← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Brittany Cyriacks, Clinical Informatics Program Director, UCHealth
00:05:37
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Transcript13 lines
- [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 2025 Health IT Digital Health and RCM Conference. I'm currently joined by Brittany Cyriax who is the Clinical Informatics Program Director at UC Health. So Brittany, thanks for being here. Would love to have us start off by sharing a little bit more about your background and your work in healthcare.
- [00:49]
C
Yeah, thanks for having me. I am a nurse. I've been a nurse for 17 years working for UC Health. I started as a clinical nurse, worked as a charge nurse, got into professional development where I did a lot of the onboarding of our new staff and then transitioned into clinical informatics and have my master's in Clinical Informatics currently for UC Health. We have a very large virtual health center and I am the informatics program director over all of those programs and work closely with our informatics team to kind of redesign the way that we're delivering care with a virtual nursing model.
- [01:25]
B
Wonderful. Well, thanks for being here and I'd love to start our conversation off with AI. So nearly half of medical practices reported using AI in some capacity last year and it remains a key topic for health IT leaders. So from your perspective, what are the use cases that are making the most difference right now and how are you leveraging them in your organization?
- [01:44]
C
Yeah, so from my perspective, AI is not new for the nursing world. We've been using sepsis predictive model and deterioration predictive model through our ehr. And so we have found that having models that can really detect that something is happening with the patient early so that we can intervene early has been very successful. And what we've kind of done with those tools is that instead of giving them to the very busy bedside nurse, we have virtual ICU nurses that get that signal instead. And we'll do a chart review, put in a few orders for the patient, and really drive care around those deterioration events. And so we've seen some really great outcomes and decrease in our mortality by really standardizing that model. And it's also been a model that's been significantly scalable. So every time we bring on a new hospital into our system and they come on our ehr, we can flip A switch, so to speak, and give them that same workflow and see the same outcomes for that organization as well. Awesome.
- [02:47]
B
And as virtual care expands from AI enabled tools and remote monitoring to broader digital health platforms, introducing new technology brings 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 innovation with operational constraints?
- [03:07]
C
Yeah, I mean, my advice that I will give to health organizations and their leaders is that you really need to bring in an informatics team if you don't have one already. These are going to be the folks that really help with that change management and really connecting with the end users and being that voice between the technical solutions and the workflow and really advocating for the right solution, something that is of ease of use for the clinicians and something that the patients find useful. We're not going to find a problem for a solution. We need a solution for the problems that we're already having. And so I would just encourage kind of that informatics involvement early on and then bringing in those end users, really understanding their friction points so that we are together finding a solution.
- [03:56]
B
And how are you seeing recent legislation, both in state and federal areas, affect healthcare organizations and healthcare IT specifically? And have you adjusted any strategies in response?
- [04:06]
C
One example I can give you is just around remote patient monitoring billing codes. I think during COVID we obviously were given a little bit more leeway in compliance and kind of the way that we ran those programs. And so we've found as they've gotten a little more stringent, that we've had to kind of redesign our workflow to make sure that we're getting everything that we need to be doing from a checklist perspective to be doing the billing for that. Another thing that we've seen is that they are covering that cost for Medicaid patients. So that's been a huge win to be able to provide these services to patients that we previously were not able to.
- [04:43]
B
And as we wrap our conversation up, what is your top piece of advice for healthcare leaders as they prepare for further advancements in technology and rising demands for care?
- [04:52]
C
Yeah, I think we run the risk of having some AI fatigue, technology fatigue. The space outside of the hospital walls is moving so quickly. And oftentimes within our organizations, we move very slowly. I think we're gonna have to find a really good balance that we can stay current in what we're doing in our work. We're also going to have to make sure that we have some governance around this. So again, that we're not getting the new fancy, shiny tool, but that we really are making sure that our solutions are fitting what our organization is trying to tackle.
- [05:24]
B
Well, thank you so much for joining me today on the Beckers Healthcare Podcast and sharing these insights again. We are live at the 2025 Health IT Digital Health and RCM Conference.
- [05:35]
C
Thank you.