So we're going to start out by asking Kim to square in anyone from Grace, who is going to be providing testimony this morning. Good morning. Can you hear us? We can. Okay. Great. Would you please raise your right hand, you are about to give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to help you God. I do. I do. Please state your name. Hi. Good morning. This is Doug Devello, president and CEO of Grace Cottage and Stephen Brown, CFO. And Doug, whenever you're ready, you can proceed. Sure. Great. Wonderful to be here. Thanks for allowing us to present today and we'll try and get through this as expeditiously as possible so that we can all have lunch at a reasonable hour. I want to start off by saying that Grace Cottage is an organization that's, I'm sure, extremely well known to the Green Mountain Care Board. Since 1949, we've been delivering healthcare to the residents of Townsend in southern Vermont with a human and personal touch. Our culture of caring combined with our knowledgeable and skilled team of providers and nursing staff has really enabled us to provide exceptional care while achieving simultaneously really, really high patient satisfaction scores. In 2017 and 2018, we were recognized as the top 20 critical access hospital in the United States for patient satisfaction by the National World Health Association, something we're really quite proud of. And because of our size and our independence and our collective sense of duty, we're able to provide our patients with a very high degree of individual attention compared to what one might find at a larger, more complex healthcare organization. We're a 19-bed critical access hospital, as all of you know. We run an average daily census of between 10 and 14 patients, and that fluctuates rather dramatically over the course of the year. We have a 24-7 emergency department that sees roughly 27 to 2800 visits annually. We have a diagnostic imaging department with X-ray and CT scanning capabilities, as well as bone densitometry. We have a laboratory that provides approximately 40,000 outpatient tests per year and approximately 6,000 inpatient tests per year to our patients and our community. And we have a very sophisticated inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation program at Grace Cottage, providing over 16,000 outpatient treatments a year and over 25,000 inpatient and swing patient services by our rehabilitation team at Grace Cottage. We have a rural health clinic. I think we're really quite well known for rural health care. We're one of the few organizations that I'm familiar with that I've worked at that really focuses on the health and wellness of our constituents, our patients and our community, rather than in driving volume and interactions and billable services. We do everything possible at Grace Cottage to actually keep people out of the hospital. And we believe, I personally believe, and I believe my team also shares the belief that primary care is really the most important solution to fixing our national problem of continuously increasing health care costs in this country. Making people healthier and keeping them out of the hospital is really the only way that we're going to drive down the cost of care in the United States. And every day of the year, Grace Cottage works tirelessly to improve the health and well-being of the patients that rely on us by providing them access to primary care providers, providing them access to an emergency department that could link them to a primary care provider once the acute episode is resolved, and by making sure that our patients are doing everything possible to manage their chronic health care issues like hypertension and diabetes and obesity and mental health and doing everything possible to be healthy and to stay out of the hospital and to stay out of the emergency department. We also have a community health team with two FTEs who provide services free of charge to our community members. And we have two advanced practice providers who provide behavioral health services to our constituents as well. And in addition, we have a retail pharmacy right here on our campus that does a very brisk business of helping our patients have access to getting their prescriptions filled so that they can continue to do the things necessary to control their cholesterol and their chronic health care issues without having to deal with long distance travel to a commercial pharmacy in Brattleboro or in New Hampshire. This year, we're really pleased. I think all of you know that the town of Brattleboro has an annual, the Brattleboro Reformer, rather, has a reader's choice survey that they conduct here in the region where people who live in this part of the state are able to to vote on the services that they feel are the best in the region. It's the Readers Choice Award and in 2020 Grace Cottage won every health care award available to us to win, including best hospital, best emergency department, best physical therapy, best pharmacy, best doctor and best pediatrician as well as the best place to work. I think that really says a lot about Grace Cottage and about the level of service, the level of dedication and commitment we have to meeting the needs of the people that rely on us for their health care. So a little feather in our cap at Grace Cottage for being so well thought of by our community and the people that use us on a daily basis for their care. Our next slide talks about hospital mission. Our mission is to serve the health care needs of our community to promote wellness, to relieve suffering and to restore health. I think all those attributes were covered in my earlier comments this morning. Next slide talks about our vision. We're dedicated to providing personalized, competent and accessible primary care, rehabilitation, wellness, prevention, inpatient care and emergency services. We really focus on preventive care as I mentioned earlier about keeping people healthy, about prolonging the well-being of our community. We collaborate with other health care organizations in the region, hospitals that are more full service organizations than Grace Cottage and we work very closely with organizations like Dartmouth-Hitchcock, with Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, with Cheshire Medical Center across the the state line, close to us in New Hampshire. We embrace, our community embraces Grace Cottage as a welcoming resource for health and wellness and the diversity and culture of our region will be reflected in all that we do. We're working very diligently on expanding our diversity and our ability to provide services to a diverse and ever-changing cultural community that we provide services to. I want to turn it over now to Stephen Brown, our chief financial officer. He's going to go over the income statement, the balance sheet and review our cash flow statement and then we can go into some specific discussion about our financial plan for the coming fiscal year 2021. Stephen? So our fiscal year 21 net patient revenue budget is based primarily on volumes experienced during the first five months of fiscal year 2020 from October through February prior to the pandemic with no additional growth projected beyond the trends that were showing in various service lines. For instance, it emergency department was trending up through all of those months and we expected that trend to continue. Didn't budget further growth beyond that but based it on what was showing during those times. We had experienced growth in some areas particularly in primary care as a result of providers, relatively newly hired providers, maturing as the last fiscal year ended, the beginning fiscal year started at those practices becoming full. So that's what the projection going forward for fiscal year 21 is based upon. I included in the presentation slides the income statement as well as the balance sheet and the cash flow primarily as reference points. I'm not going to read through them line by line be since you will call have them. The income statement is a very high level summary of an extremely detailed budget that was built from the bottom up based on extensive discussions and evaluation and truthfully best guess estimates of what might happen next year by each individual department, you know, forecast trying to forecast what may or may not happen, whether are no more government shutdowns or no more large outbreaks of COVID. It's extremely unpredictable, you know, impossible to predict, I guess, as everybody is well aware. But we used our best judgment to come up with where we thought we would be from a revenue standpoint and the associated expense standpoint. We did a really good job of trying to maintain an expense level that was really not a lot different than what was budgeted in 2020. It is certainly higher, of course, than 2020 projection. But 2020 projection would have been higher had volumes continued throughout the whole year. The next page, the balance sheet is again a very high level snapshot of where we're at, where our position is. It separates out our COVID funding sources that we will have left at the end of 2020, as well as where we believe we will be at the end of 2021. We were, which I'll talk about in a moment when we get to the slide that talks about COVID funding. We were very fortunate to have received hopefully what is more than adequate funding to get us through the crisis, even if it lasts through all of next year and into the next one. Cash flow statement I included simply to show where some of those sources of funding were coming from and going. Our overall change in charge requests for requesting for a rate increase for the coming year is 3.2%. We felt that we needed to ask for at least that much in part to keep our charge requests in some areas above what hopefully inflationary requests will be. In many cases, as we've talked about every year in the past, the majority of our reimbursement is cost-based reimbursement as a critical access and rural health clinic, particularly all of Medicare. That rate request doesn't really affect that reimbursement much on the bottom line. Actually, it doesn't really affect it at all. Where it affects are the things that are paid on fee schedules. If you're fortunate enough that a particular insurance company increases their fee schedule from one year to the next, you need to at least increase your rates enough to cover that because they aren't going to pay more than what you're requesting. Not that I'm ever hopeful that any of them will increase at 3.2%. I will turn it now back over to Doug to talk about service lines and any changes in the facility. So we have no immediate plans either short term or next year to make any major service line adjustments. We obviously are focused on risks and opportunities, which is the next slide. Clearly the biggest risk to us is what could potentially happen with the pandemic. We've been very fortunate. We've tested over 1,000, almost 1,100 patients here at Grace Cottage for COVID-19. We've had, I believe, 12 positive patients out of that total number tested and only one of those 12 patients actually died from the disease. The other patients were able to go home and recover without any complications. So we've been really fortunate in the fact that the disease has not been as damaging to the local community and to our employees as it has been in other parts of the state and other parts of the country. But that still doesn't tell us what could happen in the coming months. There's a lot of discussion about disease escalation as we get into the flu season, the influenza season. We don't know how COVID is going to react during the winter months when things get cold again and people gravitate back indoors, which is where the disease tends to spread most effectively. So we're not going to let our guard down. We've changed a lot of things operationally at Grace Cottage to ensure that our patients and our employees stay safe. Things like PPE and screening and visitation policies and things of that nature. We're going to continue those efforts and we're going to follow the advice of the health department and the governor as we move forward in managing COVID here locally and at Grace Cottage. But it's certainly a risk and I think it's going to have an impact on how people view healthcare. We've seen by virtue of the fact that so many patients, at least early on, were more interested in non-contact consultation with their providers than face-to-face visits. And we believe that's going to continue for a while. People are going to continue to be somewhat reluctant to go into hospitals, to go into the provider office. So we continue to tout the message to our patients that it's safe to come to Grace Cottage and that it's really, really important not to ignore your health care issues, not to ignore your symptoms.  If you're not feeling well, make sure you reach out at least by telephone and give us an opportunity to guide you on the best course of treatment to deal with your specific problem. The other risk, of course, is Medicaid. It's been a risk since 1947 at Grace Cottage. When we opened, it's going to continue to be a problem going forward. Medicaid expansion is something we feel strongly about. I think a lot of hospitals in Vermont feel strongly about expanding access to patients who are struggling financially, who don't have health care insurance, who need Medicaid to gain access to care. Again, keeping people healthy is the way to lower the cost of care in the state of Vermont and across the country. And the only way to do that is to make sure that as many people as possible have access to particularly primary care, if anything else. But we can't continue to expand access to Medicaid while reimbursing health care organizations at a level less than half of what it costs to provide the actual care. And so expanding Medicaid access is important for the health of our communities, but it also creates increasing burden on health care organizations like Grace Cottage to figure out how to pay for the care, to pay for the cost of the care, and to keep our doors open and keep the lights on. You've heard that expression earlier today from the Rutland presentation. So those are the two biggest risks that we have our eye on right now. With regard to opportunities, expanding access to primary care, it's one of those important things we focus on at Grace Cottage. It's instrumental in our mission and vision for the future. We believe it's what makes Grace Cottage the phenomenal organization that it is. And we want to continue to provide access to primary care. So making sure that people get appointments quickly. In many cases now, same day appointments are available at Grace Cottage almost every single day. And we're going to continue to build upon that access going forward into the future and into next year. We're also taking advantage of an opportunity in the local area with the unraveling of a very busy pediatric practice in Brattleboro and the loss of pediatric providers in the region. We just took on an advanced practice provider in pediatrics to join our pediatric physician to create a two provider pediatric office to increase access to care for pediatric patients here at Grace Cottage. We're really impressed at the number of patients, families who are contacting us even before this new provider has hit boots on the ground asking how they can get an appointment and can get on to the schedule in the very near future. So it looks to be to us, even early on, to be a demand for pediatric care here at Grace Cottage where we're going to build on that access and the need for increasing demand for pediatric care. Steven, you want to say a few things about our capital budget plans for Fiscal 21? Sure. Our 21 capital budget includes primarily two large projects, both replacement or upgrades of existing equipment. One is the regular every five or six year replacement of our PIXIS med stations and the second is a large IT project which includes a complete upgrade and refresh of our wireless and physical network for connectivity which will bring our hopefully our entire IT infrastructure well into the 21st century and position us well for the next several years to effectively use our electronic health record primarily but everything else involved and particularly now the importance of being able to zoom correctly or efficiently and have good connection for that. Unfortunately, that's probably not going away anytime soon. We do not have any approved or planned CON projects at this point in time. So at this point, happy to open things up for questions and comments. A little bit of a delayed reaction on my mute button. Apparently when you hit it twice it goes right back. Sorry about that. We're going to start with board member Lange. Robin? Sure. Thank you and thank you very much for your presentation and all the work that you've been doing in terms of your operational changes in response to COVID. I've heard a couple questions around embedded assumptions around the Medicare reimbursement. I know that as a critical access hospital you are cost based and that sequestration had made a pretty big difference in terms of cost based actually being below cost. So I'm wondering if you've quantified or looked at the impact of the elimination of the sequestration through the end of this year on your 20 budget in the first quarter of 2021? So the 2% sequestration if you look at our net patient revenue of roughly 12 million Medicare and net patient revenue of roughly $12 million amounts to about $250,000 for a year. So what would be included in that three month period going forward is about $62,000. So it's, you know, it's pretty modest to have but it doesn't make a huge difference in the bottom line of a $20 million budget. Yep and I'm assuming that your Medicaid assumptions were a flat rate, no rate changes. Correct. Thank you. To get a little bit more information about your telehealth implementation, how, you know, what you if you did tell some telehealth changes in response to COVID and how that's been going. We've done a little bit of everything with regard to telehealth but not the actual volume impact has not been all that significant other than the loss, you know, the loss revenue initially when we weren't getting paid for for non-face-to-face contact with our patients. We've seen a little bit of relief in that regard now. We're actually getting, you know, paid something for connecting with patients on a non-face-to-face basis. But again, you know, everything we do is primary care. So, you know, telehealth with, you know, with other organizations for specialty and sub-specialty services, not very robust in Southern Vermont at the present time and probably not going to be very robust going forward because, you know, it's very difficult to rely on specialists and sub-specialists to provide you with telehealth consultations when the cost to them to do so and the lack of reimbursement makes it financially untenable. So, you know, until there is a national solution on how to reimburse not only the organizations that have the patients in front of them but the specialists who are on the other end of the technology chain to make, you know, telehealth an economically viable solution to expanding access to care. There's not going to be a lot of appetite for expanding, you know, telehealth anytime soon, at least from what I'm saying. That's interesting because actually in other parts of the state, we have seen a very robust expansion of telehealth in particular in primary care in terms of it replacing face, a lot of face-to-face visits. So, it's just interesting that that pattern is not necessarily reflected in your situation. We did reckon during the initial, you know, that during the shutdown period particularly, we did use a lot of telehealth in primary care for primary, for basically necessary visits. You know, most of our patients who did it for anything that they thought they absolutely had to have, it was difficult in part to make it very widespread because connectivity in this area for video ones particularly is quite limited. Getting good connectivity outside of downtown areas in the towns we serve can be very difficult. So, a lot of them were, you know, they relied on telephone visits which can only go so far. So, yes, we did do a fair amount of it, but as soon as people were able to start actually coming back to the doctor's office, that's what is happening because it's just not a substitute. Yeah, just to clarify, my comments around telehealth were really not telephone-related interactions. Zoom, FaceTime, things of that nature where screen where you can visibly, you know, the patient can see the provider and the provider can see the patient. But Stephen's right. We have a lot of telephone calls early on from patients who were concerned about their health and really didn't know what to do. Should I go to the emergency room? Should I speak to my doctor? Can I speak to my doctor? Can I talk to a nurse? Can I get some advice on where to go to deal with this problem? So, I have a lot of that and we provided a lot of that care by telephone and really weren't getting paid for it. Okay, that's also interesting because my understanding is that the Department of Financial Regulation Order requires commercial reimbursement. So, I don't know if it's out of state insurers that you're referring to, but certainly in Vermont telephone visits were being reimbursed. Not at the level of a face-to-face encounter, always. Sometimes you're right, some of them were. Thanks. So, the other question I had about the we have someone who is not on mute. I think it might be George for Williger. So, if you could please mute yourself. Thank you. In terms of the net patient revenue assumptions, looking at the first five months, I was curious if those assumptions also factor in the new pediatrician provider or how you factor that into NPR, if at all? For the year going forward, generally providers are budgeted at the level they are at. So, I look at each individual provider, what they've been doing, what they would do going forward. In the case of the pediatrician, that is a whole new position. So, yes, I make an assumption of what I think in the coming year she will be producing from a net patient revenue standpoint. But from a volume standpoint, each individual provider is more or less expected to continue the volume that they were doing in those first five months. Got it. Thank you. That's all I have for questions. Thank you very much, Robin. Next, we're going to move to Member Pelham. Tom. Good. Thank you. I'm almost instinctively, when it comes to Leland and Grand Townsend, want to say, go Eagles, beat Rebels, but that was longer going far away. My first question is, you say in the narrative that both Medicaid and commercial relative rate changes in charge has little effect as long as our charges are higher than the fee schedule when it comes to Medicaid and commercial. And so, I'm just wondering whether the 3.2% requested increase in charge leaves anything on the table in terms of commercial and Medicaid relative to your commercial Medicaid fee schedules, or is, in other words, would a higher change in charge result in more revenue or have you maxed out with a 3.2% increase in charge? A higher rate increase would make a small difference on a small part of our business. So, for those, essentially, all of Medicaid is on a fee schedule. So, you're only going to get paid what they decide to pay us on that fee schedule and what we charge doesn't matter. On the commercials, for instance, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, we get paid for outpatient services on a fee schedule for laboratory and diagnostic imaging services. So, it doesn't, again, it doesn't matter what I charge as long as I'm charging more than what that individual fee schedule for an individual test is. Where it does make a difference is on the rest of, for instance, Blue Cross, the rest of outpatient services as well as all of our inpatient services are paid on a percent of charges. And several, some of the other commercial insurers as well, usually all inpatient and most outpatient are also paid on a percent of charges. So, yes, the more I charge, the higher they're going to pay me. But they also, we negotiate contracts, for instance, with Blue Cross each year. And the more I increase my rates, the more they want to increase their discount and therefore reducing the percentage that they charge. So, it's a fine line. How much of it I'll end up actually getting? Thank you for that. So, I mean, it looks from your balance sheet that this CARES money has been quite helpful. And it looks like about four million dollars there that seems to be, you know, will be there over time and not have to be spent. So, what I'm just curious is to what is your view of this one-time money that's enhanced your balance sheet going forward in terms of trying to save it and use it as an investment or to spend it down slowly? What's your thought about that money? So, just quickly, I meant to talk about that sooner than I never did. I really forgot that it was in the budget submission that had the slide about funding sources rather than our presentation. So, if you had recall from looking at our budget presentation, we essentially, at the beginning, back in April and May, got roughly 10 million dollars of cash coming into the facility, about three million dollars in Medicare advanced funding, which of course is strictly a loan, a three million dollar payroll protection loan, some of which will be forgiven, and about four point three million dollars in CARES Act stimulus money. As of projection at the end of this current year, we, wow, let me back up one second. The three million dollars worth of Medicare money, they're going to start deducting very soon and we fully plan to return all of that money and have not spent any of it. The remaining money, the payroll protection loan and the CARES Fund money, we will have used as of the end of 2020 roughly only about two and a half million dollars of that money. And assuming we use the eight hundred thousand dollars in the 21 budget that I put on that line, at the end of 21, we're still going to have about three point seven million dollars left over. I don't honestly know, as of today, how long we're going to be able to keep that money. I mean, based on the last thing I read a couple of weeks ago, the current plan is that you have to have spent all of that money by next June, or July, I believe it is, or returning. Fortunately, we have got all of the money still sitting in the bank that we cannot justify having spent for COVID related loss and revenues or COVID related expenses. We're not just spending the money on things that are not COVID related because you have to justify to the federal government for the CARES money what you spent that money on. So, you know, we're fortunately in a comfortable position right now that we still have more than enough money to cover any revenue shortfalls related to lack of volume due to patients not coming in here due to the COVID crisis and or increased expenses related to such as some of the things Doug referred to, you know, that we've added full-time screening positions to screen patients coming into the building. We've had to remodel or working on remodeling registration areas for that purpose, additional positions in areas such as housekeeping and places like that due to the extra work involved. Of course, PPE, spending a lot more money on that. But at this point, as far as we can foresee, we will have plenty of COVID funding available to cover any of those increased costs or reduced revenues. Thank you. Another area, and this just could be, you know, the issue having to do with your size and small numbers. But I was looking at your growth in bad debt and free care, first by 88% and the second by 34%. And the statewide averages across all hospitals, which is huge number in the billions is at 12% and 14.6%. So I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about your increase in bad debt and free care and what's behind that? We fortunately have a relatively low percentage of gross revenue to start with as a write-off percentage. You know, I think truthfully what has happened is people are making choices who to pay. And, you know, we're not high on that list of people that are going to stop providing them service if they don't pay their bills. They don't pay their fuel bill and they're not going to get fuel. If they don't pay their grace cottage hospital bill, we're still going to take care of them every time they walk in the door, whether it be an emergency room visit for primary care or needed library x-ray done. So I think it's simply our community and our community knowing that we're near, we're here when they need us and we, although we'd like to get paid, we don't force them to pay, which is probably also one of the reasons that our community is also so generous to us. Well, speaking of that, when I was down there, you talked to me a little bit about the finance committee that you have and that there are a lot of second homeowners on that finance committee and that you have all these second homeowners down there and they want to have a hospital that's up and running to their to their standards. And I'm just wondering, with this COVID event over the first part of the year, what have you seen in terms of the second homeowners and their support for the hospital and their comfortableness or their inclination to spend more time in Vermont? From what I can tell, all of our second homeowners are now primarily primary homeowners. I think pretty much every second home in the area has been occupied since March. I don't know if there's any current plan for any of them to leave. Truthfully, you go down to the local grocery store and there's as many non-Vermont cars as there are Vermont cars in the parking lot. And it's not, although there's still plenty of people coming to visit, it's not just people coming to visit. It's the people that are here. And they have continued to be extremely generous. Even during this, our foundation truthfully was shocked at the generosity of donors specifically during such a difficult time when some of those donors were probably thinking, should I spend my money because the stock market is down so far. But they've continued to show their support. And my final question is, in terms of overall NPR, you folks are seven tenths of one percent. I mean, you were very small. You've also the only hospital that over the period up to 20 or through 2019 had negative operating margins all five years. There's no other hospital that's been in that circumstance. So I'm just wondering if you have any advice for us at the Green Mountain Care Board, how we can better support a small hospital like you? Are the things that we can do that that can help you strengthen your financial structure over the long run? Especially if this one time COVID money kind of goes away and you have to pay it back at some point. So it's just a kind of an open ended question. To be perfectly honest with you, Doug already touched upon it as our biggest risk. And truthfully, the main reason for us not being able to achieve a positive bottom line is the abysmal Medicaid reimbursement and the fact that this tiny facility contributes almost $2 million a year to the state of Vermont Medicaid fund. I sadly know that you don't really have any control over that. But that is the bottom line. I mean, continuing to essentially write a check to the state of Vermont every year for $2 million. This facility, I don't think truthfully can ever have a positive bottom line. Well, on that note, I'll pass it to Tom. Anyway, yes. Thank you, Tom. Now we're going to move to member Yusuf or Maureen. Thanks. I'm actually going to take a little different take on what Tom was just talking about. You have had negative operating margins for the past five years, and you continue to miss your budget each year. And I know you're small. I know it's not going to move the needle tremendously. I really want you to be a successful hospital. I think that as we look at your requests for this year, it's similar to what we went through last year. So last year, you would ask for an 8.7 percent increase, which we reduced to a 3.5 percent increase, although the trend would have been looking at much lower than just bringing you to the 3.5. And I remember there was a lot of pushback about how you were going to hit these high numbers. Through February to that revised budget, you were tracking that negative 6.8 percent. And as we look forward to what you're forecasting for next year, if I just take you at, you're going to go at the same rate that you were at this year, which was at the minus 6.8 percent, you would come out to be about 18.6 million dollars, which is about where you've been for the past several years. Your forecast this year has your fourth quarter up projected up 12 percent from where you were a year ago. So one question maybe to help me feel comfortable that you can achieve these numbers would be, do we know where we were running through July for the fourth quarter?  And I really want to get the point that the concern here is your expenses are built on achieving a budget of 21 million dollars and you're spending 22 million dollars, 22.8 million dollars is your projection.  So I'm just trying to understand how you're going to get this potential growth again that you're forecasting. And yes, you're small. It's not going to move the needle. It's more for the health of the hospital because if you end up coming in around 19 million, you would eat into that carers money pretty quickly. But as you've said, you're probably going to have to return a bit of that because it wasn't for loss volume. So just trying to get a comfort on your NPR forecast as it relates to you being down 8% for the first five months of the year to the revised budget and then projecting significantly up in the fourth quarter. A lot of them, you're right, being small is difficult in a lot of ways. But one of the issues with it is it doesn't take much of a change in a specific line of business to make a big swing. And part of that is in what we're doing for business. To give you an idea, as an average for outpatient revenue for the hospital, we collect, give or take 50% of what we built. For the inpatient side of the service, a queue and or swing patients, we collect more like 85 to 90% of what we built. So it doesn't take a very big swing or flux in inpatient volume of collecting a lot more of what you're actually charging to offset even a small decrease in outpatient volume because you're only collecting half of what you're charging. And we have been, as Doug said, our patient census has been up this year and particularly truthfully since not so much during the true shutdown period of COVID in April. But since then, we've been busier on average than we normally are in the inpatient unit. No COVID related admissions, but we've had more acute patients in days than normal. We've had a lot of swing bed patient days. This past week on, I think it was Thursday, we had a six or eight people trying to get in here to be swing bed patients and we didn't have space for them. So that's where kind of the projections are going. Yes, there's a total gross patient volume. It doesn't necessarily change a lot. The net patient collection is very different depending on what you're doing for a service. And I hear you about expenses while it appears that the expenses are built on a particular volume. The majority of our expenses are fixed. Whether we're projecting a million dollars worth of diagnostic imaging revenue or $500,000 worth of diagnostic imaging revenue, I still need the same amount of staffing because I have minimum staffing levels in most of those departments. Diagnostic imaging, laboratory, they're all in order to keep the doors open. The emergency department is a perfect example. I have to staff the emergency department with a 24 seven provider and nurse, whether I've got one or two patients, which is exactly what we had a day during part of the period of the COVID. There were days we only had one or two patients or I've got 25 patients. Those same two people still take care of all of them. So we daily try to keep our expenses as low as possible and they're all tied to the volume we're doing. And a small change in volume does not increase or decrease the cost of our running this facility. Yeah, I just, I mean, I'm going to need a quarter. I hear you and I'm and truthfully you're only looking at five years not to make this sound good, but I have been here far too long, 36 years, I guess it is now. And I can remember one year out of 36 years that we had a positive operating margin. I appreciate that your community really helps out. I'm just, you know, in 2018, you were at 18.2 million, 19, you were at 18.7 million, 20, if I were to track where you were for down 7% through the five months, you would have been about 18.4, you know, and then now asking for the 21 million.  Do you know roughly how far ahead you were a year ago? Or can you get back to us on? I could get back to you. This week, as soon as we're done today, we need to try and do the July financial reports because honestly, they haven't haven't had time getting working on the budget to do those. But the other thing that speaking a little bit earlier in Rutland's presentation, Judy mentioned revenue cycle, and we've actually, that is actually accounts for a little bit of the revenue increase net patient revenue increase as well. We have a new director of billing that's been here now, a year plus, and has spent a lot of time assuring that we're actually getting paid for every service we provide. The emergency department is a good example, whereas, you know, rather than just if you come into the emergency room, rather than just billing a facility fee and a provider fee, if you have specific procedures and things done that insurance companies pay for, they're now billing for all of those that we were providing the care. We just weren't always billing every dollar that you could bill for and get paid for. Not that there's a lot of that, but that contributes to the bottom line as well. Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to keep just, you know, last year when we brought it down, the point back was, oh, we're going to have to cut services in order to get to the reduced number that we gave you. That's not the intent. The intent is, and we said, no, don't cut these services. If you can really get to that number, get to that number. Right. But it just doesn't look, again, like you're going to get to the numbers that you're putting forward. And again, you were trending down for the first five months of the year significantly, 7% on a budget that we reduced by 5%. So the whole point is to try to make sure you can be around and be sustainable.  So I think I got my point across, but at least like to get July where you are, because you're tracking that you're going to be 12% ahead for the fourth quarter of this prior year. If July is not tracking well ahead, you're going to miss the fourth quarter. Okay, thanks. Okay, next we're going to go to member Holmes, Jessica. Okay, thank you. And thanks for the presentation. I'm not going to belabor Maureen's point, but a couple of things I just want to suggest about the NPR. One is we just heard from another hospital that their revenue predictions are down because of the social distancing and the disinfectant that has to happen in between patients. And so that reduces productivity. So I think that's one concern in sort of assuming a return to pre COVID volumes is simply like, do you have the capacity and the productivity availability to do that? And the second concern I'm saying is the second homeowner, right? I'm sorry, Jessica, you cut out. There was some background noise there. The second concern, if you could just start that over. Sure. The second concern I have, it's not volume, it's not background noise here. No, you're cutting out. We couldn't hear you either, but it sounded like your connection was cutting out. Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, perfect. My second concern is just that if second homeowners who have stayed through the isolation and the quarantine next year in 2021 return to their primary homes, that's another reason why volumes may also decline. So those are two concerns that I have about the projections for returning to pre COVID revenue. I don't want to belabor it. We've talked about it enough. I'm just going to, if you have an answer that's great or a thought about that, that's great. I don't want to belabor it too much. While they may be included in the projected amount for the month of July, August, September, they really were not included in the budgeted amount going forward because, as I said, the budgeted amount was based on volumes in October through February. So they weren't here to start with. And honestly, like I said, in October through February, emergency department, for instance, was continuing to trend up, although those people might be coming at the moment to the emergency department because they don't have primary care providers here. I truly don't think we have huge amounts of business at the moment from the secondary homeowners being in the area. Okay. Actually, the emergency room was interesting to me. You staff a 24 seven emergency room. Correct. It sounds like you have about seven to eight patients a day on average, right? That is correct. Yeah. And I'm just wondering at what point of patient level do you say this is just not cost effective? I know you're critical access hospital. I know there's cost plus reimbursement, but at what point, given that Brattleboro is 25 minutes to the south and Springfield is what 40 minutes to the north, at what point does it just become cost ineffective to fully staff or, you know, have two providers, as you said, 24 seven for such a small patient count? It became cost and effective many, many years ago. But if we choose not to staff an emergency room 24 seven, that would be making the decision not to be a critical access hospital because that is the requirement of a critical access hospital is to have a an emergency room 24 seven. All right. And if you explored other designations, we used to be a regular PPS hospital. I'm not sure if there are designations as a hospital that you can continue doing what we do with Q and swing, which are important to the facility, and also not have an emergency department. And just on that note, however, truthfully, the emergency department having the emergency department is one of the reasons that our community are the primary reason that the large dollar volume comes in from fundraising of that $1 million we get a year give or take from those second homers that want the emergency department here. And you're correct that Bratabro is only 17 miles south of us. However, many of the patients that are coming to our emergency department live 42 minutes to an hour north or northwest of us. If you happen to look at a map and see where we are located, Springfield is a good 40 minute drive to the northeast. Rutland is an hour and 10 or minutes more to the more or less north, slightly northwest. And then you've got Bennington an hour plus the other direction. So there's a huge, huge area of people that have already traveled 45 minutes or more to get here and would have to travel another half hour to get that 17 miles to Bratabro, which is about what it takes. And I know that from experience because during my early years here, I spent six years driving our volunteer ambulance service that we had at the time. And it's a long way trying to get to an emergency room. Okay. I guess my last question in the interest of time is you didn't answer the health care advocates question about the average commercial reimbursement to Medicare reimbursement because you claimed that you couldn't calculate it by individual payer. Just for completion of your submission, if you could follow up with at least to the hospital budget team, the average commercial, so not by payer, but across all payers commercial to Medicare reimbursement, that would be helpful. Okay. Thank you, Jess. Steve, in a perfect world, what would be the percentage of your loan that you would hope to be forgiven? When I did the budget submission, I was looking at probably 65 to 75% of it being forgiven. Truthfully, we've actually just started looking at that with the change they made to the number of weeks of payroll that you could include now. I'm hopefully optimistic that we actually might get the entire thing forgiven. That would be great. At this point, I'm going to turn it over to the health care advocate, Mike Fisher. Mike? Let me unmute myself. Let me just say thank you, Jess, for your question about our question. And with that, we have no other questions for Grace Codges. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mike. At this point, we're going to open it up to public comment would anyone like to issue a public comment on Grace Codges budget submission? Okay. That was very short and sweet. And actually, we are now ahead of schedule if you can believe it.


Sam here with late in sports car driven six 23 tops chrome jumbo hobby box or tops chrome jumbo baseball boxes for Tom see so good luck here Tom Let's do it buddy Morel rookie Jordan Walker rookie Stowers Brett Beatty prism and Libertor refractor rookie Kershaw Kershaw refractor And I'll see a big redder super that'd be freaking awesome dude Tova The Entos prism Max Meyer Michael Grove refractor rookie purple auto coming up here first It is Jordan Walker to 250. What a start Congrats Tom. There you go, buddy Hell yeah, man Get that into a mag for you my friend. That's awesome and Kevin Gaussman Kodai Senga Logan who hoppy J. Melendez That is a fantastic start to this break right here Volpe and Corbin Carroll and Brett Beatty Prism Waldechuck Vladdie refractor Alex call and Marcus Strowman Josh young rookie Jared Schuster base auto for the Braids and Cal Stevenson pink mini diamonds 350 M. J. Melendez Austin Hayes Josh Smith refractor Green Jose Ramirez Chat James Outman refractor rookie Quan Nolan Gorman Pena Tovar prism Fuginami and a Nate Eaton refractor rookie Masataka Yoshida I don't think so he's been pretty quiet base auto drew waters Right out bone say probably shouldn't put his name in the media because I'll just keep just keep bringing it up then CJ Crone refractor of Max Meyer rookie Jordan Walker rookie Avera side Trouch Akunya Joe Ryan refractor James Outman rookie Gabriel Moreno Luis Arias and Evan Longoria refractor Logan Ohopi Christopher Morel Cody Thomas the 199 teal wave rats on that one there Tom and Tim Anderson refractor Christian Cosas rookie Ling there's gunner rookie That is a Titans badly and an Alex call refractor rookie O'Neill Cruz Lenin Sosa and Lindor refractor Francisco Alvarez Jay Ram. There's a Cal Stevenson Rookie for the ace on the auto and Lenin Sosa refractor rookie Josh young Christian Cosas Devers cannon Smith and jigba Riley green rookie Purple Josh young to 250 nice on the base rookie. That's Tom nice purples Machanigarh and Patel Marta Teal lava no one Gorman rookie to 199 Solid so far nice Gorman Jay Ram and a Stephen Kwan Yeah, it's a solid young right there for sure solid Gorman right there plus the Jordan Walker auto That's been a good break so far been a good break Kodai Senga judge George Springer Machado refractor Volpe and Corbin Carroll Nolan Gorman Austin Riley base auto Cal Mitchell for the Pirates nice one there and JT realm you too John Gray hobby bias Mookie Masataka Yoshida Logan Ohopi Rookie Prism Justin Verlander Tim Anderson You know Cabrera Cody Clemens 299 purple mini diamonds out That's on that one there and Adley refractor rookie very nice. Very nice Josh young And Goldie refractor Astoria Ruiz and Gabriel Morena Adley base rookie base auto Lenin Sosa the white socks there you go Tom and Ken and Smith and jiggler refractor rookie prism wander and Garrett Cole refractor for the angst go Harris on Nolan Gorman rookie from mini diamonds Garrett Cole to 299 Yoshida prism and a Tyler O'Neill refractor Ken Walde Chuck to 399 and Miguel Vargas refractor rookie Francisco Alvarez base auto Josh Lester Nice one there for the Tigers Rookie and Jacob the Grom refractor Prism drew Rasmussen and a JT realm you too Tom we're on a box for now Volpe Corbin Carroll rookies and Brett Beatty rookie Shane Bieber and Zach Wheeler Michael Harris Nolan Gorman When you guys a gunner refractor rookie for the Orioles Jordan Walker rookie Moreno Joe Ryan Chris Bryant Christopher Morell purple Jared young. I saw in there for the Cubs 194 out of 250 True purple Michael Massey refractor Rookie for the Royals There's a Chris Bryant and A DJ LeMahieu base rookie Titans for some Casas refractor. Yeah purple is nice disaster shirt Masataka Yoshida Logan Ohapi There may as drew waters base auto for the Royals Tom Yordan refractor Casas Steven Quan John Gray Josh young purple Trevor story to 250 for the Red Sox Michael can Fordo and Shay Langlears refractor rookie Adley base rookie Judge Lindor prism and Brandon Lau Greenwave Michael Toglia to 99 rookie for the Rockies Jram and Dalton Varshio auto Riley Conor Cappell base auto for the A's and And Masataka Yoshida refractor rookie. All right, so I'm Ron the next one Max five Alvarez Technicolor Lenin Sosa and as Waldo Cabrera inserts there Harper met Olson Adley base rookie Josh young Casas Luis Castillo prism and Kosh Shwaba shore bomb Who gold gold auto come on? Come on. Let's see somebody big Josh young Gold auto Michael Stefanik won a 50. Nice one there for the Angels grads Tom Pulled like five Michael Stefanik gold autos out of this Jonathan India. It's unreal the amount Unreal Dan Z swanson steer cruise Tim Anderson and Mark Vientos refractor rookie Nolan Gorman rookie base auto Michael Stefanik Nice one there for the Angels Nelson Velazquez Fractor rookie Francisco Alvarez rookie again Vladimir Guerrero junior Teosca Hernandez B. Crawl Brandon Crawl Pink mini diamonds Goldie to 350 for the Cardinals Paul Goldschmidt Nanny Machado and Stanton refractor Kind of does yeah, what's he probably doing like lobbing it? Yeah, I like to a pitcher Yeah, it's recovering first or something Eloy and Lee over Poguerra Now Christopher Morel Well, there's so many that we always say like why I just can't believe they picked that one, you know That is gonna be a green Mitch Hannigar to 99 and Logan O'Hoppe refractor last pack Cappell soon Not only I'm gonna hit Taco Bell on the way home. I gotta wake up really early tomorrow Riley green base auto Graham Ashcraft. Let's go into the Reds Nice one there and Chuck Nassay.  I will not be sitting in alarm on Thursday for sure There Taylor Ward prism and a refractor of the intos Christopher Morel Riley green cast the ounce So five up five guys and Taco Bell. Yeah, I wish dude. Well five guy and open late enough. That's the problem Gladdy Eloy and Brian Reynolds really our only options are gonna be like Taco Bell McDonald's checkers Wawa Sometimes Domino's like they'll be open super late Kodai Senga no one Gorman and Gabriel Moreno purple mini diamonds to 299 very nice and Chris Bryant Yeah, a lot of them are open to like three a lot of times to 24 hours What's it called them diamonds? No Logan oh hoppy. Yeah, the one the one in downtown is 24-7 I'm pretty sure oh the one that's down by like Is it net the one that's like next to the where the card show is yeah one? Yeah, that one. Yeah, that one probably is too Yeah Jordan Walker that but that would make that would make sense for the location Herbie Wilson Contreras and Oscar Gonzalez Yeah, I love Bucky's the closest Bucky's isn't Daytona. That's the only thing Dude, I wish we had one near us James Outman Riley green base auto Adley Ruchman. There we go Tom. Congrats, man Some last box magic right there Adley base auto and a Shane be reading that one Um Yeah, so like when we went me and my girlfriend and our friends went to the Jags Ravens game We stopped at Bucky's on the way back. I believe yeah the way back. We got food there was awesome So good, but it's always packed dude Logan Oh hoppy no matter when you go Lexus Diaz You're done to be any hour like we could go now to be it's swamp It's crazy purple Garrett colds at 250 Trout and J rod refractor No, it literally is literally it's like a shopping mall. It's nuts It's awesome though. There's Josh young you like brisket Yeah, true Elliott Hernandez base rookie auto Rangers At a Bucky's nice I Really Gunnar Henderson Paula Goldschmidt to 350 Miranda Byron bucks. I'm surprised. I when I got it was pretty good. I got to this too It's not great Alvarez Springer to Oscar Hernandez and a Michael can photo. I'll do it for your break there Tom Thanks again as always for the support buddy. Get those right out to my friend


Hello everyone. So this project started out at last Academy. So me and Harrell sat down and tried to figure out what we're going to do over the next year in terms of continuous integration and integrating master, the Gitmaster branches of KD frameworks and Plasma 5. And this is where we are after a year and we're going to prevent a work. Hope you guys like it. Next. Someone need to do the keyboard handling, man. Well, I just did. Oh, you did, right? All right. So cool. A couple of years ago when I started with KDSC packaging, and I got involved in KDSC packaging, it was more or less 60 sources, 70 sources. And the way KD releases used to work was you, the packages would get the source Star Wars a week before the release to prepare all the binary packages. And being the optimistic person that I am, I just thought, Hey, that's good enough time to get the binary packages up and test it well enough. Turns out not so much. It took about four days to actually get through all of the packaging, which left about two days for testing. And we couldn't do enough QA to catch all of the problems at times. And this got me thinking about two points. First of all, that is that there is a lot of work to be done in terms of KDSC packaging that there are massive source but source towers that are released. And that it doesn't scale. It wastes time and lots of energy. And this was when we had five or six people working on KDSC releases in kubuntu. The second thing I realized was there was a lot of improvement to be made in terms of automation. So it was mostly serialized work that could be automated away so that all of us could go to beach and enjoy mojito. So things kind of had to change, right? So Felix Greer and Philip came up with these scripts called kubuntu automation tools that popped up on launchpad, which massively parallelized all our work. And what these scripts used to do was prepare the source packages, upload them to launchpad, let them build, and then the human would actually look at the failures and go through them, fix them. This helped a little bit, but still there was still a lot of work to be done in terms of the idea that we could just go to the beach and have a mojito and just press the button, have a release, and go to the beach and have a mojito ready. So the process really had to change and that's where our CI tooling comes in. So Android Pangea. Pangea is about 14,000 lines of Ruby code and it has 44 unit tests. It is spread across 13 servers, which is basically three Jenkins servers, nine slaves, and one mobile imaging server for the plasma phone stuff that you saw yesterday. So the way it works is that we distribute packages for Debian and Kubuntu and for Debian, since Debian does not have a DPA-like structure, we use Amazon S3 to actually distribute the packages themselves. So how it works. We have Mojito jobs in, can you open KCI perhaps? There's a figure. Sorry. Wait, that one. Right. Which one is it? It's this one. Yes. So we have Mojito jobs, which basically what they do is take the, we have the packaging store on git.debian.org and we have multiple branches over there. So we have branches like Kubuntu One stable, which track Gitmaster from KDE frameworks and plasma and we have Kubuntu Vivid Archive and Kubuntu Biley Archive and all of these changes need to be merged properly and we have Mojito jobs like Mojito analytics. And what these jobs do is merge the appropriate branches amongst each other. So things like things that go into the archive, go into the Kubuntu Wiley branch on git.debian and they get merged into Kubuntu One stable automatically by these jobs. We have the builder jobs, which prepare the source packages. And by preparing source packages, I mean, they grab the Gitmaster or whatever branch you want of KDE frameworks and merge the packaging in and prepare the initial source packages. No binaries are produced at this time. It's just purely the source packaging. Then depending on which CR you are looking at, we have the binary jobs. For Kubuntu CI, we upload them to Launchpad to build them. For the Debian CI, we have slaves that actually build out the binaries. Then we have publishing jobs which publish them to Amazon S3 or in the case of the Kubuntu CI, there are QA jobs which run through some tests to make sure the packages are actually semi-usable at the very least. Can you go to the next slide, please? No, that was fine. So I'm going to talk about DCI a little bit now. So DCI currently targets Debian Unstable. It does not target anything else. It builds for two architectures, AMD64 and ARM HF. It has a PPA-like CI setup. Can you? What do you want? Tell me what you want. DCI. That's this one. Right. So it has a PPA-like structure setup. Each of these folders, so to speak, has a separate repository mapped to it. For example, you can only use the Qt 5. We currently build Qt 5 from Git as well. We build the 5.4 branch. For example, if you just want to use the 5.4 branch from Qt, you can just add the Qt repository. You don't need to add any of the other ones. If you want to use the frameworks repository, you have to use the frameworks repository and the Qt 5 repository, so on and so forth. So each of these is actually a separate repository on Amazon S3. Can you go to the next slide? I can't find my mouse. Right. So the architecture, as I explained before, for DCI was source binary publish. For the binary stage and the source stage, we currently use SCH routes to build out packages. The plan is to synergize with KCI and have Docker build out packages, primarily because Docker has an API instead of me calling commands via Ruby to SCH route. And APIs are just a nice way to interact with the system. Let's see. Right. So some statistics. We have 780 Jenkins jobs on DCI, out of which 257 are sources. So there are like source packages that DCI builds out. And that's about all three. You can take over now. No, I don't want to. Well, you have to, unfortunately. So Rowan talked about Deviancy part of things and I'm going to talk about the Kabuntu stuff. So we have Kabuntu CI and the Kabuntu CI was the first CI that we built. Therefore, its architecture is very wicked and mighty and complicated. But it shouldn't be a surprise that since it was the first thing that we built, it runs most of the core services. As we have seen the mergers run on the Kabuntu CI and all the QA is run on the Kabuntu CI and a lot of additional management stuff that is happening in the background in order to facilitate CI work is also happening there. So in a way, it is the heart of the operation. And right now it is using Launchpad as Rowan has mentioned. It is using Launchpad for builds and it is using it excessively. So Launchpad has like 50 build servers, I believe. And at peak hours, we would allocate 30, we would try to get 36 of those just for Kabuntu CI. It is a massive thing. In fact, it is so massive. We have 600 distinct build jobs for 200 services. All of these are in KDE, of course. The 600 jobs would be separated in Rowan also as mentioned. Two versions of Kabuntu, we always integrate against the latest stable version, which currently would be 15 or 4. And the upcoming version, which currently is 15, can. Additionally, we integrate both get master and if applicable a stable repository. So for KDE applications, we right now would implement master and applications 1508, which is going to be the next stable thing. Next one is the mobile Kabuntu CI. As you have heard yesterday, Blue Systems has been working on making a phone kind of software thingy. And obviously, since CI systems are very obvious, very advantageous and very awesome. As you should have heard, in Alex Fierster's talk yesterday, feedback is very important. In fact, feedback is so important that I think we could not have pulled off the plasma phone stuff had we not had this particular CI. Now, this particular CI had a bit of a rushed development, in a way. Originally, we wanted to use the regular Kabuntu CI. Since launch, you can do arm builds except they didn't work.  So yeah, whiteboards were touched inappropriately, arguments were had, flowcharts were drawn, and at the end of the day, we had a completely new delivery pipeline that is sort of based on what Debian CI does. So you create a source package, then you build it on multiple architectures, and once the multiple architectures are done, additional QH types would run. I will talk more about the QA later. Basically, you would have different QA depending on the architecture relevance thereof. So on a phone, you might want to do different QA than on a desktop. So this CI is very much the future. I'm not going to show you these Jenkinses because I think it's not very interesting to look at.  What's that? Oh, no, I think we don't have a simple enough build to finish in time. Unfortunately. So what we're doing is with the mobile CI, we have all in all eight build hosts, four of those built for 64 bits and four of those built for ARM. And the ARM ones are ridiculously slow because they aren't. So that's why it takes so long. The 64-bit ones usually finish in two minutes for most frameworks. Just raw build time. And the ARM ones usually take like 20 minutes to half an hour. Quinn, I believe, takes one hour. It's one of the biggest things along with KIO and plasma framework, I believe. But yes, so if you're interested in this stuff, then go take a look at all the CI's on pangea.pub. It's a domain where we host all this stuff. And if you have questions, you can ask us about it. The architecture. So we put a lot of thought into how the architecture of the jobs aligns and how it all comes together into actual packages. So how is this all relevant to assess KDE? And also how is it relevant to a distribution to have a CI? After all, the topic of this talk is continuous package delivery. This is also something that Alex talked about yesterday. So if you have not seen his talk, I would encourage you to watch the video recording of it later on when you're at home. So there's CI, which is continuous integration. What you're doing is essentially you take a piece of software, you build it, and you might perform a series of tests on it to see, is it good enough? But then that in and of itself is just a very automated thing. You have done automated tests. There's, of course, a manual testing. In order to do manual testing, you need continuous delivery in various ways. So there's two ways to do continuous delivery. There is the sort of testing delivery and then there's the release delivery. Ideally, it would be the same thing. And that is where we are ultimately wanted to be. Right now we aren't there. But there are plans, discussions, stuff is happening. So how is it relevant right now? So we're doing continuous delivery. We're also doing CI for the packaging aspect there. The obvious thing, or perhaps not so obvious thing is, we have build.kde, which is our general kde CI. And it is integrating in a very liberal environment, right? We want to have our build succeed and not fail for weird reasons like missing dependencies of some obscure library and then we have to buck the sys admins to install the piece of software and whatnot. So it is a generally very liberal environment, whereas distribution package building happens in very strict environments. Most distributions in the packaging would have a very concise list of which dependencies are needed in order to build this package. So there's a distribution level integration aspect to this. Integrating things on a distribution in a packaging sort of environment adds additional value as you have tighter checks on things. So you would detect things like if you use a new header and you're not looking for whatever thing provides that header. Most of the time one of our sys is going to trip over it because the dependency for that header has not explicitly been declared. So that is one advantage. Arguably not the biggest one, but it is an advantage nonetheless. I think Martin highlighted this couple of weeks ago that Quinn, in particular, is currently having a lot of development with regards to Weyland and sometimes dependencies get forgotten to be looked for in CMake and distribution integration then highlights this and can enable much faster integration and iteration on this issue. The bigger and in my opinion, biggest advantage right now is that Debian and to that extent Covintu is doing ABI checks on the libraries, unlike build.kde, unfortunately. So what that means is when any one of you breaks a library, breaks the binary interface of a library, I will know. I will know because my CITO is read and I get screamed at by my own tooling because the library is not broken. And then you will get an angry mail from me saying that your library is broken and I will tell you to fix it. So far I think there have been three instances where we were able to prevent binary incompatibility between frameworks releases, thanks to that stuff. So ideally I want to have this go into build.kde because it is really awesome and it is pretty much quintessential, particularly if there are monthly releases that we do with frameworks that we have, that we have tight control and tight verification of our ABI. It is one of the key offerings of a framework is that we do not break compatibility. So that is very important. It is very awesome and I hope to talk with Scarlett about this in a boff. Another thing and that is again, it is good to have but it is not quintessential, is the verification of installation paths. So for those of you who don't know how complicated packaging works, we would have a number of packages generated by one source. The way we know which files go into which packages, we would have a list of all the files that come out at compile time and allocated to one package or another. If this list of files is strict enough, then our integration will fail if you change a file path. There are two reasons why we want to have that happen. First of all, we want to know when you move a file from one repository to another. The other and perhaps more valuable thing is we know when you accidentally break something. There has been a case with Blues Qt, I believe, recently, where the installation destination was changed and some divorce file, I believe, was installed to an incorrect path. And I would say it turned red because now the file is not here anymore. So it looks at it and, yeah, the destination was incorrect and that got resolved. Any questions to the KDE advantage that KDE is getting from this? Then there's a QA advantage for the distribution and there's a development advantage for the distribution. So the problem with packaging is if it's like with KDE and we have 50 frameworks, each of these frameworks would have minimal changes that would have to be done to them. You would have to do that every one, so you would have to spend at least a day every month doing these changes. I don't know about you, but I don't really fancy spending a day doing weird packaging stuff, boring, tedious. So continuous integration of the stuff against our packaging enables us to do atomic changes. Something would change in a KDE repository. The packaging gets adjusted the next day. Everything's green again. And in addition to that, we can, of course, do automated QA. In fact, excessive amount of automated QA. If you introduce a new CMake dependency, we will know about it because I have written a nice tool that complains if there's a missing CMake dependency. If it's optional, of course, if it's required, it would fail anyway. I also have a tooling that would check if all QML runtime dependencies are available. There's a tooling that checks that all the files are actually installed into a package. As I was explaining, we have these lists of files explaining where installed files should go in the packaging. We have checks for that. And perhaps the most important one for us is actually the check that everything installs and everything can be upgraded and everything can be removed again. This is a test that takes about one hour to complete. And it's literally installing, I think, 600 packages. It's upgrading 600 packages and then removing them again. Yeah, so that's cool stuff. I'm done. So you do a lot of testing of the builds. Check in that the packages contain what you expect or what should be there. What degree are you testing? We have tests to also check the functionality of the software you have packaged, like actually running the application and checking the case. We currently don't. I have been wanting to do it for the last six months, but I haven't found the time for it. There's some provisioning for that. So we can, in theory, do it. So all the builds are all separated in Docker containers, so we can easily try to run an application. It's just a matter of sort of setting up the environment, getting a minimum of PDE session, as it were, to run and then have the application start and see does it exit with zero, for example. So it's on the list, but it's not currently done. Related to that, Tiki, have we looked at OpenQA? Alice just mentioned that to me. So I need to go and talk to the OpenSUSE guys and see what's going on over there. General is using and it has basically automated acceptance testing of the full list of the graphic and things and so on. So this is pretty powerful, but I think Fedora is also starting to use it and maybe there's also something that should be very easy for you. Yeah, so one thing that we definitely want to do long term is do testing of applications. So what I actually want to happen is to have someone figure out how to do application testing through the accessibility layers that we already have and then edit actual functional testing to the software, right? So we could have a QML app that would be tested automatically. And yeah, so definitely something to look at. A short comment to the graphics part of the tutorial because we united a data for an X server running and a little from visual hardware to software possible. So the experience I had with OpenQA was that will your connector be the real error I've never seen before and I've never seen after us because couldn't just start on the OpenQA infrastructure. Because at the top, yes, you don't have OpenTL, you don't have X-Map, you don't have anything, you actually expect. So, and that's the real hard part to rely on. I don't think it makes much sense to test, for example, class time to start up. It's just quite a plus for the visual of OpenTL. It's quite a plus for this visual framework. But there it is. And when made, for example, it also just made a lot of such visualized hardware because you just have to implement it and you bail out on the end pipe because it doesn't make sense. If you don't have OpenTL on radar, you just bail out on XLG applications there. Yeah, great, you have an XL0 value. But it doesn't have to end. Actually, OpenQA can do real hardware as well, it's possible. Maybe they switch plus one over here because they're currently at birth and when OpenTL was issued last night five, I was very concerned that it was going to be stuck in OpenQA for four weeks because of the OpenTL and the plasma currently transferred. I think that, in general, these sort of problems, they shouldn't, they are blockers, but I don't think we should just give up because of them because testing is just so important. Again, Alex was saying yesterday, feedback is incredibly important, right? There is not much to be shared, to be honest. So distribution packaging would always implement their own build, directive sort of, right? So they would call CMake somehow and they would call make install somehow. So there isn't much to be shared there. Other than that, QA-wise, I would like not to have a lot of overlap between a distribution here and the KDs here. Ideally, a lot of the things that we are currently doing on the Kaboom to CI, for example, should really be done on build.KD. So there isn't much that can be shared in that thing. But there's a continuous integration of some time and we will definitely talk about it. Are you sure we're not going to use CM or is it? It's already available, so there's, I think it's maintained by the Linux Foundation. It's called ABI Compliance Checker, ACC for short. And it does exactly that. Currently, we are not actually using that. We're using a deviant-specific solution that literally does dump all the signatures of all the functions in the library into a file and then compare them to the new version. What do you mean by that? We're producing a little project by email to ensure that the package you compile does actually can be written in the same way so that you get the same binary that you compile it again for the same toolchain and stuff like that. Can it be done? I am not sure there's much point in it. Well, there is because we know then that nobody's having trouble with the GCC and insert a vector into your own binary. Yes. I don't see how that could happen, but should someone present a reasonable argument for why we would want to have that done on the CI system, then it can be done. Maybe it's not that easy to do it on the CI system, not that the CI system could help you show that. Oh, yes, in a way, no. So the thing is, the packaging of the CI system is always ahead of what would be in the distribution, right? That's sort of the idea that you continuously integrate the packaging against what is in KD Upstreet. So the packaging would always be different and ahead of what is in the distribution action. We have three more minutes for questions. Then we'll get to the follow-up. Is the status of the browser or the platforms like Windows, MacOS 6, and the mobile platforms that are coming, is there some reports that mostly goes into the area of build.KD, I believe? So what we're doing is exclusive to Linux packaging, in a way. Technically, you could do the stuff we're doing, you could technically do with any operating system and any Linux distribution. It's just Windows builds, for example, since KD is essentially the distributor for Windows, it would make sense to have this done on build.KD. Yeah, same for mobile, for that matter. And actual mobile stuff is a bit tricky, anyway. For a question, and I think we'd love to create tools to check our packages, for example, we have Lindsay and to check for... Oh, yes. We have QFARs to check for installation and integration, and we have a DPUT to check for operating and demand files and stuff like that. Do you integrate those? We're currently integrating Linton. We're not integrating the other ones for various reasons. But yes, so Linton actually is also adding value to KD software. It's essentially a static analyzer of what the package is, and it also catches a lot of the issues that you would have in upstream software like your desktop file is incorrect or some stuff like that. It's actually in QFARs, since the Eric Alibaba edition. It has, so we have our own tooling for that, which has mostly traditional reasons because of how launchpad PPAs work. Ideally, this would go away. So yes, we are aware of it, and we'll look into it. Okay, we're out of time, so thank you.


Hey everyone, Hama here and thanks for all the great comments on the YouTube channel but I've also seen reading the comments a lot of you are pretty amazed by my background it took me 36 years but yes I made a room back home like my museum and I wanted to show you a little bit more in detail because most of the time what you see on the video is those overalls here but there's actually more coming to that one with helmets. There's a 2019 helmet next to it is a Firefighter helmet and the funny stuff is that I received it before Bahrain it was a gift when I had the French farmer and do an advert. That's Jimmy Johnson, Kevin Magnuson, Oli Japanese and Fernando Alonso, those helmets are traded. There's 2010 my GT1 championship that is a 2020 race helmet. That's gonna be 2008 when I'm back in GP2 and that one here that is my first ever race helmet um when I was starting go-karting so yes it's it's not new it was a gift from a good friend of mine and I'm very glad that I still carried over and what we got here that's a sort of special one that is a second place finish at the 2012 Canadian Grand Prix um yep that helmet has a very vertical value that one is pretty cool too with Lightning McQueen or Flash McQueen in French it's gonna be 2017 it's gonna be 2014 first row at the Hungarian Grand Prix in 2013 I didn't win the race should have and next to it another special one that one was made for my 100 Formula One GP start Austin 2016 a very special helmet and everyone is asking about the Mercedes test well there is the helmet the test doesn't happen yet but we've got we've got a helmet ready for it another one that's pretty cool is the F1 1000 Grand Prix that was China 2019 and it was part of the 1000 Grand Prix of Formula One the kids one that everyone kind of knows uh and next to it when I won the Monaco GP in GP2 2009 so that's a pretty good trophy 12 and then if we I don't know if we go the other way around so that's um that's motorbike race suits from Yorge Lorenzo when I won the race of champions so that's gonna be 2012 we exchange one race suit for one leather and that's really cool and then obviously my race suits of the DHL um the 2021 and then we've got all the past F1 team towards back 2015 with Lotus uh Special Worlds 2014 2013 2012 2011 when I made my way back to Formula One 2011 winning the GP2 championship uh 2010 these dams when I came back to GP2 the one missing here is the one from GT1 I don't know why I'm a bit sad about it um 2009 first time in Formula One that is 2008 when I was third driver reserve driver for Renault and then all my years with Renault driver development one that I've actually never worn was that one a1gp it was actually part of the swiss team but the funny story is I signed for a1gp a couple of weeks later I signed for Renault driver development and Renault told me that I wasn't going to be swiss anymore but french that's why I'm known as a very french racing driver but mostly swiss so I actually never worn it then my yeah new categories uh to our first ever official race uh suit from go karting I try to fit in I don't uh it doesn't fit anymore but yes that was uh kind of a long time ago so yeah that's that's my trophy room um as I say it took me a long time to make it but I really enjoyed it and then if we go on the other side here that's where I normally do all my videos and just behind me is the simulator but the simulator I promise I do another video another time I can explain to you what I do and what's there and I can also show you a little bit more of the stuff stuff around it um so hope you enjoyed the video as always make sure you click you subscribe you like you make your comments and then you know we can keep going and keep interacting thank you everyone


In a famous passage from the Gospel of John chapter 14 verse 6 in the Christian Bible, Jesus says to Thomas that I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Evangelical teachers based upon this passage insist that Christianity is the exclusive path to God, that it is impossible to have a relationship with God without going through Jesus. The basic problem with this audacious assertion is that it implodes in the face of the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures. There is actually not one passage anywhere in the Tanakh, in the Jewish Bible that says or implies that faith in any Messiah is required in order to come to God. Numerous times in the book of Devarim, Deuteronomy, God asks the Jewish people to attach ourselves to Him. Each person is addressed directly by God and God says that we are to cleave unto Him. The Hebrew word here is the exact same word used in Genesis chapter 2 verse 24 to describe the intimate relationship between the man and his wife. God beckons to us to come directly to Him and to attach ourselves to Him without mentioning any need for any intermediary. In the Bible, the beautiful book, Shio HaShirim, the song of songs, we have a parable of the intimate and close relationship between God and the Jewish people and between God and each and every Jew, and the parables based upon the romantic relationship between a man and his lover. Abraham in the book of Isaiah chapter 41 verse 8 is referred to as God's beloved, as God's friend, and that's without Abraham having any need to believe in Jesus. Moses is described in the Bible as the greatest prophet who would ever live. Moses is described as someone who knew God face to face like a man speaks to his best friend in Exodus chapter 33 verse 11. And Moses was able to have this connection to God without faith in Jesus. Kalev, one of the 12 spies who was sent into the land of Israel at the request of the Jewish people to spy out the land, to scout out the land. Kalev was one of the two spies, the other one being Joshua, who did not give a discouraging report to the people of Israel. And Torah tells us in Numbers chapter 14 verse 24 that Kalev was someone who wholeheartedly followed after God. And he did this without Jesus. And then we have David, King David, the sweet singer of Israel, whose entire book of Psalms, 150 chapters, which describes his intimate walk with God, where he says that God is close and near to all a call upon him directly without mentioning any intermediary to all a call upon God in truth. That's chapter 145 in the book of Psalms verse 18. And so we see King David, whose entire life was one of closeness to God, of intimacy with God, of trusting in God, in feeling every moment of his life that God was there with him, David is able to have that connection with God, that relationship with God, without any belief in Jesus. And so therefore we see that the New Testament's assertion that it is impossible to come to God without Jesus is patently false.


This thing is, I ask you to apologize. This is my first talk in English. We are not English natives there, so we speak Portuguese there, so I might say something that is wrong or incorrect, but I'm trying my best. The title of my talk is Brazil, How We Are Gaining Space With Django. Let me introduce myself. I am Henrique Pereira. I am a board member of Python Brazil. It's like the Python Software Foundation, but in Brazil. I'm a Python programmer since 2008. I have been using Django since 2009. I am an assistant professor at a local university, and I am an IT analyst at another university. I'm gonna speak about the not-goes of this presentation. I stole this slide from Jacinda yesterday. This presentation won't be about code. It won't be about soccer nor carnival. And I'm not going to talk about Brazilian companies using Python or Django, because there are many of them, and I might have missed someone. But I'm gonna talk about the goal of this presentation. The goal of this presentation is to show how we are developing stuff in Brazil and how we are forcing Django and how we are using Django to help people and to make cool stuff. I'm also going to share my experience and my team's experience in migrating some systems from legacy code to Django in Brazil. So let's start by saying something about Brazil. I'm pretty sure you all know that Brazil is a South American country. We have a division of 27 states plus a federal district. Our capital is not Buenos Aires. So if you think Brazilian's capital is Buenos Aires, you are wrong. Our capital is Brasilia, which stands in the middle of the country in the federal district. We have like 170 million people living in Brazil. Brazil is a pretty big country, so it's here. We are known for soccer and for carnival, but I'm not gonna talk about that. I'm gonna talk about Django in Brazil. A recent survey showed that Django was Python's number one framework in Brazil. Out of 251 persons, 139 said they used Django on a regular basis. This research is available through that link. You could check it later. There are many, many, many details about Python usage in Brazil, but this is the most relevant one. Until the past few years, Brazil was a great-blown country. So we have many-blown people there, and right now we believe that there are more Django people than people in Brazil, so we are winning. We have a mailing list called the Django Brazil mailing list, which has almost 3,000 members. We have over 450 emails per month. Last month alone, we had almost 500 emails, so that's a lot of activity for a community-based mailing list. And we don't have a Django code in Brazil, but we have something like a PyCon. We call it Python Brazil. This year's Python Brazil venue is the beach. It's a pretty nice place. Python Brazil will be happening in November, the 6th, the 7th, and the 8th of November, in Porto de Galinhas, which is this marvelous beach. There will be a Django track there, so Paidani, Alex Gainor, Linda Ross, lots of good people will be in Brazil. You are invited to come. It's a very nice place to be, and I would go there. So let's go back to Brazil. I live in the southernmost state, the blue one right in the bottom. It is far from the capitals. It's far from the center of the country. We are nowhere near Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, which are the main states in Brazil when we talk about development. And I work at a university in this state. I work at the Federal University of Santa Maria. In Portuguese, it's Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. Our university has five campuses. This map only shows four. There is a new one that was recently built. And I live and work on the number one, which is right in the middle of the state. We have almost 30,000 alumni, students, over 4,500 employees. So that includes professors, technicians, and lots of stuff. We have over 140 undergraduate programs, and over 130 post-graduation programs. But we have a problem there. Out of those 4,500 staff, we have got only like four IT analysts. Our IT personnel or IT staff is very small compared to the rest of the staff at the university. This research from Gartner shows that the average private company in Brazil has about 5% of IT employees. So for every 100 employees, you got five IT personnel. The government averages in Brazil is 6.6%. Education average is a little under 4.8. And at my workplace, we have a little over 1% of IT personnel. So that's like four times what we would have to be a level company. Our IT is mainly done at DCPD, which stands for Data Processing Center. We are 37 IT analysts, which is just a fancy name for computer personnel. These analysts work with infrastructure, user support, development, and all computer-related stuff. And the main programming languages used there are Delphi, which is not much used here in America, but it's an old language, Java, and PHP for the web-related development. So, okay, it's a bad choice, but it's the choice we had. But everything changes. So I joined this university about two years ago, and when I joined, we started doing some changes. We started working with some technologies. But this is not about me. I'm gonna talk about a system that one of my fellow colleagues worked. The system was called DECAL. It was basically a user help desk system. It was written in PHP in the early 2000. It used lots of obsolete technologies like Apache authentication and PHP 3, and lots of stuff that you don't want to touch. And it had no metrics. It was just a simple crude system where the user would create a ticket and someone from the maintenance would move that ticket around and do what had to be done. So this system was a big problem. It was developed in PHP, and it went through almost no development over the next 10 years, for example. So we had to change that, and we are working on implementing ITU, ITRA-CPG, and I talked with my fellow colleague, and he said he was gonna rewrite the system, and he was gonna do it in Java. So, okay, Java, that's fine, but you should try Django. And so he did try Django, and he wrote the whole system in almost two months. He had never programmed in Python. He had never programmed in Django. And the system is like 20 times better than the old system. And this is one of the interfaces of the system. It is a simple interface, but inside this interface, or going deeper into the system, we have lots of functionalities that were implemented using Python and using Django. This system was supposed to be built in six months using Java, and he built it in only two using Django. So we want four months, or there were not four months that we could have spent doing better stuff or working or creating better stuff for this system. And the system includes many things from user satisfaction surveys to even working and generating graphics and metrics, and okay. But this wasn't done by me. This was done by my colleague. And it is a pretty big system. It has like, I'm gonna guess, about 40 models and 100 views. So okay, it's pretty big. But that's not how we started working with Django at my university. When I arrived there, there were lots of small systems, lots of spreadsheets laying around that we had no backup or that we couldn't automate some processes. So I started working on my own. I started creating stuff. I started getting those spreadsheets and creating systems using Django with them. So we have lots of these small systems running around. This is one of the systems. It's actually a spreadsheet that's a simple crud that generates some PDFs and generates some reports. And the system is actually used. Some people stopped using the spreadsheets and now we have all data automated, all data with backups, all data generating reports. We also created many surveys for curses, for evaluating disciplines, all using Python and Django. And so this happened while I was there. We also used Django to support some legacy systems you had written in PHP. This is a chat system that the people from Moodle uses that are at our university. It was written in PHP and it was managed directly by going to MySQL and creating chat rooms there by hand. So it was a simple trick to set up a Django admin interface and create it on the Django admin interface. So we have been doing that for a long time right now. By showing to the administration that we could do this with Django, we received a great chance to develop more stuff using Python and using Django. Earlier this year, we had the chance to rewrite our website or main website using Django. Actually, we were open to any technology. We chose Django. It took one programmer four weeks to code our new website. It replaced the 10 year old PHP CMS. Our website receives over 60,000 hits per day, so it's, for Brazilian standards, a heavy website. We have almost 500 simultaneous users and this is pure Django with a simple set up and some caching and it's all done. One programmer did this in four weeks. This website is used by many people, many users, and inside it is managed by the Django admin and you can post news, you can basically do what a CMS would do. And it worked very well. We had a very good reception over this site. We also started another project based on that COW project I told you before. This project is the Maya project. It has been in development for almost a year now. It will manage our services. So all services, our IT services at UFSM will be managed by this tool. It intends to be IT compliant so every service will have metrics. Those metrics will generate reports that will then help the administration. It is an in-house solution so we have developed it from zero, from scatteratch. This tool is already working. We started inserting jobs this week. We have two programmers working. It can generate fancy reports like this one and we hope this can help us do a better job with less people than we should be doing. Basically, when a user calls to our service central, a ticket is generated at the system, depending on the service, and the ticket is then forwarded to the responsible people and these people can then solve the problem and give some satisfaction back to the user. So this is what I am doing in Brazil. This is what I'm doing in Brazil. If you have any questions, we can talk about it.