CEO Report Notes from May 28, 2025 Board Meeting

The following is an outline of comments from the CEO at the recent Redwood Coast Medical Services (RCMS) Board Meeting. 
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Community Outreach

• RCMS donated, supported, and participated in the annual Waves & Whales 5K Trail Run/Walk, which was held on the Mendocino Coast in Point Arena. Proceeds from the Waves & Whales Trail Run support ACORN Partners in Education in their environmental stewardship programs for school children in our community.

 
Organizational/Operational update

• We continue to prepare for our HRSA OSV scheduled July 22 – 24. The first pass of most of our documentation is complete at this time. We will soon start loading them to the appropriate online site as required by the OSV team. Again, a reminder for board members to be available during that time.
• We had a comprehensive visit from our IT partner, Maxwell IT, last week. They spent two full days here. They addressed most of the issues caused by the failure of our UPS systems a few weeks back during the PG&E power outage. They also analyzed the key elements of our computer and communication infrastructure and will be putting together a near-term as well as a multi-year long-term upgrade plan. We should be getting some details about that in the next couple of weeks. While they were here, we also talked about better coordination between our on-site team and their engineers.
• I had reported in the past that we were looking at a NextGen AI-based toolset called Ambient AI to help our providers automatically document important information in patients' charts based on the conversation they were having with the patient during the visit. After the initial testing, we have decided not to go forward with the implementation of that product at this time. We plan to revisit this at a later time and do more testing.
• Our leases for Point Arena medical and dental buildings are expiring at the end of June. We are currently working on renewing those leases.
• Mendocino County has changed or corrected the building addressing scheme for Ocean Drive. This has caused some confusion with our Genoa Pharmacy’s physical address. We are addressing that.
• Recently, as part of our emergency preparedness activities, we did a Tsunami evacuation drill at our Medical and Dental facilities in Point Arena. These two buildings fall in the Tsunami hazard zone as defined by USGS. We are also planning an emergency evacuation procedure practice drill for the Gualala building.
• We are in the process of getting an eye examination equipment that will be used to do in house screening for Diabetic Retinopathy. Once set up and our staff is trained on this device, this will significantly help our providers to do Diabetic Retinopathy diagnostics for our patients during a regular visit and will prevent, in many cases, annual out of town visit to eye specialist. 
• Facilities expansion project – we plan to report to the board next month on where we are with planning, county approvals, results of the feasibility study of the consulting group we engaged, and what is our recommendation to the board going forward.

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