Speaker 0 | 00:08.582

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, coming to you, not live, we are pre-recording this, but I happen to be in Morocco because I have a development team over here and we’re testing the latency, seems to be coming in quite well. And we are with Josh Peavy, Director of Information. Technology at Trinity Community Health. Welcome to the show, my friend.

Speaker 1 | 00:36.521

Thank you.

Speaker 0 | 00:37.221

And let’s do an oldie but a goodie. Let’s start off with what was your first computer?

Speaker 1 | 00:45.224

Oh, wow. Actually, I don’t remember. I can’t remember if it was a Gateway or a Dell, but it was a family computer that we got when I was about 14. So I know it was one of those dudes that, you know, a desktop. Our model with a monitor all in one package that we got from somewhere, but I honestly don’t recall what it was.

Speaker 0 | 01:05.737

So that, well, then that dates you well because it puts you somewhere on the curve of technology that you probably had a DVD player onto that. And if it was a gateway, then everyone knows those boxes were the, yeah, the cow boxes, everyone wells. It was either the gateway or was the Dell dude. Remember the Dell, like, dude, you got a Dell. Remember the Dell guy? Yes. still do that to this day still do that commercial like i verbalize that commercial through this day and i i i think saturday night live did a spoof on it with like a with george bush you know like dude you got a dell but um okay so what oh wow so then um connected to the internet or not yeah back then so you die we work okay of course we weren’t yeah it was absolutely dial up What was, so how did you end up in tech? How did you end up where you are now? Did you just fall into it and like, Hey, I just like, I can do stuff with computers. So I ended up with a job in it. Like a lot of people ended up because technology is really not that old or were you like, no, I love this and I want to do it. Or what happened?

Speaker 1 | 02:13.952

It was kind of like a combination of both, uh, in the professional sense. Yes. I did kind of fall into it, but ever since I’ve had that first computer at 14, um, whenever I realized. was that my mom actually put a restriction on me for you know the time limit and the parental controls i was so interested in learning so much about computers at that time that i figured out a way to bypass that and i was like oh this is kind of natural to me but you know it kind of started there i guess technically but i did fall into it professionally um my first job in it actually they contacted me i had my job posted uh with the louisiana workforce commission when I was taking a break from my first year in college, and they contacted me and asked me if I wanted a job. And, you know, I had never really considered a career in IT at that point or even, you know, working in the field. But I was like, yeah, sure, I’ll give it a try. And here I am today. So, you know, it worked out. But I did absolutely fall into that, or it fell into me.

Speaker 0 | 03:16.289

To be able to map out a landscape, you have to have a technology roadmap. You have to do all of these things that… I don’t know if we even thought about them or they were even a second thought back in the day. That first job, what were you doing?

Speaker 1 | 03:34.543

So I actually started out installing Promethean boards, which are just like a different manufacturer’s model of a smart board, in the school all over Louisiana. The company I worked for had a state contract that they had just gotten with a majority of the schools, over half of the schools in the state. And I started out doing that. And then kind of worked my way into cabling fiber and infrastructure and kind of go on from there into computer maintenance, hardware type.

Speaker 0 | 04:05.635

And what were you doing? Like the school network back then. In other words, were you the smartest guy on campus, so to speak, back then? Or one of the smartest guys when it came to technology? And was there a lot of… I just get this feeling that back in the day, there wasn’t a lot of people holding us accountable to what it did other than like, it’s broken, it’s not working, hurry up and fix it. You know, it was kind of like, how did you hold someone accountable that to something that you don’t know how to use yourself, yet it’s a tool that we need to have. Somehow we know that we need to have, you know, and it’s actually, I don’t think that. idea has changed too much or you still wouldn’t have upper management making technology decisions and handing it down to IT to implement and IT looking at them cross-eyed and be like, why did you choose this? And that’s kind of where the whole disconnect or the bridge between technology leadership and executive management breaks down. Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become Fairly apparent, I’m sure all of you will agree over the years, that slow vendor response, vendor response times, vendors in general, the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I’ve seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there’s also a direct correlation to your budget. and your company’s bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don’t have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’ve put together specifically for IT leadership and it’s on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we’re doing this in a way that will not… cost your IT department a dime. So if you’d like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it, and where you want to go and how we can improve your life, your IT department, and your company’s bottom line. What you’re going to end up with is… Number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization’s uptime and bottom line. And because you’re going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you’ll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you’ll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on-demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you’d like, again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it’s going to open your eyes to what’s possible. Let our back office team provide you the high-touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-GO-POUND-STAND for support. Now, if you’re wondering, what does this apply to? This applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you’re a Microsoft shop or a Google shop. what you might be paying for AWS, even Azure, co-location space, any of those vendors that you’re paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with. Hey, it’s Greg, the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request a one-on-one call, contact us at internet at popularit.net. And remember, it will never cost you a dime. What was, I guess, what were you guys doing with the network back then? And what was the… I’m just curious as to what you remember the level of accountability being or any type of technology vision. Or was it kind of like, you know, a one-way street?

Speaker 1 | 08:24.389

It was kind of like a one-way street. To answer your question, I definitely was not the smartest person in the room because I was 19 at the time. And I was fresh. So everything around me was new. And I was learning. I was in the process of learning. And so there were a bunch of guys. there that helped me tremendously to actually get to the point where i was even remotely competent in those areas um so it took me you know quite a while to get to the point of proficiency to even understand a network right um it was kind of story you know tell me a story like was some guy like okay

Speaker 0 | 09:00.404

so listen up this is a network card and this is what’s called uh i don’t even know what we had back then cat five this is called cat five plugs into here you got i mean what What was the, what was the, can you remember a very specific story? Like I can remember my first pizza delivery job and driving around with one guy and he was like, Hey, you gotta get the address. You gotta go back here, look at this map, memorize this street, memorize that because when you don’t have GPS back then, you can, you know what I mean? Like there’s gotta be some story that you remember of some guy teaching you something.

Speaker 1 | 09:31.144

Yeah, actually, whenever it came to specifically working on computer hardware, you know, at that point they were like, here is a, Just pretty much a fleet of computers, go through them and figure out what you can on them. And I had no clue what I was doing at the time. Again, you know, I dabbled, but I had a fleet of computers in front of me that I had to identify, you know, serialize, kind of go through and test. And I was like.

Speaker 0 | 09:57.120

don’t even know how to fully test these but um so i didn’t really have guidance per se on didn’t have google kind of got thrown into it yeah right did not have google back then everybody let’s just say you know nowadays you can at least google something to figure it out i had a weird old xerox like laser printer that had some weird part that you know just google youtube pops up figure out take this out take that out plug this part in use this that you didn’t have that back then right

Speaker 1 | 10:24.021

yeah that’s kind of how it was it was just you’re on your own figure it out you If you come out with something productive, then good. If not, just stay in the room, you know? Keep it. Yeah, that’s kind of what I did. With my books and stuff, we did actually have a little library, like a kind of mini library where we could go get reference books like CompTIA books and things like that. I kind of just worked my way through that and trained myself, you know? But that’s all I had available to me really at the time.

Speaker 0 | 10:51.924

You just reminded me, you just made me, I just visualized an old Nortel PBX user’s manual, which was basically like three ring binders, three of them in a row. They go into this little box that sit on a wall. Yeah, might be a thousand pages long. Fun. What about the phone systems? I love the old phone systems. Ever had to deal with any of those? So,

Speaker 1 | 11:16.411

yeah, actually, it’s this organization that I work for now. Um,

Speaker 0 | 11:20.428

we have,

Speaker 1 | 11:20.828

it’s healthcare when I came on board.

Speaker 0 | 11:22.789

It’s healthcare. You probably still have a Nortel. You probably still have a Nortel Avaya or some kind of a box in the back. What’s going on over there?

Speaker 1 | 11:28.913

No, actually we don’t. It’s a completely, uh, VoIP system now and EFAC system. Um, so we, that was actually something I came into. Um, it was in the process of, of trying to update and kind of modernize to cloud infrastructure. And, uh, that was something that I came into here. Um, and I helped build it out, you know, but. So we’re actually a nonprofit, FUHC. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those or not, because I sure wasn’t when I came here.

Speaker 0 | 11:55.107

I mean, I understand nonprofits from a general standpoint, and I guess there’s some politics to get involved, I guess, when it comes to, you know, it’s not as easy to, it might not be as easy to modernize. It might not be as easy to get the budget approved, so to speak. I don’t know. Any struggles there?

Speaker 1 | 12:19.088

Yes, absolutely. So that is the primary struggle is funding, acquiring funding, whether it be through grants or through, you know, federal services that provide funding. That is pretty much how we operate. If we don’t have it, we’re kind of, you know, out of school here.

Speaker 0 | 12:36.775

So how do you prioritize then? So that’s a good point. So how do you I guess what’s your biggest struggle, frustration or problem, you know, right now? And how are you guys? overcoming that or attacking that?

Speaker 1 | 12:51.985

So I guess our biggest struggle at this point in time is implementing what we have recently acquired funding for with the limited resources I have available. So we, you know, we’re pretty big at this point. We’ve gotten up to 43 locations as of this year across the state of Louisiana. And that is massive growth because when I started here, there were about 10 clinics.

Speaker 0 | 13:18.056

How many?

Speaker 1 | 13:19.497

11.

Speaker 0 | 13:20.357

So how big is each clinic? How many? We don’t want to call them end users, you know, customers, human beings with a soul, people with a soul. Right. How many end users are we talking?

Speaker 1 | 13:34.287

We’ve got about 300, a little over 300 end users. And the clinics themselves, some of them are massive. You know, we offer primary care services, dental services. pharmaceutical services, behavioral health. So some of those bigger clinics, you know, we could have 80, 90 people in those clinics. And that’s, you know, MDs, nurse practitioners, pretty much the whole gamut of the healthcare hierarchy. And then a majority of the clinics, as far as numbers, we actually provide services in the schools. So we open these clinics in the schools for kids to have service that, you know, typically don’t or wouldn’t be able to afford it. So a majority of our locations are within those schools.

Speaker 0 | 14:20.413

Important, being that I’m in a country where, at the moment, where I was asking people, I was asking some of my buddies over here what the health care is like here. And he’s like, well, if you don’t have money, forget about it. So it’s not like, you know, it’s not like in the United States, even if you’re totally broke and you show up to the emergency room, you’re not going to get turned away. Something is still going to happen. So that’s great that you guys are doing that. As far as technology roadmap or struggles or implement or implementation of what you have, why is it? I guess, is it manpower? Is it just a sheer manpower of implementation and time? Is it a time thing?

Speaker 1 | 15:05.074

It is. And it’s because we have so many that are so geographically spread out that trying to, you know, just physically get to the locations for things that are needed on site is difficult sometimes. Because we’re talking, you know, one of our clinics in the northwestern portion of the state is about 150 miles from the one that we have at the furthest. bottom, you know, or our furthest bottom portion of the state. So, you know, if we have an incident occur at one of those and another further location off from there, then we’re already halfway, you know, taken out as far as resources. And it can happen quite a bit. You know, you never know what can happen on a day-to-day basis, but I have found that to be probably the most difficult.

Speaker 0 | 15:49.230

We need to start cross-recruiting people inside organizations and bring them over to IT. Like, I know you work… in this department, but maybe you want to work for IT. Why don’t you give it a try out? So here’s what I need you to do. Walk over to this box over here. See those wires sticking out? I need you to hit reset. I need you to do this.

Speaker 1 | 16:09.319

It’s actually funny. It’s funny that you say that because I have actually tried to do that here. I was trying to see if anybody would be interested in flopping, you know, kind of like a lateral move from where they’re at to help us out.

Speaker 0 | 16:21.963

You’re pretty smart.

Speaker 1 | 16:23.103

I’ve had no… I had no success,

Speaker 0 | 16:26.493

but I still dropped. Hey, you’re a pretty smart guy. What do you think about coming on over to my team? That’s great. So, okay. So being in a nonprofit, being in somewhat of the healthcare space, any advice or any great pieces of advice or anything that you’ve learned that would be like, hey, if I had known this five years ago, this really would have helped me out?

Speaker 1 | 16:53.964

Um, yeah, I was, well, it’s difficult to say, you know, because before coming here, I worked at a, an MSP ISP type, um, organization where we manage hospitals and clinics, but they were, you know, private and for profit. And that was a whole different type of environment before coming here, you know, um, and a lot of what I thought would translate over from that, uh, didn’t quite translate over to the nonprofit sector of healthcare. So, um,

Speaker 0 | 17:23.924

I’m curious. I’m just really curious as to what doesn’t translate over.

Speaker 1 | 17:29.527

It’s kind of like the way that the hospitals operate. They do different types of services with ambulatory services and surgeries and emergency rooms and things like that. So I guess what I’m trying to say ultimately is that the services and stuff that we provide, we do kind of in favor of our populations that need them. We’re not. primarily motivated by money um and the way that the the operation occurs between the two you know for-profit and non-profit healthcare is completely different because you see different things each of those um that kind of have like a flip perspective so to speak it’s that

Speaker 0 | 18:10.967

i’m just gonna go out and say it um you don’t have to because it sounds like like you’re like if i say it i’m not allowed to say it but if someone else says it it’s like true it’s like one of those things you know Whereas it’s, it’s interesting. So, and you may not be saying this, but it sounds kind of like there’s certain areas of healthcare that are motivated by money and other areas of healthcare that when it’s a nonprofit act in a different way, more in the most efficient, beneficial way to the people that we need and have to help.

Speaker 1 | 18:44.912

Yes. I am kind of censoring myself, so I’m glad you said it, but.

Speaker 0 | 18:50.556

I’m just, I mean, it’s interesting. Well, no, it’s, I’ve had, we’ve had numerous healthcare people on the show before and we’ve had pharmaceutical companies we’ve had. And it’s interesting to hear someone say in a positive way, hope this doesn’t get me killed. Again, if I disappear, everybody, I did not, um, kill myself. Um, willing me, it’s, um. It’s interesting to even hear sometimes pharmaceutical companies admit, yeah, we need doctors to prescribe more of our drug because that’s how we make money. To me, that just sounds right. It’s just amazing to me. That sounds like a conflict of interest in coming from a family full of doctors and, you know, a very large medical family. I can remember when pharmaceutical reps would. would spend a lot of money on my father. And then all of a sudden, one year, like some legislation came through and they’re like, hey, we can’t do that. trip anymore doc because of you know whatever laws but you know we can do it this way and i’m not saying that my father was prescribing any more of one drug and any than the other i think it was just that was the way it has been and was and uh it’s just very um raises a lot of questions in my mind on you know what could what really could be possible with health care if The main motivating factor wasn’t profit, right? Because you’ve got so many things involved. You’ve got insurance companies. They’ve got to make a buck, a lot of bucks. Then you’ve got pharmaceutical companies that got to make a lot of bucks. And yet at the same time, you can still go to the emergency room. And if you don’t have insurance, you’re going to get taken care of in America. So that’s a good thing. I’m just, I just think there’s a lot of opportunity.

Speaker 1 | 20:55.884

Yes, that’s actually what I was in college for. My plan was to go into diagnostic medicine. And I kind of came to that conclusion after being enrolled in the program that, you know, it was more financially motivated than service motivated.

Speaker 0 | 21:11.184

Well, how many people go to become a doctor? If you’re going to become a doctor nowadays, you go become a doctor because you really want to be a doctor because I don’t think you really become rich anymore being a doctor. I think you’ve got to have all kinds of malpractice insurance. It takes years and years and years to become a doctor and you don’t make the money that you used to make. But back in the day, it used to be that profession where you really did kind of make a lot of money. I don’t think that’s the same way anymore. That’s probably a good thing. But I was pre-med too. I was pre-med and I dropped out because it was just, it’s a dying breed in my family. Like, unless you’re like diehard and want to be a doctor, don’t go become, don’t go try and become a doctor because it’s years and years of, of schooling. It’s a, it’s a ton of hard work. And if your heart’s not in it, you just can’t do it.

Speaker 1 | 21:57.228

Yeah. And, you know, finding myself back in healthcare after all those years and looking back, I’m actually really glad I did not do that. And I’m not taking away anything from anybody that did do it. You know, I’m glad that they do. do it, but I don’t think it would have ended up working out for me.

Speaker 0 | 22:11.821

No, but you still are. But look at what technology can do. Look at what technology can do for the healthcare space. And it’s not, it’s, we could probably do a five years worth of shows. It could go on. It could just be the technology. It could be the technology in the healthcare leadership, IT space show. It could be that show and we could do it all day long. In fact, we’re probably going to just, now that we’re rebuilding the website and everything, we’re going to start categorizing. categorizing all these things like it leadership under healthcare it leadership under manufacturing you know there’s um there’s a lot to be said uh when it comes to technology and how it how it um i don’t know helps patient care any great examples that you’ve seen any great examples that you’ve seen or like what what do you like what what are you excited about right now so that’s actually what i kind of tried to focus our our our central

Speaker 1 | 23:02.736

point of what we do in IT in this department for this organization is I tried to take a patient based approach with it and tried to look at it from the patient’s view because I actually was a patient at one of these clinics and I thought that if we looked at it from that perspective that would be the best way to you know it would be the best way for us to understand the business processes inside and out so we kind of took it and looked at it from for the second patient walks in the door to the second they walk out and receive a bill we want to understand all of that and how i.t can get involved in that how it already is involved in that and what we can do to better facilitate that whole process that’s kind of the approach that i took and thought um honestly would be the best approach for this organization and so far it’s worked out uh tremendously for us and it’s helped us get more in touch and in tune with not only our patient base but our uh administration team and all of our other various departments and how they all work together and that’s kind of how we found uh that sort of line that connects all these various departments together um so let’s break that down let’s break that down because i think that’s powerful from

Speaker 0 | 24:15.083

an empowering it getting out of this system admin reddit complaint group of how much your job is lame in it and i want to like quit my job group, right? Because a lot of IT can be very draining and there’s people that are just like, I hate my job. I’m not showing up today. I’m quitting. I’m going into something else, you know, like the old office space adage where you just quit and go do construction, right? But what you just said is actually very meaningful and the words aren’t coming to my mind at the moment of, you know, I guess just meaningful and transformative. So Thinking from the patient’s perspective or the main why, right, the big why of why we exist in this particular organization, which happens to be a nonprofit healthcare organization, right? You have a big why behind it. So our why is, you know, improving the patient’s experience, which improves their quality of life from the moment they walk in the door. How can technology do that? And then when you’re able to vocalize that to, I don’t know if you call it executive management, board of directors, who is it over there? What do you guys call the people? What do we call them?

Speaker 1 | 25:39.707

We actually have a board of directors, and then we have an administration team of our C-level executives. And so, I mean, we refer to them as admin.

Speaker 0 | 25:51.612

I guess my point is what you’ve said here has made me think. Back to when I sit down with IT directors a lot and we go through kind of just general road mapping and kind of like a brainstorming session or a think tank type of session, one of the first questions I ask a lot is, do you have a mission statement for your organization? Do you have any type of vision? Because what you just said shows that No, we do have a mission and we do have a vision. We have roles and values, which is to support patient care. And when you have that, you’re able to speak to the board of directors. You’re able to speak from an actual leadership standpoint versus a, yeah, I need some money to replace this blade server in the back because it’s not working.

Speaker 1 | 26:42.845

Right.

Speaker 0 | 26:43.785

You know what I mean? Like, we need to do this because it’s going to improve our ability to. serve people.

Speaker 1 | 26:53.270

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 26:54.450

I just think that’s awesome. Maybe I’m just, you know, maybe I’m making a big deal out of something small here, but I think that’s, I know it’s not small and I’m not trying to put it down, but I think the key piece here, and I’m a digger, I like to dig things out, is the fact that you have a mission or a vision attached to how you speak and how you run IT in that organization is awesome.

Speaker 1 | 27:21.354

Yeah, well, that I think is the most crucial part, at least for me in this position, is if you don’t have that, you know, what do you have to aim towards? What are you what is your goal? What is your your vision? If you don’t have that, you have nothing to see. You know, you have nowhere to go. And you just you do fall back into that that kind of admin role that just looks at technology from technology’s perspective. And there’s no human element to it, specifically speaking, you know, with health care, because it is 100 percent human based.

Speaker 0 | 27:52.042

So, and this is why we need to beat up. This is why we need to beat up MSPs. And this new portion of the show that I’m making up at the top of my head right now is the portion of the show where we beat up and make fun of MSPs because they shouldn’t even exist. Um, and because you came from an MSP and you no longer are no longer in an MSP, you know exactly what I’m talking about. In other words, do you keep earning your paycheck every day? Mr. MSP, why do you not have an MSP helping you? show up at those 45 different locations remotely because we just send out some guy that doesn’t know our vision or our mission. I like beating on MSPs every now and then just because, I don’t know, we need to do that for some reason. I want to get a bunch of people mad at me and be like, oh, this guy is making… Anyways, go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 28:39.954

I was saying that’s completely understandable because when you work for an organization like that, you’re not in it, right? You’re not a part of that company, that culture. if they’re visioning if there is one or you’re not there you are like an overseer that looks at their network and their systems and you manage that almost robotically you know and you do what you do and you do it well but you do it from that perspective that is completely removed from that organization it’s the ultimate epitome yeah it’s

Speaker 0 | 29:07.947

the ultimate epitome of top down like upper management saying we need someone to keep the lights on go hire this company they’ll show up and do it and Um, there’s a lot of good MSPs out there. I’m not, um, I’m not bashing all of them, just 99% of them and they need to earn their paycheck every day. And we just need to come up. We need to come up with a good, the acronym MSP. Like what, what could that really stand for? Do you have any, like, uh, I don’t know, something missing security, missing security policy. There you go. I just came up with that off the top of my head. That worked.

Speaker 1 | 29:44.897

That worked perfectly. That actually is a good point because there’s a lot of things that MSPs miss because of that level of management, you know, without being there every day or being involved in the operations of that organization that you manage, you don’t see. You kind of cookie-cutter manage everything, right? Like you have different customers that may be in different fields or different sectors, but you kind of manage their systems the same way because you make it easy on yourself to be able to manage them in the same way. So there’s a lot of things I think that could get missed and do get missed. Specifically, probably security-wise, if they don’t offer any type of security themselves as MSPs, then absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 30:28.995

I’m on a big… push lately for once you get to a certain size, I don’t know what, what’s the size company where you think you no longer need outsourced it. I mean, it’s obviously small business owners, you know, they might not, you know, if you got, if you’ve got like, I don’t know, 15 employees or something like that, you probably either someone in that company is all of it themselves. I mean, you’re smart enough to do it yourself or you’re, you’re using some sort of external MSP, but at what point, what’s the size do you think where you where people should be, no, we should have our own internal IT. And I know this is a very broad, people are going to beat me up, but people are going to beat me up for this because I’m like, oh, what are you talking about? What do you mean? What about database management? What about this? You need to hire a guy for that. I understand. I’m talking very in general here, but I’m on a push for as many companies that could bring IT in houses as if you can, I think you should do it. I think you should. And I don’t think the argument of, oh, you’re held hostage by one guy, and if that guy gets hit by a bus, well, no, obviously, you’ve got to do it right.

Speaker 1 | 31:36.204

Right. A hard number, I would think probably once you get close to 30, 40 maybe, you should start considering it. Definitely too low,

Speaker 0 | 31:47.351

though. That’s good. That’s definitely low. Yeah. I mean, think about it. 50 employees, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s pretty significant. Anyone out there that has a business, I mean, 50 employees is a lot. I mean, that’s a lot of people that you are putting food on the table for.

Speaker 1 | 32:03.438

That’s a lot of devices and a lot of processes. If you think that, you know, each one of those individual 50 people will probably have a desktop or a laptop of some sort, maybe both, a phone, a printer, you know, scanner, you know, cell phone, a managed type of mobile device that you’ve got to help them with if they access any type of internal corporate information. So. You multiply that and get there quickly. You’re looking at, you know, 50 people plus 250 devices or so, maybe more. So it scales fast. I would think that would be a good number.

Speaker 0 | 32:37.078

I just thought of Bill Gates and how so many people use Microsoft and just still blows my mind every day that, you know, we pay licensing fees for all of this. It’s amazing. Good for him. Good for you, Bill Gates.

Speaker 1 | 32:50.749

Yeah, right.

Speaker 0 | 32:53.656

What else is he going to make money on the next now? Vaccines. We can’t go there. I will get killed.

Speaker 1 | 32:59.500

I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to leave that alone.

Speaker 0 | 33:07.305

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Speaker 1 | 35:45.452

Are we talking COVID?

Speaker 0 | 35:46.973

No, no, absolutely not. I just told you I don’t want to die.

Speaker 1 | 35:51.556

Oh, well, I actually will touch that one because that is when I came into this organization and actually in the heat of COVID. So, I mean, I have a lot that I could say about COVID. That has been an absolute life changer for me in particular, especially working in the health care sphere during the pandemic.

Speaker 0 | 36:09.688

Fire away.

Speaker 1 | 36:10.189

I could not.

Speaker 0 | 36:10.809

Fire away.

Speaker 1 | 36:11.830

So, I’ll start by saying that. The year of 2020 and 2021 to me is one year. I still cannot differentiate in my mind that that was two separate years because healthcare absolutely broke down. From the IT perspective and the healthcare perspective, I really cannot put a point at any point in that two-year span that I’m like, okay, this is the stop right here and this is where we roll into a new year. It doesn’t exist for me because we were literally going, you know, we would have to work. home for months at a time if we did come on site we would have to be locked in a room and not able to leave expected with sick patients everywhere you know you couldn’t go into clinics you couldn’t it was bad it was very bad and it was very difficult and unfortunately for us during that time was when we went through the most expansion so we actually took in uh between the year of 2020 and 2021 we took we took on 17 more clinics actually 18 um in that two two or one year time span whichever way you want to look at it for me it’s one um and that was extremely difficult to implement and put in place uh especially with that size of growth um it was so so

Speaker 0 | 37:26.974

what’s your perspective on the whole thing and i can tell you right away so i did a boston naga jiu jitsu tournament and then like the next day was that crazy bio like i don’t know uh um expo that were like covid broke out there and then that’s what i remember like oh jujitsu started when i did i mean covid started when i did my last jujitsu tournament and then it and then i don’t know if it’s really ended yet because so much happened i ended up moving like four times during that whole thing it’s like i think everyone had yes Like you said, everyone will know like, oh, it was just kind of this blur of this like start to finish. Yeah. Who cares about whatever year, right? What? 2020? What was it? 2022? I don’t even know. 2020, 2022. Here’s something like that. During that, it doesn’t matter what the years are. It’s like the COVID time. So what did you see then being in the medical? What do you actually see? Is it any different than now? Number of patients or anything like that? Was there any kind of like crazy? What did you guys what were you involved in and what were you doing?

Speaker 1 | 38:44.096

So we what you see being in health care during that crisis is you actually get to see the magnitude of people that are actually in one place. You know, you may hear about it on the news or you may see it. you hear people talking about it but until you actually see that in person you see you know uh hospital beds and rooms crammed to the brim of people sleeping in hallways then it becomes real for you and i’m sure other people have spoken about that before especially healthcare professionals but that is a site that you do not want to see because then you’re like oh wow this is this must have been what it was like back in the black plague when everyone was in one spot you know kind of just dying together because that’s actually what it was um

Speaker 0 | 39:26.308

for a lot of people and it was it was horrific um but yeah that you’re the first person that said you’re the first person that i’ve heard say that um and again i come from a family full of like my sister was up in vermont i guess that was one of the least affected places and i asked her like did you see that and she said no i asked my other buddy who has all of the he has um all of like the retirement homes and elderly care and um facilities in Massachusetts and they actually opened up and completely emptied one of their facilities for overflow from the hospital. And I asked him what was like, you know, data because he has access to data, you know, like what were the death rates like and this, that, and he said. Phil, it’s like, he’s like, the numbers weren’t too much different from the previous year, except it all happened at once within like a couple, like, you know, like a couple of weeks or a month or something. It was like, it was like pouring gasoline on the fire or something like that. We lost everyone within a very short period of time. So,

Speaker 1 | 40:26.042

um,

Speaker 0 | 40:29.484

yes, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know what to say. I’m just, I’m just asking because, and, and what did, what was IT’s job during that?

Speaker 1 | 40:37.507

Well, uh,

Speaker 0 | 40:39.104

What happened? I’m just curious what it was for IT being in that situation.

Speaker 1 | 40:45.346

Well, I mean, it was kind of twofold for me because before I came here, I was, again, working for the MSBIS, the organization I was working for. And I mean, that was pretty much 24-7. You’ve got to set up VPNs to get people connected to work from home, from wherever they can possibly work. Kind of get them service so they can do what they can from wherever. Because, you know, it was. No one knew where they were going to be the next day. We didn’t know at that point in time, at least, were you going to be able to come in? Were you going to have to work from home? Were you going to have to work from the vehicle? So we spent a lot of time doing that. And then once I got here with Trinity, it wasn’t necessarily so bad for us because sometimes, especially with the newer clinics and stuff that we were opening, we could go in there. We would still have to wear masks and social distance and stay apart, but we could go in there and there typically wouldn’t be patients or students or anything like that so we would have a kind of open building because no one was there you know um they were all at home or in the clinic so that fortune wasn’t so bad but for the most part you know we kind of it

Speaker 0 | 41:50.097

was just difficult to to mobilize definitely i had one i.t director they moved the entire like help desk basically to his like his um I don’t know if he had a one bedroom or a studio apartment. He’s like, Phil, I’m losing my mind. He’s like, everything is shipped to my apartment. Like desktops, route, like whatever. I don’t know. And then, yeah, moving everyone, having to work from different people, having to work from home, turning up VPNs. Yes, he’s like, everything is coming to me. I think he almost had a mental breakdown. He probably did.

Speaker 1 | 42:29.383

I can’t completely understand that.

Speaker 0 | 42:31.780

um that just i’m laughing because it really is just listening to him talk about it made me uh just trying to imagine like an apartment and like boxes showing up and and all of a sudden like there’s like a network operating center like you know like like you know in a help desk like working out of your apartment i was like well you always wanted to work from home here you go right yeah unfortunately it’s not the best circumstances but you didn’t get your wish you

Speaker 1 | 43:01.588

I was kind of the same. You know, I wanted to work from home, too. And at that point, I hadn’t been afforded the opportunity to do so. And I had three young kids whenever I had to work home for, I think it was about four months right after COVID hit. And, yeah, it was difficult. You don’t realize, I guess, how difficult it is, especially whenever you have young children and schools are out, you know, and you think working from home is going to be, oh, this is going to be great. That’s not the case. You find that out real quick.

Speaker 0 | 43:28.208

My wife has homeschooled the kids for 18 years or something like that. So we don’t know. Yeah. I actually don’t know life without children. I don’t know it. I mean, I do, but it was like back when, you know, like we were like newly married. That was like, you know, the first half of my life and a quarter of that was, I don’t know, up until high school or something. So, yeah. I don’t know. I think I just went blank and had, yeah, just lost some brain cells, some more on that one. The, I ask people a lot, are you prepared for another COVID? Are you prepared for another? Um, I don’t know. What do we call that? I know there’s a word for it and it’s been used. Yes. Thank you. Wow. Yeah. Yes. Pandemic. What is your pandemic pandemic?

Speaker 1 | 44:25.632

preparedness um i don’t know uh redundancy um plan i think i would be much more prepared this time around but i can’t strictly say that i’d be 100 prepared you know because i would think if we had similar circumstance especially with this virus that it’s probably mutated and made it possibly twice as bad i don’t know but you know the fortunate part of that is we kind of already had to live it and deal with it so we’ve got to pretty good game plan of what we would need to do next.

Speaker 0 | 44:58.871

I actually haven’t. The new MSP company. I just thought of another one. Missing Pandemic Systems. That’s the other. Yes. Okay. Keep going.

Speaker 1 | 45:07.739

I’ll be in PS.

Speaker 0 | 45:09.320

Yeah, standard electric. There you go. Dyslexia kicking in.

Speaker 1 | 45:12.481

That’s okay. I think we would be much better off this time around. It still would be extremely difficult. Don’t get me wrong, but I think we would be able to handle it and mitigate some of the urgency a little bit more, at least from my perspective. I don’t know about anything outside of myself, but I think we could do it. I think we’d be much more prepared to do it for sure.

Speaker 0 | 45:36.171

Well. Josh, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I would say that the biggest aha moment, at least for me, and I would imagine everyone else listening to, is to have a vision and or a mission as to why your IT department exists. Because then it helps you translate what you’re doing on purpose, right? IT on purpose. Right. to executive management if you’re not already in executive management or if you’re not already sitting around that boardroom table, so to speak, which in a nonprofit, most often you’re probably not, or at least in the medical industry or in a large practice, most likely you’re not. It’s most likely a, I don’t know, group of doctors or other people that are very hard to herd together and get. to think anything about technology in a meaningful manner. So if you tie it back to why you guys exist to begin with, then it’s much more powerful to speak that way.

Speaker 1 | 46:45.819

Yeah, you have to kind of develop it as a competency for the organization, for the stakeholders that are within it, because it’s not typically a language that they speak. It’s not something that they see or do on a day-to-day basis, so they don’t have… the knowledge that you have, the insight that you have, and you have to bring that to them and present it to them and make it out to where you’re not just the IT guys off in the corner somewhere in a closet typing away at a keyboard, working on computers. You’ve got to make yourself a part of that organization and make them see that as well. And they will. If you can successfully do that, I think you’ve gotten half the battle taken care of.

Speaker 0 | 47:27.262

Well, thank you so much for being on. Dice like the popular IT nerds. Absolutely been a pleasure. Thank you, sir.

Speaker 1 | 47:34.837

Thank you, Phil. I appreciate the opportunity.