Common Questions
Straight answers.
The questions buyers ask first. Reviewed .
What does 618Today do?
618Today is a management consulting and advisory firm based in Southern Illinois and the Metro East, the 618 area code region. It helps organizations across the 618 turn strategy and funding into programs that actually run, working across strategy and transformation, rural health and telehealth, technology, digital literacy, and public funding. It helps clients win funding, design what that funding builds, and deliver it through implementation, program management, and reporting.
Who does 618Today serve?
Any organization that operates in the 618 area code region of Southern Illinois and the Metro East, grouped into three: rural hospitals and health systems; counties, foundations, and civic bodies; and businesses, employers, banks, and economic development organizations.
Is 618Today a news organization?
No. 618Today is an advisory and consulting firm, not a news outlet or publisher. The name refers to staying current on the region and the trends affecting clients, not to a publishing schedule.
What is post-award grant compliance, and why does it matter for rural hospitals?
Post-award grant compliance is the work that begins after a grant is awarded: periodic performance and financial reporting, drawdown requests, subrecipient monitoring, and the documentation required to survive an audit. Most rural hospitals have no dedicated grants office, so these obligations fall to finance or executive staff who already hold full roles. Missed obligations can result in repayment demands or disqualification from future funding.
What is a Funding Readiness Assessment?
A fixed-scope, current-state diagnostic that scores an organization's ability both to win public funding and to administer it after award. It examines eligibility, capacity, financial controls, reporting infrastructure, and governance, and produces a scored readiness profile, a gap register, and a prioritized remediation plan.
What is an AI Readiness & Governance Assessment?
A fixed-scope current-state assessment that answers three questions about artificial intelligence (AI) in an organization: where it is today, what it is overlooking, and where it should focus. It covers the AI tools staff already use and the data they touch, and any AI solution under consideration: what the solution must do for the organization, whether the organization is ready to run it, and how vendor proposals hold up. It ends with a written recommendation on governance, an AI use policy, staff training, and the right AI solutions, with governance first, because without governance, even the most capable AI solution can drift beyond what it was approved to do.
What is a High Reliability Organization, and how does 618Today help organizations become one?
A High Reliability Organization runs complex, error-intolerant work with far fewer failures than its conditions would predict, by practicing five principles: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. 618Today delivers high reliability engagements across the 618 in partnership with HRS Consulting, for hospitals, EMS and public health, federal and defense facilities, higher education, and industry and critical infrastructure. Engagements run from safety culture assessment through program design, training, and sustained program management.
What is air-gapped AI analysis, and why would an organization need it?
Air-gapped AI analysis runs on hardware with no network path in or out, so the data being analyzed is never transmitted to a cloud service and never used to train a public model. Organizations use it when the data most worth analyzing, such as payer mix, cost reports, budgets, and contracts, is data they are not permitted or not willing to upload to an external service.
Can 618Today teach executives and business owners to use AI tools themselves?
Yes. 618Today runs hands-on sessions for executives and business owners using the AI assistants they already have access to, such as Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, on their own real work: drafting, summarizing, research, and analysis. Sessions also cover how to check an AI answer and which information must never be entered into a public AI tool. For the organization, 618Today reviews how staff are using AI, writes a plain-language AI use policy, trains staff, and evaluates AI products before purchase.
What does 618Today mean by digital literacy?
618Today defines digital literacy as the ability of an organization's own leaders to evaluate technology decisions without outsourcing that judgment. In practice it means a board or leadership team that can read a vendor proposal, ask the right questions about cost, staffing, and integration, and judge whether the answers hold up. 618Today treats building that capability as part of the engagement rather than as a separate training product.
How does 618Today approach problem solving?
618Today begins by separating the symptom from the problem. A budget that will not close, a service line losing money, or a platform nobody uses are symptoms; the underlying cause is usually different. The firm decomposes the problem into parts that do not overlap and do not leave gaps, tests each part against evidence, and labels every claim as a cited fact, an inference, or an assumption to be verified, so the client can defend the conclusion independently.
Where is 618Today located, and what area does it serve?
618Today is based in the 618 area code region and serves organizations across Southern Illinois and the Metro East.