Rae Woods (00:02):
From Advisory Board, we are bringing you a Radio Advisory. My name is Rachel Woods. You can call me Rae. At Advisory Board, we get literally hundreds of questions from healthcare leaders every day and the number one question we're getting asked right now is how to manage the workforce crisis, particularly in nursing. Look, we've been talking about this problem for years and the challenges seem to be getting worse, not better. That's why on this week's episode, I've brought two experts from Henry Ford Health System, Lisa Prasad and Eric Wallis. Lisa is the Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer, and Eric serves as their Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer. And together they believe that we're looking at the nursing crisis through the wrong lens. It's not a workforce problem, it's a supply chain problem. Lisa, Eric, welcome to Radio Advisory.

Lisa Prasad (01:03):
Thank you. Nice to be here.

Eric Wallis (01:03):
Thank you.

Rae Woods (01:06):
First time on podcasts, or have you been on a podcast before?

Lisa Prasad (01:10):
First time for me.

Eric Wallis (01:11):
First time for me as well.

Rae Woods (01:13):
I love this. We get the chance to share new thoughts, new ideas through a new platform. This is my absolute favorite. Now, everyone in healthcare, in fact, everyone outside of healthcare too, seems to all be talking about this challenge and crisis in nursing. Frankly, this is not the first time that we've talked about this on this podcast, but I want to start off by giving the mic to the two of you. Henry Ford has an interesting take on the nursing crisis and some of the factors that are causing it. What is your take?

Eric Wallis (02:02):
The way that we're trying to look at this in many respects is we're trying to fix a supply chain problem. We currently are about a million nurses short in this country. Recently was at an advisory board presentation where we talked about the fact that nearly 500,000 folks have left the profession in the last 18 months. And so it just continues to get worse. And so really, what we're trying to do is look at what our unique solutions for how do we not just try to fill the number of people, but how do we change the work? And we are so lucky to have partners like Lisa and our innovation institute that are really helping us to look for new and creative solutions that are out there in the world.

Lisa Prasad (02:49):
Thanks, Eric. 100% agree with everything he said. The current nursing crisis is not a recruiting problem, so it's important for us to understand that we can't get in the mindset that says, if we can only fill all of these jobs, then our problems would go away.

Rae Woods (03:03):
That's right.

Lisa Prasad (03:03):
That's not going to happen. It's truly a supply chain problem where we have to look at the entire life cycle of a nursing career from both the demand side and the supply side.

Rae Woods (03:14):
So let's do that, let's look at the whole life cycle. If it is a chain, what are all the possible kinks in the chain that we should be looking at? Besides just recruiting roles right now?

Lisa Prasad (03:25):
As Eric mentioned, if you're looking at the demand side, you have to look at both. So if you're looking at the demand side, there are over million vacancies right now. And in addition, we need 200,000 new nurses every year going forward. And that's for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is our aging population. Then you look at the supply side and you have COVID and the general burnout that COVID has caused. And you have the current average age of our nurse is 52 and 20% of them are planning to retire. And as they retire, it's difficult for us to train new nurses. So we're really in this cycle where we need more, but we can't do more because we have less to do it with. And that's why we call it the supply chain problem. And in fact, in nursing, I feel like we've reached a point where compensation and opportunity are not high enough to reach a stable and sufficient workforce, and therefore we really do have to look at every phase of that supply chain so that we can begin to balance out the supply and demand.

Eric Wallis (04:27):
Yeah, I would just add to what Lisa is saying, the biggest thing that I worry about is she mentioned we need 200,000 more nurses a year in a system that can't graduate that many. And so there's a whole bucket of work that's going on in the world to try to figure out how do we increase the funnel with our academic partners, but even more worrisome to me is that when you talk to and start to see some of the research that's coming out, a lot of our nurses who are even coming into the field only plan on staying at the bedside for a very short period of time because they want to move to other things. And so one of the scariest statistics, I used to talk to graduating nursing students and say, "Hey, the average nurse stays in one job about three to three and a half years."

Rae Woods (05:12):
Oh, my gosh.

Eric Wallis (05:13):
That statistic held forever.

Rae Woods (05:15):
That's like tech. That's so short.

Eric Wallis (05:18):
Well, through the pandemic, the numbers dropped to two and a half years. And so people really want to come into nursing. We're still seeing record numbers of folks trying to enroll in nursing programs, but I don't know that right now we have the jobs and the work matched up with what people's desires and ideas of what nursing is, or they're not matched up. And so we've got to change that and we've got to find innovative ways to make being a bedside nurse something that is desirable and people have a passion about. And so technology's one piece of that. But I think we've really good in nursing at bringing back old things that we've done. Let's try this thing again. What haven't been really good at is trying to find new ways of doing things, new models, new support systems, et cetera. And so that's why I'm really excited about the challenges and a couple of the efforts that Lisa and the Innovation Institute are helping us with right now, because we're truly going and trying to seek out new stuff, new ways of working and new models of care.

Rae Woods (06:35):
And before we get to some of those solutions and new models, I do just want to pause at this moment where we're talking about a supply chain issue, but neither of you are supply chain experts. In fact, Lisa, Eric was just talking about all the work that you've done. You are a chief innovation officer. I'm not sure that I would've expected someone like you, let alone other members of the C-Suite to necessarily be talking about the nursing issue and be the one who's stepping in to come up with solutions. Why is this not just a nursing problem? Why is this a problem that the entire C-suite should be paying attention to?

Lisa Prasad (07:14):
In the short term, this has caused a real financial problem for health systems in general.

Rae Woods (07:20):
Oh, yeah.

Lisa Prasad (07:20):
So it's put a fresh lens on the problem because it's hurting the bottom line. But in the long term, this problem has been coming. We could have seen the demographics changing from a while ago, and our whole healthcare system is so based on nursing care. They represent the largest professional workers of any healthcare system. So if you're going to look at how that is going to change, you're looking at strategy, you're looking at planning, you're looking at information technology, finance, and on and on. So this truly is a strategic problem for healthcare providers. It's not just a nursing and recruitment problem.

Eric Wallis (08:02):
I've been in nursing for more than 25 years, and since the moment I walked in the workforce, we talked about the impending nursing shortage. The reality though has been that for various reason, economic downturns, other things, people have stayed in the workforce for a long time. What changed was with COVID, people finally stepped out. They said it's not worth it anymore. And so we saw this massive wave of retirement, followed by a massive wave of folks who said, "Hey, I can make a lot more money going off and do travel nursing." And then again, people just getting burned out because of the stress and the never ending wave of really sick folks coming into our acute care settings. And so it's really different and now as an executive team, as a leadership team, we're finally being forced to figure out what are we going to do as this big chunk of the workforce goes away?

Rae Woods (08:58):
So let's talk about that, and we're going to focus our conversation on bedside nursing because that's where I think the problem is first of all, the most acute. But also this is where the solutions, at least from the people that I talk to, seem to be the hardest to find and sustain. And let's talk about some of the biggest kinks in the chain. One of the biggest conversations that I've heard really over the last couple of years is the challenge of the administrative burden of medicine. And as that goes up, so does burnout. It reduces the joy in medicine, the more time you spend on these administrative tasks. But I'll also be honest with you, almost all of the solutions that I've seen are not targeted at nurses. They're targeted at physicians. Frankly, they're in the ambulatory setting. They're not necessarily in kind of acute spaces or at the bedside. Why hasn't the industry talked about the administrative burden on nurses?

Lisa Prasad (09:57):
Unfortunately, in healthcare, one of the most concrete expressions of value is payment. And in hospitals, nursing costs tend to be bundled up with the cost of a patient room. So you don't hold in on that line item called nursing costs or nursing value. And therefore, if you follow the dollar in healthcare, that stop on nursing just hasn't taken place until very recently when this has come to the fore. So I think it's changing, I think we didn't hear the voice of the nurse earlier, but it is different. And many systems such as ours have introduced new positions like the CNIO, which is the chief nursing informatics officer, who's now a bridge between technology solutions that are being integrated, and the nursing workforce. So as we learn more about nursing burnout and the direct relationship, for example, between their wellbeing and EMR, with all the documentation that they need to do, it's increasingly clear that nurses need to be included in hospital technology and design decisions. And I think that we're seeing more of that now.

Eric Wallis (11:10):
I completely agree with Lisa. I would add that probably for at least my entire career when we talk about technology in healthcare, often what it has done has been really, really focused on just making sure that the I's are dotted, the T's are crossed, the boxes are checked so that we can get paid. And what that's led to is hours and hours and hours of a nurse's day is spent doing documentation, as opposed to doing the things that really feed the soul of nurses, which is their interaction with their patients, their interactions with one another. And so I think that's been one of the big challenges is even when you talk to bedside nurses about, "Hey, we're going to look at this technology," their immediate reaction is, "Oh gosh, it's another thing that we're going to have to do. It's another thing that's going to make us do something."

Rae Woods (11:59):
It's another change. It's another burden.

Eric Wallis (12:02):
Absolutely.

Rae Woods (12:02):
It's not necessarily going to make my life easier. But even then, there's a question of how much can that technology do? I'll tell you, I'm reading a book right now called AI in Health, which I think tells you exactly what it's about and just yesterday I was reading a stat about how much, in this case it was just AI, can offload on various members of the clinical team. And it said that one of the lowest percentages of tasks that could be offloaded came to bedside nurses compared to other clinical roles, certainly non-clinical roles that do things like documentation. What do you say to the pushback that there just aren't opportunities to use technology to reduce the administrative burden when we are talking about bedside nursing?

Eric Wallis (12:53):
Well, I'm going to hope that both Lisa and I completely disagree with that. There are so many things that are just routine, mundane task kind of things. All important, but I used this example a time and one of the first conversations I think I had with Lisa was, there is technology out there that are wearables that a patient can wear that will give us that patient's vital signs on whatever schedule we want to do it, so that we don't have to have a person go into that room every hour, two hour, four hour, whatever the protocol may be, and obtain vital signs on 20 patients on a nursing unit. I think those are things that when you start really looking at, that takes real time and gives it back to our bedside care team, looking at how do we make sure that things get integrated directly into the electronic health record so that people manually don't have to do that. How do we look at technologies that make it so that we don't have to put a person in a patient room to just sit there and watch the patient because we're worried they're confused and might get up and might fall? There are a number of things that can have very real tangible give backs of time to that bedside care team.

Rae Woods (14:06):
And by the way, that example that you gave of the patient adopting wearable so that a human being doesn't need to come in and take the vitals, that's hugely beneficial for the human that's sitting in that bed. Who doesn't need to be, I'm thinking, woken up every two hours or four hours, whatever it might be for a human being to come in and take their blood pressure. Especially, oh my gosh, what bothers me the most is when they're not actually manually taking blood pressure. They're walking in to put the automatic cuff on and press the button, so it's halfway automated.

Lisa Prasad (14:34):
Yeah.

Eric Wallis (14:37):
Yeah. It's some of that kind of stuff that we've got to be able to figure this out. This seems like it should be the basics of automation, to say the least.

Lisa Prasad (14:48):
Yeah. I 100% agree. This is where technology and innovation can really play a huge role, and we're already beginning to see technologies that are coming in and being adapted. We have EICUs, and virtual nurses, and smart bed technologies, and automated IV pumps. These are all providing technologies platforms for the bedside nurse to monitor patients away from the bedside, so you're almost changing the definition of what it means to be that bedside nurse. As Eric mentioned, we have digital sensors to monitor vitals. We need to implement them once they're appropriately tested and they can scale. Some are even contactless using infrared technology. We were talking this morning, Eric and I about ChristianaCare and their use of a collaborative robot called a cobot, Moxi, and they're using this robot to perform non-clinical tasks so that nurses can spend more time on clinical care. So things like collecting supplies, and picking up medications from the pharmacy, and dropping off lab specimens, all of these things can save a tremendous amount of time. So in conclusion, I would say that this is the area where new technology solutions can really have a great impact.

Rae Woods (16:07):
So there is opportunity, and I would like to believe that there is only going to be more opportunity as more innovations come out and are tested, and are implemented. And the implementation part is hard, let's not beat around the bush. That's often the hardest part, to Eric's point, for the frontline nurses that need to see it seamlessly embedded into their workflow.

Lisa Prasad (16:29):
It's hard. And let's just be clear that we've tested a lot of things that haven't worked. So a lot of the early stage company technologies have over promised and under delivered. So there's a lot of noise in the system. Oh, you're bringing me another technology solution. What's different for this? But if you look at the maturity level of digital health technologies in this country, they're becoming more mature, they're becoming more scalable, they're becoming larger, more tested technologies. So very soon we are going to reach a point where some of these companies are ready for prime time and scaled implementation.

Rae Woods (17:08):
What advice do you have for leaders who have also tested and failed at some of these innovations? And maybe are feeling a sense of, I'll call it paralysis, of there's so many opportunities out there. There's so many pitch decks. Where the hell do I even begin knowing that the crisis is so severe? We're not talking about implementing these five or 10 years ago. We're talking about implementing them in a moment where a lot of hospitals still literally don't have enough staff and are willing to pay anything just to be able to staff their ICU.

Eric Wallis (17:43):
I think there's a couple of thoughts there. One is that you hit on it, this stuff's also expensive. And so part of this is not only the bedside team's a little gun shy, but many of us have really expensive technology platforms that we haven't even optimized yet. So you'd look at things like our EHR and like many health systems, we get the full presentation on, here's all the amazing wonderful things that it can do for you. But then we start choosing to turn this one on, and not turn that on. And it really creates kind of a patchwork that our bedside teams have to manage through, as opposed to being willing to really optimize the tech that we have and then add to it. And so I think that that causes us some challenges in this space, too. The second thing that I guess I would add to this is when you even just look across healthcare in general, we have a lot of uneven implementation of some of these technologies.

(18:46):
And so it's hard to make the case that this is the best case thing to do and scenario to use because you can go to 10 different health systems and you're going to see 10 different versions of X, Y, or Z because we haven't identified and decided what is the best practice and try to bring some of that standardization in. I do think we see more of that in the physician, clinician kind of space. But as a nursing community, I don't think we've been really good about identifying and then sharing some of the best practices when it comes to leveraging technology.

Rae Woods (19:19):
I love this piece of advice, because it's start with what you have, optimize what you have, work on the implementation at scale, especially if we're talking about health systems, what you already have. Lisa, I'm curious. What's your advice to folks who are evaluating new technologies, or looking at that pitch deck and are going, "Oh my gosh, I've been burned before. Is this where I'm going to put my money? Should I wait? What should I be picking as the next solution?"

Lisa Prasad (19:49):
Often I think that we become very reactive to the pitch decks that we get. What we need to do is step back and say, what are our pain points that we're trying to solve? What are really those wicked problems that we want the solutions around, and then go out and find the solutions that we want. This is one of the things that the Innovation Institute does with the program that I lead here, is we see pitch decks coming at us probably on a good week, we'll see 50 of them. And they're all technology based, and they all completely solve the healthcare problem.

Rae Woods (20:26):
Magic.

Lisa Prasad (20:27):
If you only do this with my technology, you're all set. You don't have to do anything else. And I can take all of those and I can shop it around and I can see what to implement. But the most valuable thing I can do for the system is to identify the four or five areas where we're really hurting, and then go out and find the associated technology solutions. And then, work with the implementation team to get them implemented as efficiently and effectively as possible at scale, and have them interoperable with everything else that we've got within the environment.

Eric Wallis (21:02):
Too often, so often we find technology or solutions that are looking for a problem. And our partnership with Lisa and the Innovation Institute has been incredible because really she asked the right question, which is what problems are we trying to solve? And let's go find the tech that actually solves that problem. So then when we bring it back to our nurses and our bedside team, we can say, "We heard you. We heard this is the thing that's causing you pain or making your job harder. And oh, by the way, as an organization, we listened and we went searching for a solution to solve your problem." And that changes the rate and the willingness of adoption tremendously.

Rae Woods (22:45):
Lisa was just talking about the fact that when it comes to technology, there's no magic bullet. There's no perfect solution. But there's also no magic bullet to the nursing supply chain problem, that's why it's a supply chain. So we've been talking about capacity as one major kink in the chain, technology being something that can open up capacity. But for me, a light bulb really went off when I learned that even with the shortages that we have today, nursing schools actually had to turn students away because of lack of educator capacity. That's when I really started seeing this as a string of challenges, all of which need to be solved. How do we then open up the student funnel so there is a larger pool of nurses?

Eric Wallis (23:31):
The answer again is, I don't know that we found the magic bullet yet, but one of the things that we are very focused on right now is how do we work with our partners, academic partners to come up with new ways for them to be able to bring more students in? I've seen a number of healthcare systems around the country that are looking at how can they offer a scholarship to somebody who's already been committed to nursing school and sign them up the minute that they walk through the doors of the university. Well, that's not going to solve our supply chain problem. One of the pieces that we've been working on recently, and we're starting with our partner in Michigan State University, is looking at some hybrid roles. How do we look for nurses who are at the bedside who might have an interest in being involved in educating the next generation of nurses, and how do we give them the opportunity to stay fully employed with us? But part of that time is actually going to be spent as clinical faculty for the university, so the university can have more instructors, which is the major limiting factor that they have and bring more students in.

Rae Woods (24:43):
And probably also extend the partnership that those people in the hybrid role have with you, with Henry Ford Health System.

Eric Wallis (24:51):
Well, not only that, but it gives them a break from the bedside. So whether you want to call it a mental, physical, emotional break from that day to day caring for patients, and now get to pour a little bit of themselves and the students and back into their profession, which hopefully is something that helps reduce burnout, helps reduce some of that turnover because we've kind of given them a creative new outlet to keep giving using their talent and their skills. So I think those kinds of solutions are going to be really critical. The challenge, why the schools don't have a lot of clinical faculties, because their rates of pay tend to be a lot lower than a bedside nurse. So if I can say-

Rae Woods (25:31):
Wait, lower?

Eric Wallis (25:32):
Much lower. And so if I can say to our bedside nurse, "Hey, you're going to keep your same rate of pay, you're going to keep your same benefits, but you're going to go do this other work that's really important to the future of the industry," hopefully that's enough to encourage some folks to say, "Yeah, let me give that a try." And one clinical faculty person that our partner at Michigan State can add means eight more students that they can accept into the program. So out of 6,500 nurses, can I find 10 that would maybe want to work in one of those roles and give us another 80 nursing students a year? And that's the hope that we're working toward.

Rae Woods (26:06):
We've kind of gone in and out of talking about compensation, which we've all kind of admitted has been too low for some time. And now there are these huge spikes when employees got the power and could demand a premium. But for me, there's a deeper issue here and that we've relied on the fact that nurses have a calling in healthcare. They have a passion to deliver best in class patient care. And dare I say, we've abused that calling and not paid enough for nurses, and therefore we've ended up with this place where nurses have lost a lot of the joy that we told them was going to be the thing that kept them in their job. But I'm not sure that your average bedside nurse today would really say that, "I have joy in the practice of medicine." How do we make the role something that's even attractive?

Eric Wallis (27:13):
One of the biggest things I worry about throughout the pandemic here is that to your point, we've gone away from, "This is my calling, this is my passion, this is what I want to do," to a place where some nurses are saying, "Hey, you tell me how much you value me by how much is in my paycheck." And that to me, that's a very scary place when anyone starts to think that their only value is based on the dollars in their check.

Rae Woods (27:39):
Because it also shouldn't be that. Yeah, I definitely don't want to set up that extreme, that it all comes down to compensation. In fact, I think a lot of the data would show that that is not enough to retain any employee today, let alone nurses.

Eric Wallis (27:53):
Absolutely. Well, and in fact, it only becomes important when they're basic needs aren't being met. When you don't feel safe, [inaudible 00:28:00] being cared for, you don't feel like that people are listening. That's when that dollar figure starts to become a bone of contention. There's plenty of research that shows that when you feel like you're valued, when you feel like people are listening, when you feel like you're cared about as a human being, then the dollar is not the thing that determines whether you stay in the profession or leave it. And so I think that's part of the work that we're wanting to do here is to say, "Hey, we hear you. We hear that there are things that as the healthcare community we've not solved for you as bedside clinicians." And as an organization, we're making the investment and doing it in a unique way with an innovation institute and partners in the industry to say, "We're going to try to start to fix some of those challenges you've been telling us exist."

Lisa Prasad (28:48):
The one thing that we haven't talked about yet, which we should in this context, is opportunity. There is opportunity that's available now to a nurse that just wasn't there 10 years ago.

Rae Woods (29:00):
Oh, yeah.

Lisa Prasad (29:02):
They, like other workers, can work remotely now in telemedicine. They can become well paid, independent travel nurses, of course, they can enter the gig economy with more and more Uber-like options. You have companies like Nomad and Florence and others that are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to create these health staffing platforms where nurses can work at their convenience, on their schedule, and fill the gaps that patients and employers have. These things have given nurses an opportunity to meet their calling without having to work at the bedside. So what do we need to do? We need to redesign the way we look at nursing care to bring them back into the inpatient setting and into the physical bedside as opposed to this metaphorical bedside. And that's what Eric is working on with the programs that he's implemented, and others.

Rae Woods (30:00):
And Eric, I just want to underline what you said because it's so important. It starts with meeting basic needs. I get worried that folks are trying to add on something that is flashy or even adding just another fricking pizza party to try to show we appreciate you, we appreciate you. But that is not only going to fall flat, it's probably actually going to make things worse if basic needs aren't met. And that is the first step to getting to the point where then we can add on these technologies and we can ultimately get to this point where we have brought joy back to the bedside.

Eric Wallis (30:37):
One of the biggest challenges I think that we face today in healthcare is that as a society, we've lost our ability to have and show empathy to one another, and that's showing up in a whole lot of places. And so when we talk about helping people find their calling, when we talk about wanting to feel safe, a lot of it goes back to just this basic understanding of we are all human beings and we all need to care about one another just a little bit more than probably what we do today. And one way, especially within nursing, to give people the time to do that is to not have them doing all of these tasks that don't add value or meaning to them, and give them the time to go into a room with a patient who they know is having a hard day and sit down and just talk.

(31:26):
Give them the time to sometimes sit around with one of their coworkers a little bit and make sure they're getting a 15 minute or a half an hour break to sit down and just talk to one another, and connect on that human kind of plane. And so I think that it's those moments that we're trying to return to our folks, as opposed to just running up and down the halls like their hair's on fire because they're trying to make sure that the next task thing gets checked.

Lisa Prasad (31:54):
Yeah. Let me just pick up on that point for a second, Eric, if I may. You're absolutely right about the time pressures on the nurse. One of the reasons that we don't have more nursing based innovations coming through the Innovation Institute is because we can't get time from the nurses because they're always on the floor. So whereas we might be able to get a doctor to stop in and give us feedback on a technology or pilot something-

Rae Woods (32:19):
Oh, interesting.

Lisa Prasad (32:21):
-it's really, really difficult to get nursing input because they're always busy on shift, on the floor.

Rae Woods (32:28):
So there's some immediate capacity that needs to be opened up in order to test the products that will open up capacity to a much greater extent. But it starts with, we need something now.

Lisa Prasad (32:41):
Exactly. And then that's how the nursing voice begins to be heard, more and more loudly.

Eric Wallis (32:48):
Well, and I agree completely, Lisa, and I think one of the things that I'm proud of for our health system is that 11 months ago they decided that for the first time, we need somebody in a role that represents all of nursing at the system level.

Lisa Prasad (33:03):
We should talk about that, because Eric's role, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but Eric's role is very new. We never had a chief nursing officer at this level before.

Rae Woods (33:15):
At the true C-Suite level,

Lisa Prasad (33:16):
At the true C-suite level. Yes. How did we forget to talk about this?

Rae Woods (33:20):
Yeah, well, it goes to show that this, again, this is a C-suite level problem. And while most health systems have a CNO on staff, that does not mean that that human being has the power and the responsibility like a, say, chief operations officer or strategy officer.

Lisa Prasad (33:39):
Exactly. So we finally have a partner with the ability to cut across all the CNOs at the different hospitals, and we don't have to worry about inpatient nurses and outpatient nurses. So Eric, please talk a little bit more about your role because, really, kudos to Henry Ford.

Eric Wallis (33:57):
Thanks Lisa. And obviously I'm very proud to be the first person to sit in this seat for the Henry Ford Health System. The reality is that Henry Ford has always been a very nurse friendly organization. One of the reasons that I chose to come to the health system almost four years ago was that when you looked at a number of our leadership roles, there were nurses that were sitting in those leadership roles. But what we didn't have was somebody, as Lisa mentioned, in an executive role at the top of the organization that was helping to pull all those threads and strings together. Having the time to sit and think strategically for nursing across the entire system. And really that's where some of this discussion and this partnership came from, was me having the opportunity to think about where can we start to solve some of these problems? And Lisa being great to reach out and say, "Hey, we've never done this before, but how do we engage the innovation Institute with our nurses to start to figure out how do we make this better?" And so I'm really excited to have great partners like Lisa in the system that are thinking about how do we start to solve some of these problems?

Rae Woods (35:13):
I want to end by actually giving both of you the last word. What is it about this partnership, your specific partnership between you, Eric, and you Lisa, but also the connective tissue between nursing and technology and it finally being seen at an executive level? What is it about that that gives you hope that we can actually solve the nursing supply chain issue?

Lisa Prasad (35:38):
I'll start with this one, Eric, and I'm going to take a slightly different tact. My job at Henry Ford is to be outward looking. I always need to know what's happening in industry so that we can solve that, so we can bridge that gap between our needs and what's being developed. So if you look 10 years ago, there was 1 billion of venture funding that went into digital health. If you look in 2021, that was 29 billion of funding. And the funding is focused around solving pain points in healthcare. And I'm personally very excited, because I'm beginning to see companies that are mature and they're becoming part of the solution for the problems that we have, one of which is nursing. So things like robotics, and AI, and natural language processing, which might help us with the documentation problem that we all struggle with so mightily, these are going to be harnessed a lot more effectively and in a lot more scalable way in the next two to three years. And personally, I'm very optimistic about their ability to help us solve the nursing challenges.

Eric Wallis (36:42):
I love Lisa's answer because I think it's spot on. I don't know if I could have answered it better. I will just add this to say, we have to change the value equation for why do I want to be a nurse? And when you look at the industry, when you look at the profession, forever nursing has been the most trusted profession because we have had that time, and space, and caring at the core of what does it mean to be a nurse. I think where we are right now is that technology is finally at that point to say, Hey, wait a minute. We haven't really figured out how to help you. When it comes to the folks who are day to day, putting their hands on and in the care of patients. And to see that start to emerge is really, really exciting. And to have a partner like Lisa and an institute within our organization that can bridge that gap and make it easier for us to find those solutions is really exciting, because I know at the end of the day what's going to happen is we're going to start bringing back technologies and solutions to our bedside nurses to really allow them to get back to why they came into this.

Rae Woods (38:05):
Well, Lisa, Eric, thanks for coming on Radio Advisory.

Lisa Prasad (38:07):
Thank you, Rae. That was great.

Eric Wallis (38:08):
Great. Thank you.

Rae Woods (38:15):
I know there are still more questions than answers when it comes to solving the nursing crisis, and it can be confusing when there are all of these new technologies that you could be writing a check for. But here's the thing, writing a check is almost never the entire answer. So think about the entire supply chain and make sure that as you are investing in new technologies, you are equally investing in the implementation. And remember, as always, we're here to help.