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Picture this.
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A patient is crashing in an operating room in Elko, Nevada.
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The surgeon needs a specialist opinion right now, not in two hours.
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And the only tool in the room is a cell phone with two bars of signal on hold, hoping somebody picks up.
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That's not a hypothetical situation.
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That's just a Tuesday.
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And it's happening in every frontier county in this state right now while we're sitting here.
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Here's the part that should bother you.
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It's not happening because Nevada's physicians are not good enough, or fast enough, or committed enough.
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It's happening because the infrastructure around them was never built for a state shaped like this one.
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Hi, I'm Dr.
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Kevin Hallow, surgeon, veteran, and co-founder of Clinician Corps.
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And this is a connected Nevada, a statewide movement to build the most unified clinical community in the country.
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Before you ever see a product screen, I want you to understand exactly why this state and why now.
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And on this podcast today, I want to talk about how we fix this issue.
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Not someday, this September.
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Here's what most people outside healthcare do not realize.
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Nevada has roughly 218 active physicians for every 100,000 residents.
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That ranks us 45th in the country.
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We're 48th in primary care, 49th for general surgery.
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It's not just the cities.
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Every single one of Nevada's 17 counties is a federally designated health professional shortage area.
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Urban, rural, frontier, all of it.
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When you have a workforce that thin, isolation doesn't just slow things down, it compounds the shortage.
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A physician working alone is doing the job of two or three physicians in a denser market and doing it without backup.
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So what does this isolation actually look like day to day?
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Three things.
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And I've lined up all three for you to review.
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So what does this healthcare isolation in Nevada actually cost us?
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Well, first of all, it is a delay in consults.
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An urgent curbside question ends up in phone tag, or worse, on a consumer messaging app that has no business anywhere near a patient's chart.
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The clinical reasoning behind that consult just evaporates.
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Nobody documents it, nobody bills it, and worst of all, nobody can learn from it later.
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Secondly, we see it in care transitions.
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Moving a patient from a surgery center to a clinic or a clinic to a specialist should be a conversation between clinicians.
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Consults should be physician to physician.
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Instead, it becomes a paperwork relay race.
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And finally, and this is the one I feel the most, burnout.
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Nationally, 43.2% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout last year.
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That's not a soft statistic.
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The American Hospital Association puts the cost of burnout to our healthcare system at 4.6 billion.
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4.6 billion dollars a year.
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Every physician managing five disconnected communication tools instead of one is paying part of that bill personally.
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None of this is because physicians in Nevada are not good enough and not good at their jobs.
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It's because the infrastructure around them was never built for a state like Nevada.
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Okay.
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This is the part about which I really want to be clear.
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A connected Nevada is not a software rollout.
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Software does not reduce burnout and it does not heal patients.
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People do.
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What we're building is the infrastructure that lets Nevada's clinical community reconnect with itself.
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That is why the platform launching in September has three pieces, each solving a different piece of the isolation problem.
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HCO Practice HQ handles the intra-office communication, video, voice, and text with intelligent routing.
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So the alerts that reach a physician are the ones that actually matter.
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HCC Console Core is for the inter-organizational consoles.
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The Reno to Elko conversation that we talked about when we started this podcast.
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It documents the clinical reasoning for the interprofessional console codes.
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So that the curbside device that used to disappear into a phone call is now visible, villable, and auditable.
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And finally, the physician's lounge is something different entirely.
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It's a verified NPI check space where physicians can just talk to each other.
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Start a forum, debate a case, ask a question, be a colleague again instead of an island.
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Every one of those is fully HIPAA compliant, end-to-end encrypted, role-based access, full audit trail.
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That is not a feature that we just decided to bolt on.
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It is the foundation upon which we've built the platform.
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Okay, let's be honest with each other.
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Nevada cannot recruit its way out of a physician shortage on any near-term timeline.
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The AAMC projects a national shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.
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Waiting for more doctors to arrive is not a strategy.
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But connecting the physicians Nevada already has, well, that's something we can do right now.
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And because Nevada is a smaller, tighter clinical community than a lot of larger states, we can actually move faster here.
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We don't have decades of fragmented legacy systems to untangle.
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We have the chance to build this right from the start.
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That is why I believe Nevada becomes the most connected healthcare community in the country.
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Not because it's the biggest state, because it's the state that's willing to go first.
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If you're a physician, a practice leader, or a surgery center administrator in Nevada, this movement launches this September, and I would like you to be part of building it, not just adopting it.
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Head to cliniciancore.com to see how HCO Practice HQ, HCC Console Core, and Physician Lounge come together as one connected network.
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I'm Dr.
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Kevin Hallow, surgeon, veteran, co founder of Clinician Core.
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Come check out our website, ClinicianCore.com.
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Sign up for our early release in September.
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You can check us out on LinkedIn, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.
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Let's reconnect Healthcare in Nevada.
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Thanks for listening.