The Backstory

NEW FEED: We've got Kim & Tim on a separate feed, so be sure to subscribe here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kim-tim-running-through-the-red-tape/id1607899100 This week the team shows up to talk NFL. Kim Fox, Tim Stewart and David Shifrin are all football fans so the news of recently-fired Dolphins coach Brian Flores' lawsuit against the NFL and three of its teams caught our attention. Th...

Kim Fox is a partner here at Jarrard and heads up our Regional Practice. Tim Stewart is a senior vice president in our National and Academic Practice. Here's what we've got for the conversation today: A quick intro about the Supreme Court's ruling on vaccine mandates, which partly clarified things but also added to the swirl of confusing healthcare laws, guidelines, suggestions and other ideas. Th...

Last week, we did a quick poll of our audience to get your impressions on health misinformation - What the most significant pieces of health misinformation are and the platforms most responsible. We're rolling that feedback together with insight from our team into a special report that will be coming out shortly. Kim Fox, a partner at Jarrard Inc. and our Regional Practice lead helped to push us i...

Earlier this year, we at Jarrard published a special report on health equity and diversity, equity and inclusion work within healthcare providers. Separately, but roughly in parallel, a team at our parent firm, The Chartis Group, in partnership with the National Association of Health Services Executives, developed a research piece on similar issues and created a health equity maturity model for he...

Today we're checking in with Reed Smith, our VP of digital here at Jarrard, to talk about a recent study showing that consumerism remains high on the list of providers' priorities but has slowed down just a little over the past year. Wonder why that might be. The theory we're working from is that digital tools and small things to increase patient satisfaction and drive consumerism forward might be...

This week, a study was published in JAMA Open Network showing that rural hospitals acquired by larger systems between 2009 and 2016 had lower mortality rates in several areas between. It's a valuable dataset showing how consolidation and a relationship with another system can help to improve care. But before hospitals start running around, waving the study in the air as vindication, we thought it...

Buckle up. This is Kim Fox, Tim Stewart and David Shifrin trying to figure out why people don't just take that extra little beat to think about how what they're about to say (or not say) is going to be received by the people hearing it. Check out all the best healthcare communications and marketing, plus a regular roundup of the stories that matter most to healthcare providers today, by subscribin...

We published a special report looking at the rising tension between payers and providers. It has insight from our network and our team, as well as survey results from the public on where they pin the blame for the high cost of healthcare - insurance companies, hospitals, doctors or something else. We also spoke with Wendell Potter a former insurance company communications executive turned healthca...

This week, we at Jarrard were very proud to announce that Lee Aase had joined us in an of-counsel role. Lee just retired after more than two decades at the Mayo Clinic where he was genuinely a pioneer in digital tools and social media for healthcare. He'll be working with Reed Smith, our VP of digital, along with our digital team and of course our clients to build their digital strategies for the...

MedCityNews published an article this week titled The Inconvenient Truth of Convenience. It points out that the remarkable convenience provided by telehealth can lead to negative consequences, as well. It then goes on to talk about other examples of this and what providers can do to limit the potential problems. As we were discussing this article, Yolanda James brought up her grandmother and also...

President Biden came out swinging against social media companies last week saying they were responsible, not just for the misinformation that's being posted on their sites, but also the consequences of that misinformation. Not long after, on CNN and a couple of other outlets, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy backpedaled a bit without exactly absolving the tech companies. So there's politics, social me...

Our CEO David Jarrard, and Partner and M&A lead Isaac Squyres confer on the flood of news this week – mostly critical – about hospitals and consolidation. That includes the frontline documentary called The Healthcare Divide and the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing digging into consolidation and antitrust. In that hearing all but one participant – so that’s bipartisan consensus – expressed concer...

CVS has joined Walmart by placing mental health professionals in a few of its HealthHUBs across the country, with plans to expand. It's much needed competition and increased access and de-stigmatization for mental health and should represent a win for consumers. At the same time, it creates some challenges for traditional providers and there are still a number of questions for CVS. Here, Jarrard I...

Reed Smith, Vice President of digital strategy at Jarrard Inc. wonders why in the world healthcare providers wouldn't want to manage their online reputation. And then he explains how healthcare providers can manage their online reputation - things like Google and Yelp reviews. It's hard work but worth it to avoid getting swamped by negative reviews and, worse watching patients leave for another ho...

Over the last year, healthcare marketers have run from thing to thing to keep up with the constant changes at their organizations. There's been no time to pause for breath and look out past today. But that needs to happen now, especially as attention is returning to the patient experience and digital tools, along with patient acquisition and retention. So we caught up quickly with Reed Smith, our...

Spring is here, vaccines are out of freezers and in people's arms, public venues are reopening and Krispy Kreme is handing out free donuts. Meanwhile, the CDC is still telling us to keep our masks on, the headlines look very pre-pandemic (and not in a good way) and new COVID-19 cases are twitching back up. So...are we allowed to be optimistic yet? In the latest with Kim Fox and Tim Stewart, we get...

We're talking about price transparency. There's been increased attention on the topic as we come up on three months since implementation of the new CMS price transparency rule and as the industry and the media starts to shift away from the pandemic a bit to look at what comes next. We're seeing increased attention on whether or not providers are compliant with the new rule. And James Cervantes, as...

Today we're catching up on healthcare mergers, acquisitions and partnerships with CEO David Jarrard and Isaac Squyres, a partner in our regional practice and leader of our M&A team. What does consolidation look like post-COVID-19 and under the Biden administration? David and Isaac are watching this issue closely, as is our network of brokers, transaction attorneys and strategy experts across the c...

A couple of weeks ago, we ran a conversation between Molly Cate, founding partner and chief innovation officer at Jarrard, Dr. Mark Wenneker, a partner at The Chartis Group and primary care internist who leads Chartis' behavioral health practice, and Dr. Danny Mendoza, a psychiatrist with the Beth Israel Lahey Health System and an expert in behavioral health integration. In that conversation, we l...

This conversation with Dorian Harriston, associate director of brand strategy at Cedars-Sinai, started out as an invite to talk about vaccine related outreach to minority and underserved populations. We do have a blog post that goes into some of Harriston's written answers to those questions, but this went much further, much deeper.  We talk about how Cedars-Sinai has created an environment over t...

Sometimes the title of a podcast picks itself. Today, our two favorite outspoken insiders, Kim Fox, and Tim Stewart, take on the vaccine rollout. It's been rocky, and there's plenty of blame to go around, but there's still time for hospitals, health systems and other healthcare providers to swerve around the potholes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are living in a pivotal moment for healthcare organizations as they face an unprecedented, existential threat.  Today’s healthcare leaders – from clinicians to executives – face a vexing challenge: how to successfully lead their organizations, patients and communities through a global pandemic. There is great opportunity in making changes to fulfill their missions and provide care and support t...

Our CEO, David Jarrard, and Michael Peregrine of McDermott Will and Emery spoke in December about the relationship between hospital CEOs, their legal teams and their boards. The focus was on the increasing expectations for healthcare CEOs to be visible and out in the community as public figures, speaking to important issues of the day. Now, as we're well into the new year, Michael and David take s...

Last week, word came out that Haven, the disruptive healthcare collaboration between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase was not going to disrupt anything. Three years after its inception, the project was shutting down. Despite everything else going on in healthcare, the announcement made pretty big headlines just as it had when it was launched. Why was it big news? And is there some la...

David Jarrard, CEO of Jarrard Inc. and Michael Peregrine, Partner at McDermott Will & Emery, discuss the changing environment for healthcare CEOs, the expectations on leaders to take a stand and how they can do that in a transparent way without stepping across legal lines. Hospitals and health systems are facing a new landscape today with social change and the COVID-19 pandemic, so the relationshi...