get our employees to come to training.
Speaker 2:So it is over communication. I think that's the name of the game. It's also methods of communication, the different channels, especially with the physicians. We realize that it's not likely going to get an email to someone's Memorial Hermann email inbox that they never check, that they never have to access, is not going to get them. It might be. Who is the person that physician interacts with? How do we reach them to get them to register them for training? And so we've also taken that approach across the board and it's just consistent information. I think even in the day of age of SharePoint and having real-time sources, there's still someone who prints something off that's two weeks old, puts it up on a bulletin board. The schedule has changed. We've had new things come up and things change, and so we still deal with I heard this, I heard this, and it's good. I mean, I'd rather hear it than not hear it and be able to dispel it, but it always makes me wonder what else is out there too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that you're doing all forms of communication, and even the back of the bathroom door. I mean you still use that as a form of communication, right, it's still a good way to reach everybody. What are you doing? You know you spoke about items that they didn't feel heard right and it's coming back to you, which is great, and those might need changes. Or you might recognize that a staff member has called out after a training that something's not quite right for that implementation. So what are you all doing in terms of your change management processes and who do you have involved on that team?
Speaker 2:So we actually had an idea early on in the project that we knew as an organization we had room to grow in the change management space, that if we were going to sustain this change over a two-year implementation that we needed to involve it certainly wasn't IT. We were not going to go and tell everyone you're changing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you better not right, Get over it.
Speaker 2:Here comes Epic. Yeah, that wasn't going to get us anywhere. It hadn't worked in the past. It doesn't really work anywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely a project right there.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. So we do subscribe as an organization to the pro-sci methodology around change management, but we still felt like we couldn't be so academic about this that people just went to another class. So we actually worked with one of our partners in our HR team and built an epic focused and epic themed leader change management training that I think we've gotten around 85% of the organizational leaders through. So this is assistant nurse, manager and above, and we've made it where it's really transferable to other things that the organization will do, but given it a flavor of Epic. Here's what's happening. Do you know this? It's turned into a good informal avenue for us to hear what people think and where people are in their Epic journey, but it's also been reinforcing the principles that we want everyone to really think through, which is things are going to change. We have five registration and scheduling systems today. We're going to have one, so all five of those groups are going to have to do something together that those user bases have never had to do. So just very fundamental things like that carry over into a shock at GoLive and a shock for how do we govern this moving forward that we don't have five independent and connected. We have actually one connected source from the beginning that everyone has to play in the same sandbox. So overall, we do run the risk. Every time we communicate something or we ask questions or we hear training from feedback, we hear a lot of well, we don't do that this way and I know that's common in implementations. I think it's harder for us because we have so many different ways today that things are done because of the different platforms that it takes a little bit of due diligence on our side to be able to confidently say back this is how you will do it in the future, here's how this workflow will work.
Speaker 2:Here's who was involved in the decision-making process, because not every single campus had a representative on every single governance group. It's really. We took people from councils. So everyone wants to know who made this decision. Why are we doing it this way? And we just reinforced that from an IT perspective. Here's, here was the process, et cetera. But you're exactly right when you open up training, people do question. You know, why are we doing it this way? This doesn't look right. This doesn't look like Epic down the street at the other hospital I worked at.
Speaker 1:Right, right, well, and, and to that point, how are you handling the? I love when you know, did you a new implementation? You get the. We've done it like this for 20 years. Why? Why would we change? It's workingst to them all of the paperwork that happens in the background, right, and so how are you all handling those employees or concerns at your organization?
Speaker 2:Well, I can. I can tell you from we've really relied on those site change readiness groups that we formed, with an executive sponsor at each site. So each, each business unit or campus, the executive sponsor is either a CMO, CNO or COO at each site. So each business unit or campus, the executive sponsor is either a CMO, CNO or COO at that campus and then they've formed a leadership team. So we really, when we feel like there's questions, that's their first line of defense. It shouldn't be pick up the phone and call IT. It really should be working through what your site and we've dispersed a lot of this information out For those things that we knew were high-impact changes that we knew people would question, would wonder why are we doing it this way?
Speaker 2:Isn't this going to create more work, more clicks, et cetera? We've actually published a series of high-impact readiness workflow packets out to the entire organization. So it's not training, it's really just hey, Epic Secure Chat is coming. It's not just going to be for clinicians and physicians, it will actually be for everyone who's a hyperspace user. This is different. This is a big change for us as an organization. We're changing how we do armband and label printing for how we do it today. That's a big change. We're pushing that out now. It's really just a nugget of information, a few slides on each of these topics that we've tried to push really from the beginning of time, starting with our wave one sites and then now we're pretty wave two heavy to get people ready for what's coming in the acute care spaces.
Speaker 1:So you took on Epic, you took on a change management platform process to implement, all while you're also implementing the Community Connect that are also going live at the same time, right?
Speaker 2:That's correct.
Speaker 1:Yes, can you put any more on your plate.
Speaker 2:You know we've enjoyed the opportunity to really get immersed in Community Connect sooner than we expected.
Speaker 2:So Memorial Hermann has had a longstanding a large ACO clinically integrated network in Memorial in Houston area and we offer have offered historically an EHR to these independent practices. As we transitioned to Epic, it was, of course, part of our value proposition and our commitment to the community to bring everyone on one platform. So they were on an EHR that was separate from our acute care EHR and so to actually get the full benefit of everything being on the same platform together, we had to make that move. So we did have it's a little bit over 100 now community connect practices that are actually going live day one of our go live may 22nd along with our memorial herman proper site. So that's definitely not the epic model. We we acknowledge that this, it some of this, had to do with timing and when we could get these practices live and off of their legacy system. So we are. We are living with that challenge every day and they're excited for what we're going to deliver for them.
Speaker 1:You guys are going to be able to pull it off. I have full confidence and I love that your organization is dedicated to the tech equity within your community and bringing them up to speed and being inclusive, for, you know, the rural health centers and the community centers that, quite frankly, wait one, two, three years just to you know be, hooked up to the larger health system.
Speaker 2:Agreed, and we do have a. Even within our owned and employed practices we have a large community benefits corporation, and so part of our Wave One Go Live is an assortment of school-based health clinics, which are our health clinics, that are embedded in schools across the Houston area. We have three mobile dental clinics that are going live on Epic with the Wisdom application, and then we also have neighborhood health centers, which are specifically designed to provide care access to community members who don't have easy access to other sites. So we do pride ourselves as an organization on what we give back to the overall community. So it's going to be nice with Wave 1 to really knock that out of the park with those sites coming in, to be followed then by our large acute care sites and the Level 1 Trauma Center. That obviously is a big engine for COVID care for anyone at any time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Let's switch topics and and talk a little bit about the IT team behind or, or. I'm sure they're not behind the wall, right, but you know a lot of them are all over the wall right now. So yeah, they're all but a lot of them are remote right, and so how are you navigating through the newer waters of remote employees with a go-live coming and them coming on site and not on site, and can you speak to that?
Speaker 2:Sure, sure. So yes, I think I joined Memorial Hermit in the middle of COVID, but at that point in time the IT organization and other departments similar to us were already in a fully remote or a hybrid remote capacity, and so we obviously took on the Epic journey and there was no. I mean, we went as far as we've consolidated office space, we've gotten rid of individual offices, just as the footprint of our physical need has shrunk, so Epic in itself. We we made the decision we're not going to bring people here every day just because we're going live with Epic, that we feel like our employee satisfaction is higher. There's a better work-life balance, even Epic aside, with being able to work remotely.
Speaker 2:Traffic in Houston is a nightmare, probably is an understatement. So just giving people that hour back a day or two hours back a day and saving on tolls is a win. So we didn't make any changes in terms of the overall policy. What we did do is align with Epic on having one on-site week per month, and so I say week. It's really a Tuesday through a Thursday, so three days a month where the Epic implementation team from Verona comes down, our consultants that we do have on the project team fly in and then our employees all gather on site and that was like when we did that the first time. That was a go live in itself because we're like oh, we have 300 people coming to campus for IT work and we have nowhere where are we going to sit. We made floor plans. It was like a go live just to get ready for it. But we heard some groans about that, like why come in when we can do this from home?
Speaker 2:But I think it's now passed where it's good for the teams to know and be able to see and speak with their Epic counterparts. It's our chance when we do in-person governance meetings with all of our different stakeholders, many of whom are also remote. If you're not in the clinical area, you're probably remote but they are also coming on site for many of these meetings and it gives us a chance just to connect and do things as a team. We don't do a large scale team event, you know, go play putt putt every month or anything like that, but we do something where it might just be as simple as a themed come and grab some food. We're going to do lunch today. Pass on through, grab lunch, you know, we'll have. Our leaders are here accessible and everything like that. Lunch you know we'll have, our leaders are here accessible and everything like that. So it's been good to see everyone and it's been a balance of things to keep to keep things fresh and keep it moving.
Speaker 1:You find they're more energized when they get together. I know like I love my team. They're here with you, know, listening to us now, and but I love, I love being remote. But then we get together at conferences or we have a annual retreat or whatever, and I'm more jazzed to get together with them then than I think if I was in the office with them every day.
Speaker 2:No offense to my divergent teammates.
Speaker 2:No, I 100 percent agree.
Speaker 2:I really, especially at first when it was.
Speaker 2:I think there was just such a long COVID hangover of not doing that Even we do it once in a while for team events but it really wasn't consistent and there were points in the project early on where we're like I think they might be visiting so much we're not actually getting things done.
Speaker 2:But ultimately it was good and people gelled and came together. We also had a pretty large team assignment shakeup as we moved into the Epic project, so we had people from different teams coming together to be an analyst in a module under a new manager and so this was good for them to kind of do the storming norming process early on in the project as well, because it was quite possible that a team who was together had a new manager based on how we aligned resources, or a manager had two people they used to manage and 10 people that were new to the team and maybe it never worked with each other. So this was also the time to go kind of fly out of the nest. You're all together now let's get rolling and learn how this will work. And so it's stabilized. People do seem energized and, like I said planning team lunches and events around when we're on site together.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love the way of thinking and how you've organized it. You said something super cool when we first talked. Are you nervous about what I'm going to say?
Speaker 2:I'm hanging on the edge of my seat here.
Speaker 1:I can see your face, but I don't know what else. So it was really cool. It was follow the data, not the noise. And when you're focused on such a big go live and you guys are extra big right, what would you tell the listeners in that comment of follow the data, not the noise, and what have you learned from other go lives and following that mantra?
Speaker 2:So it is funny you use that line line. We actually recently heard a very similar message from dr jamie mccarthy at our. We had our spring leadership conference with all directors and above in the organization and he used some of our, our epic uh, he's our executive sponsor for the project and he used some of our sort of guiding principles to talk through and really send a message to our leadership team team to follow the data, not the noise, and take accountability for that. So I think we've tried to do that in IT, meaning we're not going to swing and mandate everyone come back into the office because we're behind on something. We're not going to say work the weekend if it's not absolutely necessary to solve a problem. We're going to look at the data, follow the trends, make sure it's accurate and make decisions based on that. I think the message is we've got to have everyone else in the organization do the same thing In order to be successful and feel good coming out of May 22nd and October 5th. If everyone can do that and provide accurate data-driven information, we will help navigate the go-live ups and downs that are just natural and I don't know that we learned that exact thing from other go lives.
Speaker 2:We have gotten the opportunity to shadow a couple of different Epic customers going live as well, and I think we've and the general theme has been communicate, communicate, communicate over ready You're? You know, if you think people are ready, they're probably not. They probably don't have a full appreciation of X, y, z, and then obviously just hearing what are the issues going to be at GoLive, I think anyone who's been part of an EHR, golive, like printing login templates, I mean there's the basics but those are the easier ones to fix. That's kind of that first spike of day one, day two, day two. I think I'm most concerned about my team when we get into day three, day four, when it's really the tough issues that you have to chew on and really work hard to resolve and then start thinking about the financial impacts of those.
Speaker 1:It's those darn barcode scanners every time. And then you meet the month, and then it's billing's billing right every time it's every.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been involved in some barcode conversations this week that uh are certainly not uh front page newsworthy, but it was just like you would think we were launching someone to mars sometimes, uh, talking through barcode scanning and aztec and linear and all of that, but uh, we're getting there, yeah but it's fair right.
Speaker 1:The clinical people on the floor, like those are their, are their weapons that they're using every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, then those are the things that we need. You just pick it up and it works. You just pick up a scanner you scan a med and it works.
Speaker 2:We're trying to impart the same thing with Rover. We're definitely pushing mobility in a big way in this project. Mobility in a big way in this project we are deploying iPhone devices to all of our inpatient nurses across the system, with plans to scale later to other use cases, but obviously that's in the thousands of devices and pushing mobility and Rover and we're trying to build credibility that, yes, you've had Wi-Fi problems in the past but we've done Wi-Fi assessments, we've done Wi-Fi refreshes. We want that phone device to be something you can pick up and use and actually administer meds document on that device. Obviously do the care team communication. So very much along the same lines and what we want moving forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's great. So we always have one final question that we that I ask at the end of every podcast. I think I prepped you for it, so we want to know what your superpower is. Maybe you got it from football, maybe you got it throughout your career, and what is that superpower and how might you utilize it in these high stress school lives coming up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I was thinking about this this morning. I knew this moment was coming and really, what's fresh on my mind?
Speaker 1:is You're about to kick the ball into the that's right.
Speaker 2:What really is fresh on my mind is we opened up training for our Wave 2 users. So we have about 50,000 excuse me, 40,000 users that are now beating down the doors to get registered for training, and we've really motivated our chief executive officers of campuses, coos of our campuses, to get their teams registered. And, naturally, as you open the door for anything, there's a lot of questions, there's bumps in the road that are just natural when you have something at this scale, and we've been working through them as a team. I think what I feel like we've been able to do successfully and what I would would maybe I wish it was a superpower I I think it is something I can develop, continue to develop as a superpower is really to be able to bring down, bring down anxiety and drive everyone back to where we are. So.
Speaker 2:So I don't know, how to even capture that as one word. But I think the ability to break down a project like this and communicate the essence of it and continue to push forward is something that I either am continuing to use and challenge myself to do better at throughout the rest of the project, and I saw it this morning with the meeting we were in, where we were able to come in and say we're 35% completely registered and we just opened four days ago. So this is a great place. We're doing everything right as an organization to get to 100% training registration, so just being able to bring the anxiety level down and push forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can see that being your superpower now. I mean just you know, knowing the big project you're about to endure, and that your sense of calmness and your leadership skills that you've shown that people can't see, but I can see your non-verbals right on the call. I can just tell you're a natural born leader to help lead them into this epic. Go live and and over the field goal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're, we're hoping to, we're, we will. We will be scoring the touchdown soon and I love it. Yeah, finish the game strong so.
Speaker 1:All right, yes, awesome. Thank you so much for your time, oliver. It's been great to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time, Oliver.
Speaker 3:It's been great to have you on the show, Absolutely. Thank you very much. Thanks for tuning in to the Verge Podcast brought to you by Divergent, a leading healthcare IT advisory firm. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to hit the follow button to stay up to date with the latest IT developments and the exciting ways tech is transforming healthcare today.
