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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Dr. Mark Townsend, Chief Clinical Digital Ventures Officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health
00:10:52
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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
Hello and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. My name is Chanel Bunger and I'm currently recording live at the 10th annual Health IT Digital Health and RCM meeting in Chicago and currently sitting down with Dr. Mark Townsend, the Chief Clinical Digital Ventures Officer at Bon secours Mercy Health. Dr. Townsend, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [00:48]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [00:49]
B
Perfect. Well, to get us started, could you please introduce yourself and share a bit about your background and you work in healthcare?
- [00:55]
C
Yeah, sure. And so I go by Mark and please call me Mark. And my background is as a cardiologist. I was an internal medicine pediatric cardiologist who began what I thought was an academic career, had four kids in four years and couldn't afford them necessarily. So it created a little bit of a pivot, got me into healthcare administration, and I served as a chief operating officer in numerous capacities for a couple health systems and as an operator and a practicing cardiologist. I also then got into developing technology mostly out of necessity. So necessity being the mother of invention, if you will, I needed tools that we couldn't quite frankly afford. So as I started to build those tools, I did that as a creative outlet and did that throughout my career. So now as Chief Clinical Digital Ventures Officer for Bon Secours Mercy Health, it's meant to be a descriptive term. So what we do is we take the operational insights or the problems of Bon Secours Mercy Health, we then elevate those through leadership, and then we use those to inform an investment thesis. So as strategic investors, we use a company called Accrete Health Partners to then do strategic investing. And creating partnerships with emerging technologies helps us then bring that technology back to Bon Secours Mercy Health and implement change at scale. So not many things you can do in large health systems allow you to pull a lever and then implement change at scale. We're 50 hospitals over four states, also the largest private health system in in Ireland, with an emerging market in the Philippines as well. So we use technology to implement change at scale.
- [02:38]
B
Perfect. And as we all know, AI is kind of a big buzzword, a hot topic for everyone, and nearly half of all medical practices are or have reported using it in some sort of capacity. In the last year or so, from your perspective, I'm curious to know what are some use cases that are making a difference for you at your organization right now and how are you leveraging them?
- [02:58]
C
So back to the core of our business, being operationally focused to drive improved patient care and outcomes. A good starting place for AI is to use AI in healthcare operations. Ryan. And so you can essentially de risk a lot of the implementation if you start with something that is low risk. For example, let's engage our patients. So that was one of the first applications we developed with a partnership, a conversational engagement platform. And it's a combined marketing tool, navigator, that essentially creates a conversation and a repertoire with a patient, helping them access care. That then turned into, for example, using agentic AI to now help our patients access care when they want it, where they want it, and on the terms essentially that they are looking for. So that's a great application. All of that opens the door and builds muscle memory as an organization for us to now incorporate AI into a lot of what we do. And so now we have increasingly pulled on board applications that have a clinical relevance, if you will. And, and so AI applications as a percentage of our application portfolio, roughly 9 to now, almost 10% of our application portfolio is made up of tools that use AI. So we're getting there.
- [04:19]
B
Absolutely. And now as virtual care expands from AI enabled tools such as the ones that you were just talking about, to broader digital health platforms, introducing technology always brings challenges. I could share some advice to other healthcare leaders, navigating everything from governments to patient engagement. And can you share an example of how your organization has balanced innovation with operational constraints?
- [04:43]
C
Yeah, well, that's a loaded question, right? So, so yeah, you know, one of our, our early learnings was, I like to use the analogy there's two ways to herd cats. And you can herd cats by getting behind them and cracking the whip, in which case they run a million different directions and they all hide. Right. Or you can herd cats by turning on the can opener. And if you turn on the proverbial can opener, guess what? The cats all come out of hiding and they run to you. And so using that analogy, and we actually use that with our leadership team, we created essentially discretionary funding. So I referenced Accrete Health Partners as the venture arm of our organization, Bon Secour Mercy Health. We created what we call Accrete acceleration funding. So we said to our organization, listen, we are all cost conscious. We are all living within the constraints of our budget. If you have a problem, create an offset in Your budget, elevate your problem, bring it to us and we will match, using discretionary funding or acceleration funding, we will match up to 50% of the cost of implementing, for example, a new technology or developing a new technology internally to help with the problem at hand. And so that now has created an investment thesis for us that allows us to invest in many cases on terms that are favorable to us as our conversations and relationships mature. But it has helped us from a regulatory perspective as well because the cats are less likely to be hiding in dark corners, you know, in their own little interpretation of their regulatory environment. But as we pull them in and we accelerate essentially the partnerships that they're elevating, it helps us actually from a regulatory perspective, ensure that we are, you know, in, we are marching in accordance with our own internal principles and with even some of the external principles that, that are relevant.
- [06:32]
B
Got it, got it. And kind of in that same vein and regulations and whatnot. How are you seeing recent legislation, both state and federal, affect healthcare organizations and healthcare IT specifically. And have you adjusted strategies in response?
- [06:47]
C
So that is a fun question, particularly since the date that we are recording this is October 1, 2025 and the federal government just shut night or early this morning, I should say. So starting with the federal level, you know, obviously hospital at home is at risk and you know, is having to be truly thought, thought through differently today than it was yesterday. Right. And so we have a robust hospital at home pilot thanks to our Charleston Market, Roper St. Francis and and so that's a very real world application of what's going on from a regulatory environment. Our teams are thinking creatively this morning about how to sustain that program. And we believe there's value, we believe from a federal level that will be something, that, that, that will be respected. It won't go away, but we're, we have to stay nimble. Right. And so that's a real world example. Obviously HR1 is out there as well. And we're thinking differently about Medicaid populations and said differently, how can we engage technology to help with Medicaid enrollment and how can we engage even agentic AI labor essentially through creative partnerships to do workforce eligibility determination and to really build out our safety net specific to populations that may have difficulty accessing care because of payer related constraints in the near future? On the state level, we're in four states predominantly so Ohio, Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky. There are state by state variations obviously with Medicaid. And I think that's the most pressing, you know, constraint we've got Great policy teams and, and through our leadership, great access to smart people in the regulatory environment. But then you go through all of that, and then you can't say regulatory environment and technology with all without also then implicating our relationship with the fda, for example. Right. So we're staying close to emerging guidelines from Dr. McCrary's leadership at the FDA specific to, you know, how AI will be regulated. All that is is changing quickly. All of it is very relevant to the work that we're doing as a health system and very much, again, informs, you know, how we will deliver better care for more people at less cost.
- [09:13]
B
Absolutely. Well, Mark, I want to thank you for your time today, but before I let you go, I'm curious to hear what would be your top piece of advice for other healthcare leaders as they prepare for further advancements in technology and rising demands for care?
- [09:26]
C
That's a great question. I would say let's be encouraging. Right. So as others are essentially navigating the maze, don't get frustrated with either the pace of change. Don't get frustrated with compliance and, you know, join the conversation. And as you join the conversation, yes, there are real world constraints, there are financial constraints. Obviously, we're all driving profitability so that we can advance the care of the patients that we serve, but within the theory of constraints, recognize the constraints and exploit the constraints. Right. And so they in many cases spawn innovation, and it's a great time to be creative. And then one other comment is that specific to healthcare, it, we are at the point where we need to aggregate. Right. So there's thousands of point solutions, and then every health system has one ehr, Right. And that one EHR in many cases will say that we can do everything, which is not reality, and they are the aggregator essentially of the care that we deliver. So it's a bit of a push and a pull, but recognizing that within that push and pull, there is room for a lot of creativity to do a lot of good for more people. So. So it's a good time.
- [10:42]
B
Absolutely. Well, that's an excellent place to end. Mark, I want to thank you once again for your time today and for sharing your insights on the Becker's Healthcare podcast.
- [10:48]
C
Thanks for having me.