🔥 Leadership Secrets REVEALED 🔥 AI in Health Sector

🔥 Leadership Secrets REVEALED 🔥 AI in Health Sector. Unlock the secrets of to overcoming Healthcare IT's most pressing challenges! In this video, we'll dive into the leadership strategies and best practices that top healthcare organizations use to navigate the industry's biggest dilemmas. Dean Mauro and healthcare IT Director, and Sheriff deputy, Shawn Weldin, discuss the current state of rural healthcare, why cyber security matters in rural healthcare, and the evolution of technology in healthcare.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Rural Healthcare Technology Risks
• 5:24 Technology Challenges in Healthcare
• 11:12 AI and Cybersecurity in Rural Healthcare
• 18:26 The Impact of Cyber Attacks on Patient Care
• 25:13 Why Cyber Security Matters In Rural Healthcare
• 32:11 Evolution Of Technology In Healthcare
• 43:46 Leadership In Healthcare Technology

Transcript

🔥 Leadership Secrets REVEALED 🔥 AI in Health Sector 

Unlock the secrets to overcoming Healthcare IT's most pressing challenges! In this video, we'll dive into the leadership strategies and best practices that top healthcare organizations use to navigate the industry's biggest dilemmas. David Mauro and healthcare IT Director, and Sheriff deputy, Shawn Weldin, discuss the current state of rural healthcare, why cyber security matters in rural healthcare, and the evolution of technology in healthcare.

Chapters

00:00 Rural Healthcare Technology Risks

05:44 Technology Challenges in Healthcare

11:45 AI and Cybersecurity in Rural Healthcare

17:22 The Impact of Cyber Attacks on Patient Care

25:34 Why Cyber Security Matters In Rural Healthcare

32:12 Evolution Of Technology In Healthcare 

43:24 Leadership In Healthcare Technology

 Host (00:02.09)
All right. Well, welcome everybody to Cybercrime Junkies. I am your host, David Mauro In the studio today is a friend of the podcast and somebody we have a lot of respect for. They are in the trenches of rural America in health care, in IT, and they've exhibited great leadership over the years and driven a lot of really positive initiatives helping improve

patient health and care. I just, I cannot wait to have the interview. Sean, it is Sean Weldon, director of IT at Sabbatha Community Hospital in Kansas. Sean, welcome to the studio, my friend.

Shawn Weldin (00:50.286)
Thanks Dave.

Host (00:52.55)
Well, what has been happening in rural healthcare America lately?

Shawn Weldin (00:58.702)
A of things just kind of moving along as everywhere with everything going on with the USDA funding, with kind of going on the Fed level, everything is just changing. Nobody knows what's next is always kind of the problem with the big shake on the Fed level. A lot of our funding people don't realize on the small hospitals, our funding comes from Department of Ag. Any of those loans we get, the big loans we get from...

The government for building projects, those big things come from the USDA, which seems like a really interesting spot for healthcare, but I guess somebody had to have it and it was the goodest spot as any for agriculture in rural communities, made a lot of sense.

Host (01:38.705)
So back up a second. So are you telling me so the USDA, which I think of like the stamp on stakes, right? They're actually the ones that fund a lot of your building development for rural health care.

Shawn Weldin (01:52.11)
For rural, small rural hospitals, yeah, that's where, that's the approval entity for our our loans for like a new building. So you get a hospital loan and yeah, it's an interesting kind of relationship.

Host (01:56.816)
really?

Well, lot of yeah, a lot of people may know that I didn't know that so. Holy cow. So when they cut that, you know what what type of cuts have happened now? I mean.

Shawn Weldin (02:12.43)
So we've been trying to build a hospital. The building I'm sitting in, as you can kind of tell, as my office is, this building was built in 1910.

Host (02:16.985)
Right. Older.

Host (02:21.457)
1910, back when I was a kid. So it was, yes, back in the good old days.

Shawn Weldin (02:23.342)
Yeah, back in the good old days, when this structure I was in, this used to be a waiting room for patients. My office used to be a waiting room. So this area I'm in right now is built in 1910. The newer half of this addition was built in 1930. we had a new one. yes, yes, we went to a of wars there. It was nice. And then we built a big addition on in 2003. So we have a, but it's 20 years old now.

Host (02:39.088)
Oh wow, so the more modern is from pre-World War II. That's outstanding. Holy cow.

Right.

Shawn Weldin (02:53.294)
So as we're kind of looking at that, we've not spent a whole lot of money on our infrastructure. A large since that 2003 addition, it's amazing how much stuff has kind of, it's changed. know, think about technology in 2003, this building running network cables and phone wiring through this is a nightmare. The floors are.

Host (02:53.412)
Yeah.

Host (03:03.504)
Right.

Host (03:11.643)
Well, was it was pre iPhone too. So it probably has the state, you know, when you see homes that are older, they always have the stations for the computers. When in reality, everybody's working on computers everywhere, right?

Shawn Weldin (03:22.122)
Not even that. is pre, you know, in the new building, they, we ended up mounting computers in rooms that really were not made for it. You we're just kind of tight on space. We've done a great job and we've done a great job maintaining what we got. But it's, you know, this building, you know, the floors are concrete, but they're not really steel.

Host (03:42.99)
Yeah, it's and do you have cinder block walls too or plaster. wow.

Shawn Weldin (03:46.2)
We don't, they're plaster. They're plaster, the exterior here is brick. So we've got trying to run network cables through these floors, the wifi through this steel and laced flooring is just kind of a challenge.

Host (04:00.016)
Well, I know with some older schools and some older construction sites wouldn't have the cinder block walls. It really messes with the radio frequency. So Wi-Fi can't go where it needs to go.

Shawn Weldin (04:06.67)
Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (04:12.846)
Yeah, it's a challenge just to kind of maintain this older building. Yeah.

Host (04:15.088)
So you've got to run cable, you've got to run ethernet power over ethernet, et cetera. You've got to run those hotlines all over the place.

Shawn Weldin (04:22.542)
Yeah. And we've, we've got some closets kind of sprinkled here and there because it's easier to run every floor closet to floor instead of going through this big, huge thick floor everywhere. So that's not ideal. Uh, you know, same for that. We would love to run some fiber on here, but if we're going to build, there's no reason to hopefully spend the money on fiber. We're to rip out. we're trying to, we've kind of maintain as we can, but we're hitting the wall on a couple of things where, we need to decide and we've been waiting for the USDA for quite a while. And we've had some motion here recently and there have been some changes on the, on the level of Fed level now here recently that we've, we're seeing some improvements. So.

Host (04:27.352)
Right. Yeah, makes sense.

Host (04:37.604)
Right.

Host (04:49.135)
Good.

Shawn Weldin (04:52.93)
We're hopeful. state senators, everybody's been really pushing hard for us.

Host (04:54.894)
What seemed in the beginning? Yeah, yeah, I've been reading about it because I keep up with things in Kansas a lot in from what I understand is in the beginning, there was a sense by the administration that it was there was just money bleeding everywhere. And so they just kind of stopped everything. And now they're kind of releasing certain things after they verify, hey, this isn't what they deem as waste. They're

They're looking like if it's coming to rural health care, they see the need and they're they're loosening things up.

Shawn Weldin (05:23.822)
And I know the folks at the USDA are their kind of diligence. We're not blaming them for wanting to make sure that money is being sent properly, which it should be. It's just, I say we're three years into this almost, we're trying to get this kind of approved. And we thought, you know, we were hopeful to have this done three years ago. So it's just been a process of, you know, submitting questions and it's just, takes time. know, we submit a question, takes, it's got to go to the right people. And then at one point with the buyouts and stuff, everybody left.

Host (05:28.473)
yeah. No, not at all. Right. yeah.

Host (05:41.251)
Mm-hmm.

Shawn Weldin (05:52.342)
So we're starting over with new people and new staff that just don't know our story. And so we got to kind of start over from scratch some of them, but that's gotten better here. We've had some good motion in the last month on that. So fingers crossed, we'll have some positive news here shortly, hopefully.

Host (05:52.792)
Yeah, right.

Host (05:58.222)
Right?

Host (06:07.981)
that's great. And the plan is to to expand like you have a new new set of land and new plans built out or are you going to expand on the existing plot?

Shawn Weldin (06:17.774)
So we have, it's existing campus. We've purchased some land. The city had a shop building south of us that we've kind of taken over. So we have that land now we bought two years ago thinking we'd have it tearing ground up by now. So we've had that, this older structure, we love it, but it's just not a hospital anymore. It's a cool building. It's just, I've got HVAC.

Host (06:26.052)
Right.

Host (06:34.455)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (06:46.478)
We have window air conditioners everywhere. It's steam heat. It's just not a hospital anymore. So we'll keep the 2003 structure and remodel a lot of it. It's going to get a big remodel as part of this, hopefully. And then add a huge new, you know, we have a clinic downtown that's off site. Bring them on site and all one kind of campus set up. So that's the plan.

Host (06:49.63)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Host (07:08.834)
Yeah, unbelievable. So when, when we think about 2003, when that newest wing or the newest portion of the building was, was built, things were a lot different than, and when I look at, especially healthcare, cause we, it comes up, it comes up in all verticals, but in particular healthcare, we used to have two versions of our world. Like we had computers.

Right? We had them back in 2003. We had them in 2010, but we still had, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you live it every day. Like we still had processes. We still had kinetic, physical processes, paper. There was still a way, and it wasn't even just having things in paper versus scanning it and having it digital. It was the processes and the protocols and

and the ways of doing things. And you were able to do all these things. And should the computers break down, whatever it was, whether it was a cyber attack, it was more rare then. But it was, know, Internet outage or whatever. You didn't have the type of impact that you do in the last five years. Like in we are so dependent on our technology, especially in health care. It's it seems.

Shawn Weldin (08:22.666)
Odo. Now I- Yeah.

Host (08:32.16)
Remarkable because we're able to do so many advanced things now because of that. But yet we're more dependent. And when things like cyber attacks happen, we're more devastated because having to go back to pen and paper sounds easy, but it's not because nobody's done it. Like, yeah, nobody. But nobody has done it. Like the people that are there now are either younger and they have no experience in the actual kinetic world and paper processes.

Shawn Weldin (08:48.558)
It used to be, when we were live in... Yeah.

Host (09:00.855)
But the processes aren't there. Like the actual way of doing it, right?

Shawn Weldin (09:03.918)
We've had to really go back to some of that because when we went live with our first health record, and the clinic went live in 2007, 2006, with our first ambulatory record, which most people did the clinic first. We went live full EHR at the hospital in about 2012. And when the system went down, the nurse was like, yay, paper. And they pulled paper out and they'd be just hopping on it and they, it was great. And then we've had that shift now. We had nurses that left.

Host (09:15.968)
Hmm.

Host (09:25.506)
Right. Yes.

Shawn Weldin (09:30.894)
the nursing areas because they don't want to do charting. I don't do electronic charting. I want to go to a different area of nursing. Even internally at that point, they want to go to a different part of the hospital that doesn't do electronic charting. Of course, not everybody does it. Some of them were people that just weren't computer savvy, didn't feel comfortable with it. And so they said, I'm going to go up to where I don't have to. And then of course it followed them. Two years later, they had to. But some of these nurses, new nurses we have are great, but they have never paid for charting.

Host (09:41.825)
Why is that? it too burdensome? Is it too much detail?

Host (09:47.986)
Okay, yep.

Of course.

Host (09:58.604)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (09:59.47)
They've never had to, even from school all the way through everything they've ever had. They're young enough now that they've never, most of them, some didn't have school books into their careers. Everything was online. they don't. dealing with some of that, here, I'm going to give you this stack of papers to chart on. before the old nurses just, oh, yeah, let's get this done. can make a nurse's note in moments. Watch this. And now they're like,

Host (10:09.152)
Right, exactly. They don't know how to write in cursive, generally.

Host (10:27.167)
Absolutely. Right.

Shawn Weldin (10:29.088)
I will wait and write on this napkin until the computer's back up. And then until we finally have to say, hey, it's a shift change. You're to go home. You've got to document something on paper. And then we'll scan it in, which they don't want to document stuff on paper. Then they were going to put it back in the computer. We've kind of said, hey, we'll scan stuff in now. But it's just a shift change from the last 20 years where we've definitely seen, even the last 10 years, where we've seen the migration to staff that are very

Host (10:32.458)
until the computers back up, right?

Host (10:39.286)
Right.

Host (10:52.704)
Unbelievable.

Shawn Weldin (10:58.658)
very computer oriented, very computer savvy, which is great. We're not explaining how to get in your email, how to get into, how to do things, know, multi-factors, not the big factor that is younger generation, because it's not, they've been dealing it. They've, you know, and they should, we train our staff, if your bank's not using multi-factor, might look for a new bank, because it's, this is no longer a best practice, it is standard operating at this point. They should.

Host (11:01.546)
Mm-hmm.

Host (11:05.557)
Right.

Host (11:12.149)
They've been dealing with multifactor for years.

Get a different bank. Yeah, get a different bank.

Host (11:25.332)
No, mean, yeah, and the way we think about it, there's always there's security on one end and then there's convenience on the other. And if you're too convenient, you're going to get ruined. Right. And if you're too secure, then it interrupts with operations. So really just having that balance, finding that balance. And most of the younger generation has grown up with that balance. They've they've had it through video games and social media, et cetera, in school. So.

Shawn Weldin (11:39.342)
Well, that's when people try finding around stuff.

Shawn Weldin (11:51.374)
We always had a problem with this. If they have stuff too secure, it's unusable. That's what people find ways around it. And that's where you just really breach to be like, Oh, I didn't want to use this, this thing that made me sign in five different ways. I'm just going to, I'm going to just put it my personal stuff and I'll just use my home email to send stuff. Cause I don't want to, I don't mess with my work emails too complicated. So it's that fine line of trying to find that, that balance where it's secure, secure as it can be, but usable enough that staff can, can deal with the.

Host (11:54.727)
Right. Right.

Host (12:00.138)
Right.

Host (12:06.016)
Mm-hmm.

Shawn Weldin (12:21.408)
In the day, we're still dealing with people that need to do their jobs. And it seems we're very cyber aware as IT people, but having that other side where say, yeah, I can't lock this down so much that's unusable. It's not always like not having it.

Host (12:37.845)
Well, I always think you don't have to, right? Like in an ideal world, it would be great to have everything locked down and then there's no, but it becomes unfunctional and it almost becomes cost prohibitive, right? But the truth is,

Shawn Weldin (12:52.654)
Yeah, because we're buying this stuff we're not even using at this point because we've got to make it so secure that the staff are finding workarounds or they're just refusing to use the systems that we have that say, it's too complicated, I'm just not going to use this or wasting money on it because it's not being used anyway.

Host (12:56.394)
Right.

Host (13:00.458)
Right.

Host (13:05.833)
Right. But the key is to me is just doing enough so that the attackers move on past you. You know what I mean? There's just that that friction. Yeah, like I always view it as we're at the beach and there's people from our organization, people from other organizations, people from our family, other families there. And we see fins in the water. Right.

Shawn Weldin (13:14.862)
You don't want to the little hanging fruit there.

Host (13:32.617)
It could be a shark. could be a dolphin. I'm not freaking sticking around to find out. I'm to start swimming to shore. And the truth is, we'll never swim fast enough to out swim that shark. But the reality is we don't have to. We just have to do enough to beat that guy. Like we just have to beat the organizations that aren't doing fundamental things because they're really the attackers mentality is really just low hanging fruit.

Right? They're just going after whatever they can get. They're not necessarily going after your organization or your people individually. They're really just going after the vulnerabilities. Who's got an open door? Who's got an open port? Where can we find those vulnerabilities?

Shawn Weldin (14:19.298)
Yeah, it's just trying to do the best you can. We all have, especially in rural world, staffing's an issue. I'm very lucky in a town where I'm from where we have several IT people who live here in this small town. But resources and doing more with less. All these cybersecurity stuff, my department doesn't make any money. I'm not a profit generating department. But I can spend money like a grades person if I have to.

Host (14:26.93)
Resourced, yep.

Shawn Weldin (14:47.638)
We can spend a lot of money really fast.

Host (14:51.004)
I will say, I will say I've been working with organizations on measuring risk though, and there is return on mitigation. So, you know, when you, when you invest in a new device or a new technology, that's more because it's cool, it's fun, it's convenient, right? And there might not be as good of a return, but when you're investing in security controls, there is actually a return because it's not only operating,

Shawn Weldin (14:59.15)
100%.

Host (15:19.592)
and you're getting the benefit of it, but it's but it's reducing risk. And so if it lowers the amount of costs, should there be an event or lowers the risk of an event ever happened, that is actually a really measurable metric that can be seen on a P &L because that money doesn't go out. It's not a it's not return on investment because it doesn't it doesn't.

generate new revenue, but it lowers the amount of revenue that has to go out. And that still has a positive impact on P &O, which is great.

Shawn Weldin (15:50.862)
And a lot of, hearing the IT guys in Kansas lot is, we just don't have any money, we have any money, we have any funding, which I, hey, I'm there. We're all there. all, there's a stat out there somewhere, the percentage of hospitals in Kansas that are on financial downturns right now is majority of us. We don't make money. We're all nonprofits anyway, but we're not making any money, definitely. And just a lot of that is I'm very lucky to have some administration that understands the...

Host (15:55.976)
Right.

Host (16:10.813)
Right, absolutely. Right.

Shawn Weldin (16:20.492)
Now, technology is not going anywhere. Security stuff is only going to get more. know, our antivirus costs, you know, for long time were, as part of larger health group, we can, can purchase those kind of together and get some better volume. But, you know, we went from, they, they more than quadrupled in one year. Cause hey, we went from having just traditional AV to having, you know, MDR, XDR. And it was one those things where it's like, this has worked for 10 years and it's worked.

Host (16:41.947)
EDR, right.

Shawn Weldin (16:49.344)
As far as I know, it's worked just fine. We've not had any complaints with it. It's worth it. either either it's I said either it's doing a great job or it's doing nothing because we're not getting much stuff, stuff out of it. Either it's doing great, where it's just just taking care of it and we're not seeing any issues or it's learning everything through and we just can't tell. so when we moved to the XDR and the MDR, it's like, this is a different animal and this, cost is so much more. And I'm very lucky to have administration and some folks to say this is, this is not

Host (16:51.099)
It's worked quite, it's been quite effective actually.

Host (16:59.05)
One of the two. Right.

Host (17:14.888)
I

Shawn Weldin (17:19.136)
Just the latest, greatest fad. This is becoming, it will very soon become a requirement for insurance. We have to have some kind of next gen. So either we can wait till we have to have it. And every day we don't have it. We now know we need it at this point. We're higher risk. So did I go out that day and spend, check that day? No, I put it in the budget. We talked through it. became, within the next year we had worked through it. We're adding more features to it now on next budget cycle.

Host (17:32.605)
You're higher at risk. Yep. Yep.

Shawn Weldin (17:48.354)
process of working with your administration a lot is just saying, hey, you know, know, I know I'm not making us any money here. But one breach, one cyber attack pays for itself. This stuff all pays itself for forever. If we ever have this, if it this job once, it's paid for itself. So

Host (18:02.121)
Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the the breach costs for rural health care have gone up exponentially in the last like four years. I mean, it's just it's it's a lot. So any time you can reduce that risk or lower the impact, etc. Like there is a there is a huge benefit and to the providers to enter the the actual patients.

So, you know, rural healthcare, when we were talking about the greater impact, when you think about when rural healthcare gets hit, you know, it could be the only level tier hospital at that level for that patient in an hour travel or a two hour travel. Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (18:51.888)
yeah, in Kansas easily. There's several hospitals in Kansas, Kansas don't have hospitals at all.

Host (18:56.743)
Right. Exactly. And so you have to when if they're down because of a ransomware attack or whatever, then you've got to literally when every minute counts, you've got to ship that patient over to another.

Shawn Weldin (19:09.39)
And it's also like the, you know, for a stroke. you know, there's, there's timeframes of success for a stroke that, you know, having that image sent off to it, it, and be read by a radiologist within the so, so many minutes is very critical for a patient care to know what to give them for anti-clotting and that kind of stuff. And if we're having an internet issue or having a cyber attack, we're just having just, just downtime in general during that timeframe, it can, it can be life or death for, for a patient. And, and it's, where we're a lot of us know.

Host (19:12.391)
Right.

Host (19:23.25)
Right.

Host (19:30.855)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (19:38.254)
especially the rural folks that, you know, there's one or two of us, you know, most hospitals can't have one or two IT people on the rural side. And it's a 24-7, 365 kind of solution that we're all working through to keep that up. It's a little stressful.

Host (19:45.852)
Mm-hmm.

Host (19:49.554)
Yeah, it really is.

Host (19:54.066)
Yeah, you guys really in in yet in general. mean the burden that is on health care IT is it's monumental because it really is life or death because we are so dependent on the technology in order to render the medical care that the physicians need.

Shawn Weldin (20:12.974)
And keeping the physicians in communication with, know, we still fax so much stuff. I'd love to have faxing leave my life, but it won't happen anytime soon, I don't think. But we're still fighting faxing to different places. It's just a...

Host (20:27.789)
It is the one industry where fax has just stayed. Yes, yeah, you're right. And that's probably why it's still in healthcare. Right, that's exactly right.

Shawn Weldin (20:31.768)
That and insurance.

Shawn Weldin (20:36.674)
Because we talked insurance too much probably, but yeah. Yeah, we'd love to, and that's where the, you know, the.

Host (20:43.153)
Pretty secure though, I mean...

Shawn Weldin (20:44.91)
It's the cheapest, scariest HIPAA thing you can get a hold of for most small businesses. It is so funny that we're getting better and better at talking to hospitals electronically. We're getting better at using the QHINs and the HIEs to say, hey, I can send you stuff over here. I don't have to send you a fax anymore. But we still get a lot of patient records just faxed where people want them sent.

Host (20:49.329)
Yeah.

Host (20:57.948)
Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (21:11.534)
to their other hospital in the hospital. What are some the effects? It's the fastest, quickest way to get them to us and we'll scan them back in. So it's amazing how much we still do of that.

Host (21:15.429)
Right. Unbelievable. Yeah. Well, and there's not, mean, part of that has to do with the hacker mentality. They're not really honing their skills on how to breach fax machines. Like they're, they're busy working on AI and other things today where they could do scale like they could hit 50 hospitals, right? Not just one individual fax machine they want to compromise. Yeah, that's great.

Shawn Weldin (21:37.038)
Yeah, if you're gonna get my one patient record through a fax, not worth it. Not worth that one patient's record that's probably got nothing other than some P other than his social number, driver's license, couple things you might want in it.

Host (21:48.977)
Yeah, what are going to get out of them? Right. Exactly. Which they could buy from anybody else online. So growing up in rural Kansas, how did you get into IT in general? And you were also involved in law enforcement. So walk us through that. There's some great leadership stories there.

Shawn Weldin (22:04.482)
So I grew up in a small town in South Topeka a little bit, and I was very lucky to grow up in town with a nuclear power plant in town. So our town had a very large tax base in the 90s. So the schools were excellent. That's where one thing my parents were both school teachers. So we had a lot of the capital outlay monies to spend on buildings and equipment and that kind of stuff. You couldn't buy, you know,

Host (22:13.456)
There you go.

Host (22:21.638)
Hmm?

Shawn Weldin (22:33.038)
couldn't pay teacher salaries, which is dumb as a person who's parents were teachers, but you could build a very, very nice ball stadium. Or in our school, built every infrastructure definitely. And technology was part of that too. We, Coffin County, where I grew up had in Burlington, where was at, we had one of the first fiber networks in state Kansas in the nineties that we could talk to any school in the county over fiber.

Host (22:35.558)
Yes.

Host (22:42.032)
Right. There was infrastructure and facilities being built and things like that, right.

Host (22:56.613)
Wow.

Host (23:01.882)
That's advanced, actually. That's quite advanced.

Shawn Weldin (23:01.932)
by the county. I took Spanish over, call it IDL, Interactive Distance Learning. I took Spanish one year. Our teacher was never in our classroom. He was always in one of the other five schools, four schools. In the morning, he came to Burlington in the afternoon. So I saw him on the first day of school and never saw him in person until the end of the year, because he was always just at another school in the morning. And then he'd come to Burlington to do a couple of classes in the afternoon. So we were hooked to the libraries in town and all the schools were by fiber.

Host (23:08.452)
Yeah.

Host (23:15.088)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (23:32.142)
So it's very kind interesting to see that kind of technology growing up in that area. And then with that came the, know, the every school had a technology lab, but the middle school and high school were fairly new when I was there. So a lot of, you know, technology modules on everything from PC repair to robotics to video editing, coding, all kinds of stuff, anything kind of technology drafting, that kind of stuff. You had options to do that during school.

Host (23:59.215)
And this is back in the 90s, so this was actually quite advanced actually for back then.

Shawn Weldin (24:01.314)
Yeah, this is the, Yeah, we were, we were very blessed to have that, that kind of system in Burlington and, both, when I say both parents are school teachers and I give my mom and dad a lot of credit for, for not, they both have masters in education. And I decided I, you know, school was not my, I was not the best student. so school was not my, my everyday love. So, I was talking to our guidance counselor. Hey, what do you thought about tech school? That might be more your

your alley and, and Burlington, if you were a decent student and did half your stuff, you're supposed to, could, your senior year, had two required classes, government English. That's all you had to take. Uh, then you could take, you know, five hours of what job. Yeah. Tech school. So actually, uh, I drove to, um, Emporia, Kansas only about 45 minutes away. So every morning me and about five other kids got in a school bus, went to Emporia every day. So I took my first year of tech school during high school. So I was in tech school every morning from.

Host (24:40.751)
Yeah. And the rest you could take is like tech school classes. Yeah.

Host (24:57.423)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (25:00.206)
8 to noon and we drove back my last two hours of government English, then I computer aided, which works in our technology lab for another hour every day. that was my kind of kickoff into tech school. did two years and then I did that for my whole senior year. I was gone all morning and did that instead of going back to, I liked it. was something I would say the first year of my tech school was a lot of Microsoft Office and

The first semester, is funny because I already had, know, we had good technology, so I already had two years, or at least two semesters of Microsoft Office under my belt. So I went to tech school and they basically said, well, here's your Office 2000, which is when it was, Office 2000 textbook. And I said, well, I've already done all this. And she's like, well, here's the, how to learn access. And I'm like, oh no. So I did a lot of Microsoft Access for about a semester, which is good.

Host (25:55.65)
Wow.

Shawn Weldin (25:57.154)
a lot of Excel advanced queries, that kind of stuff, which is cool. I'm very good at Excel now. And then the second semester was PC repair and that kind of stuff, which I did enjoy. I did much more PC repair and electronics and that kind of stuff. So then the second year was all Microsoft certifications. And I'm old enough now, I have a network certification. So I am actually a certified network engineer. That's worth about nothing anymore.

Host (25:59.298)
Right. Yeah. Excel is, yeah, absolutely.

Host (26:07.94)
Mm-hmm.

Host (26:24.248)
Well, I don't know about that. It's still a remarkable skill.

Shawn Weldin (26:29.038)
So, well, I've pulled network out of more places. Everywhere I've started for a couple years, I helped remove it. And then I'm also a Microsoft Certified System Engineer as well in NT4O, which that's long ago that's been. So it was a really good starting off point for that, it gave me the basics, the hands-on.

Host (26:33.838)
I

Yes.

Host (26:43.844)
Wow.

Shawn Weldin (26:54.798)
That was much more, now I know my learning style, the hands-on, the labs, that kind of stuff, was more my learning style, which is great. So got out of tech school there, finished that up, to work for Leavenworth County in Kansas for a couple of years as an IT tech. And then got a friend of mine, worked here in Sabatha for a controls integrator here in town and said, hey, you want to move back to a small town? So that sounds like a good time. here I am and...

Through them, worked as a, small town integrator didn't need a whole lot of IT staff. There's about 30 people work there. So we outsourced our IT staff, which at that time was me, to businesses around the community as well. If you needed, you know, the city had needed somebody, a couple of ethanol plants, know, kind of If I could, so I guess, you know, a day here, a day there, we've got enough, I got busy enough, we hired a second person to kind of work with me to do that kind of stuff. And the hospital became a customer. said, Hey, we need a.

Host (27:40.23)
shared service model. Yeah, like a shared service model. Yeah, that's really good.

Host (27:50.647)
Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (27:54.062)
This is 2004. We're just kind of starting, know, when I first started working here at the hospital as a contractor, there was five computers here. There was an AS400 sitting on my floor, holding my printer up right behind my desk. We saw the mainframe system here for that. And then about 2007, they got enough.

Host (28:08.471)
Wow.

Host (28:15.661)
when servers were huge and complicated and there wasn't much you can do to them. Unbelievable.

Shawn Weldin (28:20.974)
Yep, the ASPWRN are still sitting here on my floor. I hold my printer up and then about 2007, they started getting more. I was about half every week here anyway. You they got more more computers. So about 2007, I came over here full-time as IT director.

Host (28:39.681)
Unbelievable. That's phenomenal. How did you get involved in law enforcement?

Shawn Weldin (28:47.274)
So I've grew up in the Boy Scouts kind of a scouting program. So that's actually, got to Sebetha, my friend who worked at the integrator was a friend of mine through Boy Scouts. He's actually a leader of ours. Met him years ago. then my boss at the system integrator said, Hey, you don't know anybody in Sebetha at all. So I don't, you need to get out do something. I was working 200 hours a month. You know, I didn't know anybody. was young kid.

Host (28:58.957)
Great.

Shawn Weldin (29:16.654)
was working all the time. So we needed to find you a hobby. And so I kind of went through the small town things. You can be a volunteer firefighter, which that's nothing wrong with that. A paramedic, volunteer paramedic. That seemed like a lot of school I didn't really want to do. And he was a volunteer sheriff's deputy at one point in his younger years. I got, he's like, hey, have you ever thought about doing this?

Maybe we just did some stuff through scouts with the law enforcement. I get friends I worked with the Leavenworth County guys when I worked over there doing IT for them My good friend of mine is the under sheriff of the department back home. So I kind of talked to them said yeah, you got to do that. It'd be would get back with your community kind of give back so about 2007 about 2005 I went over there as a don't get paid just volunteer your time right around full-time guys You know just doing a community activities

doing a lot of community service work.

Host (30:17.74)
paperwork, filing, probably some, did you do research? Did you do any help with investigations or was it more admin related? Probably back then, because you were a kid still.

Shawn Weldin (30:22.7)
Nope, I-

Shawn Weldin (30:26.478)
It was a hundred percent here's uniform. It's a hundred percent. Here's uniform. Here's a, here's a, here's a uniform, uh, hop on these guys, get you certified to, to shoot this firearm and then to go help the guys do whatever they need to be done. So I, I, as a unpaid volunteer, I was driving around in a cop car, carrying a gun, uh, getting trained on how to do search warrants. Uh, a lot of, a lot of drive around just backing up full-time guys where it's a, Hey, small town we have at that time.

Host (30:37.996)
Yeah. Cool.

Host (30:45.495)
Wow.

Host (30:49.553)
yeah.

Shawn Weldin (30:54.882)
Five full-time deputies. So when we had about six or seven as volunteers that on a Saturday night when I didn't have any kids back then I just hopped in with him and we'd run around and we'd Do a little ride-alongs doing a lot of Yep, doing a lot of that and doing a lot of just hey, let's go to the ball tonight's baseball game. Let's go, walk around the baseball stadium or this is the this is the system for know football game. Let's go help out that or

Host (30:56.726)
Right.

Host (31:04.13)
Do the drive-alongs, yeah, the ride-alongs, I've done those, yeah, those are fun.

Shawn Weldin (31:23.342)
A lot of that for a couple of years, playing tackle dummy or dummy for the trainings. I've been pepper sprayed. I'm not pepper sprayed, luckily I've been tased several times. But I've been flash bang a couple of times in my life playing bad guy. Would not suggest. So yeah, then about 2007 in Kansas, you can only work.

Host (31:28.396)
Mm-hmm.

Host (31:34.946)
Yep.

Host (31:38.881)
Ugh.

Host (31:43.01)
Don't go do that on the weekends. Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (31:52.302)
As a part-time employee at the Sheriff's Office as a deputy, you can only work 200 hours a year. You have to go through a two-week part-time academy. So I had to go down to Hutchison area in Kansas and take a two-week certification class to get so I could work by myself and have a normal kind of salary from the Sheriff's Office. That was in 2007, so I've been doing that since I've been as Sheriff's Office now for over 20 years and I've been a full

Host (32:13.57)
different hours and stuff. yeah.

Shawn Weldin (32:21.934)
paid employee for probably 19 of that now, 17 of that now. A lot of, and that did of course then see just the, as part of that, they found out that I was an IT person. So, hey, they were just getting computerized records at that point in 2005. So I got in the ground floor helping them get that.

Host (32:26.315)
That's phenomenal.

Host (32:37.473)
Yep. So for the listeners, CJIS, yes, CJIS, and I forgot what the CJIS actually stands for. Correct. That's right. Right. And it's really when you're working in IT and you have access to these investigative reports and confidential information, you are taking an oath and you're getting you're trained and then you take an oath.

Shawn Weldin (32:45.859)
criminal justice information systems just like ephi it's cgi so it's very similar to

Host (33:03.285)
that says like, will under penalties of perjury or under penalties of going to jail myself, I vow not to release this stuff and keep it confidential.

Shawn Weldin (33:12.406)
It's just like, kind of like HIPAA just for cops. We keep stuff in confidentiality. We don't send, it's very, it's kind of shockingly similar on how we can't send this stuff unencrypted across non-secure lines. We can't, we have to have our data, you know, secure where we store it. We have to have certain people who can only have access to things. have to physical security of like, hey, you have to have your server rooms locked and your dispatching areas secured.

Host (33:15.22)
Right. Yep.

Host (33:25.024)
to HEPA,

Host (33:34.005)
Right.

Host (33:37.406)
Yep.

Yeah, we have lot of CIGIS engineers on our staff and we always hear that.

Shawn Weldin (33:45.07)
It's a good pivot of lot of healthcare stuff. So it's been a good fix of both sides. We just rolled out multi-factor to the desktop level over there as required by the state here very soon. So we just kind of rolled that out here in the last month as we're working through that.

Host (33:49.716)
Yeah, it's very similar.

Host (33:57.386)
Good.

Host (34:00.798)
That's phenomenal. Hey, so what any leadership lessons you've gathered up from working in law enforcement and health care? Like, what have you seen or what? What are some of the traits that you find that really demonstrate excellent leadership?

Shawn Weldin (34:20.408)
So you gotta be willing to, you can't have that my way or the highway kind of mentality. It's very easy to say, am the expert in this and you need to do what I say. And that works in both kind of ways. You've gotta be able to communicate what you need, articulate why you need it, and also just realize that not everybody's gonna want to do things your way. If you can...

Host (34:25.589)
Right.

Host (34:29.246)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (34:49.058)
You know, find that good common ground. Say, hey, I know you want this. I want this. Can we find a way that makes us both at least reasonably happy here? And there are lines like this is legal requirement. We cannot do this. But there's a lot of that gray area. A lot of that gray area, it's like, or what can I do today to make us better than we were yesterday? And what can we do tomorrow to make us better than we are today? So kind of build on that.

Host (35:04.832)
Right, we have to do it a certain way.

Shawn Weldin (35:18.754)
both locations and building that as, hey, as long as you're moving upward, we're making the right direction. So don't get such in the slump where it's like, hey, I want to do this. They said, no, what do do? So we got to find the best thing we can to get us by where we're at today. So.

Host (35:31.733)
Yeah.

Host (35:35.72)
And communication is really key there, right? Like when leaders explain the reasoning and the context for why this is the better meant, like we're all part of the team. This is better for the organization because of this. Then at least you understand the context. Like my frustration, yeah, my frustration with leadership sometimes is when you get a directive and there's no context and you're like, I'll do it. Yeah, that's fine. I just don't understand why.

Shawn Weldin (35:52.172)
And I had a previous supervisor.

Host (36:04.539)
But then as soon as they explain why, yeah, as soon as they explain why you're like makes total sense and then you're able to explain it to your teammates and then you know what I mean? And it really helps understanding the context.

Shawn Weldin (36:04.642)
And I've had the chance talk to my supervisors like, yeah.

Shawn Weldin (36:15.822)
I've asked people, give me your, you know, I've had some bosses before, it's like, give me the problem and I'll tell you what I think is solution. Don't give me solutions to what you think the problem is. Because how you look at stuff and I look at stuff, they're two very different things. So I look at things as an IT person. So instead of you say, hey, I want you to put this thing in, like, that might fix that, but it's not going to fix this, this, or this. Put this in and fix all these things. And this is just barely either

Host (36:28.699)
Absolutely. Right.

Shawn Weldin (36:45.228)
more expensive or sometimes even cheaper than when you wanted to put in on the long run because of the amount of time it works, takes to put it in and the amount of effort to put it in. And nothing's more frustrating to an IT person than all this, I'll do all this work and then no one will use it. Cause I got told to put this thing in and nobody really wanted, but hey, somebody saw something somewhere saying, we need, that's the next best thing. We need to get that put in and we have to have this thing. Like, I put it in like, we didn't, none of us wanted that.

Host (37:10.93)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (37:11.099)
I don't know why we're doing this because it doesn't work right. I'm like, well, I've just told put it in. So I got 100 hours into putting this in and now.

Host (37:15.752)
Yeah, exactly. And you don't understand the context, et cetera. Yeah. And that is so common. There's so many initiatives that get brought up from a grant or from somebody seeing something that's cool. Which brings me before we wrap up, I want to ask you about AI. So AI is being rolled out in a lot of health care organizations. Yeah. I mean, how are you guys?

Shawn Weldin (37:39.502)
The hour is included.

Host (37:44.894)
Implementing AI. I've seen it used where it's being used. Very similar to, let's say, Microsoft Teams, which it'll summarize the meeting and the notes and give you the highlights, the next steps, the actions, who's responsible for what. It's good to have that all done for you. That way you don't have to rely on my handwritten chicken scratch versus yours, etc. But in the health care space, it seems like they're

rolling it out for summarizing medical records or charting and things like that because that could really save time. Is that where you're seeing it?

Shawn Weldin (38:21.88)
So we're rolling out, we're rolling out, we have rolled out and we're about to kind of roll out a second phase of it think now for, because it's worked out fairly well. still, everything's still work in progress, know, in AI stuff. It's amazing, know, when I was at Hems in 19, you know, AI was just kind of a trickle of a discussion. And in, in 2024,

Host (38:32.382)
Hmm.

Shawn Weldin (38:47.79)
when I was there in Orlando, you couldn't walk two feet without sitting in some of the AI. And last year, it was a whole pavilion based on AI. So I think we're rolling out the, it's a Weave's Oracle Health for our records. So they have some patient, set the phone down, open the app, set it down, and you have your meeting with your doctor, your appointment doctor, and it transcribes the discussion you're having. That's why we're, the first thing we're kind of working through on this is getting

Host (38:51.687)
something out. Yep.

Shawn Weldin (39:17.39)
that kind of And it's worked well. I think it's still a work in progress. We're having the doctors kind of keep notes on it for now just because of it is, I wouldn't say it's not accurate. It's just not doing exactly what they want. It's kind of, saying what they're saying, but the interpreter, there's been a little bit of interpretation to it. It's not making any kind of clinical decisions for them. It's not making any kind of ordering of drugs, none of that kind of stuff. It's just, just documentation.

Host (39:43.901)
Is it capturing the medical terms? Yeah, is it capturing the medical terms? Okay, good.

Shawn Weldin (39:47.958)
It does do a pretty decent job. Yeah, it does do a pretty decent job of finding, there's always, it's not perfect. And that's why you have to, it says very much in our documentation, you have to read this thing in Victor, because you're, it's not, it's really, we're using it no different than we used Dragon. You know, because we had a, yeah, and we, and we used it for a long time and, and we had some really interesting discussions with doctors where they would, we had one doctor that,

Host (39:56.839)
You still have to reread it. You still have to review. Yeah.

Host (40:04.626)
Right. And Dragon's been around for years. The voice recorder.

Shawn Weldin (40:16.93)
didn't like the dead man switch, he to press and hold it. So he wanted to on off switch, which we did for him until he realized he was setting it down and not turning it off. And we were getting discussion about baseball and all kinds of stuff in the background into this person's chart. They always realize that 10 minutes later, and there's this 10 pages of discussion that he has to go back and delete back out of of the out of his note before he saves it. So it does a pretty good job.

Host (40:37.117)
10 pages of, of.

Shawn Weldin (40:45.442)
the future, the things they're showing as an option now are kind of amazing, the stuff that you can, they're demoing some of that. We never want to take the doctor out of the decision there, because I don't want a computer deciding I'm a health writer for me. want this doctor I'm seeing to decide that for me. But just giving them the tools, yep. Because it can look back through my chart and say, and the new version of some of the EHR stuff we looked at is,

Host (41:01.437)
But there's a lot of research that it can do quickly and correlate it can it can connect right?

Shawn Weldin (41:15.118)
You would talk to, hey, can you show me Sean's last five labs? And are just, yep, here you go. And so him click through and do a bunch of looking and try and remember, okay, your lab was this on this day and this on this day was down to here. And you can say, what was the correspondence and was there anything else corresponding with that drop in this lab? Yes, he was on this medication, which results in this. So the features that we're hopefully gonna get one of these days will save a lot of time for the providers. That's what a lot of this is is.

Host (41:19.025)
Yeah. Boom.

Shawn Weldin (41:44.078)
You know, the doctors have used this system, they, it's not, the charting still, it's still charting, but they're not saying they're typing. Yeah, it's still task. They're still definitely involved in it, but they're not sitting at the office at 6.30 at night typing up notes or dictating notes. Cause when they get done, they sit down, they can review what's been typed for them, correct it, make any additions they want to add to it. And that's done. So they're not spending 20 minutes voice dictating to this thing.

Host (41:50.801)
Yeah, it's still a task. It's still a time-consuming task.

Shawn Weldin (42:14.2)
that's basically doing the exact same thing that the system did on its own and just in that kind of keyboard time.

Host (42:22.768)
Yeah, makes perfect sense. That's excellent. And then you just figure out where the servers are or where they're keeping the data, right? Just to make sure that it's compliant. But I'm sure any organization that is offering something in AI to hospitals has worked through that before they go to market, one would assume. Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (42:37.964)
Yeah, it's.

Shawn Weldin (42:47.31)
Yeah, you'd hope. know with ours, there's supposedly nothing. I'll say supposedly because I have not verified this. But they tell us there's nothing stored on the local device. It's all stored in their cloud. there's nothing. So if someone steals the doctor's iPhone, they're not getting any of that data off of it because it's supposedly not there at all, which sounds awesome.

Host (42:54.34)
Nope. Good.

Host (43:05.2)
Right. So that's fantastic. That's really good. Yeah. So...

Shawn Weldin (43:10.414)
But even that, you know, we're looking at the same message for the nurses where the nurses can do some of these things with where gave the nurses where they can have a have a computer in the room and voice dictate what they're doing. Hey, I'm wrapping this bandage. I'm on the left arm at this time. This looks good. I'm doing this and it will type all that for them for them. So they're not, that's a lot of nursing documentation is just reviewing what you did. If you can voice talk yourself through that as you're doing it and it'll type up your notes for you and you say, yep. I gave this med at this time.

I verified it with the barcode on the med. I I rewrapped the arm, looked good. You know, wasn't any issue. Stitches look great.

Host (43:42.853)
Yeah.

Well, one would think it would really reduce mistakes, would reduce errors. So that will render itself or wind up being better, healthcare.

Shawn Weldin (43:55.028)
When you take one step out of the documentation process, you'd hope it would just take that, take a memory out of things, try remember what you did. know, the problem is our nurses, you can get busy and then it's four hours later, they're like, I can finally sit down and chart some of stuff. Or a big trauma, a big ER trauma where they're all hands on deck and they're not documenting stuff. They are writing things on their arms. They're pulling stickers off drugs and things and stick them on their shirts so can chart it later as they're trying to get this patient

Host (44:04.432)
Right.

Host (44:10.779)
Right.

Right.

Host (44:18.319)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (44:24.674)
coded, if they can just be yelling this stuff out to the system and have it document what they're doing, it's great. So there's major patient safety and patient staff safety things too that are awesome.

Host (44:32.357)
Yeah.

Wonder what the next evolution is going to be. Where do think it's going? Trying to look into the future. I are we just going to have like video tape of everything? Like, like I wasn't at the hospital that day. We're like, we have you on video doing it, but then you have like deep fakes, like as an issue there.

Shawn Weldin (44:41.964)
I don't know, it's a...

And that lawnmower was the same way.

Yep. with law enforcement, same way, we all carry body cameras now. When I first started, that was a figment of my imagination. You would never thought we'd all be carrying cameras on us. And now we've

Host (44:56.334)
Right.

Host (45:00.079)
Right.

But thank God you do because there's so many, I don't want to say lies, but there's so much like misconception to what happened. And then you're able to look at the tape and be like, oh, that's exactly what happened. Like this is what happened.

Shawn Weldin (45:08.458)
It's... But it's always...

Shawn Weldin (45:17.038)
We've had car cameras for 20 years. So that's always never been a problem. I didn't ever mind the car camera. I don't mind the body camera either. I've always said it's never hurt me. always only helped me. When I got to go back and someone says, hey, argument about something. Well, I got to, we just watched the video. It's not a secret happened. It's available to me. If you want to see it, we can pull it up and it just keeps all of us honest, which is not a problem for us, but it's.

Host (45:19.876)
Right. yeah, long time.

Host (45:25.594)
Hmm.

Host (45:35.118)
Yeah, the video's on there. Right.

Shawn Weldin (45:45.08)
turns, turns this she said, he said, whatever things into facts, which is nice just as in the backup, what we, what we know. So.

Host (45:49.572)
Documentation, yep.

That's that's phenomenal. So every industry has associations and health care has has hims and you're involved in the GPHA as well. What are are the what are some of the key benefits that hims offers as an organization to rural health care?

Shawn Weldin (46:16.152)
So HIMSS, we're part of the Kansas chapter. Kansas is kind of different because we have two chapters in our state. The Greater Kansas City chapter is the Kansas City, a good chunk of Missouri actually, kind of around the KC metro area, and we're everybody else. So we're almost all rural. Topeka's in ours, Wichita's in ours, Salina, Hayes, But the majority of us,

Host (46:21.37)
Correct. One right around Kansas City and then one for the rest of the state, right?

Shawn Weldin (46:42.478)
When you know Kansas and I would like to play the game of back and forth who has the most hospitals and critical access hospitals in the nation. Depends on who closes the least amount of hospitals. I think Iowa may be ahead of us right now. But we're going back and forth on that. some of the net when you know, I started, I started in 2008. My first, first kind of got started as IT director here. They said, Hey, there's this group of IT people. got to get to know them. There's they meet every once in while. So I got into that says in eight when I first started it at Kansas Hems.

just as a member and just got to meet other IT directors throughout the state. The networking is great. Our big conference we had back in April in Wichita that we had a big discussion on cybersecurity AI, HIPAA security kind of things going on right now with some of the major changes in the Fed level. Trying to get that cooperation, education, lot of education. HIMSS has some certifications you can get that are very well

you know, known in the healthcare industry as great qualifiers. So it's been a, I got involved with the board about 2013, I think, remember looking back, it's just kind of with sponsorships and events. And then I kind of went through the vice president, president cycle. I think I'm currently for another two weeks. I'm still the secretary until our officer elections are going on right now. So we'll be...

I'll be stepping back just into my events role starting in July.

Host (48:14.339)
That's great. Well, I mean, to me, there's so much. There's so much core knowledge that gets exchanged from those engagements because you're able to see, you know, hey, we were thinking of trying this application rolling out and you can talk to two other hospitals that tried to roll it out and it was terrible. You're like. Thank you for that, because now I'm not going to I'm not going to die on this hill, right? You know.

Shawn Weldin (48:36.302)
We do a lot of the networking, it's like, hey, you know, we're looking for a new pack system. hey, we're using, who's this? Oh, it was off. We really liked ours or we had a couple of people like, you know, we were looking at something different, but after feedback, we're gonna keep what we got. Everybody else seems to like what we got. It's apparently it's the best thing around.

Host (48:50.134)
Yeah, it saves you from right. Yeah, it's it's it's in and you'll try something that they haven't tried yet. So you're able to relay that. And I just think, you know, that that overall awareness and knowledge from the collaboration is so, so important and the education and stuff. The.

Shawn Weldin (49:10.958)
Yeah, didn't like so we were in the, you know, we have some really good, uh, you know, there's about 300 members strong in Kansas. Uh, not a lot of those are vendors that are joined at which we're happy to have anybody join. Uh, so we're a smaller chapter on our level, but we have about 80 to a hundred people that are, that are fairly active and want to get involved and want to, want to do things and come to meetings. And, uh, the networking is awesome. So, you know, Dave was at our meeting back in April and we had around 80 people that met 90 some people and,

Host (49:28.376)
Great.

Host (49:34.317)
Yeah.

Yeah, that was fun. I loved it. Yeah. I loved it.

Shawn Weldin (49:41.614)
Just good cooperation, good discussions, lots of good discussions. You you guys see me in an alien costume running around at our conference.

Host (49:45.443)
Well, and and I love and I love an event that even though we were presenting at it, like I learned so much like I just coming away from the event and talking to people that are in the trenches, seeing it, other people that are helping other organizations in other states, like it is just so interesting. Like just. Right. Yeah, it's a good point, right, where you feel alone, right?

Shawn Weldin (50:06.286)
And a lot of it is just knowing that you're not alone in some of the, especially in rural Kansas for like you're, I'm for, for till about three or four years ago, was the only, I was the only IT person here. So it was me. So if I know I'm like, Hey, I can, who can I call and, and talk about this thing that, will understand exactly what I'm talking about. And cause no one else that possible here till I hired my other guy working for me, uh, would understand. So it's like, Hey, I need to bounce my knees. I need to vent my frustrations about something IT related. I can't, no one else here is going to.

Host (50:15.842)
Yeah, right.

Host (50:27.36)
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Shawn Weldin (50:36.238)
they'll shake their head and nod and give me the, But I call Alicia or Scott or one of the other board members and say, hey, what do think about this? And we do a lot of projects, we're part of the Great Plains group too, we do a lot of stuff together. Like our Antivirus, we try to buy together as a larger group. We're looking at some office training, like, hey, let's do Intune together and learn how to do it together. And same for HIMSS we try to do education, we do Cyber Month every year where we do a

Host (50:38.316)
Yeah, but then no one's going to understand it unless they've been in the trenches.

Yeah.

Host (50:47.096)
Right.

Host (50:59.36)
Right. Yeah, it's good.

Shawn Weldin (51:06.382)
month long cybersecurity awareness kind of thing all October every year. And because we always say that when we're, when one of us is strong, is smarter, we all are a little stronger because it's, you know, because when one hospital gets hit and one hospital in Kansas gets hit, it affects a lot of us, you know, it affects our HIE. If, you know, if a hospital, I'm very lucky to have a hospital that's kind of close by me. I'm in, I'm on the side of the state with trees and people on the East side. Um, where I can go a hospital within half an hour, 15 minutes, about every direction.

Host (51:16.162)
Right, because it levels everybody up. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Host (51:29.954)
Right.

Shawn Weldin (51:36.542)
at West, you know, if one of those hospitals gets hit, the neighboring hospital is going to get it. And some of these, we've had one also our network that they didn't get, they didn't get cyber attacked, but one they worked with did. And it came over to them through some VPN tunnels. had legacy stuff that they were still using. Yeah. And it and it, and it will, got into their system. No, that one hospital got hit and they had some old legacy VPN set up for some old records they were still using. And it came across the VPN and got into them. So it's,

Host (51:39.19)
Yeah, it's ours. Yeah.

Host (51:49.152)
right and they got they had the burden of it yeah

Host (51:55.991)
Ugh.

Host (51:59.521)
and they got in from there.

Unbelievable.

Shawn Weldin (52:05.134)
And we are such a good collaborator, especially here in Northeast Kansas, we collaborate very well. We work very well with a couple of local hospitals that we share staff. We've got a surgeon we share between three of us. One hospital has a dermatology clinic that they own that we use. And we have another person down that is just credentialing for us, all three of us use together. So we're very collaborative. It's kind of funny, we talk to different people and think you guys need to stop fighting. All hospitals, we're very close, we're within half our each other. You guys can stop fighting with each other and start working together. It's like we do all the time.

Host (52:13.899)
Yeah, that's great.

Host (52:29.089)
Ha ha.

Host (52:34.271)
Yeah, all the time. That's great.

Shawn Weldin (52:34.35)
I could drive over to their hospital in half an hour and walk into their IT guy's room and say hi and we just talk breeze for an hour, no problem. If I got a problem with sending them data, I got a cell phone and call them up. Hey man, I can't fax you, what's going on? That kind of stuff. So we're very collaborative in Kansas. There's very few hospitals that are kind of the, because we can't be like that in Kansas. We're all too, we're too nice, but it's also we're just too rural.

Host (52:49.675)
That's amazing.

Host (52:57.601)
right.

Shawn Weldin (53:01.324)
It doesn't do us any good to have that silo. It like, I'm going to be my own thing. I'm going to do my own stuff. I don't want nobody else to talk to me. I want to do my own way. It just doesn't work.

Host (53:10.357)
No, exactly. Well, Sean, thank you so much for your time, my friend. I really appreciate it. We will have links to the hospital in the show notes and links to you and your LinkedIn. If anybody wants to connect with Sean, you always have good content, good insight. You're definitely one of the subject matter experts. Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (53:15.81)
Hey, thank you, sir. Yeah.

Shawn Weldin (53:31.518)
Kansas HIMSS is always a good research for anybody or HIMSS in general. There's over 56 chapters of HIMSS around the world, mostly in the United States, a couple in India. But I think if you ever want to get involved in Health through IT, HIMSS is a good place to start. There's a lot of local chapters, a lot of cool stuff.

Host (53:39.124)
Yep. Yep.

Host (53:46.258)
Absolutely. Very good. Well, thank you so much, sir. I really appreciate it. And you too, my friend.

Shawn Weldin (53:51.637)
Hey, hey, have a good afternoon.