 Welcome back to theCUBE as we continue our coverage of AWS re-invent 2022, we're not here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, tens of thousands of attendees, that exhibit hall is full, let me tell you, it's been something else. Well here in the executive summit sponsored by Accenture, Accenture rather, we're going to talk about Baptist Health, what's going on with that organization down in South Florida. With me to do that, I have Tony Ambrose, who is the SVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer. I have Ashley Lane, the Managing Director of the Accenture Healthcare Practice, and on the far end, Deepu Kumar, who is the VP and CTO of Baptist Health South Florida, one and all, welcome. Thank you. Welcome to theCUBE. First off, let's just talk about Baptist Health, the size of your footprint, one and a half million patient visits a year, not a small number. That was probably last year's number, but yeah. Okay, all right. But not a small number. So how about your footprint and what I guess the client-based business you guys are serving in IT? Absolutely, so we're the largest organization in South Florida, system provider, and 11 hospitals soon to be 12, as you said, is probably about 1.8 million by now. People were supporting a lot of other units and we're focusing on the four Southern counties of South Florida. Okay, so that day, Broward, down that way, got it. So now let's get to your migration or your cloud transformation, as we're talking about a lot this week. What's been your, I guess, overarching goal as you work with Accenture and developed a game plan going forward. What was on the front end of that? What was the motivation to say, this is the direction we're going to go and this is how we're going to get there? Perfect, so Baptist started a digital transformation initiative before I came about three years ago. The board, the executive steering committee decided that this is going to be very important for us to support us to help our patients and consumers, so I was brought in for that digital transformation and by the way, digital transformation is kind of an umbrella, it's really business transformation with digital technologies. So that's basically where we started in terms of consumer focus and patient focus and digital is a big word that really encompasses a lot of things. Cloud is one of course and AI and ML and all the things that we're here for this event. And we've started that journey about two years ago. And obviously cloud is very important, AWS is our main cloud provider and clearly AWS or any cloud providers is not just the infrastructure they're providing, it's the whole ecosystem. That provides us back value into our transformation. And then somebody, I think Adam this morning at the keynote said, this is a team sport, so with this big transformation we need all the help that we can get to the minds and hands and that's where Accenture has been invaluable over the last two years. So as a team sport then, Deepu, you've got external stakeholders, I always would talk about patients, right? Internal, right? You've got a whole different set of constituents there, basically, but it takes that team, right? You all have to work together. What kind of conversations or what kind of actions I guess, have you had with different departments and what different sectors of the healthcare business as Baptist Health sees it in order to bring them along too because this is kind of a shocking turn for them too, right? And how they're going to be doing business. Mostly from an end user perspective, this is something that they don't care much about, where the infrastructure is hosted or how the services are provided. From that perspective, as long as the capabilities function in a better way, they are seemingly not worried about where the hosting is. So what we focus on is in terms of how it's going to be a better experience from their perspective. How is it going to be better responsiveness, availability or stability overall? So that's been the mode of communication from that perspective. Other than that, from a hosting and service perspective, the client tail doesn't care as much as the infrastructure or the security or the technology and digital teams themselves. But you know, some of us are resistant to change, right? We are old dogs, we don't like new tricks and change can be a little daunting sometimes. So even though it is about my ease of use and my efficiency and why I can then save my time on so and so forth, if I'm used to doing something a certain way and that's worked fine for me, and here comes Tony and Deepu and here comes Accenture. I'm the troublemaker, yeah. And they're stirring my pot. So how do you, you were giving advice maybe to somebody watching this and say, okay, you've got internal, I wouldn't say battles, but discussions to be held. How did you navigate through that? Yeah, no, absolutely. And Baptist has been a very well-run system, very successful for 60-something odd years. Clearly that conversation did come, why should we change? But you always start with, this is what we think is going to happen in the future. These are the changes that will very likely will happen in the future. One is the consumer expectations are the consumer expectations in terms of their ability to have access to information, get access to care, being in control of the process and their health and well-being, everything else that happens in the market. And so you start with that. And that's where clearly there are a lot of signs that point to quite a lot of change in the ecosystem. And therefore from there, the conversation is how do we now meet that challenge, so to speak, that we all face in healthcare? And then from there, you kind of design the vision of where we want to be in terms of that digital transformation and how do we get there? And then once that is well-explained and evangelized and that's part of our jobs with the help of our colleagues who have been doing this with others, then is what I call a tell and show. We're going to say, okay, in this road, we're going to start with this small thing and we're going to show you how it works in terms of the process. And then as you go along and you deliver some things, people understand more. They're on board more and they're ready for more. So it's iterative from small to larger. The proof is always in the plan, right? Here you go, if you can show somebody. So Ashley, obviously we know about Accenture's role, but in terms of almost what Tony was just saying, that you have to show people that it works, how do you interface with a client? And when you're talking about these new approaches and you're suggesting changes and making these maybe rather dramatic proposals to how they do things internally, from Accenture's perspective, how do you make it happen? How do you bring the client along? In this case, badges them. Well, in this case with Tony and Deepu, I mean, they have been on this journey already at another client, right? So they came to Baptist where they had done a similar journey previously. And so it wasn't really about convincing. Also with Accenture's help. Also with Accenture's help, correct. But it wasn't about telling Tony and Deepu, how do we do this or anything like that? Because they were by far the experts and have the experience behind it. It was really like, how do we make sure that we're providing the right team, the right skills to match what they wanted to do in their aspirations? So we had brought the healthcare knowledge along with the AWS knowledge and the architects. And we said, let's look at the roadmap and let's make sure that we have the right team and moving at the right pace and testing everything out and working with all the different vendors in the provider world. Specifically, there's a lot of different vendors and applications that are provided to them. It's not a lot of custom activity, applications or anything like that. So it was a lot of working with other third party that we really had to align with them and with Baptist to make sure that we were moving together at speed. Yeah, we've heard about transformation quite a bit, Tony. You brought it up a little bit ago. Deepu, just if you had to define transformation in this case, I mean, how big of a change is that? I mean, how would you describe it when you say we're going to transform our healthcare business? I mean, I think there are a lot of things that come to my mind, but how do you define it? And when you're talking to the folks with whom you've got to bring along on this journey. So there's the transformation umbrella and compasses two or three things. As Tony said, there is this big digital transformation that everybody's talking about. Then there is this technology transformation that powers the digital transformation and business transformation, that's the outcome of the digital transformation. So I think we started focusing on all three areas to get the right digital experience for the consumers. We have to transform the way we operate. Healthcare in its current state or in the existing state, it's a lot of manual processes, a lot of antiquated processes, so to speak. So we had to go and reassess some of that and work with the respective business stakeholders to streamline those. Because it's not about putting a digital solution out there with the antiquated processes because the outcome is not what you expect when you do that. So from that perspective, it has been a heavy lifting in terms of how we transform the operations or the processes that facilitates some of the outcomes. How do you know it's working? Well, so to add to what Dipu was saying is, I think we are fortunate in that there are a lot of folks inside Baptist who have been wanting this and they're instrumental to this. So this is not a two-man plus show. It's really a team sport, again, but that same. So in terms of how do we know it works? Well, when we define what we want to do, there is some level of precision along the way. In those iterations, what is it that we want to do next? So whatever we introduce, let's say a proper fluid check-in for a patient for an appointment, we measure that. And then we measure the next one. And then we kind of zoom out and we look at the journey and say, is this better? Is this better for the consumer? Do they like it better? We measure that and it's better for the operations in terms of, but this is the interesting thing is, it's always a balance of how much you can change. We want to improve the consumer experience, but as Dipu said, there's a lot to be changed in the operations, how much you do at the same time. And that's where we have to do the prioritization. But the interesting thing is that a lot of times, especially on the self-servicing for consumers, there are a lot of benefits for the operations as well. And that's where we're in it together and we measure. Yeah, don't give me too much control though. I don't, I'm going to leave the hard lifting for you. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, thank you. So, and just real quick, Ashley, maybe you can shine some light on this about the relationship, about next steps, about you're on this path and things are going well and you've got expansion plans, you want to bring in other services, other systems. Where do you want to take them in the big picture in terms of capabilities? Well, I mean, they've been doing a fantastic job just being one of the first to actually say, hey, we're going to go and make an investment in the cloud and digital transformation. And so it's really looking at like, what are the next problems that we need to solve, whether it's patient care, diagnosis, or how we're doing research or, you know, the next kind of realm of how we're going to use data and to improve patient care. So I think it's, you know, we're getting the foundation, the basics and everything kind of laid out right now. And then it's really, it's like, what's the next thing and how can we really improve the patient care and the access that they have? Well, it sure sounds like you have a winning combination. So I keep the team together. Team work makes the dream work happen, as you know. So there's a certain amount of, if you look at the healthcare industry as a whole, not just Baptist, Baptist is, you know, for thinking, but entire industry, there's a lot of catching up to do compared to whatever else is doing, whatever else the consumers are expecting of an entity, right? But then once we catch up, there's a lot of other things that we were going to have to move on, innovate for problems that we maybe we don't know we have or we will have right now. So plenty of work to do. Which is job security for everybody, right? Yes. Listen, thanks for sharing the story. Continued success, I wish you that. And I appreciate the time and expertise here today. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Thank you, Ashley. All right, we'll be back with more. 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