How to Enhance Board-Level Collaboration with Your Compliance Program

Does the thought of more board oversight of your compliance program inspire consternation or curiosity?

Tune in to our latest episode of Compliance Conversations to find out why board-level collaboration can benefit not just your program, but your entire organization.  It’s rare to find someone with a resume like Ellen Hunt’s -- with titles including Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Audit Executive, and Chief Privacy Officer, as well as leadership roles on both the payer side and the provider side, she brings not just technical knowledge, but key insights into relationship development and corporate culture too.

That’s why we were thrilled to welcome her to Compliance Conversations, where Ellen and CJ Wolf discussed:

  • How to develop a symbiotic relationship between the board and compliance teams
  • Tips to elevating your communication with the board
  • Why it’s critical to develop proactive, cross-functional protocols now (and not in the midst of a crisis)
  • “Scheduled executive sessions” -- what they are and how they could benefit your program

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How Involved Should the Board Be in Your Compliance Program? - Podcast

 

Episode Transcript


CJ Wolf: Welcome everybody to another episode of compliance conversations. I am CJ Wolf, your host with this podcast sponsored by Healthicity, and today I have such a wonderful guest, Ellen Hunt. Ellen, Welcome! 

Ellen Hunt: Well, thank you, CJ, thanks for having me. 

CJ Wolf: You're very welcome. I met Ellen, I don't know, maybe a year or so ago at a conference, and oh, man, she just got so much great experience and such a pleasant demeanor, and so grateful for her time today and her expertise. You're going to love her.  

So, Ellen, what we like to do is we'd like to give our guests a little bit of time just to kind of explain a little bit about your professional background, where you come from, what you've done in compliance, what you're doing today anything you want to share. 

Ellen Hunt: Sure. Well, I was one of those people who got voluntold into compliance. I started out on the payer side with what was then Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, and now it's Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois and a bunch of other states. But I was in house council, and we got indicted on 6 counts of fraud under the False Claims Act as a result of that, we needed to change a lot of things, and mostly really to have a compliance program. And so, they said to me, "Hey. Ellen, will you, you know, Will you do this?" I said, "I would," and I'll tell you it's been it's about been a wonderful thing because I moved from writing memos to actually helping people put better processes in place and help people resolve issues. So, in my career. I've been a chief compliance officer, a chief audit executive, and a chief privacy officer. I have also worked for a large hospital system, so I've been on the provider side as well, and I have to tell you, CJ, I just find working in the compliance field, and with other compliance professionals extremely rewarding. 

CJ Wolf: Yeah, it really is, isn't it? And I love what you said about being involved in like implementing processes and procedures, meeting with people, and making things go better. It's one thing to, and I respect all my lawyer colleagues who know the law and can do that, and you have absolutely have to have folks like that, it's kind of a whole another career to try to implement those things in a practical sense. 

Ellen Hunt: Yeah, it's a shift, and you know CJ, now I'm doing consulting, but I just see it as the next step of really helping people, because we have clients that are providers, TPAs, device manufacturers, and in pharma, and you'd be amazed sometimes how much the compliance best practices really apply across numerous different industries and business sections in the health care. 

CJ Wolf: Yeah, absolutely. And, Ellen when I was reading your bio, so you're a J.D. Did you go to the University of Illinois, Chicago? 

Ellen Hunt: I did, at the time though it was an independent law school known as the John Marshall Law school. But yeah, now it's part of UC, and my oldest daughter is just finished her first semester as a one-L there. 

CJ Wolf: That's awesome because that's where I went to medical school. I'm fromthe Chicago area, originally in the suburbs, and as I was going to mention that, I'm like, "Oh, we probably have some closer connections than we thought."  

Ellen Hunt: Six degrees of separation, CJ! 

CJ: That's so true. Well, good. So, thank you for that introduction. We wanted to talk today, everybody out there listening, a little bit about board oversight of compliance, right? And how their role is vital and so Ellen, why don't you just kind of share, maybe set the groundwork a little bit about board oversight, their responsibility, maybe a little bit about Caremark standards, you know, these decisions that it's kind of set the stage for board accountability. 

Ellen Hunt: Yeah, you know, this is one of the things that I'm just really passionate about because I think the board has an incredibly important role in any company, but particularly in health care, which is absolutely been the fort runner in innovations and changes in creating best practices and compliance. When you think about it really, it's an evolving standard of the duty of loyalty and I think it's important for every board member and every compliance professional to understand this, we started back in the day with the famous Caremark Standard, which was frankly just no standard at all, and actually described by the courts as the hardest claim for a plaintiff to prove. But it was basically an utter failure. Right? That's where we were in 1996. We've moved really to one of good faith in 2006. But really the tide turned in 2019, with the case called Blue Bell Creamery. And what's so important about it is the court really looked at what the board was doing. And here you had, if people remember, you know, Blue Bell Creamery had that terrible Listeria outbreak. You had a board that never ever talked about food safety. And the Court said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You have really, as members of the board, a duty of oversight and a duty of loyalty and care, which means, you got to of know what the bet the farm risks are for the organization, and you got to be monitoring them. And the flip side of the coin on that CJ, is compliance professionals have to help the board do that. And so, when you really think about it, there has to be a risk and compliance system in place. It has to be working effectively on an ongoing basis. And it's going to highlight those mission, critical, or red flag risks, and management has to be held accountable for those risks and compliance results. And so, the days of we had 20 calls to the hotline, and half of them were unsubstantiated. It doesn't matter anymore and compliance professionals have really got to get focused on what are the risks, and how are they educating their board about them. 

CJ Wolf: Yeah, and I remember that case for two reasons. I was in Texas at the time, and I loved my Blue Bell ice cream. They had to take all that stuff off the shelf. But I'm glad you brought that case up because it really does drill home kind of the maturing expectations of boards. And you mentioned compliance officers and compliance professionals helping them, you know, in your role as a consultant, do you do that kind of thing like where you may be called in and asked to train a board on compliance, and their, specifically their compliance oversight like what questions they should be asking and that kind of thing. 

Ellen Hunt: Yeah, we do a lot of that. We do a lot of board training, but also the other side of the coin on that is, we do a lot of work with compliance officers who want to really elevate and level up their board reporting. So, we're having a lot of conversations about how do you translate a dashboard that talks about activity to value. How do you connect it to the organization's strategy? How do you connect it to goals and meaningful KPIs? And how do you talk to the board in a way so that they understand that these things are connected, right? And so kind of the days of Here's your deck, and you just sit there and read your deck to the board. That's over with, boards are really demanding that the compliance professionals are knowledgeable about the risks and can do deep dives on areas that impact the organization or related to those compliance risks, whether that's you know, the OIG work plan, cyber security. And another thing that's at top of mind for every organization, even beyond health care, is attracting and retaining talent, you know. So, you got to be prepared to provide substance and show how it adds value. 

CJ Wolf: Yeah, that's a great insight, Ellen. So, if I'm a compliance officer out there listening to this, and I'm like, "I know I need to build that relationship with my board. But like, where do I start?" Like, it can be intimidating, as a compliance officer to like try to go to the board and create that relationship, any tips or things that you've seen maybe that have helped compliance officers with that building of that relationship, and I'm assuming it takes time, right? It doesn't happen overnight. 

 

Ellen Hunt: It does. It takes time, but I'll tell you it pays tenfold in dividends and so there's a bunch of things you can do. Read their bios, find out what your board members' backgrounds are, and what their interests are, and try to connect with them on that level. You probably have a board that has a number of experts, you can ask them, what you can learn from them, but the other thing is, most board members are very anxious to learn from you. And it sounds simple, CJ. But one of the most valuable questions that I have ever asked a board member is, "What would you like me to talk about? What can I tell you that would matter to you?" It sounds super simple, but the truth is it cuts the weed from the shaft. It gets right to the point, and you know what, they're busy people. They don't want to read 20 pages. They want to know that you can condense that information for them and tie it to the company's mission and purpose, and when you can demonstrate that you're doing that. Here's a tip, both Proctivity and Deloitte, and all those folks have the top 10 risks for 2023. Here's another question, which risk of the top 10 do you think is number one? You know, they're experts. They'll love to tell you what, in their opinion, what they think is important. So, don't be shy, and just ask because you'll get invaluable insights of what matters to the board by doing that. And the other thing is your corporate secretary, whoever is managing those meetings, whether that's the general counsel or you've got a separate corporate secretary Office, ask them! These people have a lot of information and expertise. What's the board concerned about? What are they reading? What articles are in there in their reports? What kind of speakers have they had? And then you can talk about that and express that interest. But I will tell you that having a relationship with the board is invaluable, because there may be a day you got to give them some bad news. 

CJ: And you don't want that to be your first kind of experience with them, right? You want to.  

Ellen: That's exactly right.  

CJ: I think you're spot on. You want to have kind of built that relationship and start like any relationship, right? Like what you just described is how you build a relationship with anyone. You ask them what interests them, you ask them what concerns them, you read what they're reading, you learn about their bios, you know, how would you want to be approached? Just kind of like the golden rule, right? And so, I love that it's not rocket science, it's just, but you have to do it.  

Ellen: It's a little work and you know, probably your organization is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors or the Corporate Governance Institute or whatever. And often they buy a corporate membership. There's probably nothing for them to add you and then you can get access to that information as well. And when you show up as someone who is interested and cares and informed, they're going to want to listen to what you have to say.  

CJ: That that's so great. I do know though that some, I've talked to colleagues and they struggle just with getting time on the agenda. So, it's like you want to make relationships, you want to start asking some of these questions, but how do you just get on the agenda in the 1st place, especially if your compliance program has never really? You know, if you have a compliance program, but it's kind of like, "Yeah, that's the compliance officer, they do their thing. The board does their thing, and you're now trying to get that connection." How do you get on the agenda?  

Ellen: Yeah, you know it's fascinating because when I've been doing a lot of reading on what's the future going to look like, right? as we start a new year. But the word for 2023 seems to be Confluence, right? And we were talking about Silos a couple of years ago, but it's just a step further and I bring it up in this context, if you can't get time on the agenda, then you have to figure out who does and why? So, everything is about risk and being risk centered.  

If you're not talking to the person who's running the ERM program, and you're not talking to the internal auditor and you're not talking to your chief information security officer on a regular basis about what they're dealing with and what they're reporting to the board. Then you're disconnected.  

CJ: That's right.  

Ellen: You're in a Silo. And just as you said, CJ. "Oh, that's compliance. It's something that people can put over at the side of their desk and not worry about until there's a problem." And you got to get yourself to the center of the desk and you got to do it in a way that shows all of this is connected, right?  

When you think about the ability to attract and retain talent and some of the studies out there about the great resignation that people are really leaving because of moral injury.  

CJ: Right!  

Ellen: Think about what the ethics and compliance department could do to keep people, right? cause there are also survivors, right?  

CJ: Now that's a great perspective. Yeah, that's a great perspective, Ellen.  

Ellen: And not only are you going to make the organization stronger with a better corporate culture, but you're also helping to increase the bottom line, cause it costs when people leave, regardless of why they leave.  

Ellen: So, you got to think about connecting not just with the board members or the corporate secretary to get on the agenda. Connect with your colleagues because what you want is for the general counsel or the Chief Audit Executive, or maybe the Chief Information Security Officer to say, "You know, We need a report from compliance!"  

CJ: Yeah. And it really, you know, in all the publications, any of us that have been in compliance for a while, OIG recommendations, they have all those publications about communicating with the board. It it's in black and white, like the expert in DOJ. Their evaluation of compliance program document, all of those documents clearly state that there needs to be communication, so if you really can't get over that barrier, there's something wrong with the culture of the organization maybe, if like you've really, really tried and you can't get in, you almost wanna start to think, "Is this really the right organization for me?"  

Ellen: Well, and another thing, another way in is education. There is that practical guidance for healthcare boards on compliance oversight. It was written by the OIG in 2015, but as you say CJ, it's in writing and sometimes your board members just either they need a refresh or they need an understanding, right? I mean, I just talked earlier about the evolution and of the standard that they're dealing with and it really has increased. They have much more duties of oversight than they did in the past. So, maybe you can't get on the agenda, but maybe as part of board orientation or board training, you can get 20 minutes to talk about how important it is for the board to exercise its duty of compliance oversight which pretty much can't do unless compliance is on the agenda.  

CJ: This is so great, Ellen we going to take a short break. I'd love talking to you and we'll be right back and talk some more.  

Welcome back, everybody from our break, we have Ellen Hunt here, an expert. And I called her a rock star. I could see you being a rock star. Did you have any music in your background?  

Ellen: I have no musical ability whatsoever.  

CJ: I don't know. There's something about you. You've got some energy to you that I love. And I thought when I first met you, you got some spark and some spunk, and that's cool.  

Ellen: Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate it. That made my day.  

CJ: You're sweet. We have been talking about boards and compliance oversight. Ellen's been giving us some great insights, and I want to now maybe talk a little bit about, Okay, so we've established a relationship a little bit. We've been on the agenda. We've conquered that. Now you've got some bad news, what if it's a Qui tam? What if it's this? Or what if it's that? And it, you know, cause you're going to not report every little bitty thing to the board but material things. How do you start to deliver that kind of bad news? If you've.  

Ellen: So, I really think the first thing is building that relationship and your board members will change, so that it's a constant thing, right?  

CJ: That's a good point.  

Ellen: Constantly working at that, but the other thing that I think is of critical importance, and this is one of the things you need to do beforehand, is you need a protocol because when there's something as serious as if the DOJ is knocking on your door, maybe it's the DOJ with the SEC. That is not the time to be sitting there figuring out who does what.  

And so, we talked about that OIG guidance for compliance oversight. One of the things that I think sometimes compliance officers don't do and they're not aligned with their general counsel on is "Well, what happens when the, you know what hits the fan?" Because what you then have sometimes have is chaos and everything's anxious and they want to take action, right? and the problem is everybody thinks that they know how to help when really you got to be very clear about your roles and responsibilities.  

CJ: Yeah, exactly.  

Ellen: And so, it's really important to have a protocol about when you're going to escalate who you're going to escalate to, how you'll escalate, and who will be involved. In some of these cases, it's appropriate for the audit committee to run the investigation and in others, it's not. How are you going to help them determine that? What are going to be the key factors that need to be taken into consideration when they should run the investigation or be in charge of it versus, you know, maybe it's much more appropriate for it to be internal? And so, these documents are living documents, they change, they evolve, and they get improved upon. But you will be doing yourself and the organization a great favor by having those conversations about who does what and when and how ahead of time. Because when you're in the midst of crisis, nobody's thinking straight, people are vying for power and prestige, and it's just not a good thing. So, it's kind of like you wouldn't have your operation in the lobby, Right?  

CJ: Right!  

Ellen: You go to a prep surgical room with the right experts at the table, doing the right things. And it's the same thing. Think of it that way. It's like a medical procedure. It needs to be precise and clear and sometimes practiced.  

CJ: Yeah, exactly.  

Ellen: In fact, maybe that's a great way to get on the agenda. Let's pretend we had a Qui tam, what would we do?  

CJ: Yeah, exactly.  

Ellen: "Oh, we don't know!" Okay, we better figure it out.  

CJ: Yeah, when you said that and when you were talking, I was thinking the same thing. We call those desktop top exercises where you could write out a scenario and give everyone the scenario and what it made me think of is I spent some time in compliance at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and every hurricane season we had a practice protocol because there's flooding, there are all sorts of, like, natural disaster stuff that happens in that region, so we were prepared. We had a protocol, just like you said, and we would practice it. And so, I love that idea of, you know, "Hey, let's just throw this out. Here's an idea, here's a case study." You know, "On Friday at 4:30, your general counsel gets a paper saying we're going to come in and get all of your documents." What do you do? Who do you call? where you go? So, that's a good idea.  

Ellen: And CJ, I just finished a class at 4 to my crisis management with an emphasis of course on compliance. And just like a physical disaster, you need to know how are you going to communicate internally, and externally with your regulators, when you've got a crisis, and sometimes we forget that, right? We're so keen on "Did it happen? Didn't it happen? Let's conduct an investigation." We forget that we've got, we really got to be communicating in a very cohesive, clear quick way. So, make friends with your Corp com people, they are as invaluable to you as internal audit, the influence SEC people, and your general counselthey are your pals and you need to be In sync with them.  

CJ: Yeah, and it really needs to be written down, kind of like a protocol like you're saying of, you know, this is who's in charge. Like, I'm going to go back to that desktop exercise for the hurricane, when we did it, the first thing was, "Well, who do I contact? Who's in charge on Thursdays? Who's in charge in the morning? Who's in charge at 1:00 AM?" And, so it's like you just kind of walk through that dry run and you'll find the gaps and you'll be like, "We're in a safe environment now. We can plan for that gap because we just identified it."  

Ellen: Exactly, exactly. And being proactive on that is, you know, some people might be like, "Oh, why don't we got to do this? It takes so much time," it will save you so much time if you do it ahead of time and you've got some real clarity with people on who's doing what and how it's going to get done.  

CJ: Yeah, I agree. Ellen, as we were preparing for the podcast, you shared a quote with me. So, I'm kind of shifting gears a little bit here about Corporate Culture and you shared an interesting quote, I think it was from Bill Marklin if I have that right, that quote, "Culture is how employees hearts and stomachs feel about Monday morning or Sunday night!" You know, that's a good one, right? And how do you think the boards' and the compliance's role in this and in developing this culture?  

Ellen: You know, I think it's front and center and I'm going to go back to that comment about "Confluence" being the 2023 word of the year. I think all of it is related and connected and how people feel is key, whether they're our employees or our patients or our vendors, or somebody who calls the hotline. There is, I think, underlying the great resignation, resistance, and reluctance to be subject to moral injury and to not want to associate and be with organizations that say one thing and do something else.  

CJ: Right!  

Ellen: So, we have all of us, beyond the healthcare industry, but all of us have a real issue to deal with on how do we attract and retain employees because we have a culture that actually means speak up, protects people who do, who takes action when we know that there has been moral injury, that supports the physical and mental health of the people that we deal with and without that the risks to the organization are, I think catastrophic possibly, Right? You're not going to get the right patients. You're not going to get the right healthcare professionals. You're not going to grow, you're going to have bad service. You're going to have, you know, harms and other quality issues, you're going to, you know, and it's this big snowball that when you get it rolling the right way, it continues to increase organically on its own, and when it starts to roll down the hill, it goes faster and faster into an environment that I think terminates everything. I mean, it's like a disease, it's an infection and once that's in your organization, it's incredibly difficult to turn it around because you know, just look how long it's taken us to get over COVID, right? But I think the board in compliance has a tremendous amount of influence and responsibility, frankly, to understand what the culture is, understand what the drivers are, and to be constantly working on improving the culture and if you have a board who never asks and doesn't care what the culture is like, that's a big problem.  

CJ: Yeah, most organizations nowadays are doing, you know, annual types of surveys that they might engage in external vendor or something to get, you know, an anonymous feedback from a good chunk of the employees, if not all of them, to kind of take an assessment of, you know, "Where's our culture? where do you feel it's not so good? Where do you feel it's good?" So, that's that should kind of be something, I think most organizations are doing nowadays.  

The other thing is you were talking, I thought– one of the best things to kind of help develop that culture is say thank you when somebody reports something, you know I worked at an institution where for a while we had, at least during office hours, we had a human being answering the hotline. We had a lot of hotline calls and not all of them were compliance, but people used the hotline for all sorts of things and we just said, "Say thank you and take the moment and say, we really appreciate you as an employee speaking up. We don't know where this concern may go. It may turn out to be unsubstantiated, or it may turn out to be something, but either way, we appreciate you speaking up." And I think you have to build that appreciation in many words over many days and weeks and months to kind of build that culture.  

Ellen: Yeah, that's spot on, CJ and I posted an article a couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn called, "Does your compliance department have a Net Promoter score?" Because I think there's a lot that the compliance department can do if they think about the people they interact with as customers, as if you're a healthcare professional taking care of a patient. You send out those surveys to see how the patients thought the experience was.  

CJ: That's right!  

Ellen: You need to do the same thing with the people that you interact with and you need to know do people feel that the organization was fair. And studies on organizational justice show, not only does that lead to more engagement, more profitability, but also that people are willing, much more willing to accept an answer that they don't necessarily agree with if they thought the process was fair.  

CJ: Right. Yes, they were heard.  

Ellen: And with that, they were heard. They were thanked and they were communicated with. So, saying thank you is great, but do you tell people throughout the process what's going on? And do you say thank you afterwards?  

CJ: That's right!  

Ellen: And a lot of compliance departments suffer from, on those employee surveys, you know people don't report because they don't think anything's been done, but part of that is you didn't tell them what you did! 

CJ: That's right! It's like a black hole. And anyone who has the courage to speak up, because sometimes it's not easy.  

Ellen: It's never easy.  

CJ: They want to know, you know, again, they might not have the full story, but they witnessed something that concerned them and they were willing enough to share it. It would just be great to say, "Look, we've closed that issue, I can't share all the details with you, but it turned out that what you reported was really needed and we really want to thank you." And just something like that, right?  

Ellen: Exactly! And you don't have to, you know, bridge or even come close to violating somebody's privacy, right? You don't have to say, "Well, you know, CJ's going to be at a performance improvement plan for the next six years."  

But if you can demonstrate you've taken it seriously, right? It's not just that little warning on the coffee cup, "caution could be hot," right? We take these things seriously by action. It makes a big difference. And when you really look at some of the studies on why people come forward, it's not because it's a preemptive strike because they're a bad performer or they think they're going to lose their job or they're just a constant complainer, it's because they actually want whatever the behavior that's happening that they think is wrong to stop.  

CJ: Right! And they're doing it for the benefit of the organization, like they have the organization's best interests at heart and they're like, "This behavior of this action is just not good for us as a group, as an organization, so I want to speak." 

Ellen: And it could be harming patients or it could be harming coworkers or whatever. So, everybody talks about the world has changed and will continue to change at a rapid pace. We in compliance need to take a long look at some of the things we're doing and going, "You know what? We could do better. We could do better."  

CJ: Let me ask you one last kind of board question. I've seen this work pretty well, having what's called "scheduled executive sessions."  

Ellen: Absolutely! 
 

CJ: So, the compliance officer has an opportunity to speak to independent members of the board. So, what I mean by that is no one that's in senior management is in the room. It's, you know, these independent board members and you schedule it on a regular basis so that if you have a problem, it's not like drawing attention, "Oh, why is the compliance officer all of a sudden having an executive session?" No, It's like if you have them twice a year and then any time you need to then they're there. Any thoughts on that type of activity?  

Ellen: Yeah, I'm an absolute proponent and in the positions that I was in when I reported to the board, I had an executive session at the end of every audit committee meeting and I went to every audit committee meeting and then I went to some Governance committee meetings when conflicts of interest issues were on the agenda, I think it's really important for a number of reasons. One is if it is a constant agenda item, it signals the importance, right?  

CJ: Exactly! 

Ellen: And when you look at the federal sensing guidelines about having the right structure and authority and responsibility, well, having it and standing executive session signals that. So, the OG's going to look for it. So, with the DOJ. I think the other thing is it isn't a tremendous opportunity for you to build that relationship. They do not expect that you need to come up with something that you think is horrific every time.  

CJ:  Right!  

Ellen: In fact, they probably don't really want you. But what they're really looking for in my experience is, and if they understand their oversight duty is, "Hey, is management telling us the truth?" And you can be a phenomenal advocate for your colleagues on saying, "Yes, I've read that ERM report and I agree with it because of blah, blah, blah blah blah!" or "You know what, I have the opportunity to work with the CIS on the recent breach and I really think that our response protocol is working 100%" or "You know what, I so value working with internal audit because ..." and so don't, first of all, don't forgo that opportunity. 

CJ: Yeah, exactly!  

Ellen: And I see a lot of complaints officers not prepared for it. The board is not going to come up with a topic for you. You need to do that yourself and you need to think about what you want to talk about. And you know, by the way, this is a great opportunity to say, "I am very interested in making sure that I'm giving you the information you need. What would you like to see in my reports? What would you like to see me address next quarter?" Perfect opportunity! So, that is incredibly valuable time. Take advantage of it, each and every time.  

CJ: Ellen, this has been so great. We're kind of getting near to the end of our time. Any last-minute thoughts that you have? That we might not have asked you about?  

Ellen: I think that now is really the time and I have a lot of my clients doing this to really look at what you're reporting and really try to tie that to value, think about impact. Impact is a huge word in ESG circles and all that. But when the attrition rate can go down, how much of that can you contribute to how well somebody's been treated by the ethics and compliance department?"  

CJ: Right! 

Ellen: Think about, "How is it that your ethic, your reputation for being a good company and doing the right thing attracts employees?" Tie it to those risks and you know dashboards, yeah, okay, they got numbers. But tell the story behind the numbers.  

CJ: Right! That's such good advice. Ellen, You know, I know our listeners are like, "Oh, I want to hear more from Ellen!" How can people get a hold of you? I'm sure, I know you speak at conferences and you're pretty active on LinkedIn, but how could people reach you if they would like to? 

Ellen: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find there. I post there rather frequently. I'm going to speak to the California and Arizona SEC meeting in February about a book club I started with a colleague called "The seven elements" and you're free to join that love to have more members. And then I'm hoping, CJ, I'm going to see you in April in Sacramento, CA for the HCCA annual conference.  

CJ: I will be there. Is it Sacramento or is it LA?  

Ellen: I think it's Sacramento. No, you know what? It's Anaheim, Anaheim.  

CJ: Okay! Yes, I will be there. And so, I will definitely want to catch up with you. And again, thank you so much, Ellen, for your time and your expertise, and your energy, and wisdom. All of it!  

Ellen: Well, thank you! My pleasure.  

CJ: Thanks! And thank you to all of our listeners. Again, we'd like to encourage you to, if you like, this podcast, please hit the like button and please subscribe and share with friends and colleagues. And if you have ideas for other topics or speakers, feel free to reach out to us at Healthicity, we'd love to meet your needs. With that said, everybody, we hope you have a great day. Thanks for listening!  

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