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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Dr. Bashir Agboola on AI Strategy, Governance, and Turning Digital Investment into Performance
00:11:51
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- [00:02]
A
This is where healthcare leadership comes together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago, April 13th through the 16th. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former President George W. Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit Beckershospitalreview.com and click on the Events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.
- [00:32]
B
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Healthcare Podcast. I am thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant physician leader. We're joined today by Dr. Bashir Agbulla. Dr. Agbulla, for more than a decade served at Hospital for Special Surgery, becoming the Vice President, Associate CIO and Chief Technology Officer. Just an absolutely brilliant person. He's now doing some consulting and some other things, but an absolutely brilliant career. Dr. Agbulla, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell people a little bit about what you've done and what you're doing today?
- [01:09]
C
Thank you very much, Scott. Thanks for the opportunity to chat with you and your audience. It's been a minute since our last conversation, so as you mentioned, I was most recently at the Hospital for Special Surgery for a long stretch and before then I was with Memorial Katrin Cancer center, also in New York City. Currently I am with InterDigm at Interdime. We are a technology consulting and advisory firm. We advise healthcare systems and enterprise enterprises on digital transformation, AI strategy, infrastructure modernization and governance. Our focus is really not just on deploying technology, but operationalizing it, ensuring that investments in AI, cloud, cyber data platforms all translate into workflow, workflow integration and financial performance, as well as improved patient experience. My career in healthcare technology has largely been at the intersection of technology operations and executive leadership, helping organizations move from experimentation to sustainable execution. I'm not a clinician, I'm a technologist and business leader. But I've spent a long time hanging out with doctors and clinicians enough to know what their pains are and to assist them in the mission of efficient care delivery. Happy to talk more.
- [02:35]
B
No, thank you. As hospitals health systems utilize technology, work with technology, what's working? Where does AI meet the hype? Where does it not? What's going well?
- [02:47]
C
Yeah, I'm really excited at the prospect of AI helping with some of the pain points we have in healthcare. You know, often healthcare gets the bad rap as being sort of a laggard to technology adoption, but in the case of AI, the industry has actually been really at the forefront in certain aspects of AI adoption because there are some real challenges that we can address and realize value quickly with AI. So I'm excited, for example, at one of the big problems that we struggle with in healthcare, which is with the workforce and clinician burnout. And we've all heard about how much time clinicians spend doing things other than being in front of a patient and caring for a patient and being present with a patient. And so we've seen examples where, for example, with things like ambient AI scribes, where the AI listens to the conversation between the clinician and the patient and is able to capture clinically relevant information for insertion into the medical records of the patient. I mean, that's just, it's one of the fastest growing instances of technology adoption that I have seen in my career in healthcare. And the impact is dramatic. Giving time back to physicians, improving the quality of their interactions with their patients. And that's just one example of where AI is helping to solve real world problems in healthcare. And there are many, many more in the works.
- [04:32]
B
Where do you see? We see sort of cascading use cases for AI. Talk a little bit about where you're the most excited about some of those use cases.
- [04:40]
C
Yeah, so the clinical documentation, as I just described in the case of ambient AI scribe is one. Predictive analytics is another area that actually, and interestingly, that's one area that we've been working on for many, many, many years. In the background, before the whole excitement about that Jenny, I created over the last few years, predictive analytics is one of the areas where AI can actually help to bring about the promise of personalized medicine that we've talked about for a long time in healthcare. We have lots of data, fragmented data, you know, data in dark places. But we're learning and we're learning to bring the data together and with that to do predictive analytics off of that data that would allow us to personalize the care that each patient would get, develop therapeutics that are tailored to the peculiar needs and the peculiar physiology of a patient. And that's another area where we can finally, over the next, I hope, few years, come up with the promise of personalized medicine.
- [05:55]
B
Thank you. And talk about Dr. Agbola, what are you personally most excited about currently? Where are you most focused and excited this year?
- [06:04]
C
There's a lot to be excited about in the midst of all the hype that's out there. And there's always so much hype in technology and so much buzz. But for me personally, I've been really excited at the opportunity to work on Building structured governance frameworks to assist technology leaders and executives in optimizing their technology investments. And I did some work last year, some research, some doctoral level research work on the effective strategies for healthcare leaders to optimize their technology investments. Because we live in a, particularly in healthcare, we live in capital constrained environment in healthcare. Our spend as a percentage of revenue is probably about maybe a third to about half of what you might see for healthcare for technology. That is compared to what you might see in other industries like the financial services sector. We'll probably spend like 4 to 5% for many systems as opposed to 10% or more in financial services and some other sectors. So it's important for technology leaders to know how best to optimize the spend in technology in healthcare. So I'm excited, I'm focused on earthing the best strategies that some of the best technology leaders out there have found to make sure that every digital dollar that they spend is well spent towards achieving the aims, the quadruple aims of healthcare.
- [07:41]
B
Thank you very, very much. And talk a bit about Dr. Abel. You've had this great career. What advice would you give to emerging leaders? What do you tell them?
- [07:51]
C
So there's a few things. So one, I'll start with an advice statement that I learned years ago and I love to repeat this quote as often as I get the chance to. This is a quote attributed to a former head of strategic planning at the Royal Dutch Shell many decades ago. He said something to the effect that your ability to learn faster than the competition might be the only sustainable advantage you have in the future. So I think that's a powerful statement. So both as individual leaders and as organizations, we have to adopt the practice of being fast learners. So we have to learn. So I would say to leaders that you have to learn. There's a lot that's changing right now. So as leaders, you have to learn technology, you have to learn finance, you have to learn the core business operations of the enterprise that you're part of. So learning broadly and learning fast would be my first advice. The second advice would be to think in terms of systems and not silos. Systems thinking isn't recognized as a capability and a strength as much as it should in our enterprises. And we often tend to just think very narrowly within our peculiar domains. Technology teams might just think solely about technology and the financing teams. Leaders think in terms of systems because any enterprise, any modern day enterprise, is not one thing. It's a system of parts that work together and decisions made in one part of that systems would have effects elsewhere within the larger system. So always think in terms of systems when you think about digital investments and digital innovation. Thirdly, I would say in order to build credibility as a leader, you really need disciplined execution. So what do I mean by that? It means you have to be sure that there is a structured governance that you use to manage what you set to do for the enterprise. Doing technology for the sake of technology or just because it's the latest innovation isn't good enough. And it would not build credibility. But having a structured governance where you have stakeholder representation across your enterprise, the voice of the customer is at the table. And perhaps most importantly, you tie what you're trying to do to the enterprise strategy. It needs to support the enterprise strategy. It can't be something isolated from it. So having that and then implementing and realizing value iteratively, meaning you implement, you test, you measure, you readjust, you derive value quickly, give value to the, represent value to the organization quickly and adjust as necessary, that builds credibility within the organization. Those would be some, some of the advice I'll give to the leaders.
- [11:03]
B
I love that. And just for our readers taking or listeners taking notes, would you synthesize those few pieces of advice just in 30 seconds for a listener taking notes?
- [11:13]
C
So learn always and continuously. Keep learning. Learn fast and learn broadly. Build credibility through structured, disciplined governance. Tie what you do to corporate strategy. It must not be disconnected from what's important to the enterprise.
- [11:35]
B
Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Dr. Agbola. It is great to visit with you. Bashir. What a tremendous career and tremendous leadership. Thank you for joining us today on the Beverage Healthcare podcast. You're just fantastic.
- [11:47]
C
Thank you so much.