SCL Health Setting the Foundation with Early Wins

Bill Russell: 00:07 Welcome to this week, health influence where we discuss the influence of technology on health with people who are making it happen. My name is bill Russell. Recovering healthcare CIO and creator of This Week in Health It. A set of podcasts and videos dedicated to developing the next generation of health it leaders. This podcast is sponsored by health lyrics. Professional athletes have coaches for every aspect of their life. To improve performance. Yet many CIOs and health executives choose to go it alone. Technology has taken center stage for healthcare. Get a coach in your corner of his health Lyrics .com to schedule your free consultation. Uh, two new services on the website to make you aware of this week. Health insights for individuals looking to propel your health it career forward. Two emails a week designed to give you insights that set you apart. And this week health staff meetings for teams, for managers really who are looking to introduce your team to new thinking from industry leaders to get the conversation started on the right foot. If either of those are of interest to you hit the website, hit subscribe and you can start getting those emails. Today. I’m excited to be joined by two of the it leaders from SCL health in Colorado, Craig Richardville and Steven Michaels. A good morning gentlemen. Welcome to the show.

Craig Richardvi: 01:11 Hey, good morning bill. Thank you.

Steven Michaels: 01:13 Good morning bill. Thank you.

Bill Russell: 01:14 So, Craig, people are familiar with you. You’ve, you’ve been around, you’ve been on the show before, uh, but you’ve made a transition to, uh, to SCL. Um, give, give us an idea of the transition. So you came into a new organization, um, you know, what’d you find? What did you have to put in place? Uh, you know, tell us about the journey to Colorado.

Craig Richardvi: 01:36 Yeah, I think first bill, uh, first and foremost that, uh, it certainly is when you come into a new organization, it’s very important not to come in with any preconceived notions or ideas of what you want to put in place. So, you know, my first 30 days was really kind of more what I would call a listening tour, where I went around and I spoke with about 40 different executives, different focus groups, stuff, different parts of it just to learn what the current state is and what the future expectations would look like, did an assessment, and then you start to execute. So within 60 days you really need to start to execute. And that was a really the third month here. And what we did here in terms of going through it was you need to identify what were the right seats to put on the bus. Then you got to put the right people in those seats. So I separate a 75% of the leadership team, uh, knowing that the aggressive and the acceleration of the work that needed to be done, uh, for our, in our markets, um, required a whole new level of talent and leadership. And so that’s why today, even as joined by, uh, my first, uh, member of the leadership team that joined me, Steven Michaels.

Bill Russell: 02:41 Yeah. So, Steven, you’ve made the, uh, you made the move, uh, give us a little bit of your background and, uh, the, the transition, um, from, from where you were to, to SCL.

Steven Michaels: 02:52 Yeah. Uh, thank you. So my background is a mix. I’ve had the fortune to work in various disciplines from big government.

Steven Michaels: 03:00 I actually started my career in the military. Uh, I’ve also worked in telecommunications industry and spent the last 10 years in healthcare. And so, and that’s been a mix of both big pharma as well as a health healthcare delivery. And like Craig, you know, when I come into an organization, um, all that experience and credibility that you build up with your previous organizations, you start off with a zero balance when you’re, you come into a new organization. So, um, you know, uh, my first 90 days here has been, uh, a lot of getting to know the people, uh, the organization and stuff like that. And, um, you know, hopefully my background will help me, kind of guide us to the success that we need to be. But like Craig, it’s a lot of learning in the beginning.

Bill Russell: 03:43 So Steven, are you conflicted? You have a Villanova over your right shoulder, you have Notre Dame over your left shoulder. Is that, is that your background or is that, is that kids or what is that?

Steven Michaels: 03:54 well, that, that’s my background actually. So, uh, I actually got my, uh, undergraduate degree from a university that you’ve probably never heard of, although I’m very proud to be a Campbell university camel. Uh, I always joke about the fact that, uh, you know, we’re the only university in the world with a fighting camel as a mascot. So, uh, so that’s, that’s the one piece in the center back here. I did some postgraduate work at both Notre Dame and Villanova getting S Sigma and executive leadership certifications. And so I’ve got a friend of mine that kinda jokes, he’s like, he’s like, you’re, you’ve gotta be the only non-Catholic to go to both of those schools, you know? Uh, and I was like, well, you know, maybe that’s true.

Bill Russell: 04:35 Yeah. Or, or a huge basketball fan. Uh, so, so Craig, you go into a new organization? You do the listening tour? Uh, we’re seeing a lot of it organizations start to, let’s just say bifurcate a little bit in, uh, around sort of a, an operational it and a digital it and an innovation. It, um, what, what were, what was your thoughts as you went in and after you’ve done the listening tour of how you’re going to organize to, uh, not only serve the current needs today, but also advance the organization?

Craig Richardvi: 05:08 Yeah, so, uh, and coming through and actually my, uh, my last, uh, member of my executive leadership team actually starts in a week. So that whole cast will be a complete at that time. And we look at the actual programming went through and we developed a, what I would say would be, um, a group of products and a group of platforms and that falls underneath all of our programs. So, uh, we put into place, uh, five platforms and those platforms are very geared around who are, um, uh, partners are going to be in the future. And most of them have a very large sweep of services, some overlap. So if you looked at a USC and our cloud space, for example, Google, is our major partner, they’re a major technology company that uh, we are going to be partnering with the many different avenues of, of work.

Craig Richardvi: 05:56 We look at XRM or a CRM, a we call it XRM because it includes all relationship management. Uh, we are a Salesforce partner on the EMR and revenue cycle management side. We have Epic on the ERP side. We’re actually going through an evaluation at the moment. By the end of October we’ll have both our uh, platforms selected as well as our implementation partner. And the last of the five is our service management. So these are how we plan to interact with all of our associates and service now is that we have implemented that in August of this past year. So a lot of movements around the platforms and really part of that is going to be to make sure we start to um, eliminate the best of breed type concept and try to bring a lot of the one off partnerships into the fold of our five major partners and platforms on top of that. Then we have five product lines and that’s where I think we’ll, you also see a kind of a circular influence around it. One is around application services, one is around data services, digital services, it risk and technology services. So we have five major platforms, five major product lines, and that’s how we’re organizing all of our work for the company.

Bill Russell: 07:08 So Craig, I’m going to come back to you in a minute to talk about budget because you rattled off a bunch of platforms and I just happened to know from my former budget that those are expensive platforms. So but Steven, I want to, I want to go to you. You’re, you’re new into the organization as in the CTO role. How much of your time is spent on, uh, on today, on normalizing the not normalizing on, uh, on really getting the, the, uh, infrastructure solid, the security platform solid, and then how much of your time is spent on future thinking and, and, uh, future endeavors?

Steven Michaels: 07:48 Well, so kind of be into my first 90 days, that balance is a little skewed, uh, just because, uh, it’s a lot of learning. And, and, and so forth. And so I do spend a little more time today, uh, in the weeds with our platforms. Then, uh, what I will be doing in the future just to be effective in my role. I think for my role, uh, to be effective, I need to be spending more of my time aligning kind of the technology value stream to the organization’s missions and values. And that’s really getting to know the leadership across the organization and understand, uh, what their priorities are and how their teams are, are interacting with our technology. I can tell you that even doing that sometime will require me to get into the weeds because, you know, I was just at one of our hospital locations last week and just kind of looking at how specifically at the, at the end of that value stream when someone is actually touching the technology and putting it into action, uh, how that can be different than how we may envision it further up the line. And so really I think for me to be effective to the organization, it’s really going to be that whole mission value alignment to the organization from technology. My goal for the rest of that, so when kind of running the day to day, is that we Institute enough of a resiliency design and plan around that to where that’s just kind of the, the um, tying our shoestrings and making sure that they’re good and tight before we start playing. You know, that that stuff should just happen and should, should work. It shouldn’t be a distraction, but it is a challenge for every CTO out there because it’s pretty easy to get bogged down, especially if things are not like they should be.

Bill Russell: 09:28 Yeah. The CTO role is interesting to me because you have to go, you have to be able to go very deep and then you also have to keep an eye on the horizon. Uh, and, and you and Craig together, we’ll keep an eye on the Verizon to say, you know, what is, what’s going on in the world of automation?

Bill Russell: 09:42 What’s going on, you know, robotic process automation and other areas that you guys are keeping a firm eye on. So Craig, I come back to you on, on a budget. I know when I came in to the health system I, I took over at, um, one of the initial things I had to do was to, uh, educate the leadership on what was going to be required to deliver. It’s funny cause you look at the job description for the CIO and they’re all so aspirational. You read it, you’re just like, wow, this is one of the most forward leaning companies. And then you get in there and you’re like, okay, if you believe this and it’s going to, it’s going to require this kind of investment, this kind of thing. You know, how, how do you, uh, how do you approach those first, that first year in terms of budget and educating and, and um, and really setting the right foundations for the future?

Craig Richardvi: 10:34 Well, the timing is actually perfect because for most health systems, including ours, the budget season, it actually right now, so we’re right in the midst of it. So outside of learning a new process, one of the things I will say, well we you know, came in and started to review. Some of the current work or some of the past decisions that were made. We’ve already in the past several months past three and a half months, have generated over 4 million to the bottom line in a positive state by rightsizing our agreements, uh, displacing a one off, uh, vendors to consoliddating, uh, our portfolio of services that we’re offering. So we’ve already, I think have some credibility that we built, uh, that we are looking at these, I think you said the key word is investment. The things that we are putting in do have to have a return coming back.

Craig Richardvi: 11:19 So initially, you know, it was talked about that you know, that these are going to be some large expenses, uh, that we are bringing to the table. And yes, they’re not cheap. However, if you have the strong buy-in from the corporate areas, from the clinical provider areas, and you put the right due diligence around your business case, these are actually investments that have a return coming back to the organization. So in terms of selling it, they sell themselves in terms of change management. You know, we’re in a, in an organization or really at the organization as an industry that is going through a tremendous amount

Craig Richardvi: 11:54 of change management. And that is something that, in my opinion, we just aren’t getting used to and that needs to be part of our daily flow and our daily work. And the Csuite up here, I, they strongly believes and most of them are pretty much in their roles just in the last several years from a very, a large, a high performing organization. So we’ve got really the top talent. And, uh, Steven and I and the rest of the team are very, uh, privileged to be working with this set of people and are, we’re very well aligned in terms of how we want to move the organization forward. I want to be a leader in this digital transformation for the industry. And how do we want to provide, uh, the best services to achieve our mission for our ministry back to our patients.

Bill Russell: 12:37 So you guys, uh, you, you threw out a bunch of, uh, great topics to jump off on. So, you know, the Google partnership. So we heard from, I joked on the show that we should now have signing day big announcement and somebody puts on the Google Jersey or the Amazon Jersey or Microsoft. And uh, so Chris Ross put on the, uh, put, put on the Google Jersey, uh, for Mayo 10 year AI, um, partnership and talked about how the Google engineers are gonna be working side by side with the Mayo, uh, clinicians. And uh, I think his quote from the health 2.0 conference last week was. “This AI thing is real.” Um, so you know, you guys have a pretty strong Google partnership talk either or both of you talk through a little bit about what you guys are doing with them and what it looks like.

Craig Richardvi: 13:31 Yeah, I’ll start off first and let Steven and fill in a lot of the blanks. So the relationship with Google is a, is a continuing maturing relationship. So we’ve made a large investment. We’ve partnered together to do some of the basic type services, so things like G suite to replace Microsoft office. Uh, we’re in the process of, uh, going down a road of Google voice for business to replace our Cisco call manager and all of them have multimillion dollar returns, uh, to successfully start moving ourselves down there. We also signed a very large GCP, uh, agreement with them to allow us to be able to, uh, take advantage of cloud services. And you know, Steven has already talked to some of our business partners in a different space to allow them to be able to either move or to add, uh, Google’s cloud to their environment.

Craig Richardvi: 14:23 So it’s not an AWS or, or not just an Azure, uh, company, but something now where Google cloud is at least one of the three and we hope to be the preferred in the future for other people making these decisions. And then there’s a whole slew of the AI and ML components, uh, whether it’s on the contact center side, the administrative side, or on the clinical side. And so we have a, a regular meeting. I mean, uh, Steven has team chairs, our Google a steering committee, which is a subcommittee or really it’s a equitable committee to our technology committee. So I’ll let Steven kind of fill in a little bit more of the details, but it certainly is a very accelerated and advancing a relationship.

Steven Michaels: 15:04 Yeah. Yeah. The one thing I would add is that, you know, when you get, when you go down the path of Google and, and Craig and I had this discussion before I actually joined SCL is, you know, once I heard that was kind of the direction that was going, you know, I understood, you know, that the culture change will be the, the most significant and you really have to be not just forward thinking to, to kind of go down the path, particularly in like, we think of something like G suite where you’re changing the day to day, uh, tools that associates have been using for 20 plus years. And, uh, but, but when you look at things through the lens of the Google developers and you see that they’re designed around certain things are extremely collaborative, uh, and, and really like, you know, we’ve had discussions around how certain platforms like SharePoint and others really get kind of replaced by the holistic product.

Steven Michaels: 15:58 Uh, and so you just have to, you know, uh, kind of beat that drum and, and, and let your associates, uh, find their way with so and so. There’s a little bit of a bumpy road, but SCL, particularly in technology, uh, we’re, we’re trying to be forward thinking. You know, I, I kinda chuckled earlier when I realized that Craig has his desk phone sitting on the cabinet behind him. And, and the reason for that is, is that, you know, he doesn’t have a desk phone. And so it’s not that our telecom telephony team is bad at home placement and put it way up there on the corner. It’s, but it’s, but we don’t, you know, any of us don’t have desk phones. We’ve moved to a more hybrid, you know, sip a solution like Google voice for business. And it just allows us to be a lot more mobile, uh, and so forth that know, I think as far as, you know, the AI platforms, I mean, there’s, there’s, without question and you know, from a natural language perspective, you know, their use of TensorFlow and stuff like that. Google is definitely an industry leader and we want to align ourselves to someone like that. And they’re just, you know, the abilities to use that, uh, investment that Google has made is, is, uh, is pretty amazing.

Bill Russell: 17:07 So I’m fascinated by the phone. I mean, clearly there’s a lot of ways to get off of that conversation. So, um, the, uh, the Cisco solution has proven to be a way to expensive solution to scale. Uh, that was the case for us. It’s just, it was a very, uh, hard hefty solution to get across the board, including into our call centers. With that being said, we found the cloud solutions and I’m going back six years, we found that cloud solutions, uh, couldn’t cover all the use cases that you had in a hospital setting. Do you guys have sort of a hybrid approach there? I guess, Steven, that’s a question for you.

Steven Michaels: 17:47 Sure, yeah, absolutely. And you’respot on, Google will tell you as well as Microsoft, if you wanted to talk about their team’s voice or Skype for business voice solutions, they’ll tell you that when it comes to a complicated environment, like a contact center, for example, uh, they’re, they’re not the solution for that, right? So you can think of all the features and functionality that comes with building out a robust contact center. Uh, they’re, they’re not really ready for that. And honestly, you know, when I’ve talked to some of the folks, uh, at, at, at Microsoft for example, they’ll tell you that they’re, they’re not necessarily interested in getting into that deep business. Uh, and, and, and from my perspective, if I was them, I wouldn’t want to either, frankly, because, you know, the phone call interaction with businesses is a, it’s something that’s going to die off. Like folks like the three of us on this call, we would probably spend a lot more time trying to interact with a business virtually then than ever picking up the phone and calling, right?

Steven Michaels: 18:46 Like, I’ll search your website and I’ll try to chat with people. I’ll do all these things really to avoid making a phone call. Uh, and so, you know, knowing that that’s kind of where technology is going, that fewer and fewer people are eager to pick up the phone and actually puts a phone call. Then these, these, uh, cloud solutions are not necessarily poised, uh, to, to do a lot of development specifically around Google and Microsoft, but there are players in the space like in any contact or Genesis for example, that can compliment some of your existing, uh, Cisco infrastructure, uh, and give us the ability to get robust tools and so forth. Uh, and, and the most recent announcement from Google where you’re able to, you know, kinda kind of route your data through the Google platform and how it interconnects with, you know, your existing platforms like the Cisco, uh, is, is the, is the area that we’re looking into to be able to kind of have the best of both worlds, if that makes sense.

Craig Richardvi: 19:44 You know, bill, if I could just jump in just for a minute, I think Steven touched on a very important point that might be overlooked and really, you know, it is the term contact center. It’s no longer our call center and we did some changes recently with service. Now. It went up with our, um, uh, an upgrade, a major upgrade within the Epic environment a week and a half ago or so. And we already saw was a total shift of the number of, uh, incidents that were reported in terms of how they were reported. So 80% of audits are just reported or were reported via, uh, online, uh, utilizing that as a contact versus having to a phone call come in. And so we had people, you know, eight people sitting around waiting for five calls an hour. They come in via the phone versus the incident piece.

Craig Richardvi: 20:31 And then what we saw and what we’re learning is the actual AI feature within service. Now in this case, we’ll actually start to build based upon all those different incidents and how they’re reporting. And so in the future, you know, there’ll be able to, and we’re talking just a couple months away when they actually start to, in their problem, it’ll start to solve it for them cause it will have a database of knowledge built enough and we’ll take that artificial intelligence or bring that back, which you won’t have a, a reported incident at all anymore. It’ll be self self-serve. So we’ll see ourselves in a short period of time. And when we look at things that, uh, with Google as some of the partners as Steven mentioned, that’s going to be very similar of how we plan on delivering that service back out to our patients. So much of the work that the patients will do will be initiated via the voice and or online with very little human interaction. So we’ll have the building up what I would call like the digital workforce.

Bill Russell: 21:23 So great. That’s a good transition. You know, we’ve gone from patient to consumer to person people and people centered design around it. Uh, w how has that, how’s that changing the, uh, the thought process in terms of strategy, tools and implementation for you guys as you move, uh, move maybe from a patient center to a consumer and, and a really a person center. When we talk about population health and we talk about social determinants of health, we’re potentially not talking about even consumers anymore. We’re just talking about the community that we live in. So how does, how does the, how does that impact health it and how does that impact your thought process for technology and strategy?

Craig Richardvi: 22:07 So we have a very progressive, uh, strategy team here and leadership group as I mentioned. And so when he came in here and started to learn about the organization and then looked at our strategic comparatives and the initiatives or the next five years, and this called mission for 2025, became very clear that for us to be able to accelerate our work to support and to achieve or overachieve even the, uh, the objectives that were established as part of that strategic plan, that’s where the, the, the growth for us is coming into the digital services area. And that’s where I was able to actually repurpose, uh, one of the executive positions to be the vice president of digital services. And now we’ve got the work around that. So we’ve already inventoried all the different digital assets that we’ve created. We’ve now started creating the, uh, the list of achievable, uh, uh, goals for other digital initiatives in the future.

Craig Richardvi: 23:00 Then we also, which I think is equity important is to, we created a list of that parking lot. So we wanted to make sure that we looked at all the different digital assets that we’re capable and that would be capable of coming in the next serveral years. And so we have things that we’re working on, things that we want to work on and the things that we don’t want to work on just to make sure that there’s a conservitive effort. And that was very intentful that if somebody asked me, for example, um, what are you guys doing in the area of blockchain? I can say for us at this time, it is something that is on the parking lot list. We are not spending resources, time, and energy within the blockchain. As that matures, as we continue to mature, there will likely be the opportunity that we would bring that into the portfolio. But for the moment we’re going to allow other people to, uh, continue to generate that good work. So it was really for us to create the digital piece, which will lead into our consumer and our person. Uh, the focus of that, we are very personalized in the delivery of our services. That customized and not one size fits all was very personalized to bill Russell, for example, when you come into our service line.

Bill Russell: 24:05 Yeah. So let’s talk about CRM or XRM as view. And Steven, I’m not going to put you on the spot here. You, you’ve been there for 90 days, is that right? Yes, sir. So I’m just gonna throw this out to both of you. So from a CRM perspective, how are you thinking about it? You have a phenomenal tool in Salesforce that can do a jillion things. I mean, it literally is a platform that can go in a lot of different directions. How are you going to use that platform and, and, uh, is it around personalization or is it around outreach? I mean, where, where does it get used the most effectively in healthcare? Yeah, either of you.

Steven Michaels: 24:40 Okay. I was going to say like, you know, one of, one of the challenges you run into is the bleed over of technology, right? So I think in every organization I’ve been a part of that, and my last three organizations have all been Salesforce platforms and it’s a great platform. And, and, uh, and how is utilized, I think that like with many platforms like that, there’s so many capabilities that sometimes we don’t realize what we don’t know. And so there’s sometimes there’s features, functionality that are being used. Um, I haven’t seen that yet at SCL. I haven’t been there long enough to see, you know, to, to to what extent we are, uh, utilizing. But Craig mentioned the, uh, service now as a platform, right? There’s a lot of bleed over between service now and Salesforce for example. And so the challenge for someone in our position is we’d have to look at that bleed over and see, okay, well how much are we consuming on one end?

Steven Michaels: 25:34 So in other words, like to what degree are we consuming Salesforce, uh, and using the features that be differentiators between them and a service now, for example, uh, so that we can make the right decisions for the organization. Uh, we’re not there. And certainly the new VP of digital coming on will be a major player, uh, just because of that responsibility to, to get us there. But that challenge has existed in every organization I’ve been a part of. And it’s not unique to, to SCL, just simply because these, these platforms that are being built are fantastic and robust, but they also bleed over into each other quite a bit

Craig Richardvi: 26:11 You know, Bill, when you and I talked about Salesforce, um, in, in some of the different ways of how we could use it and what we found out, uh, the current inventory of the assets, we actually using Salesforce and pretty much every way you could think of the issue was, uh, to Steven’s point, we didn’t rationalize what would be the best platform for some of the services and also we would needed to align the different services together. So we knew and we were talking to internal people, for example, that we had a certain amount of personalization to it or looking at, um, uh, uh, actual patients of ours or providers. Again, very personalized with some of the ways that we would look into. They look at the outreach with a lot of our consumer base, you know, to start to capture and bring some of that information in. Uh, you know, again, we’re kind of moving toward that Avenue as well.

Craig Richardvi: 26:59 So we’re using it in all different assets. So how you would think you would use the, uh, the cloud for, um, uh, Salesforce. So both the marketing cloud and the, and the service cloud. And then we’ll rationalize primarily the service cloud of how that fits within some of our other platforms that we have. And so for us, it’s really going to be organizing the work and then accelerating the work based upon the best platform that we choose. And we have a very, you know, the, the, the, when you look at the sales force and the digital products that we’re bringing out, it’s myself and our senior vice president of marketing on the executive sponsors. So it’s not an it thing, it’s not a marketing thing. It’s actually a corporate thing that we’re coming together on for. And if you looked at our new name that we originally just rolled out in the last couple of months, our new name is actually ITDS. So it’s information technology, which is basically what goes across all industries. But we’re also responsible for digital services, which is the last thing. So I think we’re probably very unique in being called ITDS, but it kind of brings in the future of the digital world that you, uh, brought up as well as the base foundational aspects of technology.

Bill Russell: 28:10 So, uh, that’s fantastic. So I guess this is one of the final questions here. Let’s talk about data a little bit. So data is foundational for the digital services that you’re going to be delivering, uh, in terms of, um, well, in terms of everything, I mean, data is the, is the lifeblood of, of digital services. How are you gonna normalize that? How are you going to make it available? Um, are you going to be developing your own set of digital tools on top of this? You could be tapping into the, uh, into the, uh, uh, ecosystem of, of innovators that are already out there, or are you going to be tapping into maybe some of the programs that larger health systems have in place? What are your thought processes on that?

Craig Richardvi: 28:53 Yeah, you know, we’re, we’re not going to be doing a lot of, uh, what I would say internal development. Uh, what we’re going to doing is we’re going to be looking to, uh, look to see what’s happening across other industries as something that Steven and I and the rest of the leadership too are very proud of is the network that we built over our careers are not only in healthcare but outside of healthcare and how that all is, is being utilized. Cause, you know, data and digital is a piece going across all the different verticals that are out there. But we’ll be looking at the innovators in terms of some of the things that the large technology companies like in our platform partners like Google for example, or service style or some of the things that Epic is, uh, moving forward with bringing those into our portfolio.

Craig Richardvi: 29:39 And what we want to do is make sure it aligns quickly with our 2025 and that we are in my terms, are going to be a leader within the change transformation where we’re the right size, uh, core company to, to really make some changes moving forward. Uh, data is foundational to our work. Data needs to be moved quickly in terms of the, uh, uh, put it in the hands of those who will actually make decisions, uh, based upon the data, whether it’s an individual provider or whether it’s an executive that’s providing some direction for the whole company. So that becomes another, uh, product that we’re delivering in our data services steering committee and we’ll be leading that charge. And the way that we’re looking at it is we are actually looking at bringing all different kinds of data interchanges in and outside of the organization, all within a single platform and a single services fresh to provide that back out to our customer base.

Bill Russell: 30:32 Absolutely. Uh, last question. Best thing about moving to Colorado. Moved to Colorado yet Steven. Yeah.

Steven Michaels: 30:41 Yes. I actually have and um, you know, my, my background being from North Carolina, it’s going to get me in a lot of trouble, but I’m going to be honest with you, bill, probably the best thing about moving to Colorado has been the barbecue, you know, which I know that’s blasphemous for me to say being from, uh, North Carolina. But I’ll tell you, man, there’s, there’s some great food out there, but of course everybody’s gonna talk about, you know, the beautiful sky and the weather and, and all. That’s amazing. But the, probably the one that’s been most surprising has been the food,

Bill Russell: 31:13 yeah, more days of sunshine than any other, uh, city in the, in the country is what they say. And just out of curiosity, you came from North Carolina and Villanova and Notre Dame over your shoulder. Are you or what’s your, what’s your college basketball team?

Steven Michaels: 31:28 Well, that’s a great question, bill. So being from North Carolina, you have to make a choice at a young age. As to which basketball team you’re going to pull for? I was with TarHeel, uh, you know, definitely, you know, I was, I was like nine years old when Michael Jordan and, and Dean Smith and James worthy, who was from my hometown actually won the national champion. So, uh, definitely a Tarheel when it comes to basketball and it’s extremely hard to watch the Tarheels play Villanova or any of the other schools I’m affiliated with because I’m still a Tarheel at heart.

Bill Russell: 32:01 So I get this picture of your father taking you aside, sitting you down and saying son, it’s time to decide. You’re nine years old, you know, is it Duke, is it UNC? Is it NC state? Where are you going?

Steven Michaels: 32:14 Well, he didn’t give me much of a choice. It definitely wasn’t going to be Duke in his mind, that’s for sure.

Bill Russell: 32:20 Craig, what about you? Best thing about moving to Colorado?

Craig Richardvi: 32:24 Well, I want to have to, uh, uh, default to, uh, the weather. Uh, the lack of humidity is amazing. The summer has just been, uh, uh, physically one of the best summers out there. I don’t think I’ve had one bead of sweat. Um, come down my head. That’s beautiful. And then every day, you know, come into the office or going home or just going out casually, the backdrop of the Rocky mountains are actually gorgeous. It’s just, um, yeah, it’s just that kind of having a mural on your wall and still even see some white caps, you know, throughout the whole summer, which was kind of nice to see when you, you’re kind of gazing up there. It’s like, how can that be? You know? So, uh, actually the, uh, both of those to me have been just a very great place to live. But when you grow up on the East side, you know, from Michigan and then down to North Carolina, um, you know, spent a lot of time, at least I have not spent a lot of time on the Western side of the United States, but everything I decided of the, uh, the other side of the Mississippi for sure.

Craig Richardvi: 33:19 So I’m really looking forward to exploring, you know, with short little sprints to different parts of the West, which is just a beautiful part of the country as well.

Bill Russell: 33:28 Well, Craig, you’ve lived a charmed life because Michigan is one of the most beautiful States on either side, surrounded by water and North Carolina. I mean, I mean, you have mountains all the way down to the ocean. I mean, you can really cover the entire, uh, landscape in North Carolina. And I think the hardest thing, so I’m on the West coast now too. The hardest thing for me to get used to is mountains without trees on it. I mean, people don’t get, when you drive through the Appalachians and that kind of stuff, you, you know, you don’t get as many great views because there’s trees as opposed to here. If you’re on the top of a mountain, you could see, uh, you can see for miles, but it’s miles, it’s Rocky. So,

Craig Richardvi: 34:09 but that’s the name

Bill Russell: 34:13 Well great conversation. I will have to check back with you guys. Um, you know, next year I’d love to love to hear how things are progressing, uh, just getting started out there, some exciting things going on. So thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Uh, any, any way, any way people can keep track or follow you guys.

Craig Richardvi: 34:31 Yeah, I mean, you can see a ourselves on LinkedIn in our progression, but any type of, uh, industry leading communications and conferences, you’ll continue to see us, um, project ourselves more and more out there on the forefront. I do want to thank you Bill, though because you’re a really a big asset to the industry. You take a very generic and neutral approach and the objective approach to bring your things out to the rest of us that are trying to execute some work. So I appreciate all your talent and being able to pull in a lot of the different people that you have over the years.

Bill Russell: 35:04 I appreciate that. Appreciate that. And Steven, thanks for, for joining us as well. I appreciate it. We’re going to keep trying this format of having not only the CIO is on, but but other people from within their organization to maybe have a little deeper conversation. So I appreciate your, uh, perspective. Uh, even though I’m a UNC fan, I appreciate you being on the show was great. Thank you for having me.

Craig Richardvi: 35:28 All right. Go heels

Bill Russell: 35:31 back every Friday for more great interviews with influencers. And don’t forget, every Tuesday we take a look at the news, which is impacting it. This shows the production of Thiss Week in Health it for more great content. Check out our website this week health.com YouTube channel this week health . Thanks for listening. That’s all for now.