Maggie McKay (Host): Wrapping up the year, we check in with President and CEO of Community Memorial Healthcare, Mick Zdeblick, for a Year in Review of 2024. Welcome to Wise and Well presented by Community Memorial Healthcare. I'm your host, Maggie McKay. Welcome back, Mick.

Mick Zdeblick: Thank you.

Host: Good to have you here. So to begin, would you please share a brief overview of Community Memorial Healthcare's journey in 2024?

Mick Zdeblick: Yeah, journey is the right word. It has been a journey. Maybe I'll do it by seasons. It started in the spring of '24 when we had a Change Healthcare optum cyber attack. You may have had a lot of press in the beginning of the year and heard about that. For us, it really impacted us a lot. We had over 16,000 insurance claims that we couldn't file.

And that really kind of kept us from getting paid for services up to the amount of almost 50 million. So it was a rough, a rough spring for us. I do want to thank our partners, Kaiser and Gold Coast, who really stepped up and helped us through those tough times. And then in the fall, you heard a lot about the East Coast rains.

Well, that really impacted a lot of the supplies up and down for health care, and we were impacted by some of that rainfall and closures of the plants as well. So dealing with a lot of the challenges in our supplies. And then here we are in the winter with the terrible mountain fires impacting not only our community, but a fair amount of our staff.

We had one day, 20 percent of our staff had to go back and help make sure that their family was safe. There were evacuation orders and so forth. So it's hard to run a hospital without staff, but we did a great job of keeping everybody safe and I'm really proud of the fact that our firemen and all the disaster response folks stepped up and really kept everybody healthy and safe.

Host: Wow, that's quite a year. I have a feeling 2025 is going to be a lot better for you.

Mick Zdeblick: I hope so.

Host: How can it not be? Can you talk a little bit about the expansion of nurse career development programs?

Mick Zdeblick: So we've spent a lot of time with our local colleges thinking of ways that we can either help folks who are in healthcare and they want to get their nursing degree, or folks who may be new to healthcare and they need to come into some of the training programs.

So we've developed a fantastic relationships and allowed some of our nurses to become, I would call them adjunct faculty or temporary faculty, if you will, to help train some of the nurses going through residency programs on our floors. And for us, it just produces more nurses in the community. But also, we hope that they just love CMH and they want to continue to work with us.

Host: That's amazing. Also, what about physician onboarding? What's that about?

Mick Zdeblick: That's about growing our just number of providers we have in this market. There are certain specialties that we're short of physicians, so it's nice for us to team up with our local physicians who have private practices and we've been co-recruiting with them, so that we can bring additional physicians into the community, as well as, once they come to us, how do we help them embrace our community and get involved with some of the great schools we have?

So, some of these physicians have young families, so we want to get them into the right school systems. As we all know, getting a house or buying a house has been challenging, so we try to hook them up with the right real estate broker. And, we're always open to ideas on how we can build more housing options in Ventura.

Host: Yep. I know that. Tell us a little bit about the DEIB committee.

Mick Zdeblick: So the DEIB is our diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging committee. We're here to take care of the human. And to do that, sometimes we have to reeducate ourselves on how we embrace diversity. How we embrace, being the belonging in our community. So we've kicked off a committee that both includes our residents as well as our nurses and our staff and our executive team. So it's a nice way to say, trust us in your healthcare journey. And really we're here to take care of everybody.

Host: That's really nice. Very inclusive. Mick, Community Memorial recently celebrated significant milestones in its cardiovascular care program, including the 600th Watchman implant and the 500th TAVR procedure.

How do these achievements position Community as a leader in structural heart care in Ventura County?

Mick Zdeblick: We're very proud of our cardiologists and some of our practitioners who are really cutting edge in the sense of that they're finding the best ways to solve the problem, but do it in the most minimally invasive way. So, having 600 Watchmen and 500 TAVR procedures means we're continuing to provide high quality that's equal to or better than some of our partners in the market.

And if it's not better, then we partner with them and we'll transfer our patients. But most of the academic medical centers we're partnering up with really respect that we're doing fantastic cardiac services here, and some are actually looking to us and seeing how we can advance it even farther.

Host: Community Memorial also received the Health Grades Cranial Neurosurgery Excellence Award for two years in a row. Congratulations! How does this and the five star awards from Health Grades impact the care available in our community?

Mick Zdeblick: Getting awards is nice, but it's really to the staff and to the practitioners who are passionate about constantly doing high quality work. So how it impacts the community is you can trust the fact that we're going to continue to do the right types of procedures, push ourselves to do it in a way that helps recovery faster, minimizes any sort of negative interactions with the body and try to do as most minimally invasive as possible.

So these awards are very nice. We appreciate them. But we're going to continue to strive to provide the best care in our community.

Host: Could you please discuss the recent expansion of services in Ojai, including the new health center and land acquisition?

Mick Zdeblick: Yeah, I'm really proud of the fact that our Ojai Foundation and the hospital teamed up together to say, what's the best long term future for Ojai? And as you know, the Ojai Hospital, it's a beautiful building, but it's a one story stick frame that needs to be addressed from an earthquake and seismic standpoint.

So we've teamed up with the foundation, we've made an investment together to acquire the adjacent property. And we're doing that so we can start to plan what does the future campus look like. Do we need to build new, do we need to renovate, do we need to expand services? And having that extra adjacent property gives us those flexibilities to explore that.

While we're doing that planning, we're also expanding our clinic structures. So we've added more clinics in the market, really, to address access, and that's the key, is increasing our access both by physical, the clinic, but also by the physicians and the providers getting them into those clinics.

Host: That's exciting. What impact do you anticipate these expansions will have on the Ojai community in terms of access to care and overall health outcomes?

Mick Zdeblick: We definitely want to be Ojai's trusted healthcare partner, so if you present in our clinics or in our hospital, if we can treat you there and meet your needs, we will. If not, we can transfer to Ventura, if we have the services here, and if not, we'll transfer with one of our partners. And get you to the right level of care. So our goal is to be Ojai's trusted healthcare partner.

Host: How is the implementation of Community Memorial's strategic plan progressing? Are there any specific initiatives or goals that you can update us on?

Mick Zdeblick: Let me just kind of recap. Our strategic plan has five elements, financial strength, culture of quality, invest in the next generation, collaborative partnerships, and expect more. On the first two, financial strength and culture of quality; we really are getting to the point where we've stabilized our financial challenges and we feel we're at a break even point, which allows us to start to reinvest in our programs, our people, and our facilities.

On the culture of quality, we are very proud of the quality we provide. We have a couple opportunities to continue to improve. For example, one of the commonly mentioned quality indicators is hospital acquired infections. We've cut those down by 50 percent in the last nine months. So a big improvement and focusing on the right activities there.

Of the other parts of the plan, probably the collaborative partnership is the most upcoming one for us to talk about. We've teamed up with Providence and we're going to install Epic on our campus using the Providence install. It'll be their Community Connect Epic install, which is electronic medical record we're bringing it to our campus here.

What's exciting about that, it now allows us, CMH, to interact with all the other EPIC clients, which is all the academic medical centers in the area, so Cedars, USC, Kaiser, everybody's on EPIC, and this allows us to interact with them so we can provide better care for our community.

Host: That sounds like a win-win for everybody. How are employees adapting to the themes and goals of the strategic plan? What steps is Community Memorial taking to support employee engagement and wellbeing during this period of transformation?

Mick Zdeblick: We've really invested a lot in our leadership academy. This is having our managers and directors and our executive team get together and start using the common language of some of our management tools. So we've been hosting eight sessions a year, eight of the 12 months, and that allows us to have the same vocabulary, the same tools, the same approach to how we're addressing some of the changes in healthcare.

Also gives us an opportunity to really understand where folks want to take their careers. And that allows us then to invest in their career growth, and they keep staying with CMH and really stay with part of the family for us.

Host: So, you mentioned EPIC. The upcoming EPIC Go Live in March is a significant milestone, I would think. How is Community Memorial preparing for this transition and what benefits do you anticipate it will bring to the organization and to patients?

Mick Zdeblick: We are in Countdown to Go Live. We are going live in March of 2025. Right now, most of effort is focused on training. So we're going to be training not only our physicians and nurses, but almost everyone in our hospital will be interacting with our electronic medical record from housekeeping, knowing which rooms need to be cleaned and when they are clean to turning it over for a new admission to our admitting staff and our folks working in scheduling and billing on those sides.

So EPIC really is impacting our entire organization. So training is our main focus. From a community standpoint, from someone out in the community, having us go live on EPIC will allow you to interact with all your other EPIC interactions.

So if you've had care at any academic medical center in the United States, for example, at Cedars or USC or, UCLA, we can now see your medical records once we go live on medical record. And that, once we go live on EPIC as our medical record, that allows us to make sure we have the most comprehensive data from you so we can provide the best care for you.

Host: That is amazing medically, but also you mentioned once the rooms are clean, how does that work? On EPIC, you look and do they have to like sign in that this room is ready for the patient or how does it work?

Mick Zdeblick: So Epic has a lot of goofy names, but, that's just the kind of company they are. But there's a part a part of Epic that is called Rover. And Rover is where the housekeeping staff will be able to log in and see, Hey, these three rooms just became available because those patients have been discharged.

 It gives the housekeepers a chance to kind of come up and do deep clean in the room, make sure they're disinfecting everything and appropriately and using the right dwell times, which allows all the bacteria to get killed.

And once that's done and the room is ready for the next patient, they go back into Rover and click that that room is now available for the next admission.

Host: That's amazing. That sounds so efficient. Can you talk about any plans for expanding service lines or specialties at Community in the near future?

Mick Zdeblick: We continue to try to partner within our community. So we've been working with VCMC, the county hospital, to really make sure we provide the best pediatric services we can. So we've made some tough decisions. We've teamed up on the outpatient pediatrics. We continue to grow there. And VCMC continues to expand on their inpatient pediatric offerings, and I believe they have a opening ceremony of their new pediatric wing.

That was a joint effort working together. Going the other way, we take care of almost all of the cardiology and cardiac activity that VCMC needs at our facility. So therefore, we can continue to grow, as we mentioned earlier, with the TAVRs and the Watchmans. That's us providing the best cardiac care for this market.

And we'll continue to look for those opportunities and continue to grow in neuro and with some of our spine physicians and some of our service lines like cancer will continue to grow.

Host: So as we look ahead to 2025 and beyond, what's your vision for Community Memorial Health Care? What are the key priorities and challenges that you foresee?

Mick Zdeblick: We've established the foundation of consistent quality performance. We're now at break even, which allows us to invest in programs. You know, we had a difficult financial challenge two years ago. We lost about 38 million. Last year, we lost 6 million. And this year we're going to break even and produce some positive net operating income.

So this does allow us to start investing in programs. So I think our community will see that now it's our time to hear what you need, invest in the programs, recruit the right providers, and continue to build this great organization to meet our community needs.

Host: Well, thank you so much, Mick, for joining us. It's good to catch up with you and hear about all the exciting progress and developments over the year. Good luck.

Mick Zdeblick: Well, thank you, Maggie. It's been a joy talking with you.

Host: Absolutely. Again, that's Mick Zdeblick. If you'd like to find out more, please visit mycmh.org. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out our entire podcast library for topics of interest to you. I'm Maggie McKay. Thanks for listening to Wise and Well presented by Community Memorial Healthcare.