Transcript
Speaker: Hello, welcome to the Health Data Ethics Podcast.
Speaker: I am back this episode with another fantastic interview.
Speaker: I'm really excited in this episode to introduce a long-time coworker, long-time collaborator,
Speaker: personal friend Jack Stock.
Speaker: Jack, do you want to give an introduction?
Speaker: Hi Jennifer, how are you?
Speaker: Good to see you and good to see those in the audience or at least part of it.
Speaker: My name is Jack Stock.
Speaker: I've been working at the Cleveland Clinic for the past nearly 27 years.
Speaker: Prior to that, I've been in IT pretty much since I attended Northeastern University.
Speaker: So I've gone through the full cycle of what IT has used to be and where it is today and unknown where it's going tomorrow.
Speaker: I've been in the business relationship management role for probably seven years now, and I am currently a senior business relationship manager residing over regional hospitals across the country.
Speaker: I think there's a lot that our BRM interested audience can learn from you because our program at Cleveland Clinic is one of the larger and more mature BRM programs.
Speaker: I wanted to, A, first of all, I say this to you all the time, but I'm going to say it in public, working with you and working with the rest of our BRM team leadership is one of the absolute best things about this job.
Speaker: I love it very much.
Speaker: And I do not take lightly the ability to work alongside you.
Speaker: You've been a BRM for seven years.
Speaker: That's a long time in the program.
Speaker: Can you talk to me a little bit about how the role itself and its relationship with IT has changed over those seven years?
Speaker: Sure, it's actually extremely interesting to me as well when I think back about not having the type of relationships that we have with our institutes and some of our business partners internally in the organization.
Speaker: Several years ago, we really had no embedded
Speaker: person or representative from IT into the businesses.
Speaker: And we found after numerous conversations with our businesses, how better to serve as a value-added base IT shop can we help our business partners that are very heavily and even more dependent on IT as we move forward in the
Speaker: in these decades.
Speaker: So when I first recognized it, and again, it was started off by a gentleman named Chris Clancy, who was part of one of our executive directors, to see an opportunity to say, you know what, there's probably something as you look at an account rep when it represents a large Merck or a Google or Microsoft, when they come into representing an external service provider.
Speaker: I think what Chris did and what our current director has done is really mature the relationships and also
Speaker: building the ability for a person to sit within the business and sit with the leaders, which we never had.
Speaker: And really, it's adding the fact that we're understanding each of those businesses that reside within the organization we work in today.
Speaker: A lot of times when people are working with IT and they don't have this kind of relationship in place.
Speaker: And again, this is from experience myself.
Speaker: There's huge gaps, huge gaps of understanding what their needs are short term, what their needs are long term operational considerations.
Speaker: Fiscally, there's a huge budget consideration that I don't think a lot of people when they don't have this role in place to be able to correlate what how and what IT needs to do to ensure that the success of these projects that are being requested, regardless of its AI based or just infrastructure or application based.
Speaker: really have to do a lot of learning and understanding.
Speaker: So it's great to have that relationship person or business relationship manager in each of these business partner entities and to help guide them, shepherd them through the processes, understanding IT, making sure we could give them the best product and the best solutions possible
Speaker: and the most cost-effective, not just for our internal business partners, but also just generally for the business.
Speaker: And ultimately, in this case, in healthcare, our patient care and patient experience factors.
Speaker: That's one of the things that I love about working in healthcare is that our value proposition is really so simple at the end of the day.
Speaker: Is this going to make life better for our patients?
Speaker: Is it going to make it easier for our caregivers to focus on
Speaker: giving care to the patient, right?
Speaker: Can we strip some of the, I guess, the static out of their workflows?
Speaker: It's lovely when it works really well.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit more.
Speaker: If you were giving advice to an organization that maybe has a BRM program, but it's not fully staffed, or maybe it's not as mature as it could be, kind of lower on that BRM maturity curve,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So you've got a group of folks who are maybe ticket takers.
Speaker: They're escalating process, you know, like they're escalating service requests.
Speaker: They're working on processes, but they're pretty transactional.
Speaker: What advice would you give them if they're looking to grow and mature their program?
Speaker: I think there's a lot of assessments and analysis that has to be done, a lot of getting to know, even if you're starting within the preliminary stages and starting to build relationships.
Speaker: You know, a lot of times it's a trust factor.
Speaker: There's a lot of challenges around the political aspects.
Speaker: So it's really ensuring that the leader or whoever's leading the business relationship team internally in your organization and representing a service provider, in this case, IT, to really understand the business and what those requirements are to make sure when IT does embed themselves or a person embeds themselves into the business, it's not just understanding the business needs and not just understanding the portfolio of IT, which is substantially huge depending on the type of organization, but it also comes down to...
Speaker: You're fine.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, we record live, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You get all the life.
Speaker: It also comes down to what I call instincts and true human nature.
Speaker: You know, every individual, no matter who you work with, there's absolutely challenges facing the business themselves and running the business, making revenue, doing patient care, hitting the goals and the strategy, not just for their own institutes or in the case of the internal businesses, but also focusing on the strategy for the organization.
Speaker: So from my perspective, the most important thing is building the relationship, building the trust in a very slow, casual, comfortable, transparent means and ways with that business partner.
Speaker: And the more I've worked in this particular role, the more I have found out is bad news is better than no news or tough love is another term I use quite often.
Speaker: This is where we can learn to be successful with each other, both as from the business and IT, for them, for the business to understand the value-based care that we offer and we try to push for and ensuring that we understand the business well enough that we know and we start to understand what may be forthcoming and IT is better prepared for that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's great.
Speaker: Those are all really important points to consider.
Speaker: Are there any, is there any bit of advice, any question you want to answer that I haven't asked you today?
Speaker: Anything that you feel is important to say?
Speaker: I think from my perspective, and again, learning from having no background at all in this role to where we stand today as a team in this particular institute that we work for and in the organization that we work for,
Speaker: is the fact that we're being more open-minded and having wider eyes to the problems, that we in IT really are extremely intelligent, have a lot of opportunities, but it's really stupendously important for us to understand what the leaders of all our internal businesses are looking for and asking about and
Speaker: trying to avoid those problems and plagues that come across every day.
Speaker: I think a lot of times in this role, you have to be a jack of all, master of a couple.
Speaker: And I think it's very difficult for some people that have either a background in applications, a background in infrastructure, or maybe even a lot of cases, we even have our own clinical nurses on staff.
Speaker: And we will have to go through our own evolution and changes.
Speaker: So you have to make sure you really almost fit a model of what the right person is, depending on the type of internal business that they'll be supporting.
Speaker: So I think that that is something also critical to the success of the project.
Speaker: Not just project, but also the implementation of going forward with business relationship management in any company.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting because our role in particular involves so much switching of gears, right?
Speaker: Seeing things from the business's perspective, seeing things from IT's perspective, looking at things from a technical perspective, trying to look at things from a strategic perspective.
Speaker: I feel like that kind of mental flexibility, like you called out, is really, really important.
Speaker: We are coming up on time.
Speaker: So I did want to say, Jack, thank you again for agreeing to come on the podcast and share some of your experience and your expertise.
Speaker: I have learned so much from working with you.
Speaker: I see absolutely no reason to deny people the ability to learn from you just because they're not as privileged as we are.
Speaker: So thank you.
Speaker: I really, really appreciate it.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: I appreciate this opportunity.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
