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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
How Innovation & Thoughtful Collaboration Are Shaping the Future of Clinical Care
00:26:26
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- [00:00]
A
Hello everyone. This is Erica Spicer Mason with Becker's Healthcare. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. Today we're going to talk about innovation and thoughtful collaboration and how these two concepts are shaping the future of clinical care. And joining me for this conversation, we have with us YA Fellin, the senior Vice President and General Manager of Clinical decision Support and Provider Solutions at Wolters Kluwer Health. Ya, it is great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining Becker's Today.
- [00:33]
B
Thank you, Erika. Great to be here as always.
- [00:36]
A
Well, again, great to have you. And for any listeners who may be new to your work, I'd love if you could share just a little bit about yourself and your background. And also in the spirit of our conversation, what fuels your focus on advancing innovation and transformation in healthcare?
- [00:53]
B
Yeah, no, happy to. I've been fortunate to be in healthcare my entire career, amazingly, as I reflect on it, actually stumbled on healthcare administration as an undergraduate major and pretty early on knew I wanted to be in the healthcare industry. My career has kind of these two big eras, if you will. First decade plus, I was working with hospitals and health systems. On the consulting side, my area of expertise was surgical services. And so I spent a lot of time basically traveling the country. I've seen almost every state because I've been to the hospital or health system that's there, really figuring out how to put operational best practices to work and to drive outcomes for hospitals and health systems. And then really for the last 16 or so years had a big career shift onto the SAS technology side of healthcare. And so I've been focused on leveraging technology to help across a range of functions, population, health, now, clinical decision support, to put technology to use to drive outcomes at scale. And so in terms of kind of what fuels me or my focus on innovation, first and foremost it's about how do you get an organization to the outcome that they're trying to achieve. I think that's been inherent from the early days of my career. And you know, I think what's unique about this moment, when you talk about advancing innovation and transformation in healthcare today, I would argue across the last two years if I, if I've always been very focused on how do you deliver outcomes at scale. The technologies that we're now working with, and specifically some of the work around generative AI, have really unlocked either challenges or opportunities, however you want to think about it, that we used to think were too hard or off limits or where you couldn't kind of scale in a way to meet the business need. So that's kind of what's fueling me right now. Or maybe not kind of definitely what's fueling me right now. It's really how do we step into this new era of technology and take outcomes and the mission and priorities and goals of hospitals and health systems to a whole new level in terms of what's possible to be achieved?
- [03:27]
A
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing a bit more about yourself and some initial thoughts on how you're looking at innovation and transformation right now. Your background in the hospital administration consulting space, and then more recently in technology, you have this really holistic perspective on what organizations need from an operational standpoint and then the technology that can support those operations. But you also raised this great point about how we've entered this era of technology, especially with AI, where we've unlocked, as you said, challenges or opportunities that we used to think were too hard or off limits. What an exciting time amid all of this excitement. Still, healthcare organizations are of course, facing a lot of complexity as the pace of innovation continues to speed up. So from your perspective, what makes a partnership actually effective in helping organizations turn innovative ideas into real world impact?
- [04:28]
B
Yeah, it's such a great question and I kind of want to draw out one of the earlier challenges you talked about, which is the complexity. And if you think about the healthcare market right now, there's so much opportunity, there's so much potential, there's so many companies that are racing to help customers solve a challenge. I think that in and of itself just represents a form of complexity when you get into true partnership and kind of move beyond a vendor or a customer style relationship. What I have found from a partnership perspective is that to be effective, you have to connect on a couple of key dimensions. First and foremost is mission. For any strong partnership, is there a shared mission and journey and sense of the right way to achieve the objective? And I think beyond that foundational piece, it's how do you then focus, given all the complexity, given all the potential of things that you could do around the priorities and goals of the organization that you're partnering with? I think it's actually that focus that translates into innovations having a real world impact. So you're aligned for a mission perspective. You sit down and you figure out, okay, if we could only do three or five or maybe 10 things, because you can do a lot with AI, what is our focused list of items? And then, you know, with any good innovation cycle, it's the block and tackle to go from idea or concept to an outcome. And you know, I don't think that's an overly complex playbook. It tends to be grounded in starting with a proof of concept, figuring out how you scale. But in my experience, kind of true partnership, you focus on those dimensions, you have some of the hard conversations around what's really important in terms of the application of these opportunities, and then you turn that into an impact.
- [07:10]
A
Such great insight. Ya. And I'm wondering with all of that in mind, you know, we're talking about aligning on mission blocking and tackling, seeing how innovation will be able to scale. Are there any recent collaborations that Wolters Kluwer has been involved in? Or maybe even you've seen this elsewhere in the industry that you feel showcase this approach? You know how to successfully scale innovation through an enterprise approach?
- [07:39]
B
Yeah, no. This is probably the most fun that I'm having in my role right now is truly building deep partnerships and collaborating on innovation. I'd probably start on the industry side. We've announced large partnerships in the ambient space with both Abridge and Microsoft, two of the largest, most respected ambient players. I think it really does follow the pattern from your previous question, Erica. We have mission alignment with those organizations and they have mission alignment with the hospitals and health systems that they serve. We've worked really hard to focus on a set of problems and pain points where we feel like both organizations bring something unique to the table. In this case ambient technology from those partners and on our side, proprietary, trusted, evidence based content for use at the point of care. And then we've really kind of dug into, okay, how do you design a system and an integration of our two capabilities and that can generate an impact and outcomes. We announced these partnerships across the last six or so months, or actually announced some of them previously. The products have come out across the last six or so months. But I think when you really step back, these are collaborations that have been a year plus in the making. It does get into that true innovation process and cycle. How do you do a proof of concept? How do we learn to work together as two different organizations with a shared mission? And then ultimately how do you build that into a scaled product that gets released into the world? And what I'm excited about is the reception of those products has just been fantastic from our shared customers. So I would say that's on the industry side a little bit more. In the up to date world, we've been really innovating in terms of putting generative AI into our core product experience. We launched our expert AI capabilities Built on top of the core up to date content last September. And we've taken a very governance, partnership, friendly approach with large hospitals and health systems. And part of that is making sure that you do have the right transparency and governance processes. And so recently we've launched with some of the largest hospitals and health Systems in the U.S. think of the biggest system. They've all been rolling this out and I think that collaboration has just been so critical. It's everything from have we shown up to governance committees and processes and demonstrated how we measure bias in our products so that our customers don't have to do it? 2. How do you introduce thousands of users across a hospital and health system to a generative AI experience? Some folks are very comfortable using that for clinical decision support. Others, you know, still want to, you know, learn what are the best ways to prompt or ask natural language questions. And I just feel like we've had, you know, tremendous collaboration and partnership with our, you know, our hospital and health system partners to figure out the right way, you know, to get these technologies into the hands of end users in a governed environment.
- [11:37]
A
Yeah, great insights and appreciate you sharing what partnerships are meaning to you at the industry level and then also in terms of up to date and how you're collaborating with hospitals and health systems. And you just touched on what it means to meaningfully have clinicians adopt these tools in ways that are safe and actually helpful for them, which we know is so important because clinicians are essentially inundated with data, new tools, competing information systems and streams. So how can innovative approaches such as the partnerships you're touching on here, help to reduce that complexity for clinicians and ultimately create more connected experiences that surface the right information they need at the right moment in care?
- [12:22]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. And the complexity, in my experience and opinion, can get out of control pretty quickly if you're not careful. I would bring it back to a couple core basic principles or tenets. The first is you need to be in workflow. And you need to be in workflow at the right moment for a clinical decision to be meaningful and appropriate. You know, if you've got a physician and you've got information on a medication order that would lead to a better outcome, you can't present that information after they've already gone through the workflow of ordering a prescription. That's just a basic way of describing it. And you know, back to some of the partnerships, I think that's one of the reasons why we're so thrilled on the ambient partnership side because the ambient workflows are this kind of new canvas and territory of places to be really smart and seamless into clinician workflow. So first and foremost, I think is intersecting with workflow in the right ways. The second is that the information or the insight or the product that you're delivering really needs to solve a problem. And I almost chuckle when I say that right now. I do feel like there's a lot of technology that is in search of problems. And that's one of the cons of when you reach a point where there's so much technology, information or innovation, I should say. But how do you get more patients with managed blood pressure? That is a real clinical outcome problem that needs to be solved. How do you more efficiently provide a referral or a consult for a patient that needs one? Grounding all of the innovation around what's the complexity or problem at a hospital or health system? You know, how do you make sure that clinicians have timely information about the formulary or the antibiotic antibiogram for their hospital that should be referenced in the workflow of clinical decision support? So, you know, workflow, you know, real problem solving. And then, you know, I think at the core is, at least for us as a business, is do you also have a unique asset or set of insights that are worthy of those first two opportunities? Being in the workflow, solving a problem. And for uptodate, we've got this proprietary set of content. It is edited and written by the world's foremost experts on how do you bring evidence based medicine to the point of care? I think just being able to, you know, unlock those insights is, you know, at least our, our key area of focus. And when you get those things right, what I tend to find is the, the complexity and the, you know, competing information kind of, kind of goes by the wayside. Right. Because you've, you've hit the, the triple threat of opportunities.
- [16:06]
A
Absolutely. And yeah, I know something that is central to Wolters Klu's approach is the, the concept of trust. And so as you're seeing clinicians adopt tools, especially tools that are driven by AI, what role are you seeing trust play in determining whether clinicians ultimately embrace the tool? Any best practices or insights you could share there?
- [16:30]
B
Yeah, I, I, I mean, I think trust is the ultimate thing. Right. And to me trust is an output or an outcome of something much deeper, which is do you have high quality information that enhances the decisions or experiences of a clinician? So I view trust as something that very much needs to be earned day in and day out. And I think trust in this innovation landscape is so critical. One of the downsides of generative AI is it's going to give you a very, very confident answer and it's probably also going to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. These are kind of well documented patterns and challenges within generative AI. And so how do you trust something that, you know, has been, you know, kind of programmed, if you will, to, you know, be agreeable with you and to get, tell you what you want to hear and to be very confident? And that's been a, you know, that is a huge industry challenge. I think that's been a really important part of our AI journey. We've basically infused our clinical logic and clinical reasoning and validation into our up to date expert AI experience. And what that's done is it builds on the core trust. Right. People can trust an up to date topic because we show you the world renowned authors and editors and the peer review process that painstakingly, you know, we run day in and day out to make sure that that information is accurate. And so that's built a foundation of trust. And then the way that we are extending that with these new technologies is to put, you know, the clinical intelligence, the validation layers. We're actually just about to publish on our validation process and results, you know, really on top of the new technology so that ultimately we continue the pattern of trust and we can be the trusted source in a world that has different challenges and obviously different opportunities from where we've been operating. So I still believe trust is the thing. I believe trust is something you have to earn day in and day out. And I think clinicians will continue to embrace solutions that, you know, they know that they can rely on for their most important decisions.
- [19:24]
A
Absolutely. And yeah, before we, we close our time together today, I wanted to be sure that we touched on agentic AI as well. I know a lot of our conversations so far has centered on generative, but agentic is something that we're hearing more and more about from healthcare leaders. In fact, recent data shows that I think it's as high as 85% of healthcare leaders plan to increase investment over the next few years in agentic AI. So given everything that you've described about reducing cognitive burden, improving the care experience, where do you see agentic fitting into that picture and what do you think leaders should be thinking about as adoption accelerates?
- [20:06]
B
Yeah, this was one of the best topics at the Becker's event was the conversation around agentic opportunities. It was great to connect with other health care leaders about where they are and are not experimenting with agents. And I always want to be careful. Some of these things can become a little bit buzzwordy. But from my perspective, agents are places where you've truly allowed the technology to make a decision. It has agency to perform a task. And so, you know, generally speaking, you know, we're seeing a lot of experimentation on the administrative side and particularly, you know, with decisions that you know are low risk. So think of, you know, how do you have an agent deployed that helps, you know, reach out and contact patients to schedule a follow up appointment? Now, in some ways that's low risk because worst case scenario is that somebody that didn't have an appointment or wasn't going to have an appointment still doesn't make its way through the system. In other ways, it was fascinating in these conversations that is still the brand of the hospital or health system that is starting to communicate through the agent. And then on the flip side, I think there's just a ton of potential for agentic tools in higher risk scenarios. So when you're talking about real clinical decisions, and I think part of the value proposition there is that there are not enough clinicians for the work or the amount of clinical workload that's out there to be done. One area that people talk a lot about is the shortage of pharmacists in the hospital. So, you know, I think there's tremendous promise. I think there is a whole range of challenges that need to be grappled with. Had a great conversation at Becker's about who supervises the agents that are being deployed. There's some really smart podcasts out there these days around, you know, is there going to be a new role, you know, almost a vice president of HR that's in charge of agents. So how do you stay on top of, you know, what an agent's doing in the same way that you would manage or measure a more traditional employee? How do you have validation frameworks that make sure that the agents are working towards the intended goals? Ultimately, I think there's a big regulatory angle that's kind of yet to come in terms of agent or agentic use in healthcare. And overall, we see agentic, you know, opportunities in clinical decision support as a very transformative opportunity. It's something that we're leaning into heavily within up to date, but at the same time, it does raise the stakes in terms of quality, safety, governance, you know, supervision, you know, all of those things that, you know, it really takes to build trust and ultimately high quality outcomes in terms of what you're trying to achieve.
- [23:33]
A
Yeah. An important note. Yeah. About how agentic AI certainly does raise the stakes when we think about governance, security, all of those considerations that it sounds like you had some really robust conversations about on site at Becker's annual meeting. So glad to hear that the event spurred some insightful conversations there and so glad that you were able to join us for this conversation today on the podcast. Before we wrap, is there anything else you'd like to leave listeners with, especially around innovation? What we've been talking about in regards to shared visions and thoughtful collaboration? Anything else that you think we should know?
- [24:10]
B
Erica, I probably come back to the same note every time we chat and I really appreciate you continuing to host and have me on the podcast. This also came came across, I would say, loud and clear at the Beckers annual meeting. In all of this AI hype, I still think it's critical to remain grounded on the human side of things. One of the best panel I joined at the Beckers meeting, it talked about the future of clinical leadership and there were some great hospital and health system physician leaders talking about growing the next round of physician leaders. And they were talking about basically what are the competencies from a physician leadership perspective that you'll need in the era of AI. And one of the more straightforward things was how do you teach or lead an organization through developing prompt skills. So often how good a response you get from an AI tool or product or solution is based on how well you're able to prompt and interact with it. And ultimately I think that's a, you know, that gets back to the humans. Right. There's a set of skills that we're going to have to, you know, grow and build upon and develop or innovate to thrive and take advantage of all these opportunities. And I still think, you know, the not forgetting that we are in the business of treating humans, you know, done for and with and by humans. And so, you know, figuring out how you get them all aligned with the new technologies and the AI systems I still think is probably the most important task at hand.
- [25:50]
A
Yeah. Well appreciate you yaw ending us on a grounded and human focused note. I think it's a really important point for our listeners and sounds like it was top of mind on site as well. So just want to thank you again for making time for the conversation today again, it was great to have you back.
- [26:08]
B
Likewise, thanks for having me.
- [26:10]
A
And we'd also like to thank our podcast sponsor for this episode, Walter's Kluwer listeners. Be sure to tune into more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview. Com.