Heath Fletcher (00:14)
Hello there, welcome to another episode of The Healthy Enterprise. If you're a returning listener, then thanks for coming back and if it's your first time, then welcome. My guest today is Stephanie Dorwart. She's a healthcare leader, productivity and workforce optimization expert, and she's a CEO of Altius Healthcare Consulting Group. Altius provides hospitals and healthcare systems across the country with specialized performance improvement and workforce optimization solutions. If you want to hear more about that, as I do, then let's get started.
Hello Stephanie and thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Healthy Enterprise and I'm looking forward to hearing more about Altius. And so let's start with, know, tell our listeners who you are and what you're doing and about Altius.
Stephanie Dorwart (01:06)
Hi, Heath. Thank you so much for having me today. I'm looking forward to sharing information, but my name is Stephanie Dorwart. I'm the owner and CEO of Altius Healthcare Consulting Group. And Altius primarily improves the financial and operational performance of hospitals and healthcare systems. And we do it by educating, elevating, and empower the leaders to make sure that they have the tools, the knowledge, the best practices, and all of the information to provide the highest possible quality of care at the lowest possible cost with an engaged workforce.
We've been working with healthcare organizations of all sizes. We do it from critical access, which are the very small hospitals that might have only five or 10 patients on an average daily census all the way to large academic medical centers. But our sweet spot has always been the community hospitals. And we have a passion for ensuring that every community across America continues to have a hospital that can meet the needs of the community that they serve.
Heath Fletcher (02:02)
that's amazing. And so how did you find yourself in this place? Like what drew you to be to do this? And you must have seen some sort of weakness or need. So ⁓ yeah, how did you get here?
Stephanie Dorwart (02:16)
So that's a great question. And if I may, I'm going to actually start from the beginning and just share the evolution of how I arrived at what I might provide. if they want to change careers and they're trying to think through what that might look like. So I started my career actually as a mathematics teacher and I taught high school calculus, statistics. And at one point in time, I started to think I really want to go back to school and I want to get my master's degree and I want to do something else.
Heath Fletcher (02:26)
Let's do that. ⁓
Stephanie Dorwart (02:46)
I knew that I did not want to be a superintendent. I did not want to be a principal. Didn't want to be a guidance counselor. So I started looking at what path I could take. And at that point in time, I went back to my roots where I was always the child that walked around with the stethoscope. And I always wanted to take the heartbeat of all of my family members. I was taking their pulse. was, I was illegitimately the pediatrician playing, you know, doctor with all of my family members, diagnosing their ailments. And so I back to
those roots and decided to get my master's of health administration. At the time, I was very lucky to also have a mentor that was talking to me about the industry. They said at the time it was late 90s, early 2000s. There's really a need for data in healthcare. We don't have a lot of it. We're not using benchmarks yet. We haven't evolved at the level other industries were. And I think your background in statistics and mathematics could really support things.
So that was how I went to get my Masters of Health Administration. How I ended up doing productivity was the first hospital that I was working at actually had a reduction in force the week prior to me starting there. And I was tapped on the shoulder very quickly to build out their productivity metrics and productivity system to make sure they never had a reduction in force again. And it was during that tenure at that organization, Heath, that I really...
started dissecting hospital operations and working with leaders and identifying what was working, what wasn't working, what other consulting companies were doing well, what other consulting companies weren't doing well, and where I thought there were gaps within the information and benchmarks. And that's how I ended up with Altius, really with a commitment to do things a little bit differently and provide hospital leaders with the information necessary to make a true difference in their community. So it's all about
quality of care, it's all about right person, right time, right place, right clinical outcome, but making sure you're also doing it with the right culture.
Heath Fletcher (04:48)
Right. And interesting that you actually had the ability to go on the inside first ⁓ as you know, actually employed by a medical center. And so you got to actually experience what it was like on the inside of the administration of a care center, right?
Stephanie Dorwart (05:09)
I did, and that experience was invaluable because I was able to interact with a lot of different experiences, know, operating room, laboratory, radiology, I was exposed to it all, both internally but also externally. I think during my tenure there, I interacted probably with 10 to 15 different consulting groups and or projects that were going on to really understand the makeup of how those worked as well. So it gave me a vast experience, both internal and external.
and the ability to actually see results within that organization by what we were doing, but also what did we need to do to expand? In healthcare, there's a lot of turnover. I'm sure you've heard that. You see all that. are tons of staffing shortages. And for years, we've heard the mantra, when you're talking about productivity, you need to do more with less. But that's kind of insulting when you say we need to do more with less. And it's really about how can we...
do more with the same and even more importantly, how can we do everything a little bit differently and take an innovative approach to our care models and innovative approach to our staffing? And that's really what we've been doing at Altius.
Heath Fletcher (06:18)
Yeah. And you must have seen that. long has Altius been operating?
Stephanie Dorwart (06:23)
So we're operating for about 10 and a half years, but technically we've been, I've been doing this now for about 21.
Heath Fletcher (06:29)
Right. So in that 10 years of Alteas, of you starting Alteas, mean, the changes in healthcare have been extraordinary. What have you seen, what's been the most impacting for you as a business owner, business leader? What have you seen in the last awhile that's been the biggest challenge for you?
Stephanie Dorwart (06:50)
Yeah, there's been so much. Yeah, I mean, we can talk about COVID all day.
Heath Fletcher (06:52)
Besides COVID.
my God. Yeah. It's in every conversation. It's just such an impact in our, in all our lives. I mean, it's a very interesting subject matter. think none of us are tired of it really yet because there's still so much learning to come from.
Stephanie Dorwart (07:10)
So let's stay on that for a minute because I think it's important. In healthcare, we've been a very methodical industry. Change happens very slowly. ⁓ Oftentimes it takes months and months and months to actually make a decision. And there's a lot of strategic planning and a lot of thought that goes into it, but COVID struck overnight and all of a sudden.
the discussions about telehealth that had been happening for decades. you know, if really, if you think about it, were changed overnight and hospitals immediately had to be able to go to virtual care and onboard things and, you know, go to situations where now we're checking patients in on their phones, where, you know, text messaging, there are a lot of different things that had to happen overnight where typically the innovation would have taken five years, three years. So overnight, there was a lot of, I'd say new,
Heath Fletcher (08:01)
Yeah.
Stephanie Dorwart (08:06)
technology that came to the forefront with telehealth and the ability to meet patients where they are. And we're still seeing those impacts today where we're starting to see some changes within the industry like virtual nursing care, where you might be on an inpatient nursing unit, but you also have virtual nursing care that's right there and available. So instead of you ringing the call bell and hoping like heck that someone was able to get you within the time period that you need, you press the button and you have a nurse right in front of you.
that's asking you what's wrong, what you need, and then basically disseminates that to air traffic control and gets to the appropriate party. If you need someone to assist you with going to the restroom, do you need food? Whatever that is, seeing innovation in those areas, and that's gonna change. But then of course, what everyone is talking about, and if we're talking about technology, is artificial intelligence. And the AI in healthcare is going to come up in a lot of different areas. I think we're gonna say, see it first.
Heath Fletcher (08:48)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephanie Dorwart (09:05)
and a lot of the discussions with how you actually can treat patients and diagnose things faster, but we're also seeing it in revenue cycle. Just the ability to bill patients appropriately at the right amount, so you're not going through three different billing cycles to get to the right amount. So there are changes that are happening, it's happening quickly.
Heath Fletcher (09:26)
That's very interesting. Yeah. The telemedicine is an interesting conversation too. It's, ⁓ I, I met with a fellow, Dr. J. Sanders, who is, he, he says he's not the father of telemedicine, but he is kind of like the, he was the, he was working for the founder of telemedicine in Boston back in the day, 1969 or something. Anyways. So that seed was planted way back then. And you're right about the pace of the way things go because
1969 it was it was the seed was planted but they still really didn't roll anything out until COVID. You know like it was kind of trickling out but I mean after 40, 50 years we still didn't really have our true telemedicine system but now it's yeah it's crazy that it takes that long. ⁓ And another thing too automation or did the digitization of healthcare too like you talk a lot about data and
and using data as your benchmarks and all that kind of information. mean, healthcare has actually been finally been digitized. That happened in the last 10 years too, didn't it?
Stephanie Dorwart (10:32)
It did absolutely, know, data digitized, having the information at the fingertips to actually understand all the metrics is relatively new to healthcare. It's only been been within the last decade. And so if you're thinking about productivity, you're thinking about benchmarks, it's a very new concept in healthcare. And if you take it a step further, when you're looking at data, data at its fruit, it's just information. And it's
that's numbers and we're always looking at variances to best practices. But the question is, what do you do with that data? And how do you use it in a way that's actually going to advance and improve care so that it can have a positive impact on the patients that are being served? So it's relatively new where you were actually able to document and find out how much time is it taking to actually do an operating room procedure? What is the length of stay in the emergency department down to the level that we have it right now or before it would literally take?
hours to get data out weeks to actually have someone crunch off it. Now, you can understand what that looks like in a few seconds. So it's a different environment right now. And when you're looking at that data and, you know, dissecting it all, now it becomes education. So there's that leadership, you know, component of actually understanding how do nurses take the information that's at their fingertips and actually use it to schedule differently, use it to staff differently, use it to make sure they have the right acuity levels.
on the patients and provide the right level of care.
Heath Fletcher (12:02)
And if I got this right, you also ⁓ teach people how to use data in your process to show them where their inefficiencies are. Is that correct?
Stephanie Dorwart (12:14)
That is absolutely correct. One of our biggest things that we've done to train leaders is really turn them into the CEO and CFO of their individual areas, if you will. So in order to be a great leader, regardless of what industry is, you need to have vision and you have to have strategy. So we work with each of the department level leaders to understand what is your vision for your department? How do you want to evolve? What are your KPIs? What are your metrics? What are you working to achieve?
how are you going to empower your team to do that? Because we need to enroll the team in the vision of the leader, even if it's the department leader. So you become the CEO and we train them how to do that. It's just like all of us with our habits stacking each day. How are you going to habit stack your department?
Heath Fletcher (13:00)
I like that habit stack.
Stephanie Dorwart (13:02)
How are you stacking, you know, what you're doing every single day so that you can be effective and reach your goals. And we also talk a lot about the fact it's not how you get the long term win, but how do you make a small step every day towards that goal? Just like we a lot of, you hear a lot about people that are making the decision to get leaner or get fitter, but it starts with actually putting your shoes on and going to the gym or putting your shoes on and walking.
So what's that first step that you can take as a leader to empower that change? And we teach on that and habit stacking. And then also whenever you're talking about the CFO, how do you build your budget? How do you actually understand the staffing levels? Do you know how to read your balance sheet? If not, we show them how to read the balance sheet. How do you develop a budget? How do you make those changes and how do you communicate it to your team? So it's really taking those core business processes.
and business knowledge and teaching it all to the individual leaders because we're really good, not just in healthcare, but probably a lot of different industries of taking a strong clinician or taking a strong technician, someone that's really good at their job, even if they're great at social media and saying, Hey, congratulations, you're excelling. Now, good luck. You're the manager and walking away and cricket. we've really taken it.
Heath Fletcher (14:25)
in crickets.
Stephanie Dorwart (14:28)
to heart that we've built out a leadership journey program. You that starts from understanding teamwork, understanding who you are as a leader, because you really can't lead anyone else unless you can lead yourself, understanding how to lead your team and build a team. And that's been, say what the differentiator is for Altius is that it's not just about productivity. It's not just about the benchmarks. It's truly about educating and elevating your team. And we do that through a leadership.
Heath Fletcher (14:58)
journey. Wow, amazing. ⁓ I mean, transitioning into a manager where you're taking that leadership role, I mean, you're really shifting their mindset because when you first roll this out, do you find that you get a lot of deer in the headlights? Like, wow. ⁓ You know, how am I going to take this on? I don't know if I'm built this way. I mean, this is all teachable. This isn't something that's innate in people.
How do you kind of get people over that hurdle where they're just like blindsided by, this is where I got to go now? What? I wasn't ready for this.
Stephanie Dorwart (15:36)
Well, let's let's be honest, we blindside people a lot whenever we we come in because we're we're typically sharing, you know, benchmarks and, you know, sharing performance levels. And everyone right out of the gate, Heath wants to be an A student. We know that all of us are wired. We want the A. So if we're sitting across from a leader and they don't have the quote unquote A.
then it becomes that education factor of exactly what it means and then the empowerment of how we can take them. And the most exciting thing is when we have those deer in the headlights in front of us and we're able to convert them into someone that's excited because it all starts with that first change. the way to do that is really talking to the leader of how do you overcome the challenges and how do you overcome the mindset and
Heath Fletcher (16:19)
Yeah.
Stephanie Dorwart (16:28)
We weaponize a lot of things, not just in healthcare, but in other places and productivity has been one of those things that's been weaponized. It's been used as a negative piece. It's been used as punishment. It's been used as here's your number. We want you to figure out how you're going to reach that. You're not where you're supposed to be. You're a C student. And it's really not that about that at all. You can have the variance to your target and still be the best leader possible. And just sharing that and then
Heath Fletcher (16:54)
Hmm.
Stephanie Dorwart (16:57)
How do you make the changes scale your systems? Do you have dysfunction that we need to address? Do you have gaps in care? Are there processes that we can influence? And working with that leader to identify the one thing they want to influence and change, and then partnering with them to change it. And when that happens, and you make that small improvement, regardless of what it is, and you celebrate it, everything changes. And you can apply that to any industry, any place that you want.
Heath Fletcher (17:23)
Right.
Stephanie Dorwart (17:24)
If you have that winning strategy hands down where you're partnering with a leader, working on that one step that they can change to influence and then celebrating it when they achieve it, you can accomplish anything as a team.
Heath Fletcher (17:38)
That's amazing. do you help? yeah, so that's part of your job. You help people to learn how to be leaders, how to inspire their team, how to encourage their team, train their teams. I also know too, there's a stage in your process that deals with accountability. That can be a difficult step, right? Is holding people accountable? there's,
There's magic to that somewhere. I'm sure you got something to share with that.
Stephanie Dorwart (18:13)
There is magic to that. And it starts with a very simple process. First, know, leadership at its core is a lot about relationships, but it all starts with trust. And, know, if the team does not believe the leader and does not trust the leader, because the leader is not doing what they say they're going to do, then anything else is going to fall on deaf ears, so to speak. you know, the first step
in the magic is you have to build trust with your team and you build trust with your team by committing and doing what you say with you're going to do. So if you're having one-on-ones with your team and they state, you know, something that, well, we can't meet this productivity target because we need a resource nurse to help us with our breaks. And you commit to having a resource nurse on those shifts and you can use this example or anything, then you have to have the resource nurse. So if you say you're going to do something, do it.
If you're saying that you're going to provide education, provide it, if you say that you're going to provide more orientation, provide it, because you have to do what you're going to say you're going to do first. And then with the accountability, when you put the goals in target or you hold those one-on-ones and you're actually saying, you've been working at this level, we're going to ask you now to elevate to this, you have to hold them accountable to it. So magic really is, if you set the target and you set the goal,
have the conversations about you have to check in about it all too often. targets goals are set at budget cycle. And if you use this as a personal example, we all set goals when January 1. In healthcare organizations, they set the goal with the budget. And then no one really pays much attention to the goal until it's time to go against the border, you're losing $1 million per month, or you're missing your budget by 20%.
or you don't have the volume that was budgeted, now you wanna know why. But true accountability starts with measuring it consistently and having those check-ins. And if you're off course a little bit, it's better to know that quicker so you can pivot. So it's just like anything else, if you're staring down the goal, pivot and adjust. Don't wait until you're nine months in and then wonder, why aren't we hitting our target? So accountability really begins there.
Heath Fletcher (20:36)
Because once you get the budget numbers, the damage is already done. But if you had milestones along the way that you could hit, then you could probably address some of those areas that needed repair before you actually got to the budget review.
Stephanie Dorwart (20:53)
Exactly. And if you're, if you're making those slow and steady improvements. goes back to what a championship teams do. Championship teams. If you look at anyone that's won the super bowl or any other Philadelphia Eagles this year, Kansas city chiefs last year, championship teams are never satisfied. They're always looking for every place that they can to become better, build a culture of excellence, develop excellence in every step that they do.
Heath Fletcher (21:14)
Right.
Stephanie Dorwart (21:23)
And productivity budgets, it's not any different. It's about that slow and steady improvement. What can we do better? Where can we grow? How can we provide a better patient experience? How can we reduce the amount of time it takes to get the test results back? And when you're looking at it from that lens, championship team, we want to be the best provider of care. We want to provide the best experience for patients. Things change because now you're approaching it from a different lens. You're looking at it for
you know, providing compassionate care, you're looking at how can we innovate and be different. You're not focusing so much on just the numbers, focusing on the numbers with the processes, with the people, and that's where the magic happens.
Heath Fletcher (22:01)
Right.
Yeah, yeah, I like that. I knew you were going to bring a professional sport analogy in there somewhere. It's usually baseball though, right?
Stephanie Dorwart (22:17)
It's
lot of times it's baseball. Actually hockey is my favorite.
Heath Fletcher (22:22)
is it? that's what you got hockey players behind you on the shelf. Yeah
Stephanie Dorwart (22:25)
I have hockey players behind me. have a Steelers logo on my chair if I would actually move so that you can see it. There it is. yeah, sports analogies always come naturally to me. We do a lot on training, you know, if you would say about your training season, spring training and the fact that you're going on the field, but you have to prepare to be there. So you're always training, you're always looking to get better. And a big issue with you know,
Heath Fletcher (22:31)
There it is.
Stephanie Dorwart (22:54)
I'd say personal development, leadership development is that continuous growth and making sure that you're always looking at what can I do better as a leader? Where can I grow? And if it's your organization, how can we change to meet our metrics?
Heath Fletcher (23:08)
Right. I mean, and probably there's a lot of reasons why we kind of get lost in, in our, we get lost in our day to day. We all get buried in the day to day. And sometimes some, you working on our leadership or working on our business, for example, is, that we just get lost in the day to day grind and there's always stuff coming at you. How do you teach people to kind of, you know, manage that, you know, and how to do you teach them how to like,
set time aside and how to do their leadership development and is that part of the training?
Stephanie Dorwart (23:41)
Yeah, there are a lot of ways that we provide services in there. Sometimes it's having conversations about what can you delegate? What should be on your plate? What should be on others' plates? Where are you taking leaders monkeys, so to speak, whenever you should actually be having them focus on that? So what are you delegating? What should you be automating? Are there tasks that are extremely manual right now that you can automate and make it easier? So we have conversations around that a lot.
And then honestly, at times it's actually talking about calendars. You would be amazed at the number of, you know, leaders in healthcare that if you were to look at the typical CEO's calendar right now, it would go from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. nonstop, starting with maybe a medical staff meeting at 7 a.m., followed by a board meeting Monday through Friday, no white space. So.
It's really hard to think strategically and problem solve without white space on your calendar for thinking. It's really hard when you're going from back to back zoom meetings and you're entering each zoom meeting and the first thing that you say is, sorry, I'm late. Sorry, I'm late. Sorry. Because there is not any room. we talk about schedule the meeting for 25 minutes. Schedule the meeting for 45 minutes. Don't go back to back and make sure you're blocking time.
Heath Fletcher (24:55)
God, yeah.
Right.
Stephanie Dorwart (25:10)
Also, schedule time to review your email. Otherwise, you're going to keep getting emails nonstop on the phones. We talk about turning off notifications, you know, in certain cases, people will get ahold of you if it's an emergency. But if you're constantly somewhere else, you're never present in what's happening. And that can lead to a very disjointed leader in a disjointed organization.
Heath Fletcher (25:36)
And how do you go from one meeting to another or one call from another? If you don't have time to process what the last meeting was just about. You know, I find that too. It's like, if you don't, you do a meeting, you gotta actually kind of think about what did I just talk about? Or what did we just decide on? And you know, I think that's great. Giving ourselves, giving space to ⁓ process things in between one thing and the other.
Stephanie Dorwart (26:04)
Yeah, another quick tip if I can is yeah, patient. We're talking about meetings. I think we have a habit of inviting every possible person to the meeting that might need to know something about the conversation is going to occur in that meeting instead of focusing in on who should be in this meeting because they're going to be directly involved in making a decision. Because if you have three or four people in the meeting, you can make a quicker decision and actually influence change and communicate the results to everyone else.
instead of having 20 people in the meeting and not actually accomplishing anything during that meeting time.
Heath Fletcher (26:41)
Right. That's a good point. Is this this part here, is this probably the most challenging for people or is there something else that they that they struggle with more?
Stephanie Dorwart (26:50)
I think, you know, if we're talking directly about productivity and the work that Altius does, I think the biggest challenge, you know, that we really face is, you know, believability in the information. So a lot of it goes back to the education and translating what the data means to them. So the biggest, I'd say, obstacle that we face is a lack of understanding about what the numbers are actually communicating, telling.
going back to everyone wants to be an A student. If you look at that and you find out you're a DRF student, right, or you're not necessarily the top, instead of approaching it with penalty or approaching as a negative, really looking at with curiosity, what's in the gap? Why are we operating with where we are and what can we do to change it? So it's really, if you approach it with curiosity, you can now start to dissect what makes it different. And I think that's the biggest challenge for people.
is we want to defend, know, we want to argue, we want to fight. No, the scale is wrong. Instead of saying, Oh, yeah, I ate, you know, the pizza over the weekend and the ice cream over the weekend, and the scale is not wrong. You know, I made the wrong decisions. So we want to argue the data instead of just accepting it, acknowledging that it's there. And then, okay, what can I do to influence and that's the biggest challenge.
Heath Fletcher (28:16)
Right. I could see that. it, and I are just acknowledging it as it's just data. It's not a reflection on you. It's not a reflection on your activities. It's, it's, it's just an outcome that we can now use to our advantage and say, okay, now we know how to, now we know how to improve. Yeah. I can see that being a tough, tough transition.
Stephanie Dorwart (28:38)
That's a tough transition. think the other challenge really is the biggest obstacle is to get people to actually do something and act and you know, change is hard. We're all, we're all set in our day to day activities and a change is very difficult. So just getting someone to decide to make a change, take that first move act because they're afraid of failing. They're afraid of being wrong. They're afraid of what happens if they make the wrong decisions. So
Heath Fletcher (28:48)
⁓ yeah.
Stephanie Dorwart (29:08)
we have to empower people to make change by saying, it's okay if you're wrong. If you make a decision wrong, I would rather that you make a change and move forward, move in the direction of what you believe is the right choice and that you can change. So act, take the step forward. And if you are acting and you're making change, you're going to accelerate, you're going to build momentum, you're going to hit the ball.
Heath Fletcher (29:21)
Hmm.
Stephanie Dorwart (29:35)
to bring him back in the sports analogy, you're gonna hit the ball on base and once you're on base, you can round. So you just act, accelerate and just move forward. There go.
Heath Fletcher (29:46)
Okay. Okay, let's ⁓ let's take a step back. I want to talk about you and your transition from a being a teacher or you went back to school, which is ⁓ a big change in itself. Also going from working in the healthcare to now running your own company. You're now you're now an entrepreneur. How did you make that shift? Because that's a big jump.
Stephanie Dorwart (30:12)
It is a big jump and the one piece that we didn't talk about in there is the jump is probably a little bit different for me than it might be for another entrepreneur from the standpoint of I actually purchased the company I was working for. Yes.
Heath Fletcher (30:27)
Oh, that's smart.
That's business model.
Stephanie Dorwart (30:31)
That is a business model. at the time that the former owner was retiring, he had the choice of either selling on the open market or selling to me. And we made the decision that it would be in order to maintain everything that was built because I had built the productivity service line under that company. And at the time, it was roughly 90 % of the revenue of that company that I would just take that on. we used to, when we first started, we were everything to everyone.
And I would say that one of the biggest things that we did is really develop what our expertise is and focus in on that we're productivity workforce optimization and leadership development. So my entrepreneurial journey was a little bit different. But if you had asked me, you know, years ago that I would I ever think I was going to be a business owner, I probably would have said no. But there then came a point in time where I really wanted the autonomy.
Heath Fletcher (31:23)
Right.
Stephanie Dorwart (31:30)
of making the decision to own my own future, but more important, I wanted to make a huge impact. I knew that there was a big opportunity to serve more organizations and more hospitals and healthcare systems, and ultimately wanted to influence those hospitals and be able to help them stay open. And that really became one of my core values. The community that I grew up with, we lost our hospital several years ago, it's been decades now.
So it's a core passion of me because I saw what happened to our downtown when that particular facility closed and also saw what happened when all of a sudden the emergency department that used to be within five minutes now, 20 minutes away, 15 minutes away. So living through that really made me much more passionate about what Altius can do to really change healthcare. So we have, I'd say a little bit of a
passion for rural communities. really like working with the rural areas. We like working with the smaller healthcare systems, but ⁓ we really focus on that across the board. So from my entrepreneurial journey, at some point I got the itch. And now I just love the ability to be able to grow and scale and build what we're doing.
Heath Fletcher (32:55)
So how, let's talk about that. How are you growing and scaling? What's your process for that?
Stephanie Dorwart (33:01)
So growing and scaling and marketing is always an interesting conversation. I think what I've learned while being an entrepreneur is one of the most effective ways to grow is to be able to tell your story and to share success of clients. So storytelling, I say, is probably one of our key components. We do a lot of LinkedIn lives.
So we're providing free education as well so that organizations that do have a need can source and understand, taste the ice cream if you will, of what we're offering and know what our lessons is and what our approach is before they actually purchase and buy. So we have found that being able to tip your toe into the water a little bit or dip your toe into the water and taste that is a way for us to market.
And then social media, you know, we do a lot on LinkedIn because that tends to be the platform for us. But email isn't dead either. we do email journeys. So we have email blast, we have a blog on our website, which is actually pretty popular. So you know, we update that monthly. So I'd say we're traditional in our marketing approach and growth strategies with a little bit of a flair of, you know, some newer techniques.
Heath Fletcher (34:00)
Not at all.
And you not necessarily exclusively rural, but you kind of like to focus on help supporting rural areas, rural communities and organizations. Smaller, businesses or are you, are you sort of flexible?
Stephanie Dorwart (34:34)
We are flexible. We support all healthcare organizations and all hospitals. We just have a passion for making sure that we are there to support rural communities. At times, I think sometimes they are left a little bit behind, especially if they have 100 FTEs or 200 FTEs they're very small. So even though they're not our primary, I'd say market, we definitely provide services there. Our traditional markets really are community hospitals.
Heath Fletcher (34:59)
Right.
Stephanie Dorwart (35:01)
might have one to 10 hospitals within the healthcare system, and that tends to be in the market. But there are a lot of rural hospitals, and unfortunately right now, many of them are in danger of closing. There are reports out there that range anywhere from 300 to 700 are at risk of closing over the next five to 10 years, depending on which report you read, which study you read.
So we definitely have a commitment to doing everything in our power to helping to support them and keep their doors open.
Heath Fletcher (35:33)
Yeah, that's potentially devastating for a lot of those communities and infrastructure. Like he says, I've heard that before when the hospital closes, the town closes.
Stephanie Dorwart (35:45)
Yes, when the hospital closes, the town closes. right now there's a lot of conversations happening throughout what's going to occur within these organizations. when you make cuts, you might think on a balance sheet, we need to cut something somewhere, wherever that is. But when you make those cuts, some of these communities, means services are going to end. It might be that their labor and delivery service ends. It might be that some of their operations
are no longer able to be there or it could be the doors close as you mentioned entirely. So it's not just cutting dollars, it could be cutting actual services and closing and shuttering the facility. ⁓
Heath Fletcher (36:28)
And Tommy and Telemedicine can play a role in that as far as ⁓ providing some of that support in those communities and certainly in ⁓ yeah, particularly the rural ones where there is no other healthcare support, but it's not it's not the same as a hospital shutting down. That's for sure.
Stephanie Dorwart (36:45)
Correct. And there's some really exciting conversations that are happening right now in healthcare, you know, about things like micro hospitals. How do you take the traditional footprint and shrink it down to a level that's sustainable? So, you know, a micro hospital that can, you know, provide the services the community needs, that's starting to come to the forefront. There's also a lot more talk about preventive care, you know, and making sure that we're moving the needle and actually focusing on the chronic care management, preventive care.
There's a lot of excitement happening there and solutions that are coming to the.
Heath Fletcher (37:19)
⁓ interesting. Yeah, you must have your finger on the pulse of what's coming. what do you see coming? What are some of the big changes you see coming in healthcare ⁓ from your perspective?
Stephanie Dorwart (37:29)
So I think one of the biggest changes in this might be a little controversial, ⁓ perhaps, is I do think that... Yeah, we're gonna go there. I do believe that we are going to see insurance companies and providers in that space start to cover things in the preventive care with more nutrition education. I think we're gonna see more prescriptions for food, more prescriptions for healthier food.
Heath Fletcher (37:38)
Well let's do it anyway.
Stephanie Dorwart (37:59)
I think there's gonna be larger coverage of things on the exercise, fitness, how do you take care of yourself? How do you prevent this ⁓ realm of things than there is now? Right now, basically, we have a sick care system. know, something happens, now you're diagnosed, you're prescribed a pill, you're sick, but I truly believe it's going to shift where we're focusing on how can we prevent things and...
there's a lot of exciting, you know, testing that's happening. And it won't be too long before if you wanted to, you could have the DNA test that basically tells you everything that you need to know which drugs are going to react to your system. Well, which drugs are not going to react to your system? Well, what food is good for you, what food is not good for you, how you need to X that is coming. And I think the biggest innovation that we're going to see
is that hospitals and healthcare organizations will start to be in some of those markets a little bit more. There was a number that came out, I think earlier this year, that stated that for the first time, and I don't know the number off by heart, but I believe for the first time, the amount of money that Americans spent out of pocket on things like healthcare, ⁓ infrared saunas, grounding mats,
supplements that they're taking on their own. If they're seeing a physician that's not covered by their insurance because they're more of a holistic functional medicine doctor because they're in that model and they're paying out of pocket. People are paying $10,000 per week. For the first time, that number collectively was larger than what we spent on pharmaceutical.
Heath Fletcher (39:37)
Yeah.
Is that right? That is good news actually. It means there's a shift in people, the way people are thinking about. They're not worrying about, ⁓ where's the nearest hospital so that when I get older, when I get sick, I've got somewhere to go. They're thinking about how to avoid that scenario altogether.
Stephanie Dorwart (40:12)
100 % and it's exciting to know that's occurring because people are willing to pay out of pocket to have the comprehensive blood panel done Insurance won't cover They are willing to go out of pocket and have the Comprehensive MRI if they that's something that they need to have done so that they can see what problems are that the insurance will cover So there's a lot of those exciting things and not everyone needs an MRI. So I'm not suggesting that
Heath Fletcher (40:21)
Right.
No, no, no.
Stephanie Dorwart (40:39)
But it is exciting to know that people are willing to make these decisions. I think what we're learning is that we care more about our health than people might want to believe. So when we're educated, we'll make the right decisions. And I think that's an important shift that we're seeing.
Heath Fletcher (40:59)
Yeah, I think you're right. Education is a big part of that. Um alright. Well, I'm now uh what's the future for Altius? What's your vision? Where do you wanna see this? Uh where do you wanna see Altius go in the next five years?
Stephanie Dorwart (41:14)
Yes, so Altius is really moving forward. Our vision is to focus on making sure that we're taking all of the information that we put together for productivity and workforce optimization and dissecting it into a way that leaders can understand. So our vision and future really is to make sure that we're helping all of our clients balance their staffing resources and needs.
with their operational financial challenges and turn them into the best possible organization that they can be. So, worth building out the culture of excellence built on a foundation of productivity and workforce optimization.
Heath Fletcher (41:52)
amazing. I love the way you said that. And actually, I just kind of made this association is that you're actually helping. You're helping with prevent almost preventative preventative health itself within the administrative body of organizations, you're actually helping or teaching them to be more holistic and work towards and prevent obstacles from hitting them in the future. So I think that's very great.
Stephanie Dorwart (42:22)
Great point, exactly. We're diagnosing the problems and preventing them from ever getting into the situation that they need a reduction in force. Our goal is to make sure that our clients never have to have a layoff and preventing them from ever being in a situation that they have to consider cutting services or shutting their doors.
Heath Fletcher (42:42)
amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing this ⁓ journey with the listeners. Is there anything else you'd like to share that we haven't covered today that you wanted to mention?
Stephanie Dorwart (42:55)
You know, I don't think so. I think that we covered everything and I hope that all the listeners found this valuable. And I think I will just close with just a thought that, know, whatever, regardless of what you're doing, start with your vision, understand where you want to go, what that framework is, and then just take one small step towards it. And if you do that every single day, you're going to be in an amazing situation.
Heath Fletcher (43:21)
Great advice. And they can reach you at altishcg.com is your website, right? Altishcg.com. And anyone can reach out to you on LinkedIn as well. can find you there.
Stephanie Dorwart (43:33)
Absolutely, I'm very active there and that's probably the best place to reach me.
Heath Fletcher (43:37)
Amazing. Thank you for your time Stephanie for being on this episode and I look forward to see where Altius goes in the future and we'll maybe chat again.
Stephanie Dorwart (43:46)
Sounds great Heath, it was my pleasure to be here.
Heath Fletcher (43:51)
Okay. Well, I think we hit that out of the park. There's another baseball analogy for Stephanie. awesome to hear what she's doing, to help organizations in the healthcare space to become more efficient and more productive in their operations. she's working inside to create a more holistic and healthy environment on the inside of the organization. so they can be less reactive and more proactive and more preventative in their.
⁓ business functions. If you want to learn more about Altius visit their website at altiushcg.com or you can reach out to Stephanie on LinkedIn Stephanie Dorwart her link is down below I believe somewhere down there do you see it anyway thanks for listening again and stay healthy and we'll talk again soon bye for now