EHRs offer significant advantages for data sharing; however, they can result in an excessive volume of ambiguous notes due to the increasing ease of data entry. As healthcare systems evolve and AI becomes more integrated into the field, it is imperative to prioritize the most relevant information. Optimizing these systems with a patient-centered approach will ultimately benefit both healthcare providers and patients.
On today’s episode of In Network's Designing for Health podcast, Nordic Chief Medical Officer Craig Joseph, MD, talks with Mark Mabus, MD, chief medical informatics officer and vice president of EHR at Parkview Health. They discuss Mark’s healthcare journey, EHR documentation and efficiency with the use of AI, and the challenges of "note bloat" within patient records. They also discuss a project that improved vaccine reminders in the EHR, which resulted in higher immunization rates and enhanced provider efficiency.
Listen here:
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Show Notes:
[00:00] Intros
[02:00] From pharmacist to physician
[06:30] Clinical informatics and technology in medicine
[09:00] The role of technology in healthcare
[12:04] Reducing “note bloat” in EHRs
[18:28] Hesitancy to change in EHR workflows
[19:27] Collaboration with coding teams
[21:21] Integrating AI
[28:00] Vaccine reminder improvements
[33:31] Mark’s favorite well-designed thing
[36:57] Outros
Transcript:
Dr. Craig Joseph: Welcome to the podcast. Doctor Mark Mabus, how are you today?
Dr. Mark Mabus: I'm alright. Thank you so much for having me here.
Dr. Craig Joseph: It's an honor to have you here. You are a well-established clinical informatics officer and CMO and pretty much a very important person. Where do we find you today?
Dr. Mark Mabus: Where do we find me? Well, I am CMO and my full title is VP of clinical and revenue cycle solutions. Meaning those things that have to do with our EHR, which is Epic at Parkview Health. Parkview Health is based in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Dr. Craig Joseph: So, you're a family practice physician.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Correct.
Dr. Craig Joseph: But, I think you started off life as a pharmacist. You were born as a pharmacist. Is that true?
Dr. Mark Mabus: Yeah. If you want to figure out my age now. Yeah, way back in high school. My high school had a mentorship program, and they we got to put down what we were interested in. And so, they had talked to area leaders, in the community people in rotary and other stuff like that who would volunteer to be youth mentors. And so, I did like a shadowing day of a pharmacist and thought it was interesting. I always thought healthcare was on the mind. As a potential future career. That or music? I know two totally different things, but, yeah, that was what was going through my head back then.
And after that mentorship, he offered me a job, you know, I actually started work at a pharmacy at 15. I thought that that would help support my plans for medicine no matter if I chose to stay in pharmacy or go on to medical school. And at that time, a bachelor's in pharmacy was the degree you got. It was five years. Got a scholarship for it. So, I figured, hey, we'll do this. And so I went through school to be a pharmacist; about my third year of pharmacy school, I made that firm decision that I want to go to med school. You need a premed degree. Anyway, so pharmacy was perfect for that. So? So yeah, I did that. I worked as a pharmacist during med school. Even took a full year to work as a pharmacist, so came out of med school with a little bit less debt than my peers. You know, which is always a good thing.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Very good.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Yeah. And then went into family medicine from there.
Dr. Craig Joseph: How many? I just, I don't know, a lot of physicians who are pharmacy degrees, who are pharmacists, like, is there, how many of you exist, like, have you met? Dozens. Hundreds.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Thousands of handfuls. You know, it was easier when it was the five-year degree. Now it's a six-year doctorate program. Yeah. Which is usually a bachelor's four plus two in the official doctor pharmacy. So, you might get some people that have bachelors in pharmaceutical science or something along those lines anyway. But I think it will be a dying breed.
Honestly, my cousin did the same thing about 15 years prior to me, and I did meet, through our physicians group at Parkview. There is, there was a psychiatrist who actually did the same thing as well. So yeah, there's a handful of us, here and there. But like I said, I think it will be a dying breed with the change in the degree program that happened, you know, 20 years ago.
Dr. Craig Joseph: So, I'm fascinated because I kind of see the evolution of the way physicians work over the last maybe 20 or 30 years from kind of when I started practicing, maybe, which was a gazillion years ago, you know, I want the CT scan that I want, and I wanted just my way too. I actually had a physician tell me, can't I just consult radiology and have them order whatever the most appropriate study is? Which I was like, that's a very reasonable request. And no, no, you cannot do that.
And I think we're slow, maybe this is good or bad. I don't really know, but I think we're slowly moving in the same way with some of the sophisticated, complicated pharmaceuticals that we have, like, hey, man, I just want to anticoagulant this very sick patient, and I don't really want to be an expert on anticoagulation and can't I just, you know, consult someone like a pharmacist to just manage this for me? And the answer is sometimes you can, but it just seems like pharmacists are becoming more and more are becoming closer to two physicians.
Dr. Mark Mabus: They are for sure, you know, they make decisions about vaccinations across the board. That's a big one. I still practice clinically, two half days a week. And there is an embedded ambulatory pharmacist in my office. And let me tell you, that was one of the hardest things to give up when I , who am a pharmacist, he said, here you need to dose this, more for my patient here, help me have this diabetic, achieve their A1C goals. You know, I understand because I'm not there all the time. I'm not a full-time clinical person, but, just even that that core of me being trained that way to giving it off to somebody else, it's hard at first. I've got a fabulous pharmacist in my office, so, I have no worries there. But it was just that, you know, integrating them into the team has been so much more valuable. You know, first starting in the hospital 20, 30 years ago, when they got more, you know, clinical duties. And now in the ambulatory world, too, they know their stuff, and they have been empowered to be able to do that.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Yeah. And it's helpful for all involved if you're able to offload some of the work , you're not maybe as good at as others if you don't do it frequently.
Dr. Mark Mabus: And I think some of that background that I have transitioned me into that kind of clinical informatics realm to the whole, you know, I was using software at a pharmacy, filling prescriptions as a teenager, learning that process, knowing the drug background. Fast forward to residency. We were required to become a part of a system wide committee. So, to give us experience in the administrative side. And so, I chose at the time, well, the pharmacy committee, they let me also do the CPO committee. But I was in residency. EHRs were more just for orders, and they were just getting into all the other, you know, bells and whistles, that we knew came along with meaningful use at all. But, yeah, one of my projects with the CPO committee was helping to design a user interface for drug interaction screens. So, this was an old product, you know, doesn't exist anymore. But you know what pop up happened to a provider that helped them figure out, hey, this is a duplicate drug. This is a drug interaction, where do we put different alerts on, text on the screen and things like that.
It drew from my pharmacy background. Also combining it with my medicine background and what I was doing with technology back then. And I think that's what really solidified my interest in EHRs. And then, the optimizations and that whole process going from there. So, it kind of fell into that position. When I was in residency, there was no such thing as a clinical informatics board certification and stuff like that. That came later. I was involved from the start there, transitioned later in residency where we're making those preparations, this phase to go to electronic notes. And so, one of the ways we did that was to create a standard documentation form that had checkboxes and things like that. So it made the transition easier when it happened, because that was a lot of the capabilities of that EHR was the click boxes and stuff like that. So, my third year of residency designed all that form. They delayed our EHR go-live. So I never got to do that transition in residency. But I took that information to private practice thereafter. And used some of those forms again for a couple of years until my private practice went up on their EHR. Then my practice was acquired by Parkview. They saw that I had done this work previously and integrated me into the system, too. They've been live on Epic since 2012, 2013. They had me, kind of, fill in that space in the ambulatory world starting as point one FTE, and then it just grew and grew and grew from there.
Dr. Craig Joseph: So, you were you kind of came at it more from the kind of the patty and the drug interaction checking perspective.
Dr. Mark Mabus: I think that started it all off for sure. And, yeah, all the way back to software that we were using at a retail pharmacy, though.
Dr. Craig Joseph: So, you were not one of those kids, programing computers in your basement in junior high?
Dr. Mark Mabus: Not really. I mean, I took a class in basic, you know, one class didn't use it in pharmacy school. Actually, I did start, some HTML programing and started a website that lasted maybe a month or two. It was kind of a blog before blogs were popular. And I had started writing about healthcare technology news. So, I had a total of like four articles in a month's time and then kind of was like, this is fun, but nobody's reading it. It would have to be a side business venture, and I'm not ready to do something like that. So yeah, I did learn a little basic in HTML, but nothing else. And really didn't keep that up too much. It was just using the tools that the software companies were providing. You know, it wasn't programing from scratch.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Yeah, that's fair and probably smart. So how long have you been in your position now as the CMIO?
Dr. Mark Mabus: So CMIO alone, it's been about five years. This past year I also took on the VP of HR clinical revenue cycle. That basically means I shifted from a role that was reporting up through the physician structure at our institution, to a CMO and things like that. I'm now in ES and I have analysts, managers, and directors reporting to me too. So, it's kind of a dual role, there because there's the whole East side and getting into people management and budgets, which they never teach you in med school, that's that comes from other education, but still maintaining the desire to have, things that CFOs do. And that's focus on clinician efficiency, doing both, right now and. Yeah, that's I think how, you know, the CIO side of things is, is how things have kind of grown throughout at least the Epic community, you know, for sure with the presentations that I've done, there and the, focus is that, that I've been able to share with others, as well.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Well, let's talk about some of those presentations. One of them was an attempt to reduce note bloat. So, can you talk a little bit about what you perceive to be, what is note bloat? Why does it exist? And how do you make it better? I will simply say that when I was a medical student, no bloat man. Medical students wrote very long notes on pieces of paper.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Yes, I had that experience with my very first patient I saw as a medical student. I was given a form to fill out and say, and they were in the ER, and they said, here, fill this out with the patient. I'm like, okay. So, I did every single line on there not knowing that you could pick and choose what parts of that paper you filled out. It took me forever and things like that. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Notebook was that dope load is basically putting in information into documentation that may not necessarily have to be there or things that are outside of what a clinician thinks should be in there because somebody else wants it in there. Like you need to have this in there for billing. You need to have this in here for legal. You need to have this in there to get that prior off. You need to have this to meet your coding level of specificity. So, you could get reimbursement for X and X. It, you know, the notes originally were intended to tell a patient's story, and there are all these other things that kept getting added and added in there that the physician ultimately became responsible for doing, and EHRs kind of supported that because it was, oh, it's easier just put this in there, just put this in there and then and then.
Yeah, I mean, there's things that can be automatically put in there. There are things that can be cut and pasted forward. It just became this never-ending cycle of making progress. Now it's bigger and bigger and bigger. The US has the lengthiest documentation of any other country in the world, things that have been brought to light, ultimately, if a provider is responsible for doing that, which they became that way with EHRs, they didn't offload that to a transcriptionist or things like that. It became more of the provider responsibility. The provider becomes a data entry person, which they never went to school for and don't like doing, but they're required to do so. So, note bloat contributes to people not liking their jobs. You know that's burnout. And how can we, you know, with technology too. Can we make this easier? Can we change how the process works to ultimately reduce burnout? You know, I've called myself a note bloat reduction expert. I'm transitioning that phrase to reducing documentation burden. Okay. Basically, there are tools that can make notes look bigger but more efficient too, like ambient and AI. Those notes tend to be lengthier. But let's get back to notebook.
So, the kind of initiative that I took to start this all off was with some of the changes that CMS clarified in the last six years or so. So, in 2019, there was this tiny little blurb in the physician fee schedule that basically said, if you've got a certain information in one area of the EHR, you don't have to put it in your actual progress. Note it could be linked or reviewed or things like that that flew under the radar from, I think, so many people until 2021 when the new ENM CPT code, requirements came out. These tiny changes were the first changes to CPT requirements or documentation in general that CMS had done in like 20 plus years, the advent, advent they were way behind on changing their guidelines, to match what EHRs were doing. So, so the 2019, the physician fee schedule change, the 2021 ENM changes for ambulatory and then for all other areas in 23. Those really provided some of the framework that could be used to address, reducing that, that documentation burden. Thanks to friends at Epic, Clinical Informatics there and the physician well-being services. You know, they were up on this, too, and starting to promote it throughout the community. Education, you know, had to get the word out. Hey, these changes are happening. You don't have to be stuck in doing what you've been doing for the last X amount of years. You now actually have the opportunity to change that. So first off, what are those changes? You know, getting that out to providers and our coding and billing staff to, you know, they obviously needed to know that, hey, these are changes. You may see things that are different than how you were taught. Don't yell at providers for doing the right thing by cutting this stuff out of the, out of there. So, you know that education was key.
Dr. Craig Joseph: I want to put an exclamation point on what you just said. You know, I work with, health care systems all across the country, and I can convince most of the physicians of. Don't put this in if you don't think you need it. It's the coders. And, and it's not always just the coders, but the whole billing apparatus that's been built around the physicians who don't want to acknowledge reality. And I'm stereotyping, of course, but like, there's just so many where they're like, well, that's not our interpretation. And you're like, well, I read English and yeah, here's the quote and I'm not sure what's open for interpretation. So, this is not a problem for you all and at your health system or.
Dr. Mark Mabus: It hasn't been because of good engagement early on. Okay. Now I'll be I'll be completely honest before all these guidelines came out, you know, I have that bias to you know, I don't, And I know this will sound harsh, but I don't want somebody with a two year degree telling me what to do and I think that's the opinion of most physicians in that they didn't want to listen. And I think it caused that friction, between coding and providers for the longest time. So knowing that these changes were coming, knowing that we would have the different players in the mix, that was my olive branch reach out to our coding department and explain what's going on and provide them the information that that, epic had kindly collected into documentation that we could share there to have them discuss with these thought leaders if need be as well. But that engagement from the start, before you actually start making your changes in workflows, I think has been so beneficial.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Brilliant. All right. So you so you've kind of go on a tour, parts of the hospital that many physicians don't see. And then you went to the physicians and said, hey, you don't have to do this. And when they at least in my experience, when I would say something like this, as the CMO, you don't have to do this. They would always look over to the coder like they would it would they would lose eye contact with me and look at the coder and see if the code or the truth. Yeah, yeah. Because I think a lot of us have been beaten down by the map. You know, we it's just been decades and decades of incremental loss of, authority. And I was going to say dignity, but maybe that's too old to going too far.
Dr. Mark Mabus: So it there's a hesitancy to change too, that the trust on the provider side, I know there were a quite a few folks that did not go all in when these changes were made, you know. Oh, maybe I'll remove their medication list from my note, but I'll leave that history in there for now but I there's some people that took that type of approach and, hey, I'm just happy that they did something, it's putting steps in the right direction as a thought, in the right direction to the mindset that you don't have to do everything that, that you, you were doing there. SPart of that whole process in the education was for providers was to look at what are some best practices that the EHRs providing. So, so epic said, use this smart link, not this, because the smart link brings in a big old table and stuff like that use collapsing, smart link headers and things along those lines. The informatics team, we were able to take those recommendations, review them internally, especially with coding and stuff too, and then bring that to the providers and say, hey, here's some options that you can have. Granted, if there were some standard notes that we changed completely, that upended some of this as well.
But you know, here, individual provider, here are some tools that you can use to change your workflows if you want to. And we kind of left it up to them to, iterate how they, wanted to. So, so yeah, it's steps and it's still going on to new functionality. Just last year we early adopted from epic something that they call hover bubble smart links. There are ways that instead of listing out, a bunch of information, it's just a, line of text, and you use your mouse and hover over it to see your information. We've even got some of those in standard notes that will disappear when you sign the notes. It's just there for informational purposes while you're authoring the note and then gone later. You know, that that, was a system wide change that's gone over. Well, if that information needs to stay in the note, the coding folks still see it. It's been good. So, still working on that with ambient, like I mentioned, that does tend to be word in how the AI outputs, the note in that documentation.
But my thoughts on that is that the provider didn't write it. You know, they just have to read and review it quick. And reading is faster than writing. You know, reading is faster than data entry. So ,I'm not too worried about character counts going up. If somebody uses ambient, I was just worried that documentation burden is lessened and that we look at other metrics like your time in notes, 8 to 20 minutes on average. For our providers who are using ambient, they are spending 8 to 20 minutes less time in notes because of using ambient. So, I am not going to dig them that there was their documentation is a tad bit longer, you know.
Dr. Craig Joseph: That's fair, but they're not the only ones reading it right. They're their colleagues. You and I have to read their notes too. So, let's talk about Ambient, you know, and I is sitting there listening in the room making a transcript, one would imagine. Yes. And then turning that transcript into, finished. Note that the physician then reviews doing some other things too, at least either now or in the near future. Right. Queuing up orders. So when I say, hey, we'll start little Johnny on amoxicillin 255 and it will automate when I go. I don't have to type that order in that order will be there too.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Be queued up for you to. Yep. Just send along and after review. Yep.
Dr. Craig Joseph: For sure. So that's all brilliant. So there's an arms race going on right now who can do that work. You know one is everyone's going to use one of these two. Or the other option is hey there's going to be 20 of these, companies. And we should be able to and I think the big air vendors are going to allow us to swap those in and out. Like, I can be with company A, and I'm like company B is giving me a slightly better deal this month. Which direction do you think you're going in? If we have a prediction, we will not hold you to it, but we will publicly shame you if you're wrong.
Dr. Mark Mabus: I wonder if there's more options coming. Like, will the EHRs take this over? You know, I know some of the companies themselves probably are developing some voice recognition that, that would be the development would be so much more accelerated with this whole GPT and AI world that I would not be surprised if something happens on the vendor side right now. It's all outsourced. I think the big companies are getting big dollars behind them, too, especially smaller ones that that come from nowhere. And we'll see what their stakeholders say, with, with how things are going. But this is the year of consolidation. You know, there have been so many different vendors out there. I think some of the smaller ones, honestly, are going to get eaten up this year or fold because of the prevalence of others there. There are companies that seem like they prefer vendors over the others for whatever reasons. That's up to them. I don't want to get into that. But yeah, preferential treatment might also consolidate the field even more.
So, I mean, if you're not on some of the big EHRs, there's still plenty of options out there. And, but they will be dwindling. Honestly, it's going to be down to, 1 or 2 or maybe a third will pop up there. Who's got the best deals this month? Absolutely. We have multiple live, Parkview. So you can exist with, multiple different voice recognition vendors at once. The increase in functionality, though, I think, with the orders and other things being automatically queued up for providers, I think that's what's going to drive provider engagement. Right now. I still have a lot of holdouts, for whatever reasons. I think, oh, that's nice for the notes. But once it starts becoming that whole integrated experience with, orders, follow ups and patient education all being brought into one, do it for me type things. First off, that's going to be more providers wanting the experience. I think that's going to be absolutely fantastic for not only reducing documentation burden, but reducing burnout because the computer is doing so much for you. We will finally get away from providers being that data entry person, and they can go back to seeing patients like they went to med school for, you know.
Dr. Craig Joseph: This is crazy talk.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Yeah, I know, but that's this is that big picture that I see evolving over the next couple of years. And with all that, user interfaces have to change too. You know, the current way we author things and visits and how encounters appear and stuff like that if we're not doing as much data entry and we're doing data validation, that is going to change what we could have as a possibility in front of a provider on the screen. You know, I might end up just, you know, using it as a reference tool, which is what the computer should be rather than a data entry tool. So I have big plans that I see the whole interface changing, whether it's from results being shown in one way, the area for documentation being tiny compared to half of the screen like it currently is there's I think it's going to open up so many different possibilities for that user experience. I'm excited to see what we come up with and where that is, is going. What's the ambient technologies ready? To support that.
Dr. Craig Joseph: It is exciting and it's all changing. So, so very quickly. I was talking to, one of the epic executives, a couple of months ago at a meeting, and I was saying, like I'm hearing some complaints about the, one of their one of Epic's, AI tools, the in-basket management. You know, I think it's called art. They were like, well, when are you talking about like. And I was like, I don't know, maybe six months ago, eight months ago. And the guy kind of just laughed at me and he goes, oh, I don't that's just way like, talk to me about where we are. I can talk to you about maybe two months ago. Meaning that hey, what? When it was bad six months ago it might really have been bad, but it's every month. It's changing.
Dr. Mark Mabus: It's. It is changing so fast. For sure. For sure. You know, we first went live on epic, it was like, oh, here's your yearly update for you. Now it's quarterly. And there's even the monthly patches that have new things available. You have the opportunity to early adopt other functionality that goes outside of those upgrade cycles. And when do you take that live? But it's always a change there, too. You know, some of it is, is, being driven so fast by technological changes. Can you keep up with what it's doing? Can you keep educating and iterating? You know, even your phone will download a new version of your app every week. And health care's technology is finally catching up to you. You know, your app store on your phone. And so it's hard when it affects your, your daily work that affects someone else's life. But still, it's still a lot of changes.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Yeah, yeah. Well, let's pivot quickly to vaccine reminders. We were just talking about documentation. And I ask not because I'm exceedingly interested in vaccine reminders, although as a as a pediatric pediatrician, as a pediatrician, I often say I haven't met too many vaccines that I, I don't love. You made some tweaks to vaccine reminders in your EHR and saw significantly improved, uptake. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about that.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Yeah, that was one of my first projects as an epic physician builder, working with an analyst on that, project. You know, we were, implementing epics, health maintenance, activity, which became their care gaps activity at first, you know, what do you decide to put into health maintenance? You know, there's a lot of recommendation and content that aligns with national quality initiatives on care gaps, which tend to include immunizations and other things like cancer screenings and stuff like that. So we had implemented a lot of those health fitness reminders for the standard schedules, the things that the quality measures are built on and things like that. Epic started to release some build for, risk based, like immunization tracking and that because they're on a different series than the standard series that's recommended by the CDC. So states that you have a certain health condition. You know, diabetes is an easy one. Guess what? As a diabetic, you're recommended to have a pneumococcal vaccination at a younger age. So things like that, focusing on risk based, focusing on your individual patient that presents right in front of you. How can you tailor medicine to support their needs as opposed to a blanket system need or a blanket quality measure across the system.
So it did take a little bit of buy in, especially from primary care. You know, that will be focusing on these things that are recommended that you should be doing. We're just going to program it into the EHR. So we use some of Epic's standard foundation tools to help with the risk-based series for immunizations. We did have to do some customizations, from those foundational rules. The other thing that helped with what we did with our implementation was, we also created one click orders to help providers choose the correct vaccine. So there's the health maintenance framework, and then there's a care gap. Orders, care gaps can trigger. And, a order panel for you automatically. You can program in what that needs to be. We took that one step further outside of foundations build and did some custom build that searched for what particular vaccine was recommended and then match that up to our formulary. You know, what we have in stock at the offices and basically with one click decide which vaccine to give. And we also ended up later extending that to pediatric combo vaccines, where one click can satisfy all three of those, vaccines that are in like pencil or pencil, Pediatrics, all that stuff.
With one click, you got all three and it satisfied all those for health maintenance. But yeah, just even not just building it into that health maintenance which triggers reminders on my chart and stuff like that, but also having the one click, making it so much easier for a provider to just get that order done. So we implemented that and tracked our outcomes over the course of a year. And before the implementation we had X number. Afterwards we had 75,000 more. So not only did that provide a revenue increase for primary care, obviously, but obviously public health benefit. You know, we're getting people things that they need that could prevent hospitalizations. And then the individual patient like I mentioned these were risk based. They were tailored to that patient that was right in front of you. What is their risk? Are you evaluating that for that individual person? So that is that was a kind of newer mindset in how we use the EHR back in 2018, 2019 when that happened. Getting my providers to focus on not just their quality metric that affect their bonus, are you doing the right thing for that patient right in front of you, you know, giving them the best care?
Dr. Craig Joseph: Sure. I know you're following one of the major things that my coauthor and I talk about in our book, make it easy to do the right thing. And, physicians will do the right thing if you make it easy. And so will the patients off it. Right. And so you followed that and you got success. Well, this has been great. As you know, near the end of our, interview, we always like to ask the same question, which is, is there something that's so well designed in your life that it brings you joy whenever you interact with it? Now, with you, it might be it might be vaccine reminders might be, when you're seeing a patient and the vaccine reminder pops up and, you get, it's so well designed. I don't know who designed that. Oh, wait, it was me. It was me, a doctor.
Dr. Mark Mabus: No, no, I mean, I could go on and make it the show and say it was that song that you wrote. Doctor may best to help promote bending that note curve and reducing documentation burden or introducing people to that new policy on Secure Chat, that song that you wrote that was catchy through and throughout the system. No. Because I do that, I have done some wacky things like, writing songs and getting words out to providers that way. But you leave this, this, this question pretty open-ended in your life in general. Yes. And, I'm, I'm taking it outside of medicine. So you're going to hear a little, a little tidbit about me that you may not have known. I am going to answer this by saying silicone baking mat.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Yes, yes. Bring it.
Dr. Mark Mabus: They are fantastic. Oh my goodness. Especially with kids. You know, I've got five kids and teaching them how to cook on their own, and you know this recording this just after the holidays. And so there was a lot of cookie making happening at my house. And oh my goodness, those cookies just plop right off. You know, if you've got that baking mat down, we bake a lot of cakes because we got a lot of birthdays, you know? Same thing. You got that silicone baking mat in there. They wash off pretty easily. They're cheap. I kind of equivocate to baking. I love to bake myself. It's similar to what I was doing back in my pharmacy days we would make drugs compounding you.
They teach you how to do that in in pharmacy school. It's following a recipe. Guess what? I follow recipes. When I cook or bake. I prefer, you know, baking and my wife does, you know, the, the savory stuff throughout the week. I bake on the weekends. And so, so yeah, I'm using some of that stuff myself. So, it's so simple. It's so impactful. And obviously food makes people joyous, you know, it's so much fun to, to share, meals with people. So that's another fun part of my, lifestyle. I'll throw it to you there.
Dr. Craig Joseph: I love it, I love it, and it, I can yeah. I mean, it totally meets the criteria of being well designed and bringing you joy for sure. Yeah. Awesome. Well, this was so interesting. So informative. Thank you so much. We will. Are there any, YouTube videos of you singing songs that we think might be appropriate? Okay.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Oh for sure. So, some of the songs, the songs themselves are on SoundCloud. It's soundcloud.com/thedoctr, “thedoctr”. There's no E in there. And it's all one word.
Dr. Craig Joseph: It's like the weekend.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Yes, yes. And so that's the best place to just hear songs. I'm on YouTube too, as doctrMK and, “doctrmk” but that's got some of the music videos. There's some podcast style interviews that I've done for education up there as well that are for public viewing. Any of that stuff is out there for people to use and see. I've got stuff that is, privately available too, because it has copyrighted information in there.
So, people can reach out to me and ask for some of that content with specific use cases too. And that can also be shared. I love sharing with the community through informatics, not just Epic informatics, in general, is so supportive of each other. And don't reinvent the wheel. If somebody's done something, see if there are folks willing to share what they've done and I'm one of them. So, anybody can reach out to me at any time.
Dr. Craig Joseph: Love it. We will throw some of those links in our show notes. Thanks. And, this would be great. Again, thank you so much for your time. This was, so helpful, so informative.
Dr. Mark Mabus: Thank you so much too.