Catholic health care providers face a unique challenge – synthesizing the realities of their unique mission and the need to be technologically innovative. How do you faithfully follow the call to continue Jesus’s healing ministry and be as forward-thinking as possible? Joe Kelly, Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at Mercy, joins the show for a two-part episode. In part one, Kelly discusses his journey to the current role he occupies, how Mercy’s mission colleagues play a role in the organization’s perspective on data, and a Biblical parable that has proved to be a rich, theological foundation for their team to build on.
Catholic health care providers face a unique challenge – synthesizing the realities of their unique mission and the need to be technologically innovative. How do you faithfully follow the call to continue Jesus’s healing ministry and be as forward-thinking as possible?
Joe Kelly, Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at Mercy, joins the show for a two-part episode. In part one, Kelly discusses his journey to the current role he occupies, how Mercy’s mission colleagues play a role in the organization’s perspective on data, and a Biblical parable that has proved to be a rich, theological foundation for their team to build on.
Brian Reardon (00:08):
Welcome to Health Calls, the podcast of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. I'm your host, Brian Reardon, and with me is our executive producer, Josh Matejka. Hey Josh.
Josh Matejka (00:17):
Hey Brian.
Brian Reardon (00:18):
And for this episode, which will actually be a two part episode, we're going to be talking about building a culture of mission and innovation. And our guest in just a moment is going to be Joe Kelly. Joe serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer for Mercy here in St. Louis. Josh, before we bring in Joe, at the heart of a lot of the conversations this season have been really two ideas. One, the mission of Catholic healthcare and the reality of technological innovation. So we wanted to bring Joe in. Can you share with our listeners why we chose Joe as a guest to address, I guess the synthesis of these two ideas?
Josh Matejka (00:57):
Yeah, Brian, in a lot of our conversations so far this season, we have been talking about those two ideas maybe in a more roundabout way and not necessarily avoiding them, but we've been talking about different aspects of Catholic healthcare, whether it's chaplaincy or community benefit or data analysis and processing. And both of those things come into those conversations. But ultimately, the synthesis of those two things is really important because you have these two really complicated realities. The technology is evolving at a rapid pace, but we have this mission that we adhere to in Catholic healthcare that sets us apart from all other healthcare systems in the US and those are things that are not easy to synthesize. And so when we were thinking about really just getting to the heart of that conversation and addressing it directly, we have a lot of really great work happening with our members here in our backyard in St. Louis. And luckily we had a connection with Joe and he's done a great job at Mercy as their chief transformation officer, and he's gotten a lot of recognition from that. We've seen a lot of articles come out of places like Becker's kind of recognizing the work that Mercy has done, not just since AI became part of the public consciousness, but far ahead of that time too. So we wanted to bring Joe on to discuss how those two things come together and the work that Mercy has done to make sure that they are building this culture that is innovative and transformative while never losing the mission that makes Catholic healthcare so special.
Brian Reardon (02:21):
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's interesting as we talk to Joe here, it is about understanding that technology has a role to play, obviously in our healing ministry, but you have to be grounded in the work we do and tying that back to the mission and the why of what we do. Well, let's bring in Joe Kelly. Joe again is executive vice President and Chief Transformation Officer for Mercy. Joe, great to have you here in the studio with us here in St. Louis. How you doing?
Joe Kelly (02:45):
Hey Brian, great to be here. Thank you.
Brian Reardon (02:46):
So to start our conversation, I think it'd be good for our listeners really to learn a little bit about your position and the work that you lead. I know you've been with Mercy since 2014. I remember you in earlier days as a chief marketing officer. Can you maybe a little bit as we get started here about how your role has evolved over the last decade where today you're now their chief transformation officer, and I guess what does a chief transformation officer do?
Joe Kelly (03:11):
The short answer is whatever the sisters tell me to do. I'll preface this with in every Mercy job description, there's a dot point that says other duties as assigned. And I think that's prevalent throughout Catholic healthcare. I started at Mercy in marketing, quickly moved into marketing and business development and responsibility for digital. Then we created an office of transformation in 2019, and that was really bringing a bunch of teams together, very talented people and unifying those teams to execute our strategy, to bring our strategy 2025 to life. So that brought our technology teams together. It centralized our data and analytics functions. It brought our AI capabilities under the transformational umbrella operational strategy. We established data governance, we created a human-centered design team, a product development team, and we centralized our contact centers for ease of consumer access and to get the questions that they needed and the appointments that they needed taken care of. All that to say that all of those functions when existing in a silo still do a great job. I think Mercy's perspective was bringing those teams together under a common umbrella around transforming the consumer experience in healthcare has really enabled us to scale things better than we have historically and to move faster than we have historically.
Brian Reardon (04:27):
And I think it's interesting that you're not an IT person. You're not somebody who grew up in computer science or whatever. You've got a background more on the communications side.
Joe Kelly (04:35):
Background is more on the marketing side and really coming from a financial services industry, data neutralizes emotion, you can't get a budget without really understanding your numbers and knowing how the business works. And I think having that perspective of a consumer oriented industry and bringing that into healthcare I think has really benefited me personally. I think, and hopefully mercy in our patients
Brian Reardon (05:03):
And in Catholic healthcare and really for all of healthcare, we would hope that the patient, those we serve really is the center and the why of what we do. And as you work to drive change and growth, particularly around digital innovation, what are some of the guiding principles I guess, that you adhere to?
Joe Kelly (05:21):
It's a really important question, and I think even the mindset shift of moving from using the word patient to using the term consumer. Consumers have choice. They can choose where to go. They can choose if they would like to come back or not, depending upon the service level they experience. So I think having that mission oriented lens of being other centric that we exist to serve others, we're going to be entering our third century of service in 2027. And in most Catholic orders there's three vows that are typically taken. Our Sisters of Mercy took a fourth vow of service. So that service orientation kind of permeates our ministry and kind of our ethos. And when we look at our values, we have five values, but we have one super value and that's dignity. And when you think about when we've asked over 3 million patients what's important to them, what matters over the past 10 years and regardless of age, income, ethnicity, gender, geography, it really comes down to five basic human needs, access and convenience, personalization, transparency, coordinate my care, treat me with dignity and respect.
(06:32):
And if you think about what consumers are seeking in healthcare and our mission, our sisters were kind of ahead of the game 200 years ago in establishing all of those things were at the forefront of what they were trying to accomplish in Dublin. The Sisters of Mercer were one of the first non cloistered orders in the world, and they got permission from the Vatican to not sit in a building and pray for others, but to actually go out into the streets in the poorest city, in the poorest country in Europe at the time, and provide ministry to women and children and those in need, that ethos kind of permeates us. And everything we do from an operational, from a technology, from a customer service perspective kind of starts and ends there.
Brian Reardon (07:12):
And you think about the adoption of technology across all sectors and obviously it just continues to grow, sort of head spinning. All of the developments in my 20 years working in Catholic healthcare, it's 20 plus now. One of the things I've always noticed, it seems like healthcare in general, and I'm not saying mercy or Catholic healthcare, but just healthcare in general seems like we're a little behind. You look at the banking sector, you look at any other industry and the use of technology particularly that that's consumer facing seems to be more advanced I guess in other industries. Do you think, and this is kind of a general question, is healthcare finally starting to catch up or where would you put us with some of that? You mentioned you came from banking, so where do you put healthcare in general as it comes to adoption of technology that is useful for consumers and helping them decide how their care is going to be delivered and proceed
Joe Kelly (08:07):
At the risk of dramatically oversimplifying healthcare delivery is the last bastion of analog. We're still learning how to apply technology, and I mean that sincerely. We rely often on technology as a silver bullet. We purchase a lot of point solutions. We think that solving or implementing a vendor or purchasing a solution is going to make the operations work more smoothly or improve workflows or improve the rev cycle process or improve the consumer experience. The reality is we've decommissioned more technology solutions over the past three or four years than we've commissioned. And that's really the mindset of technology doesn't solve the problem. The operating model solves the problem, and technology is a tremendous enabler to that operating model. But our perspective at Mercy is we really want to get to a point where we can predict outcomes, but you can't predict without automation and you can't automate without standardization.
(09:08):
And healthcare is my personal opinion, probably one of the least standardized industries. We have so much variation. We have so much local autonomy, we have so much, we create exceptions. And you can't really scale technology when you do that. And I think that's one of the reasons why healthcare is behind. And last point on this, we've kind of been getting away with that. We're not going to be getting away with that much longer. I mean, if you think about labor productivity in the United States, healthcare delivery is one of the only industries that has negative labor productivity over the past 30 years. And when you think about upcoming labor shortages with physicians and specialists and nurses, we're going to have to get better at standardization and scaling technology to ease cognitive burden for our caregivers and to improve experiences and enable the ability for patients to self-schedule to take care of things on their own.
Brian Reardon (09:57):
Well, let me ask about how Mercy looks at all of this through the context of theological, the ethical underpinnings of Catholic healthcare. And I thought, Joe, it was interesting you shared with Josh and I, a theological reflection on data governance that Mercy has written and I guess is updating. And one of the things that I thought was kind of a neat analogy there was looking at this through the lens of the parable of the mustard seed, and you look at the seeds as being data, the sower as being data governance. The process is soil and capability as sort of the field in which the seeds are scattered. And I thought that was kind of an interesting analogy. So maybe to start with, can you talk a little bit more about that?
Joe Kelly (10:44):
Yeah, sure can. I think this is a credit to our enterprise data and analytics team who worked with our mission team years ago, probably going on four years ago now, and really thinking about data less as an asset or a fuel that powers our technology platform. But the patient data that we have is really a reflection of human life and it needs to be treated with the same dignity as human life. So they're not just zeros and ones, they're patients who came to us in time of need. And so setting that mindset was really important for us as a ministry for our data team. And it really changed the mindset of how we steward data, how we govern data, how we use data, and how we view it as not ours to own, but it's our patients' data and it's our responsibility to take care of it and steward it.
(11:31):
And it's a beautiful way to think about the experiences of past patients can inform the outcomes of future patients. And so with that as kind of a foundation, we really went to Matthew eight and really viewed that parable of the mustard seed as data that falls along the path is like the spreadsheet that must be updated with mappings each time the report's generated new data causes that spreadsheet to fail or fall into inaccuracies if not taken care of. And data that falls among the rocks is like data that gets managed within an individual department and isn't shared across the entirety of the ministry. So that other functional areas, other teams, other specialists, other caregivers can take care of that and steward that data to help navigate our patients. Data that falls among the thorns has been through a governance process but doesn't really have an owner.
(12:19):
And that data lives off on an island and it's not really utilized. And over time the accuracies become inaccuracies and the process chokes out and that data is ineffective and data that falls on the good soil that's effectively governed data roles and responsibilities have been identified. The process of updating the data has been defined and automated. The data updates automatically and it's on time for all stakeholders. And that enables our ministry to grow rapidly and to save lives, which is ultimately how fruit is Baird. So I think part of that mindset shift and part of working with our mission team was really to just not view data as an asset, but view data as the lifeblood of our ministry and its reflective of the human lives that we're privileged to take care of.
Brian Reardon (13:07):
And I think what that also does for those working especially in it, and I know from in a previous life, our IT department would often say if they asked what their job was, it was to provide a great patient experience. It wasn't about managing data, it wasn't about making sure that we weren't attacked the cybersecurity threats. It really got back to the core of what we all do in healthcare, and really that's about serving the patients. So I would imagine using a parable like that really resonates with those who are more sort of in an IT or data management role.
Joe Kelly (13:39):
It does. Life is so much about the lens you choose to look through, and it really alters the perspective of our team members. And I think an important point here is a few months ago we made the shift of referring to all of our 55,000 people employed at Mercy. We used to call them coworkers. They're all caregivers now. And I think nowhere was that more evident in Covid where our data teams and our technology teams ultimately it was very clear how they were caregivers and in an environment where patients were isolated, they couldn't have their families visit them, but a technology team member could bring an iPad or enable a nurse to bring an iPad into the room. And FaceTime family or our data teams were able to identify and create algorithms and models to anticipate where the next spike of the five waves of Covid that hit us would be, and so that we could prepare for those and transfer coworkers and resources as needed. And so that shift to that nomenclature of caregivers and this theological reflection on data or two of the very tangible ways that all of our caregivers can see themselves in our ministry of taking care and serving others.
Brian Reardon (14:46):
Love it. A big goal. Kind of sticking on the theological theme, a lot of technology applications, and I'm sure you'll agree with this, would be you'd make the decision, yeah, we're going to go with that particular application. It's really about increasing efficiency, like you mentioned earlier, increasing productivity. That's a need in healthcare in general as you do that work. Have you ever encountered a time where maybe you're like, huh, I'm not sure that this workflow is really consistent with our mission and there may be some conflicts there, and if so, how do you navigate that?
Joe Kelly (15:18):
At Mercy, our CEO refers to healthcare as a series of a thousand cues that we force patients to wait in. And I think our perspective and where we enable technology solutions, automation and put our data to work is really around instead of having someone wait in a queue, why not automate that queue? And if we standardize the workflows, then we can automate it or potentially even eliminate that queue from existing in the first place. I think a lot of focus has been on applying technology and ai, especially the past few years, gen AI for standardizing workflows, improving efficiencies, improving rev cycle, improving experience, improving care. But I think you're, again, kind of going back to it really depends on the lens that you look through. I think your perspective changes if you look through a mission lens, it's not about improving productivity or improving workflows.
(16:15):
It ultimately is, but the real goal is closing trap doors that we create for our patients. If you go back to our super value of dignity, but we're not treating people with dignity and respect if we're putting them on hold for 30 minutes or we have thousands of numbers on our website and they don't know who to seek in their time of need, or they can't get an appointment with a doctor when they need it, or it's late at night and a loved one is ill and you don't know what to do or where to go. We need to enable technology to close trap doors. We need to enable technology to allow patients to self-serve. We need to utilize technology so that patients can know where to find care in their time of need and give them options for what channel to go through to receive it and be transparent about how much it will cost, how long it will take.
(17:03):
Healthcare in general as an industry needs to do a better job of looking through that dignity lens. It's not okay to be diagnosed with something and wait three weeks for a follow-up appointment or to not know what to expect when you're sitting in a waiting room. So I think this is where technology can be deployed. It's about looking through a mission lens and thinking about how we make healthcare more convenient, how we personalize that care, how we're transparent about pricing and next steps and what to expect and transitions of care, how to coordinate that care and not ask the same things over and over. And ultimately, it comes down to if we do those things, we are treating people with dignity and respect. And it all ties back to mission. It all ties back to our super value. It all ties back to service as what our sisters took as a fourth foul.
Brian Reardon (17:50):
Yeah. My last question for this first segment of this episode would be, we've been talking about the theological underpinnings or the mission why of technology. A lot of our listeners, we recognize work in the mission field. So what role within Mercy do folks that may be ethicists work in formation, work in spiritual care? What type of input do they have as technology decisions are being considered at Mercy?
Joe Kelly (18:18):
Another great question, Brian. I think one of the things I'll lead with here is that we established a governing council on ai, and we've established principles. This was about three years ago. And we have a mission representation. We have an ethicist on this council along with clinical practitioners, doctors, nurses, technology folks, AI folks, data governance folks. And I think it goes back to in accord with our mission to bring the healing ministry of Jesus, of those we serve, we have to use AI and technology and data at a foundational level to seek, to uphold human dignity and advance the common good. And I think all of our principles kind of derive from that. So our mission teams help us every day when we're looking at what machine learning model to build or what AI partner to engage in a relationship with or what problem to solve.
(19:11):
We often have hackathons at the Microsoft Technology Center here in St. Louis, one per month. And we start with a big problem that we're trying to solve, and we get a cross-functional team there to solve it. And our mission team, as always has a voice at the table. And I think our ethicist and our mission team really helped us to develop our guiding principles for responsible AI use at Mercy. And our first guiding principle is it needs to be human-centric and socially beneficial. Second, it needs to be safe and secure. We have to declare the purpose. It's got to be trustworthy, and we have to have routine monitoring and really making sure that wherever we're using technology, wherever we're implementing an AI model, we're not introducing bias to the underserved, we're not introducing bias to either racial or ethnic or geographic disparities. And I think having those guiding principles is a North star for us, really helps to, we have a pretty well articulated strategy. We know the areas where we want to focus and deploy resources, and these guiding principles help. It's our roadmap. Our strategy is a North star, but this is the roadmap that helps us get there.
Brian Reardon (20:20):
Great perspectives. I think that's a good place to pause for segment one. I want to get into some more of the practicalities and maybe dive a little deeper on this issue in part two. But again, that was Joe Kelly. Joe serves as the Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer for Mercy. And thanks for listening to this episode of Health Calls, the podcast of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. Josh, I think this is a really rich and informative conversation with Joe Kelly. We'd encourage folks to listen to part two of this conversation. Both episodes are now available on all of the streaming channels and all the places you can find podcasts. You can also find these podcasts@chhausa.org slash podcast. Again, thanks to Josh Matejka, our executive producer to Yvonne Stroder for her support, and to Brian Hartmann here at Clayton Studios in St. Louis for engineering this episode. Thanks for listening.