Blake Halladay from Nightingale Education Group shares their experience with Quorum

Speaker: Blake Halladay, Director, Regulatory & Legislative Strategy

Blake Halladay: Before Quorum, we really had two major issues that our organization was struggling with specifically in regulatory and legislative concerns. One was more reactive and one was more proactive. So on the reactive side, we really lacked an early warning system. If you will, a risk management system, we had been surviving so far on what I call luck and luck is not a great strategy for risk management, you know, being in the right place at the right time, kind of a thing, hearing about bills and regulations that were being proposed or had been proposed that might affect us. Luckily, we had been in the right place at the right time, as I said, but luck is not a great strategy. So we needed an early warning system. So something that would let us know that something is coming our way, something that might affect us either positively or negatively, but something we would want to be aware of something that we knew we would need to react to. And we really didn't have anything in place for that. So, that proposes a pretty substantive risk. Our organization operates in two pretty heavily regulated worlds in the higher education world. So post secondary education college, specifically for-profit colleges and universities, very heavily regulated. And then also we're a nursing college. So we deal with professional licensure license exams and preparing people for a licensed profession. So lots going on in that world, a very heavily regulated world. So there's lots that could happen in either of those worlds that could affect us both on a state level and on a national level. State level, from a licensure perspective, from a state authorizations perspective, schools being allowed to rotate to clinical rotations on ground rotations in states that's dictated by state laws by state licensing boards, by departments of education, post-secondary groups, et cetera, et cetera. And then on the federal level with U.S. Department of Education, right, changing rules on, you know, gainful employment on quality measures, things like that. So we really didn't have anything in place that, that allowed us to know what was coming down the pike, something that might affect us, really big problem for us. And then on the other side, the proactive side of things as we grow and have grown across the country, we have students in almost every state in the country, which means we interact with the governments of pretty much every state in the country. We found ourselves being more and more active in the legislative and regulatory space. So either proposing legislation that would create greater access to nursing education, supporting other people's legislation, maybe for nurse compact access, things like that. So nurses can cross state borders and still practice or opposing legislation, something that might shut down those things that might hurt access to nursing education that might, you know, create barriers to access to nursing education or may make it harder to become a nurse, things like that. So we, as we became more and more proactive in this, we didn't really have a system that allowed us or that enabled us to be effective in that. We didn't know who the main players were, you know, who should we talk to? What representatives are available in these spaces, you know, who votes on health, who introduces bills on health, who's successful in bills on health and in education, you know, who are their staffers? How do we get a hold of them? How do we build a coalition, right? Those kinds of things, what current Bills and laws are in place. We didn't really have a good system for that and we were just kind of going off a word of mouth or trying to do our own individual research, which can be really, really cumbersome when you're dealing with every state plus territories. So really before Quorum, those were our two main big issues was our reactive and proactive, the early warning system we just didn't have in place and a system that will enable us to be proactive and efficient in our regulatory and legislative endeavors.

Blake Halladay: So we signed up initially for Quorum, Federal and Quorum State. And I'm very excited because we are actually in the process right now of signing up for Quorum's Grassroots software. So, so far, really, the State and Federal sides of Quorum on the legislative regulatory tracking have helped us immensely on meeting both that reactive and proactive need, right? Especially the reactive need as we, as we've been building Quorum, we're, pretty new to the system. Maybe, you know, other companies that may have been with Quorum for years, we've been here for, you know, a matter of months, maybe half a year or so. We've been able to start building dashboards with tracking boards, lists, widgets, whatnot, put together with keywords and search is built in that are constantly looking for bills, regulations. tweets, newsletters, Facebook posts, anything that mentions terms, you know, the nursing shortage, for example, something that we pay close attention to licensure state authorization, things like that when we hear those and when we see those and Quorum alerts us to those, then we know we can take a look and say, OK, is this something we need to be aware of, do we need to watch this? Are we for it or are we against it? And that has been amazing. Right, just in the short time, really, that we've even been with Quorum that has really, really helped us as we've been able to build those alerts in, you know, every day I get multiple alerts. I get alerts on committees, committee hearings and meetings that are coming up that I may want to jump in and watch their live stream if they have one state and federal and bills announcements, newsletters, things like that, that mention things that I might be interested in, which is really great. You know, even seeing legislation that's been proposed right here in our backyard in Utah where we are headquartered, you know, something popped up that we weren't aware of through our normal channels of being involved in things that right there proved its worth. So building that risk management system now using both Quorum, Federal and State has been incredibly beneficial. It's also really helped us on building relationships with officials that we're meeting with, We can pull up an official's bio, how are they voting? What bills are they sponsoring? You know, what district are they from? What do they represent on a state and a federal level? And then we go meet them and can speak more educatedly to their issues and to who they are. Which helps us really build a relationship with them. They know that we're doing our homework. We're not just there to, you know, use their services, we really want to get to know them. And that's been really, really great as well using that the downloads feature where you can put together kind of a we call them a one pager even though they're multiple pages. But that's been super helpful to have that. Now, on the proactive side, similar, right, using Quorum, Federal and State has enabled us to know, you know, who we should reach out to, with whom should we work and how are they voting, who do they most likely vote with or usually vote with building a coalition of people that we can work together to get good co sponsors on, you know, we're, we're running a bill right now that we've luckily enough to have bipartisan co sponsorship, which has been really, really great knowing these sponsors and what they're involved in, really excited to get working with the grassroots software. I haven't had a chance really to, to put it into place for ourselves because we're just new with it. But I've seen multiple demos now working with the Quorum team and I know it's going to be exactly what we need. We have thousands of students all across the country that are very interested in being involved in forwarding the cause of creating greater access to nursing education. Now, with this grassroots software, we have an easy a way for them, this avenue for them to get involved. They can just jump on our website, go find the issue that they're interested in Sends a letter or a tweet, contact basically, write their direct representatives or the governor's office that says, hey, you know, I'm a student with Nightingale support this bill or oppose this bill or whatever it may be. So we can now get our students involved and help them be a part of the legislative process, which is really, really great. So, using again Quorum Federal and State, using it every day, really, really grateful for what we've been able to do on building risk management as, as well as building better relationships proactively. And also now with Quorum Grassroots, being able to build that system that allows our supporters, our advocates to jump on board on the things that we are proposing are important and that they also feel are important. Great thing.

Blake Halladay: As far as results go, that we've been able to see with Quorum hard for us to put a metric number to that right now or a metric to that rather, just because we haven't been with the system all that long. However, I can share that we've seen some really incredible accomplishments, achievements benefits from Quorum just in the, the half a year or a few months that we've been with the system. And one of those is our ability to see now see where we were previously blind. right? I've referred to our previous strategy as luck and luck is not a great strategy for risk management. So we have replaced that strategy with, with a much better strategy now of alerts, dashboards, tracking boards, you know, searches that allow us to be aware of what's going on. We now have the capability of building dashboards for every single state in the country. Dashboard for every single state, we are in the process of building those. We have some of them up and running including federal, you know, various territories. These dashboards are full of widgets and tracking lists that search for constantly search for terms that we are interested in tracking things that are very important to us, right? If anybody mentions a nursing shortage, we can see that if it's in a tweet or you know, Facebook post or newsletter or a news release, a PR Wire or something of that effect, we can pay attention to that. We know what bills have been introduced in every single state and on the federal level that involve nursing or for profit, education or barriers to access to education, you know, creating access to nursing, all of those things we can build in our building dashboards that can show us, hey, in the state of Alaska, here are the bills and the regulations that mention these terms that are important to you. What do you want to do with them? We now can use those to trigger an internal process of reviewing where we didn't have the ability to do that before. Now, we can see boy, there's maybe a couple 100 bills that popped up that we didn't even know existed. We can go through our internal process of reviewing those bills. Tag them as, as watching, unimportant, support, or oppose if it gets to that point, you know, do we need to support this bill? Do we need to oppose this bill? And if we're going to support or oppose, what are we going to do about it? We have the contact information for people attached to those bills that we can reach out to and show our support or express our opposition. We didn't have that before. So it's created a bit of a mountain of information for us right now. But it's a mountain that we're very grateful to have. And as we sift through that mountain then it's just a maintenance, right Every week we jump in and we can see all of the bills in each individual state on the federal level. We review it in our internal process. We give it a status, oppose, watching, an important something of that effect and then move on or if it's something that we need to actually take legislative action on, we have access again to the contact information for the people that we need to reach out to based on those bills. So that is a huge success for us with Quorum. Again, I can't give you really a metric on that thousands of bills that we now are aware of that. We didn't know even existed before that has drastically reduced our risk level because now we know what's out there and we know what we need to do with it. Or at least we know we can do something if we need to. So huge accomplishment for us. Very, very grateful for that on our proactive side of things, knowing who to talk to, knowing what they're about. Being able to get a really clear picture of this legislator, you know, what, what has she voted for? You know, what issues has she voted for in the past? Like, what categories is she really interested in? Who does she normally vote together with? If we want to build a coalition together, You know, who does she not vote with? What kind of relationships does this person have that has been really, really helpful for us as we're building coalitions with our legislative endeavors right now. So, yeah, great accomplishments, especially on the risk management side. And now as we're moving more into our legislative proactive endeavors, we are educated and we have the tools to find the information that we need that we didn't have before. And that's been huge.