← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. My name is Chanel Bunger, and today I'm excited to speak with regular guest Dr. Molek Purahit, the Chief Health Innovation Officer at Dados X Digital Health Labs, who joins us today to share some insights into a recent healthcare conference that he attended. Dr. Parohit, I want to thank you, as always, for joining me today. I'll turn it over to you so you can share some of those things that you learned.
- [00:21]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. It was a great conference. I'd love to. It's always very energizing to go to a conference like health because you learn to see all the developments that are already in place or coming down the pipe or in the near future. And it's so energizing to see people who are so passionate wanting to make a difference, wanting to change healthcare for the better. And so it's a great, great conference for anybody that's not attended before. One takeaway for me, and this is the sort of the theme of this year, was Legends and Heroes in Health Care. And there have been many, many people who have advanced healthcare in so many ways. And over the last couple of years, we've seen one of the biggest things is improvement in documentation. And this is a major bane for physicians, nurses, and others because you do your normal work day, but then you have another two, three hours of documentation to do, and you can imagine how that can affect family life and others. And I'm still, as a practicing clinician, I'll tell you, that is one of the biggest barriers to enjoy providing care and health as a physician is taking care of the patient, talking to them, getting the things they need is awesome. That's a very fun interaction. I enjoy that. It energizes me. It grounds me. It's one of the things, it's the thing that makes you go into medicine. But then after that, you spend three times as much time putting things into a chart, 95% of which are irrelevant for that visit. But they're designed to serve an administrative need or billing need or quality need that may or might actually improve the outcomes that they're intending to improve. And if you look at US healthcare notes, our notes on average are about 30 to 40% longer than other comparable nations. And simply because there is a lot of, for lack of a better term, really junk in the note that really, one, I think hides the relevant information that we need by having so much text. And then two, it really just puts a burden on people entering the information in. So I think that's a huge advancement that's happened in the last few years. Second, what I'll say is in general, the category of automation and reducing menial tasks, health care is awesome. I love seeing patients, I love doing all the things I do. I love the innovation side because we can make things better. But there are menial tasks that always cause a burden in terms of time, in terms of mental energy, in terms of burnout, and seeing some of these automation features coming in and documentation one of them, but also for administrative purposes or prior auth so many of these burdens on physicians that it makes it so much better. The other thing I'm seeing is with the advent of AI in healthcare, is really talking about looking at quality in a very different way and looking at the data in very different way and joining different pieces of data in a way that you as a human cannot do. One of the analogies I use is 100 years ago, before we had lab tests, we could get blood and we could see blood, but we could not see the underneath surface of that blood. And so until tests like a complete blood count CBC or a complete metabolic profile like a CMP came out, which was taking that blood, treating it, and then putting it under microscope and looking at some of the things in there, there's a lot of values and things that we cannot see about a human being. But once labs happened diagnostically, that opened up the world. And what we're seeing now with AI looking at radiology, looking at cardiology, looking at so many other features that you're able to analyze data in a much more sophisticated way that is beyond the human eye. And it's not a lack of skill, it's simply beyond the physics of the human eye that you can detect and see. Now that you can find those things with a physician evaluating the patient, you got a lot more emphasis on better diagnostics, better treatment plans, rare diseases. These are some of the biggest things that are happening out there. And it's very energizing and very inspirational to be in health care at this time and see some of the basic things become much better.
- [04:17]
A
You tell us a little bit more about. You mentioned radiology and cardiology. I'm curious about how AI is used in these fields and what you're seeing there.
- [04:25]
B
Yeah, great question. And you know, with radiology and cardiology, I think those have been on the cusp and ripe for AI to intervene and add decision support for a long time, but now we're only seeing some of those tools come out. So, for example, radiology, the human eye can see only so many things. It's not an issue of skill or knowledge, it's an issue of physics and simply what our eyes can perceive and what range of light and that kind of stuff. And that's okay. And so we have tools that can enhance that. And the same thing with cardiology, for example, with an ekg. For most people, they're just squiggly lines on a piece of graph paper and they don't know what that means. But what they actually mean is taking the advanced physiology of a heart and using electrical patterns to diagnose their structural issues, acute issues, heart attacks, et cetera. And there's a lot of sophistication behind the knowledge of converting that squiggly line into real knowledge and medical knowledge about what's going on with your heart and vascular system and those lines and other things. We're limited by the human eye because the human eye we can only see 400, 700 nanometers. We can only see certain changes in terms of distance and that kind of stuff. But with AI and scanning those things, what you can now do is actually get a much more sophisticated and in depth analysis of that squiggly line that can then give you diagnoses on maybe structure, on maybe pathophysiology, acute disorders or other things that required very fancy tests that were thousands of dollars. And now you can do this with an ekg, which is much less expensive, much faster, and much more scalable for every patient. And so now because of this advent of technology and AI using that, we're able to take some screening tools, scale them at a much broader level, cut your costs and improve care using AI as a decision support for the physician and combining that human level skill with the AI skill together.
- [06:30]
A
Got it? Got it. A lot of exciting and innovative things happening in healthcare right now. I'd love to hear it, but while I still have you, is there anything else that listeners should know?
- [06:38]
B
Yeah, I would say, you know, for anybody in healthcare, attend these conferences, whether it be health or Beckers or there's a ton of. And Beckers does a fantastic job bringing new technology, new innovation to the forefront. Along with these other conferences. I would advise physicians, nurses, others who are on the front line to attend these conferences because their insight and clinical knowledge and daily work is the kind of knowledge we need to inform the next level of technology so that we can have better tools and better sophistication, better care for patients.
- [07:14]
A
That's a great note to end on, Dr. Perrett. I want to thank you as always for joining me today and for sharing these insights on the Beckers Healthcare podcast.
- [07:20]
B
Thank you. Always an honor. Thank you for having me.