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- [00:01]
A
Philips is a health tech leader focused on innovation that improves the health and well being of people. Our healthcare technology and informatics solutions help care teams diagnose, treat and manage more patients with greater precision, speed and confidence. Across the care journey with Philips, clinicians are empowered with streamlined insights in the moments that matter for every patient. Better care for more people Philips.
- [00:29]
B
This is Grace Lynn Keller with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast and we are recording live at the 10th annual Health IT Digital Health and RCM meeting. I'm currently joined by Amy Trainor who is the CIO at Ochsner Health. Amy, thanks for joining me today. Would love to have you start off by sharing a little bit more about yourself and your work in healthcare.
- [00:46]
C
Awesome. Thank you guys for having me. I am really excited to be here. It's actually my first time at a Becker's conference so I'm enjoying myself meeting lots of new people. So thanks for having me here to do the podcast. As you mentioned, Amy Schraynor, CIO at Ochsner I have been CIO for almost 18 months, or 19 months I would say now, but I've been at Oshner for 15 years in multiple different roles. I am a nurse by trade so love bringing my clinical chops to the technology world but I've been working in healthcare IT for around 20 years. Really excited to talk more about all of the things AI, but also we really focus at Aschner on reforming our teams. Happy to talk about that too. Really thinking through like how do we focus on what the experiences we are delivering, whether that's a patient experience or a physician provider experience or a nursing experience. But really thinking through like how can we use technology and tools to really help what that looks like for our physicians, clinicians and patients. So happy to be here, thanks for having me.
- [01:47]
B
Wonderful. Well, let's start our conversation talking about AI as nearly half of medical practices reported using AI in some capacity in the past year and it does remain a key topic for health IT leaders. So from your perspective, what are the use cases that are making the biggest difference right now and how are you leveraging them in your organization?
- [02:06]
C
Really great point. I mean AI is no longer a buzzword. I would say through my career in tech, like there's been so many buzzwords. This one is real. We are using, we're being very thoughtful on our use of AI. I would say the easiest and the fastest place that we are really trying to expand is using ambient technology for phys. While not a hard roi, the work life balance or work life harmony as I like to Call it is really amazing and the docs really do love it. So like easy peasy, let's do it. We're in spread and scale phase right now for that. We've been using our own homegrown models and some standard models from our EHR vendor for quite some time. Really helping us with managing sepsis and other quality measures throughout the organization. Which it really helps because it follows our purpose and the why behind that. I think lots of also smaller summarization tools from within some of our EHRs, but we are also targeting. We kind of think of this in two different buckets. So it's clinical or patient facing and then back office and really evaluating the risk associated with each. Right. So in the clinical, patient facing, physician facing, nurse facing, we want to make sure that that is following all of our principles. We're QA it, we understand how good is this we making sure it doesn't have bias to the best of our ability. And like is this accurate enough to put in front of our clinicians and physicians on the administrative side of things? Not so much. Not that we don't care about the accuracy, but more so the risk is so much lower if we are, you know, prioritizing a authorization or a status that's not affecting someone's care. So really how can we go all in on back end rev cycle administrative burden things? Test it out as fast as possible. So we are with lots of different vendors and then really making sure we're being very pointed and careful in the clinical AI space. And not that we want to be slow or laggards, just really that we want to make sure we are delivering high quality AI to our clinicians and physicians because it's care that they're delivering. So really excited about the work we're doing in this space. We are doing some really great recycle pharmacy authorization automations. That's saving our pharmacists a ton of time which is kind of opposite of what I just said. Right. Because pharmacy is clinical but the work that they were doing was administrative. So like how do we summarize the data that they need to get those medication authorizations to get the patients to the, to the meds, to the patients faster. So while clinical, very low risk as far as like reviewing sending authorization requestments. So request request. So really exciting. I I can only imagine if I was saying this next year what that would look like. Right. Like we would probably double the things that we're using AI for. But I think it's really important that we're very Strategic making sure you know, in the, in the, in the world we live in in South Louisiana. Our, our payer mix is not very much commercial. So like how do we make sure we're spending our dollars that give our physicians, clinicians and our patients the best use of healthcare and technology?
- [05:28]
B
Absolutely. And as virtual care expands from AI enabled tools and remote monitoring to broader digital health platforms, introducing new technology can bring challenges. So what advice do you have for leaders navigating everything from governance to patient engagement? And can you share an example of how your organization has balanced inn with operational constraint?
- [05:48]
C
Really great thought. We have an enormously large virtual care program for our. Not just telehealth or outreach, but also for, for nursing. And that has been a work in progress. I'd say we started that probably in 2019 at our first hospital have scaled to over 600 beds now that was a, when I say a work in progress, we learned very quickly. It's really just not about technology. The people in the process, especially on the operational side matter. So um, I really think in the world of AI and virtualization and all the things we're doing, we have to really make sure we are not automating bad processes. Um, it's very easy to say like hey, we're doing this this way, let's just automate it. And it wasn't necessary in the first place. So simplicity is really important to, to us at Ocher as well as like making sure we have the buy in from our front end staff and nurses. We know that when we do that with all of the things technology, whether it's virtual care, whether it's AI, we get the buy in and adoption so much faster. And adoption is the key to success in AI deployment for sure. And in virtual care from a governance perspective, really being thoughtful and close to our government relations team, making sure we're up to date on all the latest and greatest regs and then utilizing technology to guide the physicians and clinicians in the right space for those are huge. So really a close collaboration with that team makes that work a, a little bit easier for us. From a technology perspective I would say virtual care at Ochsner means a lot of different things. So we really care about making sure our patient, we're delivering to our patients what they are asking of us. So virtual care could mean a virtual video visit. It could mean an asynchronous visit where they're sending in a message with pointed questions and we're giving them a result. It could mean on demand virtual care from a urgent care provider so many different things. Virtual care from a nurse in the inpatient setting, virtual consults. We really want to make sure that we are supporting our patients in the ways they want to be supported, similar to how we communicate with them as well. So whether it's in text message or phone or you know, really honoring their preferences and their ways of wanting to communicate and then utilizing that to the best of our ability.
- [08:18]
B
100%. Shifting gears slightly, I would love to know what recent legislation shifts both state and federal have affected healthcare organizations and healthcare IT specifically and then if you've adjusted any strategies in response.
- [08:33]
C
Well, absolutely. I think the virtual care geography as of yesterday was a big strategy change for us. But in general I think we really just want to make sure that I take it into two different buckets. So from an AI perspective we created our own principles that really align well with the guidance that's coming from the federal government and we play a really close role with our state government to make sure that we're all on the same page as far as like hey, this is what we see from the federal government. This is what we're doing to really abide by those rules at Ochsner. How can we help influence other healthcare organizations in the state but also smaller community facilities as well. So really having that. I know I keep going back to the alignment. Really being aligned with the resources that are out there is really important. I would say from a, from an AI perspective we early on took a pretty hard stance on like we need guiding principles for AI like what are our non negotiables about like highly scientific, you know, no bias when possible and how do we prevent bias? Making sure that we feel good, that there's a human in the loop from a clinical perspective that while we know that might not be forever but for now these are things that we find to our core of we don't feel like these are non negotiables, these or these are non negotiables. We don't want to explore and move away from them. We want to feel good about that. So lots happening I think in the government space where I hope to see is more focus. If I'm being honest. I think we've kind of touched on cyber from a regulatory perspective. There really needs to be more coming down and I think there will be on like what do we need to do? What are the minimum requirements not just for health care providers, but for vendors and for HIE IS and others that host our patients data. How do we make sure that that stays protected? So I would say Maybe opposite than the question. Right. Like your question was like, how is it affecting you? I want more in that space. I wish there were more guidelines and rules that we can all really get aligned in behind in there because we're all really, you know, worried about what that looks like in the future.
- [10:49]
B
100%. And then final question as we wrap our conversation. What is your top piece of advice for healthcare leaders as they prepare for further advancements in technology and rising demands for care?
- [11:00]
C
Great question. I would say the people process and technology. I know that's like an old school saying. It's so important today really understanding where there are gaps where you can use technology or not. And I think that it's really hard on we're here to, you know, a rev cycle but technology and digital conference. Sometimes the best technology is removing, making it less complicated. We've seen that really hold true. And some of the ways that we were doing online appointments and offering, you know, restricting how established patient versus new patient and like, is that really needed? How do we really look at that and open that up a little bit more? So really that would be my one advice. People process technology. The people in the process drive the technology, not the opposite. We've got to understand what that means. And an operational buy in could not be more important. AI education, basic education about what does AI mean for healthcare jobs of the future. Whether it's patient facing clinical jobs, back end jobs or an IT jobs, we've got to have those hard conversations. And what I've seen so far is like the more open and transparent we are about it, the more people are willing to adopt and look at the tools that we're giving them. So I couldn't explain more that getting in front of that is the best thing you can do. Really. Two great examples quickly, because I know we only have 5, 10 minutes. We have a pharmacy AI solution that was really owned and spearheaded by our chief pharmacy officer. It was amazing, adopted 100% in wonderful ROI. And then we have a solution in one of our other specialty spaces that was an IT solution that we gave to the service line versus the service line, giving it to us with low adoption, not much trust in the product because we don't have that buy in. So just right there, if you really bring it along the whole way, your operational counterparts, the. The road to success is much shorter. And that would be my other piece of advice.
- [13:14]
B
Absolutely. Well, Amy, thanks so much for joining me today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. Again, we are recording live at the 10th annual Health IT Digital Health and RCM meeting.
- [13:24]
C
Awesome. Thanks for having me.