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Episode 124: Approaching Analytics and AI in Nursing with Curiosity and Confidence

August 14, 2024

Episode 124: Approaching Analytics and AI in Nursing with Curiosity and Confidence

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August 14, 2024

Episode 124: Approaching Analytics and AI in Nursing with Curiosity and Confidence

August 14, 2024

Joni: 

Hi, this is Dr. Joni Watson. Welcome to The Handoff, the podcast for nurse leaders, brought to you by Works, the technology empowering next generation health system workforce management. I'm thrilled to introduce our episode guest. 

Joining us is Joe Squire, the director of Analytics and Data Science At UPMC, Heart and Vascular Institute in Pittsburgh. Joe has a remarkable track record of helping healthcare organizations like UPMC harness their data to improve healthcare outcomes. One of his notable achievements includes leveraging data to lower cardiac surgery mortality rates by more than 2%, securing a ranking in the top 15%. 

Nationwide, Joe is a master at leveraging data centralization analysis, visualization and process automation to drive significant results. He's implemented and engineered an enterprise analytics solution that centralized clinical registry data reporting, management and billing, resulting in over $600,000 in annual cost savings. 

Under his leadership, teams have experienced 100% growth over three years with zero turnover, a testament to his exceptional leadership and team building skills. But that's not all. Joe has also played a significant role in securing over $1 million in grant funding through data-driven applications, and has streamlined work processes for multiple teams.

Within UPMC, Joe's passion for data, continuous learning and innovative solutions is truly inspiring. He's here to share his insights, experiences, and the exciting possibilities that data brings to healthcare. Joe, welcome to The Handoff. 

Joe: 

Thanks, Joni. It's great to be here.

Joni:

Absolutely, glad that you're here. I love the opening, “the exciting possibilities that data brings to healthcare.” I don't say that too often, but I'm excited to do that today with you, Joe, because you really are a master at all of the things that we've mentioned. So Joe, you have a unique nursing leadership role at UPMC. Tell me, how did you get into data analytics?

Joe: 

Yeah, so it was kind of a roundabout journey. I mean, as any good story starts, it starts with wanting to pursue some pie in the sky dream and a girl. And so coming out of high school, basically I want to be the sound engineer for Pixar. And so started pursuing audio engineering and was quickly informed by, in the very first class that I had at university, that I was pursuing a degree where there was no degree required. So I said, I need to reevaluate my life. And at the time I had just broken up with my high school sweetheart and said, “let's find a degree that is at the college where she is at so I can chase her.” And that was kind of what inspired me to pursue nursing because it all kind of lined up the pie in the sky dream and… the girl did not work out…but everything else worked out really well.

Joni:

Oh my goodness, Joe. 

Joe: 

So, I went through nursing school and the intention over that course of study was to go back to anesthesia school after I graduated. And so I graduated, got a job in the ICU and quickly moved to try to, in the next couple years, move into anesthesia school and those, we'll talk about it in a little bit, why those dreams didn't pan out, but ended up burning out in the ICU and then getting a job within an OR. And at the time I was sharing 24/7 call with one other individual. So we were seeing about 2000 hours of call a year, and it was a terrible work-life balance. And my wife and I had our first kid at the time. And so it was really just me trying to find better work-life balance at that point. And ended up in a role that was basically glorified data entry with the clinical registries, which are basically collections of data around procedures or disease processes.

Well, needless to say, coming from some pretty high speed nursing areas with the CT ICU and our OR, I got a little bored of entering data within the first couple months. And so I began asking the question, well, we're collecting all this data, so what are we actually doing with it? How can we make changes? What can we use it more for? And so those questions kind of started this snowball effect of learning how to leverage data, learning how to work with data, learning how to operationalize data, learning how to get people to understand the data and make changes with the data. And building on that over these years, I've been fortunate enough to be put in positions where I've been able to lead teams and help them and help our group really work better with data and be able to make changes and really affect what matters most is patient outcomes and seeing more patients go home alive.

Joni: 

Yeah. Wow, Joe, that's pretty powerful. Your story reminds me again just how important the voice of the nurses, the voice of clinicians are in all processes and aspects of healthcare. It's really powerful. You also mentioned burnout and your story is quite compelling. Your first job you said led to significant burnout due to the extent of physical and emotional harm. And you're certainly not the first nurse to experience that and you won't be the last. Would you be willing to share some vulnerable moments and maybe discuss the early warning signs and what advice you would give to others experiencing similar challenges?

Joe: 

Yeah, just to clarify, it wasn't my first job. I spent a year at a community ICU, and then I moved into a Quaternary Care CT ICU. So, there was a significant difference in culture, which was a shock. Number one, when you go from a community hospital to a downtown flagship hospital that's doing the biggest and baddest cases kind of deal. And so that culture shock was one thing. And because of that, you basically found a culture, and I'm still involved with this, with the same unit today and in a different capacity. And the culture has changed significantly, which has been part of the turnaround that we've seen there, a large part of it I should say. But at the time it was very much, and we see this a lot, the nurses eat their young, and that was kind of a trickle down from the way that the residents and fellows were treated and the way that the attendings talked to each other.

And on top of that, you're dealing with a lot of death and morbidity and you are seeing these kinds of things over and over every day. We had individuals who, so lung transplant, we did a lot of transplants and lung transplants in particular, and you'd see a lot of these individuals kind of languish and come in and out of the ICU and develop relationships with them. And then one day they just end up dying. And you have more traumatic experiences where say an ECMO cannula gets pulled out somehow, or we had an individual who pulled out their VAs, we had percutaneous VADs in somebody and they pulled them out one night and they just exsanguinate. And you're sitting there trying to push blood as fast as you can, try to keep volume, but you have a huge hole in your heart basically, and you're not going to survive that. 

And so I think it was a combination of that culture and a combination of just trying to deal with the stuff that you see, that it's that stuff that people don't know, they don't have anybody to really talk to about. Everybody deals with that stuff differently. I actually am still in contact with a nurse who started the same time as me in that unit.

They actually said– I didn’t even bring it up– but they actually said the other month, “I don't understand what this burnout is. What is burnout? Why are people burning out?” And I think it's just the way different people process the world. And I think, and that's okay. You can process the world in a way that you're more sensitive to these things. And as a male, it's hard to admit that you can frame it in a way where you say, “I was not tough enough to deal with this.” And yeah, I wasn't. And I didn't really realize it until a couple events happened. One of them was when I was at a friend's bachelor party and we had been drinking and I started talking about all the deaths that I had seen, and the next morning I got weird looks and comments from people that said, “you were really worrying us last night.”

And on top of that, going to work, it was just, you dreaded it. It wasn't a simple Sunday night scaries kind of thing. It was to the point where one night I was driving to the night shift and I said, “If I take this car and I run it into the cement barrier, I won't have to go to work tonight.” And so those kind of things kind of triggered like, okay, I really need to move on and figure out what I'm doing because, and at the time I didn't call it burnout, it wasn't on my radar, and I didn't really think that I had been affected that much until after I left the position. And it took me two to three years after leaving that position to even drive the route that I would take to work to not have a sinking feeling in my stomach.

And that's concerning. And that's when I realized, okay, there was an issue. And reflecting back on that, I think kind of the early warning signs that you're going to see is really that emotional and part of that emotional exhaustion is why I did not pursue anesthesia school because I basically said, if anesthesia is anything like this experience here, because this is where everybody's like, oh, you have to go to this unit and get this experience so that you can get an anesthesia school. This is the best unit to be on. I said, I don't want any part of it. And I distinctly remember one day getting an email from the anesthesia school I'd started applying to, and they said, “Hey, we need you to finish your application.” And I said, Nope, I don't want any part of this. And that's, I remember just kind of passing on that.

So I think on top of that, just your detachment. So you just start developing a very cynical attitude towards work. You just feel detached from the patients. You feel detached from your colleagues and just apathy. So whether it's apathy for what you're doing at work or apathy in your daily life with things, those kinds of things, they happen, right? They're pretty generic and they happen with anything in life. But I think if you see a pattern that continues, it's really one of those things that you kind of have to pay attention to. And I think a good way of being able to identify whether it's just a normal up and down or it's something that's more systemic is having a solid sounding board. So whether that's having friends that you can talk to who call you out and say, look, something's wrong or a significant other or family, I think that's hugely important.

I think everybody talks about self-care and that's different for everybody. For me, it's really just what are the essential things I need to take care of my body. Now it's become, what are the essential things that I need to take care of my body through the day? So I like to be able to work out, so you prioritize those things that make you feel better, make you better able to function and not neglect those things because easy to, especially as a nurse who you work 12, 14 hours in a shift and you get home and you get the quickest thing to eat, you throw on the TV, you just lay around, you go to sleep. If you're working the night shift, that's a whole other story about how terrible your sleep patterns are.

Joni: 

Yes. 

Joe: 

I think in the end, really obviously, professional help if you need it, but in the end it's really about finding a healthy work environment. And that's tough in healthcare, to find a work environment that's supportive and you don't have any of those systemic issues that we constantly talk about, whether it's nurses eating their young or patient violence or clinicians from different services just berating you or treating you poorly. But they do exist. I will say that I loved my OR job after I moved to that job. It was truly a team effort among all different practices, and you were well respected and it was a fantastic job. And if it hadn't been for the call, I don't know if I ever would've moved on from that. I mean, I probably would've. I'm not content with being still, but it was a fantastic job to be part of.

Joni: 

Wow. Joe, first, thank you for your vulnerability in sharing that with us. That's a lot, and I appreciate your authentic vulnerability. There have actually been a couple of headlines of nurses taking their own lives within the last several months from exhaustion or culture or multiple things. As you mentioned, burnouts at that level are a result of multiple things. And so you also touched on a really pivotal piece that I personally didn't learn until later in my career is knowing yourself and making decisions that really kind of shift the trajectory of your career by knowing what you want your life to look like. So kudos to you for really thinking about what you want your life to look like and making that decision. Because I mean, declining anesthesia school, that's a pretty big deal for a lot of nurses. That takes a lot of introspection and understanding of yourself, which I think is a leadership skill in and of itself, honestly.

And so like I mentioned, you weren't the first to have this experience and think those thoughts and you certainly aren't the last. And so for any listeners who are experiencing the same mental and physical symptoms, for anyone who's listening, struggling with thoughts of harming yourself, I want to encourage you that your life matters. It does. As our colleague, please take a step and either call or text 988 for crisis support so you can regain control over this moment, and your life matters. It really does. So Joe, I am so thankful that you shifted gears and found something that you were curious about. And you, you mentioned that you kind of never settle, you're always pushing forward. You taught yourself to leverage data effectively, which is kind of mind blowing to me. Can you walk us through that self-learning process and how it propelled you to implement change in your workplace?

Joe: 

Yeah, I think the key to how I learned and how I got to where I am is really being problem focused. So in learning analytics, the curiosity that I would have would naturally seek out problems, and I would find that problem and be like, “okay, how can we solve this problem,” whether it's using data or whether it's using a process change or whether it's doing something else. And if I didn't know the answer, I would just teach myself. And I think there's a lot of people out there that have, I heard it termed one time as “multi potentiate.” And so it just means that there are people out there who don't have just one calling in life and they're frequently trying out different things and trying new things. And I firmly fall into that camp and it's evident with my hobbies. I pick up something new, I try it, I go pretty deep on it and I'll move on eventually.

And so it's very similar to me and how I've gotten to be where I am when you go from wanting to be a sound engineer, to being a nurse, to being an analytics professional. And so I think that problem focus and developing skills to solve specific problems has really been something that's that I have a strength in, but it's also a way that I taught myself analytics. And so understanding, okay, if we have raw data, how do we get it to somebody in a form that is information that they can understand? And so you naturally learn how to make charts and graphs, and as you move down that road, you're starting to think, okay, surely this stuff exists in a better format. And then you discover data warehouses and you discover, okay, how do I get the data out of the warehouse? And you say, oh, there's this language called SQL that you can magically pull data and make it in a way that is great to work with.

And then you start thinking, okay, well there's all these people talking about this, these advanced analytic techniques. How do we predict things? How do we cluster people to understand how they interact with the health system? And so you start learning different techniques using different languages like Python, and so it's kind of a snowball effect. Once you try to start solving these problems, it just naturally grows on itself. And so I think nurses really have this unique, we have this unique position in healthcare where whether it's good or bad that we're seen as people that can fill holes, whether it's at the bedside or away from the bedside, and especially in large health systems, we've been able to work ourselves into roles that wouldn't exist otherwise. So there's a lot of quality positions, there's a lot of informatics positions that nurses can move into, and those all deal with data, and it doesn't have to be a specific, if you want to get into data, you're interested in, okay, what is this data or what is this analytics thing that I'm talking about working in these roles, you deal with data and you can then apply analytics to that data, and if it's something that interests you after doing that, then you can keep moving down that path.

That's really how I got involved. I moved into essentially a quality role, a data entry role basically, and it was something that I grabbed onto and ran with. It's also difficult because a lot of these roles are uncharted territory. So it's things, a lot of what I've done has been very much creating roles that were never there and defining that role as it's been created. And that can be frustrating sometimes, especially when you don't have a clear direction and you don't have exactly a way forward with certain projects. And so that's also a downfall to this, but it's also a huge upside. You can be very creative. And so that kind of leads me to one of the reasons I love analytics is because it marries the right side of your brain with your left side. Growing up, I was in a garage band, I did musicals, I was very artsy, photography, stuff like that. But I always knew, and I was good at math as well, but I always knew that my right brain would never let me go full, left brain.

I could never go full crazy artist, which is what you're required to be basically to be the best of the best. And so I think nursing was an attraction for that reason. So it's an art and a science, but analytics I think is even more so because there's a lot of creativity you can bring into analytics while also using the analytical side of your brain as well. I think there's, for people out there that are trying to figure out where they fit in and want to use more creativity, want to also be analytical, I think there's a lot of potential there. And with nurses, there's great gateways in quality and informatics to get involved with data and test it out to see if it's something that works for you, and then you can actually fully move that direction if you'd like to.

Joni:

Wow. Joe, I'm having a couple of light bulb moments as you're talking because I have never heard anybody talk about analytics in this way, which I love. When people are passionate about what they do, I mean, your passion is clearly coming through as you talk about creativity and analytics. I'm like, what? But it makes sense as you're explaining it, and I appreciate your perspective on multi potentiated individuals that you can be more than one thing in your life. That has also taken me some time in my career to settle into because I thought I had to fit into one mold, and I'm very similar to you, I'm pulled to a lot of different things, and I think that's probably why I was pulled to nursing very similar to you, is that I get to use all of those different aspects. So I love the way that you phrased that.

Joe:

Thank you. 

Joni: 

You also mentioned, which I really haven't thought about, you touched on the multi-skill of nurses and how we tend to have a lot of organic growth in our careers because we can fill holes, quote unquote. And it's funny that you say we can fill holes because I have often described my leadership style as caulk. I just see a hole and I fill the hole and I kind of learn as I go, very similar to you. And so that's definitely a theme I see in a lot of nurse innovators. So thank you for touching on that. Now, you started to talk about things like predictive analytics and clustering, and so my assumption is that you're stepping into, or you have long been in, I don't know, Joe, this AI space, I'm sure it's kind of everywhere around you as well, since it's everywhere around everyone else right now, I know that you encourage your team to understand and use AI. Tell me from your perspective, from a data analytics perspective, what are the practical benefits you've seen from AI and healthcare and how can nurses be better prepared to work alongside these technologies? Because right now there are headlines popping up of nurses striking or being concerned about AI. I'm curious from your analytics perspective on this.

Joe: 

Yeah, AI is definitely an interest of mine. I wouldn't say I'm an expert. There's very few experts on AI, even though you'd think if you go to social media, everybody's an expert. I will say right out of the gate that if anybody's interested in especially how generative AI and how it works and how it fits in and how it could potentially fit in with your life. Ethan Mollick is a Wharton professor who's published a book called Co-Intelligence, and it's a fantastic book and a lot of my concepts that I talk about with AI have stemmed from that and I've applied it to my own life. 

But having said that, from my perspective, where I sit as a director of data and analytics here at the Heart and Vascular Institute at UPMC, whenever you are in analytics, it's all equated to a nursing unit.

So as a nurse, every day we come in and we do the technical tasks that nurses do. We pass beds, we assess patients, and then you have the nursing, the unit, director who may not be as hands-on. So they have this what we call “technical decay,” and that's what we call it in analytics. So if you are actively working with data on a daily basis and you actively have a skillset where you are pulling data from the warehouse or you're making reports, you have this upkeep of your technical skills, but as you move into leadership, there's this natural decay just because you have to have your head up and looking out and guiding teams. And so what AI has allowed me to do is really stay in that technical world more because you can iterate faster, you can create faster, and AI, right now the ChatGPTs of the world are really good at coding.

They're not great, but they're really good. And they allow me to stay technical because I can work faster with them. I'm more efficient with them. 

But in terms of how I see AI in healthcare, I really see it relieving administrative burden from clinicians and also helping with assisted decision making down the line. I firmly believe that jobs, I shouldn't say all jobs, but I don't think jobs will be lost because of AI. They'll shift in the way they look, obviously, because AI will come in and take over certain tasks, but you as a human, you as a person that operates in a job are not just a collection of tasks. You are a person that operates in a system. And so AI is really good at doing tasks, but right now they're not good at operating in systems because humans need to navigate those systems.

So if you have a nurse nurse coordinator that works at an office, sure, AI may be able to handle some initial triage calls for you and take those lower end tasks away from you, but it's not going to be able to navigate handling the prior auths that you need to run through the system yet. It's not going to be able to handle going out and talking to a physician about a certain patient. It's not going to be able to do everything at once. Sure, you can have multiple AIs do different tasks for you, but right now with the current technology, it's not going to be able to replace humans directly. It'll gradually be adopted into these systems and help people work more efficiently, help people make better decisions. But right now we're not at that stage. And so I think some of the biggest things that as nurses, what we can prepare to do to work alongside AI, and let's just be honest, AI has been out there.

You open your Facebook feed, it's there, you just aren't aware of it. AI is even in the monitors we work with, it may not be the same AI that we're working with now. It may not seem like it's the same AI, but it's AI nonetheless. Yes. And so I think if we're thinking about, and again, it's how you frame AI, what are you envisioning? Is it the robot coming down the hall? I think that's what a lot of people are thinking about, but it has to be that there's different scenarios that could play out on the road. So I think for nurses, one of the ways that you can really start working with AI and adopting it into your daily life to better understand it. Because really what this comes down to is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of AI and how you can pair your weaknesses with its strengths.

So just bringing AI to the table is one of the tenants that Ethan Mullick talks about. So trying to work it into things that you do on a daily basis. And now when I say that floor nursing doesn't allow that, there's not really great use cases. And you can see research on that right now in terms of who's adopting the AI, who's using the use of LLMs that are out there. And it's largely white collar administrative workers. So when I say a nurse is invited to the table, the use case would be, alright, are you studying for a certification? Are you a nursing student studying for the NCLEX? Are you looking to start a project for, say a career ladder move? Those kinds of things are really where AI excels. So whether it's ideation on what that project should be or whether it's feeding it documents to create basically study simulation for different certifications or tests, it's really good at being a tutor.

It's really good at basically being a consultant. We've all probably heard of hallucinations, the newer AI, these LMs do hallucinate, so you have to be careful of what it spits back to you, which again is a great way of testing yourself on whether you understand the concepts and everything. 

But I think that's one of the best ways that nurses can really start using AI is to, and then as you work with it, you can understand, okay, it may not be really good at this one thing I want to try it at, but it's really good at this other thing. And as you understand that and you work with it, AI is only going to continue to get better. Right now the AI we're working with is the dumbest AI we're ever going to work with. And so if you fail to start understanding it now, it's eventually going to get to the point where it's going to be really hard to start understanding it. And as AI is introduced into the clinical units in various ways, you're going to have a hard time adopting it. And I mean, we've seen some of the older nurses have seen nurses who refuse to use EHRs when they were first put in, and that didn't work out well. 

Joni: 

Right.

Joe: 

So I think really just kind of thinking about how you view it and how you approach it as a nurse, you should really try to understand it before you criticize it. So anybody going out there and picketing and saying, “AI is going to take our jobs,” it's not going to take your job, not now anyway. And I don't ever foresee in the way that health systems work and units work, there's no way that AI is going to be able to operate in those systems efficiently. And that's usually everybody's argument is, “well, what I do is too complicated to do.” Well, yeah, a lot of the system work that you do is complicated. Maybe not some of the tasks like passing medications, but it's things like that that we have to start understanding and understanding what AI is good at, where its limitations are, what the possible futures look like, and just staying up to date on it. It doesn't have to be anything extensive, but it's definitely something that will be pervasive. It already is, but it's something that will definitely be pervasive in the future.

Joni: 

I think you've hit the nail on the head, Joe, in that it's really knowledge and skill that we really have to just start to step into and try and understand. I mean, the EHR is a great example. The way pumps have changed, that's also a great example. We would never expect to hire a nurse who is not willing to learn how to use the pump. Our IV pumps, which are pretty complicated these days, let's be realistic. And so you've mentioned in other answers to previous questions, you just kind of start and learn it and ask questions. And nurses are great at doing this, and we really get the opportunity to help make AI even better, to support us in our work, the experts we know where it can be helpful, where it's not, where it gets it right, where it gets it wrong. So the voice of the nurse is powerful in AI development, in healthcare in particular. So I love that, Joe. Now we've kind of touched on this a couple of times, but with the integration of EHR systems and the need for upskilling in informatics, I mean there are things that nurses need to know today that we didn't need or didn't have use of 20 years ago. I mean, that's just a constant, we're called to continuous professional development. What immediate steps can nursing professionals take to become more proficient in these areas that we've talked about today?

Joe:

So I think in terms of just analytics and AI and all that stuff, it's a matter of putting in perspective. So nurses are data analysts. Anybody's a data analyst. We wake up, we look at our weather app, we're interpreting data and making it into information. As nurses, we constantly deal with raw data and contextualizing it and turning it into information in our heads, whether that's blood pressures or lab values or medication administration, stuff that goes into that. Nurses are inherently that and they just don't even realize that they're analyzing that data and making it into information, interpreting it in their heads. And so I think nurses really need to, I think for lack of a better term, gain more confidence in what they're doing. 

And just like you said, it's important that nurses are advocates, especially now with the AI age where we are sitting at the table and helping people make those decisions on how these tools will impact nurses, how these tools will impact the workflows of the units.

And I think a lot of the absence of us from those tables is because we just don't have the confidence to say, “yeah, we deserve to be there.” And I think that's either, and I think the people who are sitting there saying, “well, I would love to be at those tables, how do I do that?” There's two ways you work and you get a position at the table or you bring a folding chair basically. And those folding chairs can be created through networking, social media– LinkedIn's a great place to leverage and network– and trying to figure out different areas that people are working and getting into those areas and becoming subject matter experts in different things. Or even locally, you start networking within your health system, you start talking to the physicians that are engaged in the research or the administrative work within a service line or within a department.

And it's really a matter of creating that chair, building that chair, and then getting to that table in that manner rather than relying on official hierarchy, which like I said is the other option. And so I think outside of that, if there's interest in becoming more proficient in working with data or understanding AI, there's tons of resources out there, whether it's YouTube or books or courses. 

The other thing is, like we talked about, nurses have a lot of options and what they get involved in and where they're working. And so if you want to explore that option, bedside nursing is not going anywhere. You can always move out for a little bit and then come back, test the water, see if it's something that interests you, and then if it doesn't, like I said, you can always go back to the bedside. And so I think those are definitely areas that you have options in doing, whether it's helping guide the formation of these different technologies that are being produced or whether it's exploring a new career path that nurses are in a really good position to do all of that.

Joni: 

That's great, Joe. I love that. I mean, you've mentioned “just start somewhere.” That's beautiful. So Joe, you mentioned Ethan Mallick’s book Co-Intelligence. I'm curious because you are drawn to a lot of different things, and so I'm curious often what leaders are reading or doing to sharpen their skills or to grow or develop. What are you reading these days or what are you learning about or doing these days to spur your thinking or nourishing your soul?

Joe: 

Well, I decided to go back for my second master's degree, so that's a lot of my extra time now.

Joni:

Oh wow. Joe, you're doing lots of reading then? Lots of work.

Joe: 

Yeah. Yeah. So I have a master's in nursing administration, but I decided I wanted to formalize the analytics. So I'm getting a master's in data science, but outside of that, in terms of nourishing my soul, I think it's really trying to be there and be with my family. It's tough when you have a lot of competing priorities, especially whenever you're going back to school and everything, and it's a matter of really trying to find that balance with work and life and for whatever reason it can be rewarding to be able to work and get that balance. And it's kind of one of those things that, well, it's a strange thing to say it nourishes my soul, but it's definitely one of those things that I find interesting.

Joni:

That's great. Joe, so what would you like to hand off to nurse leaders at all levels and in every setting today? You've touched on a lot, but what do you hope everyone walks away with today?

Joe: 

I would say the one thing that you should never say as a nurse is “I'm just a nurse.” I can't stand when I hear that nurses have so much potential, so many areas they can get involved in. And don't discount yourself in that manner. Don't degrade yourself in front of people by saying that. Have confidence. Be who you are. You have a lot of skills that you bring to the table and go forward with that confidence and just be a nurse. You are a nurse. Yeah.

Joni:

That's great. Joe, where can people follow or connect with you to find more of your work after this?

Joe: 

The main place that I'm active is LinkedIn. I'm under Joe Squire there at LinkedIn and I tried a couple different social media areas, but LinkedIn's really kind of where I stick to.

Joni: 

Yeah, I would say, Joe, your LinkedIn posts are some of the most valuable posts in my feed. You had a post not too long ago about box plots, I think it was. I was like, I saved that one. It was great. Thank you for that. Just little nuggets all across your LinkedIn. So everyone be sure to find Joe Squire on LinkedIn. Joe, I love your passion for data and analytics that propels care and work forward. Thank you for the work that you do, and thank you for spurring us with your expertise today. It's been fabulous.

Joe:

Thanks, Joni. 

________

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In this episode of The Handoff, host Dr. Joni Watson speaks with Joe Squire, the Director of Analytics and Data Science at UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute. Joe shares his journey from aspiring sound engineer to nursing and eventually to a career in data science. He discusses how he uses data analytics to improve healthcare outcomes, including significantly reducing cardiac surgery mortality rates. Joe also opens up about his personal experiences with burnout and offers advice for healthcare professionals facing similar challenges. Additionally, they explore the role of AI in healthcare and how nurses can leverage data to enhance patient care. Joe’s insights and passion for data-driven solutions are both inspiring and educational for nurse leaders and healthcare professionals.

Transcript

Joni: 

Hi, this is Dr. Joni Watson. Welcome to The Handoff, the podcast for nurse leaders, brought to you by Works, the technology empowering next generation health system workforce management. I'm thrilled to introduce our episode guest. 

Joining us is Joe Squire, the director of Analytics and Data Science At UPMC, Heart and Vascular Institute in Pittsburgh. Joe has a remarkable track record of helping healthcare organizations like UPMC harness their data to improve healthcare outcomes. One of his notable achievements includes leveraging data to lower cardiac surgery mortality rates by more than 2%, securing a ranking in the top 15%. 

Nationwide, Joe is a master at leveraging data centralization analysis, visualization and process automation to drive significant results. He's implemented and engineered an enterprise analytics solution that centralized clinical registry data reporting, management and billing, resulting in over $600,000 in annual cost savings. 

Under his leadership, teams have experienced 100% growth over three years with zero turnover, a testament to his exceptional leadership and team building skills. But that's not all. Joe has also played a significant role in securing over $1 million in grant funding through data-driven applications, and has streamlined work processes for multiple teams.

Within UPMC, Joe's passion for data, continuous learning and innovative solutions is truly inspiring. He's here to share his insights, experiences, and the exciting possibilities that data brings to healthcare. Joe, welcome to The Handoff. 

Joe: 

Thanks, Joni. It's great to be here.

Joni:

Absolutely, glad that you're here. I love the opening, “the exciting possibilities that data brings to healthcare.” I don't say that too often, but I'm excited to do that today with you, Joe, because you really are a master at all of the things that we've mentioned. So Joe, you have a unique nursing leadership role at UPMC. Tell me, how did you get into data analytics?

Joe: 

Yeah, so it was kind of a roundabout journey. I mean, as any good story starts, it starts with wanting to pursue some pie in the sky dream and a girl. And so coming out of high school, basically I want to be the sound engineer for Pixar. And so started pursuing audio engineering and was quickly informed by, in the very first class that I had at university, that I was pursuing a degree where there was no degree required. So I said, I need to reevaluate my life. And at the time I had just broken up with my high school sweetheart and said, “let's find a degree that is at the college where she is at so I can chase her.” And that was kind of what inspired me to pursue nursing because it all kind of lined up the pie in the sky dream and… the girl did not work out…but everything else worked out really well.

Joni:

Oh my goodness, Joe. 

Joe: 

So, I went through nursing school and the intention over that course of study was to go back to anesthesia school after I graduated. And so I graduated, got a job in the ICU and quickly moved to try to, in the next couple years, move into anesthesia school and those, we'll talk about it in a little bit, why those dreams didn't pan out, but ended up burning out in the ICU and then getting a job within an OR. And at the time I was sharing 24/7 call with one other individual. So we were seeing about 2000 hours of call a year, and it was a terrible work-life balance. And my wife and I had our first kid at the time. And so it was really just me trying to find better work-life balance at that point. And ended up in a role that was basically glorified data entry with the clinical registries, which are basically collections of data around procedures or disease processes.

Well, needless to say, coming from some pretty high speed nursing areas with the CT ICU and our OR, I got a little bored of entering data within the first couple months. And so I began asking the question, well, we're collecting all this data, so what are we actually doing with it? How can we make changes? What can we use it more for? And so those questions kind of started this snowball effect of learning how to leverage data, learning how to work with data, learning how to operationalize data, learning how to get people to understand the data and make changes with the data. And building on that over these years, I've been fortunate enough to be put in positions where I've been able to lead teams and help them and help our group really work better with data and be able to make changes and really affect what matters most is patient outcomes and seeing more patients go home alive.

Joni: 

Yeah. Wow, Joe, that's pretty powerful. Your story reminds me again just how important the voice of the nurses, the voice of clinicians are in all processes and aspects of healthcare. It's really powerful. You also mentioned burnout and your story is quite compelling. Your first job you said led to significant burnout due to the extent of physical and emotional harm. And you're certainly not the first nurse to experience that and you won't be the last. Would you be willing to share some vulnerable moments and maybe discuss the early warning signs and what advice you would give to others experiencing similar challenges?

Joe: 

Yeah, just to clarify, it wasn't my first job. I spent a year at a community ICU, and then I moved into a Quaternary Care CT ICU. So, there was a significant difference in culture, which was a shock. Number one, when you go from a community hospital to a downtown flagship hospital that's doing the biggest and baddest cases kind of deal. And so that culture shock was one thing. And because of that, you basically found a culture, and I'm still involved with this, with the same unit today and in a different capacity. And the culture has changed significantly, which has been part of the turnaround that we've seen there, a large part of it I should say. But at the time it was very much, and we see this a lot, the nurses eat their young, and that was kind of a trickle down from the way that the residents and fellows were treated and the way that the attendings talked to each other.

And on top of that, you're dealing with a lot of death and morbidity and you are seeing these kinds of things over and over every day. We had individuals who, so lung transplant, we did a lot of transplants and lung transplants in particular, and you'd see a lot of these individuals kind of languish and come in and out of the ICU and develop relationships with them. And then one day they just end up dying. And you have more traumatic experiences where say an ECMO cannula gets pulled out somehow, or we had an individual who pulled out their VAs, we had percutaneous VADs in somebody and they pulled them out one night and they just exsanguinate. And you're sitting there trying to push blood as fast as you can, try to keep volume, but you have a huge hole in your heart basically, and you're not going to survive that. 

And so I think it was a combination of that culture and a combination of just trying to deal with the stuff that you see, that it's that stuff that people don't know, they don't have anybody to really talk to about. Everybody deals with that stuff differently. I actually am still in contact with a nurse who started the same time as me in that unit.

They actually said– I didn’t even bring it up– but they actually said the other month, “I don't understand what this burnout is. What is burnout? Why are people burning out?” And I think it's just the way different people process the world. And I think, and that's okay. You can process the world in a way that you're more sensitive to these things. And as a male, it's hard to admit that you can frame it in a way where you say, “I was not tough enough to deal with this.” And yeah, I wasn't. And I didn't really realize it until a couple events happened. One of them was when I was at a friend's bachelor party and we had been drinking and I started talking about all the deaths that I had seen, and the next morning I got weird looks and comments from people that said, “you were really worrying us last night.”

And on top of that, going to work, it was just, you dreaded it. It wasn't a simple Sunday night scaries kind of thing. It was to the point where one night I was driving to the night shift and I said, “If I take this car and I run it into the cement barrier, I won't have to go to work tonight.” And so those kind of things kind of triggered like, okay, I really need to move on and figure out what I'm doing because, and at the time I didn't call it burnout, it wasn't on my radar, and I didn't really think that I had been affected that much until after I left the position. And it took me two to three years after leaving that position to even drive the route that I would take to work to not have a sinking feeling in my stomach.

And that's concerning. And that's when I realized, okay, there was an issue. And reflecting back on that, I think kind of the early warning signs that you're going to see is really that emotional and part of that emotional exhaustion is why I did not pursue anesthesia school because I basically said, if anesthesia is anything like this experience here, because this is where everybody's like, oh, you have to go to this unit and get this experience so that you can get an anesthesia school. This is the best unit to be on. I said, I don't want any part of it. And I distinctly remember one day getting an email from the anesthesia school I'd started applying to, and they said, “Hey, we need you to finish your application.” And I said, Nope, I don't want any part of this. And that's, I remember just kind of passing on that.

So I think on top of that, just your detachment. So you just start developing a very cynical attitude towards work. You just feel detached from the patients. You feel detached from your colleagues and just apathy. So whether it's apathy for what you're doing at work or apathy in your daily life with things, those kinds of things, they happen, right? They're pretty generic and they happen with anything in life. But I think if you see a pattern that continues, it's really one of those things that you kind of have to pay attention to. And I think a good way of being able to identify whether it's just a normal up and down or it's something that's more systemic is having a solid sounding board. So whether that's having friends that you can talk to who call you out and say, look, something's wrong or a significant other or family, I think that's hugely important.

I think everybody talks about self-care and that's different for everybody. For me, it's really just what are the essential things I need to take care of my body. Now it's become, what are the essential things that I need to take care of my body through the day? So I like to be able to work out, so you prioritize those things that make you feel better, make you better able to function and not neglect those things because easy to, especially as a nurse who you work 12, 14 hours in a shift and you get home and you get the quickest thing to eat, you throw on the TV, you just lay around, you go to sleep. If you're working the night shift, that's a whole other story about how terrible your sleep patterns are.

Joni: 

Yes. 

Joe: 

I think in the end, really obviously, professional help if you need it, but in the end it's really about finding a healthy work environment. And that's tough in healthcare, to find a work environment that's supportive and you don't have any of those systemic issues that we constantly talk about, whether it's nurses eating their young or patient violence or clinicians from different services just berating you or treating you poorly. But they do exist. I will say that I loved my OR job after I moved to that job. It was truly a team effort among all different practices, and you were well respected and it was a fantastic job. And if it hadn't been for the call, I don't know if I ever would've moved on from that. I mean, I probably would've. I'm not content with being still, but it was a fantastic job to be part of.

Joni: 

Wow. Joe, first, thank you for your vulnerability in sharing that with us. That's a lot, and I appreciate your authentic vulnerability. There have actually been a couple of headlines of nurses taking their own lives within the last several months from exhaustion or culture or multiple things. As you mentioned, burnouts at that level are a result of multiple things. And so you also touched on a really pivotal piece that I personally didn't learn until later in my career is knowing yourself and making decisions that really kind of shift the trajectory of your career by knowing what you want your life to look like. So kudos to you for really thinking about what you want your life to look like and making that decision. Because I mean, declining anesthesia school, that's a pretty big deal for a lot of nurses. That takes a lot of introspection and understanding of yourself, which I think is a leadership skill in and of itself, honestly.

And so like I mentioned, you weren't the first to have this experience and think those thoughts and you certainly aren't the last. And so for any listeners who are experiencing the same mental and physical symptoms, for anyone who's listening, struggling with thoughts of harming yourself, I want to encourage you that your life matters. It does. As our colleague, please take a step and either call or text 988 for crisis support so you can regain control over this moment, and your life matters. It really does. So Joe, I am so thankful that you shifted gears and found something that you were curious about. And you, you mentioned that you kind of never settle, you're always pushing forward. You taught yourself to leverage data effectively, which is kind of mind blowing to me. Can you walk us through that self-learning process and how it propelled you to implement change in your workplace?

Joe: 

Yeah, I think the key to how I learned and how I got to where I am is really being problem focused. So in learning analytics, the curiosity that I would have would naturally seek out problems, and I would find that problem and be like, “okay, how can we solve this problem,” whether it's using data or whether it's using a process change or whether it's doing something else. And if I didn't know the answer, I would just teach myself. And I think there's a lot of people out there that have, I heard it termed one time as “multi potentiate.” And so it just means that there are people out there who don't have just one calling in life and they're frequently trying out different things and trying new things. And I firmly fall into that camp and it's evident with my hobbies. I pick up something new, I try it, I go pretty deep on it and I'll move on eventually.

And so it's very similar to me and how I've gotten to be where I am when you go from wanting to be a sound engineer, to being a nurse, to being an analytics professional. And so I think that problem focus and developing skills to solve specific problems has really been something that's that I have a strength in, but it's also a way that I taught myself analytics. And so understanding, okay, if we have raw data, how do we get it to somebody in a form that is information that they can understand? And so you naturally learn how to make charts and graphs, and as you move down that road, you're starting to think, okay, surely this stuff exists in a better format. And then you discover data warehouses and you discover, okay, how do I get the data out of the warehouse? And you say, oh, there's this language called SQL that you can magically pull data and make it in a way that is great to work with.

And then you start thinking, okay, well there's all these people talking about this, these advanced analytic techniques. How do we predict things? How do we cluster people to understand how they interact with the health system? And so you start learning different techniques using different languages like Python, and so it's kind of a snowball effect. Once you try to start solving these problems, it just naturally grows on itself. And so I think nurses really have this unique, we have this unique position in healthcare where whether it's good or bad that we're seen as people that can fill holes, whether it's at the bedside or away from the bedside, and especially in large health systems, we've been able to work ourselves into roles that wouldn't exist otherwise. So there's a lot of quality positions, there's a lot of informatics positions that nurses can move into, and those all deal with data, and it doesn't have to be a specific, if you want to get into data, you're interested in, okay, what is this data or what is this analytics thing that I'm talking about working in these roles, you deal with data and you can then apply analytics to that data, and if it's something that interests you after doing that, then you can keep moving down that path.

That's really how I got involved. I moved into essentially a quality role, a data entry role basically, and it was something that I grabbed onto and ran with. It's also difficult because a lot of these roles are uncharted territory. So it's things, a lot of what I've done has been very much creating roles that were never there and defining that role as it's been created. And that can be frustrating sometimes, especially when you don't have a clear direction and you don't have exactly a way forward with certain projects. And so that's also a downfall to this, but it's also a huge upside. You can be very creative. And so that kind of leads me to one of the reasons I love analytics is because it marries the right side of your brain with your left side. Growing up, I was in a garage band, I did musicals, I was very artsy, photography, stuff like that. But I always knew, and I was good at math as well, but I always knew that my right brain would never let me go full, left brain.

I could never go full crazy artist, which is what you're required to be basically to be the best of the best. And so I think nursing was an attraction for that reason. So it's an art and a science, but analytics I think is even more so because there's a lot of creativity you can bring into analytics while also using the analytical side of your brain as well. I think there's, for people out there that are trying to figure out where they fit in and want to use more creativity, want to also be analytical, I think there's a lot of potential there. And with nurses, there's great gateways in quality and informatics to get involved with data and test it out to see if it's something that works for you, and then you can actually fully move that direction if you'd like to.

Joni:

Wow. Joe, I'm having a couple of light bulb moments as you're talking because I have never heard anybody talk about analytics in this way, which I love. When people are passionate about what they do, I mean, your passion is clearly coming through as you talk about creativity and analytics. I'm like, what? But it makes sense as you're explaining it, and I appreciate your perspective on multi potentiated individuals that you can be more than one thing in your life. That has also taken me some time in my career to settle into because I thought I had to fit into one mold, and I'm very similar to you, I'm pulled to a lot of different things, and I think that's probably why I was pulled to nursing very similar to you, is that I get to use all of those different aspects. So I love the way that you phrased that.

Joe:

Thank you. 

Joni: 

You also mentioned, which I really haven't thought about, you touched on the multi-skill of nurses and how we tend to have a lot of organic growth in our careers because we can fill holes, quote unquote. And it's funny that you say we can fill holes because I have often described my leadership style as caulk. I just see a hole and I fill the hole and I kind of learn as I go, very similar to you. And so that's definitely a theme I see in a lot of nurse innovators. So thank you for touching on that. Now, you started to talk about things like predictive analytics and clustering, and so my assumption is that you're stepping into, or you have long been in, I don't know, Joe, this AI space, I'm sure it's kind of everywhere around you as well, since it's everywhere around everyone else right now, I know that you encourage your team to understand and use AI. Tell me from your perspective, from a data analytics perspective, what are the practical benefits you've seen from AI and healthcare and how can nurses be better prepared to work alongside these technologies? Because right now there are headlines popping up of nurses striking or being concerned about AI. I'm curious from your analytics perspective on this.

Joe: 

Yeah, AI is definitely an interest of mine. I wouldn't say I'm an expert. There's very few experts on AI, even though you'd think if you go to social media, everybody's an expert. I will say right out of the gate that if anybody's interested in especially how generative AI and how it works and how it fits in and how it could potentially fit in with your life. Ethan Mollick is a Wharton professor who's published a book called Co-Intelligence, and it's a fantastic book and a lot of my concepts that I talk about with AI have stemmed from that and I've applied it to my own life. 

But having said that, from my perspective, where I sit as a director of data and analytics here at the Heart and Vascular Institute at UPMC, whenever you are in analytics, it's all equated to a nursing unit.

So as a nurse, every day we come in and we do the technical tasks that nurses do. We pass beds, we assess patients, and then you have the nursing, the unit, director who may not be as hands-on. So they have this what we call “technical decay,” and that's what we call it in analytics. So if you are actively working with data on a daily basis and you actively have a skillset where you are pulling data from the warehouse or you're making reports, you have this upkeep of your technical skills, but as you move into leadership, there's this natural decay just because you have to have your head up and looking out and guiding teams. And so what AI has allowed me to do is really stay in that technical world more because you can iterate faster, you can create faster, and AI, right now the ChatGPTs of the world are really good at coding.

They're not great, but they're really good. And they allow me to stay technical because I can work faster with them. I'm more efficient with them. 

But in terms of how I see AI in healthcare, I really see it relieving administrative burden from clinicians and also helping with assisted decision making down the line. I firmly believe that jobs, I shouldn't say all jobs, but I don't think jobs will be lost because of AI. They'll shift in the way they look, obviously, because AI will come in and take over certain tasks, but you as a human, you as a person that operates in a job are not just a collection of tasks. You are a person that operates in a system. And so AI is really good at doing tasks, but right now they're not good at operating in systems because humans need to navigate those systems.

So if you have a nurse nurse coordinator that works at an office, sure, AI may be able to handle some initial triage calls for you and take those lower end tasks away from you, but it's not going to be able to navigate handling the prior auths that you need to run through the system yet. It's not going to be able to handle going out and talking to a physician about a certain patient. It's not going to be able to do everything at once. Sure, you can have multiple AIs do different tasks for you, but right now with the current technology, it's not going to be able to replace humans directly. It'll gradually be adopted into these systems and help people work more efficiently, help people make better decisions. But right now we're not at that stage. And so I think some of the biggest things that as nurses, what we can prepare to do to work alongside AI, and let's just be honest, AI has been out there.

You open your Facebook feed, it's there, you just aren't aware of it. AI is even in the monitors we work with, it may not be the same AI that we're working with now. It may not seem like it's the same AI, but it's AI nonetheless. Yes. And so I think if we're thinking about, and again, it's how you frame AI, what are you envisioning? Is it the robot coming down the hall? I think that's what a lot of people are thinking about, but it has to be that there's different scenarios that could play out on the road. So I think for nurses, one of the ways that you can really start working with AI and adopting it into your daily life to better understand it. Because really what this comes down to is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of AI and how you can pair your weaknesses with its strengths.

So just bringing AI to the table is one of the tenants that Ethan Mullick talks about. So trying to work it into things that you do on a daily basis. And now when I say that floor nursing doesn't allow that, there's not really great use cases. And you can see research on that right now in terms of who's adopting the AI, who's using the use of LLMs that are out there. And it's largely white collar administrative workers. So when I say a nurse is invited to the table, the use case would be, alright, are you studying for a certification? Are you a nursing student studying for the NCLEX? Are you looking to start a project for, say a career ladder move? Those kinds of things are really where AI excels. So whether it's ideation on what that project should be or whether it's feeding it documents to create basically study simulation for different certifications or tests, it's really good at being a tutor.

It's really good at basically being a consultant. We've all probably heard of hallucinations, the newer AI, these LMs do hallucinate, so you have to be careful of what it spits back to you, which again is a great way of testing yourself on whether you understand the concepts and everything. 

But I think that's one of the best ways that nurses can really start using AI is to, and then as you work with it, you can understand, okay, it may not be really good at this one thing I want to try it at, but it's really good at this other thing. And as you understand that and you work with it, AI is only going to continue to get better. Right now the AI we're working with is the dumbest AI we're ever going to work with. And so if you fail to start understanding it now, it's eventually going to get to the point where it's going to be really hard to start understanding it. And as AI is introduced into the clinical units in various ways, you're going to have a hard time adopting it. And I mean, we've seen some of the older nurses have seen nurses who refuse to use EHRs when they were first put in, and that didn't work out well. 

Joni: 

Right.

Joe: 

So I think really just kind of thinking about how you view it and how you approach it as a nurse, you should really try to understand it before you criticize it. So anybody going out there and picketing and saying, “AI is going to take our jobs,” it's not going to take your job, not now anyway. And I don't ever foresee in the way that health systems work and units work, there's no way that AI is going to be able to operate in those systems efficiently. And that's usually everybody's argument is, “well, what I do is too complicated to do.” Well, yeah, a lot of the system work that you do is complicated. Maybe not some of the tasks like passing medications, but it's things like that that we have to start understanding and understanding what AI is good at, where its limitations are, what the possible futures look like, and just staying up to date on it. It doesn't have to be anything extensive, but it's definitely something that will be pervasive. It already is, but it's something that will definitely be pervasive in the future.

Joni: 

I think you've hit the nail on the head, Joe, in that it's really knowledge and skill that we really have to just start to step into and try and understand. I mean, the EHR is a great example. The way pumps have changed, that's also a great example. We would never expect to hire a nurse who is not willing to learn how to use the pump. Our IV pumps, which are pretty complicated these days, let's be realistic. And so you've mentioned in other answers to previous questions, you just kind of start and learn it and ask questions. And nurses are great at doing this, and we really get the opportunity to help make AI even better, to support us in our work, the experts we know where it can be helpful, where it's not, where it gets it right, where it gets it wrong. So the voice of the nurse is powerful in AI development, in healthcare in particular. So I love that, Joe. Now we've kind of touched on this a couple of times, but with the integration of EHR systems and the need for upskilling in informatics, I mean there are things that nurses need to know today that we didn't need or didn't have use of 20 years ago. I mean, that's just a constant, we're called to continuous professional development. What immediate steps can nursing professionals take to become more proficient in these areas that we've talked about today?

Joe:

So I think in terms of just analytics and AI and all that stuff, it's a matter of putting in perspective. So nurses are data analysts. Anybody's a data analyst. We wake up, we look at our weather app, we're interpreting data and making it into information. As nurses, we constantly deal with raw data and contextualizing it and turning it into information in our heads, whether that's blood pressures or lab values or medication administration, stuff that goes into that. Nurses are inherently that and they just don't even realize that they're analyzing that data and making it into information, interpreting it in their heads. And so I think nurses really need to, I think for lack of a better term, gain more confidence in what they're doing. 

And just like you said, it's important that nurses are advocates, especially now with the AI age where we are sitting at the table and helping people make those decisions on how these tools will impact nurses, how these tools will impact the workflows of the units.

And I think a lot of the absence of us from those tables is because we just don't have the confidence to say, “yeah, we deserve to be there.” And I think that's either, and I think the people who are sitting there saying, “well, I would love to be at those tables, how do I do that?” There's two ways you work and you get a position at the table or you bring a folding chair basically. And those folding chairs can be created through networking, social media– LinkedIn's a great place to leverage and network– and trying to figure out different areas that people are working and getting into those areas and becoming subject matter experts in different things. Or even locally, you start networking within your health system, you start talking to the physicians that are engaged in the research or the administrative work within a service line or within a department.

And it's really a matter of creating that chair, building that chair, and then getting to that table in that manner rather than relying on official hierarchy, which like I said is the other option. And so I think outside of that, if there's interest in becoming more proficient in working with data or understanding AI, there's tons of resources out there, whether it's YouTube or books or courses. 

The other thing is, like we talked about, nurses have a lot of options and what they get involved in and where they're working. And so if you want to explore that option, bedside nursing is not going anywhere. You can always move out for a little bit and then come back, test the water, see if it's something that interests you, and then if it doesn't, like I said, you can always go back to the bedside. And so I think those are definitely areas that you have options in doing, whether it's helping guide the formation of these different technologies that are being produced or whether it's exploring a new career path that nurses are in a really good position to do all of that.

Joni: 

That's great, Joe. I love that. I mean, you've mentioned “just start somewhere.” That's beautiful. So Joe, you mentioned Ethan Mallick’s book Co-Intelligence. I'm curious because you are drawn to a lot of different things, and so I'm curious often what leaders are reading or doing to sharpen their skills or to grow or develop. What are you reading these days or what are you learning about or doing these days to spur your thinking or nourishing your soul?

Joe: 

Well, I decided to go back for my second master's degree, so that's a lot of my extra time now.

Joni:

Oh wow. Joe, you're doing lots of reading then? Lots of work.

Joe: 

Yeah. Yeah. So I have a master's in nursing administration, but I decided I wanted to formalize the analytics. So I'm getting a master's in data science, but outside of that, in terms of nourishing my soul, I think it's really trying to be there and be with my family. It's tough when you have a lot of competing priorities, especially whenever you're going back to school and everything, and it's a matter of really trying to find that balance with work and life and for whatever reason it can be rewarding to be able to work and get that balance. And it's kind of one of those things that, well, it's a strange thing to say it nourishes my soul, but it's definitely one of those things that I find interesting.

Joni:

That's great. Joe, so what would you like to hand off to nurse leaders at all levels and in every setting today? You've touched on a lot, but what do you hope everyone walks away with today?

Joe: 

I would say the one thing that you should never say as a nurse is “I'm just a nurse.” I can't stand when I hear that nurses have so much potential, so many areas they can get involved in. And don't discount yourself in that manner. Don't degrade yourself in front of people by saying that. Have confidence. Be who you are. You have a lot of skills that you bring to the table and go forward with that confidence and just be a nurse. You are a nurse. Yeah.

Joni:

That's great. Joe, where can people follow or connect with you to find more of your work after this?

Joe: 

The main place that I'm active is LinkedIn. I'm under Joe Squire there at LinkedIn and I tried a couple different social media areas, but LinkedIn's really kind of where I stick to.

Joni: 

Yeah, I would say, Joe, your LinkedIn posts are some of the most valuable posts in my feed. You had a post not too long ago about box plots, I think it was. I was like, I saved that one. It was great. Thank you for that. Just little nuggets all across your LinkedIn. So everyone be sure to find Joe Squire on LinkedIn. Joe, I love your passion for data and analytics that propels care and work forward. Thank you for the work that you do, and thank you for spurring us with your expertise today. It's been fabulous.

Joe:

Thanks, Joni. 

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