John Muir Health partnership insights

Braden Lang, Managing Director, Strategic Portfolio Services, Optum

- You are a big believer in a sprint-based approach, having been a key to John Muir Health's success. Can you tell us a little bit about why this approach through sprints and what that means to you?

Bill Hudson, Former Chief Information Officer at John Muir Health

- Now, you break off things in these bite-size elements, work with cohorts of physicians that are tightly aligned, making sure you're solving for a very specific problem, don't get it overly complicated, and move that forward in a good and safe way, and make sure that you communicate and educate along on the way. And so one of the things that we've done just recently, which I think is pretty cool, we've implemented translator services for our digital visits. And so if you don't speak English and you speak one of 200 languages, we can bring an interpreter in to that call within 30 seconds.

Braden Lang, Managing Director, Strategic Portfolio Services, Optum

- You talked about some of the limitations that a community health system like John Muir Health experiences around resources and scale force you to prioritize, etc. A lot of organizations, John Muir Health is no different, have engaged in partnerships to try to get access to more scale, more resources, etc. What recommendations would you have for other health systems, as they're thinking about engaging external partners for supporting their digital transformations.

Bill Hudson, Former Chief Information Officer at John Muir Health

- When I talked to To Cal Knight and Cal talked about his vision about how we're gonna leverage partnerships. It was really a partnership vision. It wasn't like we're gonna do these things and the things we don't want to do, we're gonna give it to somebody else. It was we're gonna focus on the thing's that we're really good at, and we're gonna bring partners in for the things they're really good at. And those two organizations being really good at their own individual things is gonna create some synergies where, you know, it's not one plus one is two it's one plus one is something really interesting, which is we're providing care in a different way. How do I lean into a partnership? And how do I determine what are my most important things that I think differentiate me from my competition? What differentiates me to my patients? Why did they choose me and think about those extraneous things, that don't add value that you're not as good at and say, you know what? I'm gonna bring somebody else in that is good at those things. And I'm gonna focus on the things that I can really make a difference at. And the thing that's interesting when you do that, it's not just that it's like, oh, I'm doing this one thing. You get better at that thing because that is your focus. And so you tend to get better at that thing 'cause you're not distracted with the other things 'cause your partner is maintaining that. Now that's tight communication, that's good understanding, it's making sure that the partnership is aligned. There's a lot of work that goes into pruning that and managing that to make that function. But if you can do that, it really becomes this really kind of cool creative growth, where you really are able to grow and expand beyond where you were before, because you're focusing so much on the things that you do that are differential.