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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Joey Seliski, Director of Digital Health Strategy and Operations at Allegheny Health Network
00:13:57
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm Scott King, thrilled today to be joined by Joey Soliski, Director, Digital Health Strategy and Operations over at Allegheny Health Network. Joey, how you doing today?
- [00:13]
B
Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me into the Beckers team for allowing us the opportunity to discuss.
- [00:18]
A
Of course. No. So happy you're with us. We're going to have a great conversation. I know we're going to get into a lot of the kind of trending topics in healthcare. So much going on right now. Just wanted to see if you don't mind introducing yourself and talking a bit about your background before we jump into the questions, Joey.
- [00:34]
B
Absolutely. So as you hit on director of digital health Strategy and Operations for Allegheny Health Network, we are part of Highmark health. Highmark is a 29 billion nonprofit organization with over 44,000 employees. And HN Algheny Health Network is a provider arm within that. So we have about 14 hospitals, over 300 clinics, 3,000 physicians across Western Pennsylvania. My personal journey, you know, I started wanting to go into pediatric oncology throughout undergraduate went to school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And in Wisconsin's backyard is a company called Epic, who many, many are familiar with. You know, thought I'd only go there for one year. I didn't know too much about healthcare technology or the company. But over time, you know, I fell in love with what technology and healthcare truly can do, how it can transform care not just for maybe for one patient, but, you know, truly at scale. So, you know, after that, I was there for multiple years working across international healthcare, tribal healthcare mergers and acquisitions and technology standardization initiatives, and came to Allegheny Health Network about three years ago to really help, you know, Allegheny Health and Highmark Health Network identify opportunities for using technology to better improve experience, operational efficiencies and, you know, clinical outcomes. So that's a little bit about myself and how I got to where I'm at today. And I'm excited to talk more.
- [01:47]
A
Thanks so much, Joey. You know, speaking of opportunities, I want to ask you what opportunities and headwinds you might have your eye on right now in health care.
- [01:57]
B
Sure. I think there's, there's two big ones I specifically want to chat about that we hear often, not just at LA Health Network, but across the country. You know, workforce shortages are something that we hear every day about statistics, both now and in the upcoming years. You know, by 2028, we're looking at a shortage, you know, across the country. This isn't specific to us, but in General, you know, 60 to 90,000 physicians and over 100,000 nurses over the upcoming years. So the burnout is real. And it's, you know, we really have to use that headwind, looking ahead to find opportunities for how do we prevent that? How do we keep our staff happy and engaged with the patient? And there can be a better way for technology to fit into that. So, especially in the world of where we're at with artificial intelligence and automated administrative tasks. You know, you're seeing this in ambient documentation across the country, and we're doing that at Highmark, Highmark Health, Allegheny Health Network. Ways that you can find also like chart summarizations. How can you prevent a clinician from needing to go search for something, just being able to input a. I want to find the lab results for this patient over the past four weeks, and it can pull it in quickly versus that time it takes to remember where to go search and find it. So those tools like that, that really help our staff focus on patient care quickly are key. I think too then we're trying to think about hybrid care models to help with this. How can we implement concepts of virtual nursing at our facilities or for maybe our remote hospitals, allowing a clinician from the city or Pittsburgh to assist on rounding that specialist in the future. So we're trying to figure out how staff can still practice at the top of their license, remove those admin tasks, and hopefully that'll start to then address some of that burnout or shortages projections. From a financial perspective, then that's another headwind that again, not just all facilities are facing and your costs might be rising, reimbursement rates, margins are tight. And with that, from a technology lens, the opportunity is using your platforms and artificial intelligence specifically in the revenue cycle as well. So how can you accurately code, find information from the inpatient stay from the chart to surface that code on the claim, reduce some denials using technology and and ultimately also accelerate collections and secondly, then use predictive analytics to optimize your staffing. How can you best know where to allocate your resources based on historical information and also understand how your operating rooms where you should staff, you know, or tell your patients to come and based on historical info. So I think those are a couple larger headwinds that, you know, we're thinking about and just ways that we're starting to use that, you know, as an opportunity to address and using technology to do that.
- [04:25]
A
Absolutely. And, you know, some of the things you were saying about workforce shortages kind of dovetail into our next question here. And that is, how are you thinking about growth and adding value to your organization, you know, especially in spite of those workforce shortages.
- [04:39]
B
Yeah, I think the first thing with that is, you know, growth isn't also just about maybe buying technology, implementing it sometimes it's about forming relationships and connecting dots internally with, with what we have. So how can we develop our technology team informaticists and groups, understand stakeholders and understand listening, building trust, meeting with clinical and operational revenue cycle teams to know what other top challenges and then using that to educate and say technology and what we have now could solve that. If we partner and change the way that we do work, we make this adjustment to it, it could do it now. Or how do we then leverage market analysis to say a health system out west is, is solving that top challenge of radiology? And here's how they're doing it. You know, should we, how can we learn from that playbook and maybe implement that? That's our top problem as an organization we want to solve. And so, you know, sometimes our role in technology again is not necessarily going to buy it, but it's actually connecting the dots internally, being the dot connector and the relationship developer, having that trust and then pulling all the teams together and then make, helping them show how to use it in training. I think then too, you know, the final thing is every organization now has to be using AI and data as their compass. You know, it is driving where we need to maybe consider investing, where it aligns with our organizational goals and how do we start to use it, you know, predictive models or analytics, the generative AI and the two in the future here, agentic AI to solve those top things we need. So those are, you know, a couple things I, I'd say for how we're trying to, you know, add value when we're thinking about at our organization.
- [06:13]
A
Yeah, I know you've touched on, you know, emerging technology that's helped your system and others like, like the types of AI you just mentioned. But do you think, is there another risk or investment that you think is worth making for the next year?
- [06:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think there's two. So I'm going to address it from both the people perspective and then technology. Right. So from a people perspective, start to invest now and in the next year in AI literacy and just team development as I hit on, you know, it's impacting every role in health care clinician. We need our clinicians, operators and leaders to understand, you know, what AI is and what it is and where and how it works and integrates in the workflows or does not. You know, teaching our teams how to troubleshoot this, review the outputs and assess is operations ready for this or not? You know, it's not just about the technology as you know and that we talk about a lot. It's about the people and process alignment and without all of that, even the best technology fails. So it's important to educate staff across the organization and within your own department in the technology digital space on how do we keep learning? Stuff's coming out every day, new AI models, new technologies. So we always need to give our time to learn. Now from a technology perspective, an investment area you recommend to look into is in the imaging space and around AI in that area. I think regardless of your reimbursement models or your contracts, there's value in the fee for service or value based care realm and using AI platforms to assess your images that are being captured and to look at, prioritize urgent cases, assist in image detection and saying this patient might have intracranial hemorrhage, maybe you should review that now and then also assist with generating the report for a radiologist like they are starting to become technologies that can do this and that is going to help us develop our workforce of the future and really start to get through some of this maybe backlog of images that tele systems might be facing potentially across the country. So if you make sure you start to understand the market, what is your radiology department doing? Journey mapping that I think it's really important to take a look because whether that's partnering with another vendor, whether it's building it internally, you should start exploring that area in 26 and 27.
- [08:29]
A
Yeah, I think you made a really good point. You said, you know, even the biggest or best technology fails. And you hear so many health systems people are worrying about getting that, you know, that, that next new shiny object. Just curious, what, what's, what's a top tech that has kind of failed you or your system or, or let you down, you know, at least temporarily.
- [08:52]
B
Yeah, I wouldn't say there's necessarily been where the technology fails necessarily or like where it is like the partner we chose to work with. It's more the concept of we can't just put technology on a process or operational team member who's not ready for change. Right. Understanding what is the readiness for a change like this. Take aside the technology by implementing it, what will it do pre and after and is that team ready or not? Is it actually solving a problem that they have or is it adding a step? So I wouldn't even say the technology is not always the hard part. That's exactly the easy part. The hard part is culturally getting folks assessed and ready and saying, yes, we are ready for the change. We know how it'll change us and we think it is a top thing to make that adjustment. And that's where that concept I hit on earlier of having trust across the business and clinical operational and all teams allows you to have those conversations and then sort of make a checklist to say yes, we're ready or no, we're not ready. So maybe we should focus on a different area right now. So hope that helps answer that.
- [09:53]
A
Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. People have to be ready and willing to learn how to use the technology properly for it to be efficient. Absolutely. And last question I have for you, Joey. Where do you see the best opportunities for growth in the future in healthcare?
- [10:10]
B
Yeah. So there's again two aspects. I like focusing. I always like focusing on the people and the technology. You know, I think adoption and enablement teams are critical. They have been, but I think in the world of AI are that much more, you know, whether that's informatics, your training team, a different implementation team, however the health systems, you know, across the country define it. You need to make sure you're ready for this and have a plan. I think a lot of organizations right now, right, think about AI and we'll use that as an example. We have governance and maybe compliance around it, but we need to make sure we're thinking about clinical integration or the operational integration into our workflows and change management. Again, you know, AI is not going to deliver value or solve the true problem. We need teams who really know where in house staff interact with technology or the patient. How do you prompt the tool or technology to get the output you need and how does that fit into your true care delivery? Where and how are you talking to the patient in the call center? Need that AI model to output to so you don't leave the system or as a clinician where you're talking to the patient now and you need that to be surfaced. And then when you do that, you know, you can assess to the business readiness. That's again, I'll head on from the last question but you know, before implementing AI, evaluate is your department prepared for that process change again? You know, if not, let's not maybe introduce the technology yet. Let's start with the education. Let's just talk through what it is and what it isn't and then design a smaller pilot before we scale. I think it's easy to just think, throw on the technology when again, you don't maybe have the team ready for it. So the question is not AI versus not AI mindset. Like the secret sauce here is mapping how people, how AI, how other technologies that aren't AI, so they'll always be there, all interact with each other and then how those collectively work together sort of in like an end to end journey, start to finish. And so when you can do that, map it out and document pain points, how it's solving that, that all then is truly how we're going to change some of the headwinds that we talked about at the beginning. Now, from a technology perspective, the biggest opportunity for growth is again, you're seeing it across the country with ambient intelligence. But conversational intelligence is a huge opportunity. Our voice is powerful. Whether that's patient facing in the clinic, video visits, whether that's on a telephone in your call center, all that information from that voice conversation is now being able to be captured, guide your next step, documentation the action you should take, maybe that protocol that you need to take from the call center when you're getting called in. And so it's happening now and it's just having a conversational intelligence strategy across the various platforms and making sure you are moving forward with that in all care settings and roles. So I think in general, my takeaway just for folks to think about is process, map out workflows, find where inefficiency is costing time or money, and then take an approach of getting rid of stupid stuff or the gross GR R O s approach. What are things that we're doing that maybe we can just get rid of? How can we find a quick win that we could, you know, implement now and change that off your plate? And when you do that for the various care settings, you're going to find opportunities. You know, technology isn't just about the tools, it's, you know, the culture, the education and alignment. So, you know, start small, really think about real problems and that'll truly allow for you. And you know, what we're thinking about is to build readiness for our future at Allegheny Health.
- [13:31]
A
Joey, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Really appreciate all your great insight on not just tech, but, but people in health care too. And it was a great conversation. I really look forward to working with you again soon.
- [13:42]
B
Absolutely. Thanks for having me and thrilled to have the teams from Alligator Health Network contributing to some of the work that I talked about and the great work that they're doing. So thanks again for having us.
- [13:50]
A
Absolutely.