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Speaker 0: This is Scott Becker with the Becker health care podcast. Hey I'm thrilled today to be joined by Jillian Men Jillian Director of Nursing infusion Services and Mac blood Services at the Mo Cancer Center, Mo Cancer Center is 1 of the most prestigious, best regarded oncology and cancer centers in the world. We're thrilled to have Jillian with us today. We're gonna talk today about topics, focused on innovating and infusion center operations, including patient, access empowering staff, measured success and a lot more. Today's podcast has brought to us by green toss, credible leader in sort of the logistics of operating rooms and infusion centers. Jillian, to get us started, Can you take a moment to tell us about yourself, Be role organization, tell us about Join Men enrique and Mo cancer center and what you do? Speaker 1: Good morning. And thank you for robin. We thought. Yes. I... My name, and I worked at Mo Cancer Center for the past, my gosh, 10 years now, and I pulled Bs from a University of Tampa and and Ms msn from I University Essential Florida, and I am currently the director of our infusion services and our ambulatory 1 draw. So I oversee about a hundred and 15 different chairs alongside our per site clinic and blood draw areas. Speaker 0: Did thank you. And tell us a little bit about Mo cancer center, that Mo cancer center known for just tremendous care and in research, talk us about the patient centric approach, and and and what does that mean and about your mission at at Mo cancer center. Speaker 1: Absolutely. So Mo mission is to contribute to the prevention and care of cancer. This goal is deeply embedded into our organizational culture. So every day we are finding innovative ideas, refining our ideas and our processes to better serve the patients, their needs, and their families as well, we kinda meet the patient where they're at in their journey and create the personalized care plan to tailor their to their specific conditions and types cancer. So my responsibility is to ensure that our infusion centers are easily accessible that they're are equipped to provide the comprehensive cancer treatment that we are known for And, our aim is to ultimately deliver exceptional care, helping to alleviate, you know, the fear and anxiety that's associated with any cancer journey. Speaker 0: Thank you. And talk about how long has you been with Mo? Speaker 1: I've been here for 10 years. Speaker 0: Amazing. So what what an amazing grip Mo. And when you look at sort of operational challenges and opportunities in trying to be patient centric and really take care of patience and patient experience. Can you talk about any 8 examples in in what you... How you look at that and what you do? Speaker 1: Yes. So I think 1 of the primary challenges we faced when we're looking at patient centric care, you know, 1 is accessibility, and into, you know, trying to get them in at the time that are most convenient to them. Our patients are still working or have lives outside of our cancer center. And so we we want to do everything we can to ensure that they're getting their treatment timely. And efficiently, but also that it doesn't take up every single day of their lives as they're trying to live outside of peer. So, we often have patients that prefer this 10 to 2 time, which are our peak hours during our infusion center, and due to the variant laying some treatments and, hours of operation. It it not always possible to schedule everyone at think... Their desire times. Or get them in on same day as what they would hope for. So, many patients also have multiple appointments in a single day, including their lab work their consultations with a provider, plus infusion. So this can lead to an often long and exhausting day for our patients. So it's difficult to complete all of them at the expected times. Oftentimes they can get delayed in in any point of that journey, and so they often experience a tiring and drawn out visit than what they had anticipated. So we've seen some of those challenges with the couple appointments plus just an overall availability of our treatment chairs. Speaker 0: Thank you. And and take a moment. I I sort of right. Patients are having been very busy lives. They're making infusion therapy a part of their lives, trying to fit it into their terms their complete life will or putting in their cancer care front center. And and the last thing they want is to not be able to handle it in a relatively convenient way or have long waits we're not able to get them when they want. Talk for a moment and everybody talks about Ai, how is artificial intelligence helping to address operational challenges? And and what are you sort of see in the new technologies, new Ai technologies in terms of sort of mapping out on logistics for patients. Speaker 1: So Ai has helped us in many ways. Birth? It has helped us level load our template for our infusion centers better. It can help determine how many patients are needed at any given time. Is help decrease the bottleneck that has happened and any potential delays that could happen due to the bottlenecks prior to Ai by 2PM, all of our infusion chairs for at capacity causing significant delays. But once we implemented the scheduling system this rarely happens. So if we start to notice bottlenecks happening, we can go to the system and pull the data and to determine where the adjustments to be made so that our treatment are being done timely and efficiently. Furthermore, it's helped to increase our volume and completed hours. So prior to the Ai implementation, we were only able to treat a think, you know, a certain number of patients each day. Well, once we looked at what we actually could do monday through Friday or even into the weekend, knowing that not every day is needs to be out to apples. And so it's helped us align that the volume so that we're utilizing all of the chairs effectively. It's also helped to align the nursing staffing to meet the patient demand, and also helped us utilize our resource effectively. So we can... On any given day, we can say we have 5 nurses starting at 8AM, and they work 10 hour shifts. Based on that information, and the Ai system can develop appropriate template thoughts to ensure we're utilizing our resources to the fullest to treat the patients on time. And to not over overturn in the template throughout the day. So the volumes have been able to steadily increase without the need to add additional chairs, which has been crucial because space is always you a little bit of a conundrum. So, that has been a game changer for us, and we... So because we've been able to utilize our early morning in our late E slots since they use of implementing Ai. Speaker 0: Thank you. And talk about... You've already touched a little bit on some of the outcomes you're seeing from Ai. Do you wanna touch further on that? And then could you also talk about is you introduce introduction adopt new technology? How do you sort of navigate change management? You know, for example, when implementing the Iq for infusion centers from to us. How do you sort of navigate bringing that in and making it work, and and and how do you deal with people getting used to doing things in a little bit of a different way? Speaker 1: Yeah. So... Well, take into the first 1 or, I think our outcomes are the... Our patient volume has, been increased by 9 or 10 percent in the past... Just in the past a year. We started with lean tossed back in late and 20 19. So every year, we've seen an increase in our volumes without necessarily adding additional chairs, which is incredible. And so to answer your change question. It's changes an inherent part of health care, effective communication, especially regarding. Even necessity and rationale behind adapting new technology has been crucial when individuals typically understand the purpose behind the change. Particularly for us at Mo in our commitment to enhancing our patient's treatment journey, they're more likely to embrace that change more swiftly, Our priority is always the well of our patients. And Ai technology has proven to be the instrumental in achieving the goal in how not only the patients that also our staff understand that. It ensures a smooth adoption. We were able to identify stakeholders early on. And so when we have these key stakeholders at the table, and who will be affected by the change and involve them in the process, it goes a lot soon. We were also able through the help of Lean screenshots provide adequate training. So that who our workshops and just reference materials so that has also helped. We continuously monitor our progress and gather feedback not only from the system, but also, the staff who are who are doing the day to day activities, and if there's a particularly challenging day, and we can always go to the system and look at that. It's to determine what we need to do and what adjustments we need to make so that we do not have that consistency again. And then we we'd like to celebrate the successes of it and and, celebrate the milestones that we have implemented. From this change. So I think that's been the key to adopting the change really reconciled. Speaker 0: Thank you very, very much. It's really amazing what you've accomplished. And how much pride you taken what you're doing in infusion therapy at it at Mo, it's sort of like, how much profit you taken and how welding things are going? Speaker 1: Take a great deal of pride in this, being able to treat patient's cancer is something that I I feel very blessed to be able to do and to have a team that is dedicated to doing that is is just really incredible and it's incredible to see. I love being able to, look at the data and be able to determine, okay. We have this many nurses coming on, so let's get their scheduled into the system so that the... That we can adequately have our template be based on that staffing so that our nursing to staff patient ratios are within a normal limit so that we're not burden the staff where they could make the mistakes and we're not burden our patients with long wait times, being able to look at this system and be able to make adjustments so that our patients can have a smooth treatment is just incredible and it it's really been out a great privilege to be a part of. Speaker 0: Thank you very, very much. And and talk to us a little bit about what advice or best practices, which give to others that are looking to improve their their infusion therapy operations and and hit that level of customer centric patient centric you're trying to do so. Speaker 1: Sure. I think first, you have to have a deep understanding of what your problem is. But you're trying to solve with Ai. For us, it was definitely that tended to to bottleneck and long wait times. But for others, it might be, share utilization or even share capacity. And so really understanding what the problem is that you're trying to solve will be the first are, and then you want to, look at the stakeholders and then what outcomes you're looking to achieve and provide data that is accurate and reliable. Once you can ensure that your data is there, in can we can look at now solving that problem. It's important to pay attention to the, factors such as the size, the complexity of the treatments, the acuity of your patients, and then also the interoperability of the system, knowing that information will, will be crucial to the success of the implementation of the system. Most of the time, our, our projects have required, a trial in Eric And so we've had to try different approaches and learn from the success of each approach and then the failures with it. Because not every day is going to be the same. And so we have to be able to determine which our staffing and what our patient volume is each day to be able to actively treat patients in a timely and an efficient manner. So what and then, you know, continuously monitor and improve, we are always looking to improve our templates. We always want to not necessarily rest on our morals on what we did the day before because health care is always changing. We're always having new treatments come out new different ways of of, treating cancer. And so we wanna make sure that our infusions centers are equipped to handle that. And so we're constantly monitoring and and improving our processes to meet our patient's needs. Speaker 0: Thank you. I'll ask you a couple more questions. I I'll ask you... I'll just give you 1 segue really quickly. Processes You regrets what if Uc, are you ever amazed how much Uc out, uc itself has grown over the last decade or so. Speaker 1: Yes. I've had the privilege to, attain my master's of science nursing degree in from the... Nursing program there. And it was an incredible program. And as I have met people along the way and network along the way. Everyone's like, oh I would to use the app, or I've done this program there. They've... It had this... That... It's seminar here. So it... It's growing quite a bit, but Yeah. Yeah. I'm not surprised because it's a great school, but I do tend to hear more about it now than I did when I achieved that. Degree back in gosh 20 18. Speaker 0: Well, that's just fantastic. It's really amazing What Us Uc cf has accomplished over the last a decade or so in terms of national prominence. And so forth me. Obviously, my foot cancer center is is renowned. Talk 1 more moment about and trend you see in the future of infusion care, infusion therapy you'd like to share or or thoughts you have in the future of infusion care? Speaker 1: Yeah. I think our infusion care is always gonna be characterized by our patients that our approach. So we have to be able to leverage the technology, our data, our collaboration to optimize our outcomes to enhance the patient experience, and overall to just transform the delivery of therapies because our health landscape is always continuously evolving in the treatments that we're providing or evolving. And so we just need to stay ahead of of this and can make sure that we knowledgeable in the best practices with using systems like Ai and and to provide the best possible care for our patients to achieve the best buffalo. Speaker 0: Thank you. Again, Jillian Men, what a pleasure to visit we... You an amazing career in helping to lead up Mo cancer Center, Mo cancer Center, 1 of the great cancer and oncology, health systems in the world Thank you for joining us today. And in a special thank you also to Lean toss for sponsoring this episode, Lean toss is the developer of the Iq for infusion centers tremendous tremendous company toss, amaze what they do in terms of the logistics and trying to manage operating humans infusion therapy centers and more. Thank you very much. Thank you to you, Jillian, and thank you to To. Thank you very much. Speaker 1: Yeah.