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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Matthew Love, President and CEO of Nicklaus Children's Health System
00:14:52
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R1 Representative
R1 is the leader in healthcare revenue management, helping providers achieve new levels of performance through smart orchestration. With more than 20 years of experience, R1 partners with 1,000 providers, including 95 of the top 100 US health systems and handles over 270 million payer transactions annually. If you want to learn more about how you can transform your revenue cycle operations, Visit us at www. R1RCM.
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Will Riley
Hello and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. My name is Will Riley with R1. I am joined today by Matthew Love. Matthew is president and CEO of Nicholas Children's Health System. Matthew, welcome to the podcast.
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Matthew Love
Hi, good morning. Great to be here.
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Will Riley
Great. It's lovely to speak to you today. Thanks for joining us. To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your role? Tell us about Nicholas Children's and the community that you serve?
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Matthew Love
Yeah, great, yeah, as you mentioned, I'm Matt Love. I'm honored to be and privileged to be the president CEO of Nicholas Children's Health System in Florida, one of four specially licensed children's hospital in the state of Florida. And you know, children's hospitals, they're special place, right? So we're about 325 beds. We've been around 75 years. This is our birthday year. So lots of excitement along those lines. You know, we are the premier children's hospital in South Florida. You know, high ranked on US News and World Report expanding. We see about a million visits every single year. 4 out of 5 kids in Miami Dade have come to our organization in the last three years. And so when you think about pediatric health systems, you know, we are the one in South Florida. And as I said before, children's hospitals are special places. They're different than adult systems. Adult systems are great but you know, children's hospitals are special.
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Will Riley
Yes, yes, I agree. Tell us a bit about some of the priorities that you have as a uniquely pediatric institution as you go into 2026.
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Matthew Love
Yeah, so we spent 2025 doing a lot of pre work on some, several big initiatives, had the support of the board to really become the player in South Florida for pediatric healthcare. So there's two or three big ones. The first one that we're really excited about is our partnership with Broward Health. So Broward Health is a county to the north of Miami Dade. We're working with the CEO there, Shane Strum, great guy, great friend around expanding pediatric services. So what does that mean? It means kids in Broward will be able to get care in Broward County. They don't have to travel. And so Working with Broward. So in February we'll go live with that initiative in terms of taking great specialists to Broward. It's about, just put into perspective. It's probably about 45 minutes to an hour drive north. Miami, Miami miles. Right. So it's, it's, it's not very far, but it's a long, long time in the car. And really the initial, the purpose is to keep kids close to home, keep them in Broward County. Of course, when they need that very high end tertiary care, quaternary care, they'll have to come down to the hospital. But that should be few and far between. It's really this great initiative. So February of, of next year we'll be celebrating opening that component. The other one is around pediatric cancer. The state of Florida does not have a highly ranked pediatric cancer program. And so we're an initiative to develop that with three other children's hospitals in the state of Florida. Spread throughout the state, Northern, central, western and then southern Florida. Just yesterday I was in Jacksonville receiving a seven half million dollars check from Governor Sanders to help kickstart this initiative. Too many kids have to leave Florida for cancer and that shouldn't happen. We're the third most populous state growing every single year. It's a great state. Right. Florida is a great state. People are coming from all over the country. And so there's no reason that kids should have to leave for care, cancer care, specifically the support systems, everything around pediatric cancer. It's different. Right. You need mom, dad, brother, sister, everyone around you when you're a sick child.
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Will Riley
Yeah. Wonderful. That's great to hear about. Thank you. I want to start by talking a little bit about technology actually, and how you're adopting technology. Healthcare's historically moved pretty conservatively in implementing new technologies, but it feels like with AI that might be a bit different. Do you agree with that? Is AI got a sort of pull factor about it that you haven't seen with other technologies?
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Matthew Love
Yeah, yeah. So I've been, you know, I've been doing this for about three decades now and you know, early on I do believe that industry generally is just slow to adapt. And there's probably very different reasons for, for that in terms of, you know, being patient centric and those types of things. But AI feels like it's different. I agree with you. You know, I hope folks don't think it's the, the answer to everything. Right. Because I don't think that really exists. But it is, it is interesting to see how healthcare systems and payers and the industry in general is really looking at this differently than I think what we've seen with technology over the last three to three decades or so.
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Will Riley
Yeah, yeah. And why is that then, do you think? Is it just that it works? That when you see it actually doing something, it's genuinely helpful and people just want more and more of it? Is it as simple as that?
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Matthew Love
I do think there's a component around this immediate success. Right. Some of the early things we've seen are successful. I mean, if you use it personally. Right. If you go and ask it, you get some pretty reliable good things. You got to double check it. Right. Because not all, all the time. It's not always accurate to the T. And I think that's one of the concerns we would have in the industry would have around, particularly around medicine. Right. It has to be. Right. And so this balance between those two components. I also think the environment in health care is different today than it was 20 to 30 years ago. 10 years ago. Right. Five years ago. The challenges that, you know, everyone's facing in terms of the cost pressures, the reimbursement pressures, the payer pressures, you name it, it's different. It's accelerated over the last couple of years and it's going to continue. So finding solutions that can help us become more impactful, more effic, as well as keeping the patient in mind in terms of the entire process, I think that's really pushing the acceleration. Right?
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Will Riley
Yeah. Okay. Okay. And when you think about that acceleration, innovation in healthcare is often. There are often two archetypes that people have in mind when they think about innovation in healthcare. They think about incumbents. The traditional providers pay as technology providers. Right. Who have the data and the scale and the reach to be able to do things. And insurgents like upand cominging new technology companies who are more disruptive. Right. And that could be in terms of care delivery or it could just be in terms of the technology that people use. When you think about those two ways of going about it, which sort of approach are you taking when it comes to innovation?
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Matthew Love
You know, I think this is one of those that you have to look at and there's a saying that's going around. You know, this isn't an or, this is an and.
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Will Riley
Okay.
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Matthew Love
Right around, you know, there's something to say about, you know, these institutions, these companies, these processes that have been around for a long time. Right. They've been around for a long time for a reason, because they work and they're stable. At the same time, you know, these. I'll use the word disruptor, I think that's what you were referring to a little earlier. Yeah, you know, we need those too because you know, people have a hard time thinking differently, sometimes radically different. And these disruptors help us think in that fashion, think much differently. Everything's impossible until someone does it. I heard that saying recently, which is true in AI and technology and innovation. And so I think that the beauty of this is going to be, is when those two come together, that's when the magic is going to happen.
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Will Riley
Yeah. Okay. Okay. How are you as a leader approaching governance of some of these new technologies? Because it's creates new demands, I would think in terms of how you're using data, for example, maybe some new challenges and responsibilities in the C suite. How you think about AI governance?
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Matthew Love
AI governance is a topic that I think needs more conversation. To be honest with you. We're approaching it in a way similar to what we do other things. It has to be a multidisciplinary team. We have to have the lawyers there, we have to have the finance folks there, we have the IT folks, the operators, the physicians. Providers really have to come together around looking at things in twofold. Right. One is what do we bring into the organization and how do we bring it in such that it's safe. But also if we're providing some solutions externally to some startups and some other companies around problems that we have that they can help solve, how do we have governance around that as well? And it's a bi directional component. I don't think anyone has the answer on it. It's new.
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Will Riley
Yeah.
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Matthew Love
But the core principles around the governance have to be around being safe, being patient centric, being efficient, having an impact. The things that we would have governance on other things as well. It's just this view of AI has to be brought into it.
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Will Riley
Yeah. Okay. And tell me a bit about how you're using some technologies, the AI or other technologies to help. You've talked a bit about like looking for efficiency for examp. So how are you doing that within your organization either to make providers lives better or on just the pure administrative side of care delivery?
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Matthew Love
Yeah, so we're looking at AI in several different buckets. Right. And so one and what we call is really the kind of the back office support and then front facing to patients and to providers on the back office. It's actually a little easier because there's less risk to patient care, less risk to providers. So we have something we call Ask Nic. Of course, we're at Nicholas Jones Hospital after Jack Nicholas And Barbara Nicholas. So we have this tool, AI tool called Ask Nick. And anybody in the organization can go in and it overlays all of our policies and procedures, everything internally that you would think from an HR perspective, from a control perspective, finance perspective, et cetera. And so anyone in the organization can go in and ask it questions. And just like ChatGPT, it goes out to all our policies and scrapes them and figures out what the answer is. So you could say, I'm a nurse, I've been here three weeks, I need to take some time off for family reasons. What's the policy on paid time off? And it'll come back and give you the answers. And so that's really the back office side of things. And which is pretty cool because we've seen a significant reduction in the number of calls into our HR call center. So tremendous impact there. And then on the front facing, patient facing, provider facing side of things. You know, we're doing some things around scheduling the ambient listening that you hear about everywhere, everywhere you go around. How do you help give time back to providers to spend more time with the patients, you know, scheduling efficiencies, those types of things. But also some on the clinical related to aging of bones. Right. In pediatrics, that's an important component of how old is a bone. Right. Just because someone may look a certain age, they may not be. Right. And so technology, AI technology helping us in our imaging, in our radiology department is some of the areas that we're exploring at this point.
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Will Riley
Wonderful, wonderful. We see some aspects of healthcare shifting from a very labor and human centric approach to more of a technology centric approach. Right. Particularly in back office administrative functions. Do you see that playing out?
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Matthew Love
Yeah. This kind of trend of becoming more efficient, more impactful, something that is going to continue. It's been, we've been doing it for decades in healthcare. Right?
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Will Riley
Yeah.
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Matthew Love
It's going to continue on a go forward basis. I think what we have to remember is that AI is not a strategy. Right. AI is a tool. Just like in the old days when I remember Lotus or Excel, when it came out, right. People thought that it was going to decimate the finance world, the accountants, the CPAs, it was going to eliminate all those jobs. It really didn't. Right. It made them better, it made it more efficient. It pushed some of that analysis out to people closer to the operations where they could do some of the analysis. So it's a tool and so AI has to be viewed the same way. It's a tool to help us do we need to become more efficient. Yes. Do we need to make sure we're more impactful? Yes. All those things are absolutely true. But at least at Nicholas Jones, right, we are a people organization, right? People make it work. Physicians make it work. Nurses make it work. And AI has to be part of their. Of their work streams and workflows. But it's not intended to replace people. You're still going to have to have that judgment, that clinical judgment, that interaction, talking with the patients and families. AI is not going to do that. Right. That's got to be that. That's got to be a provider. And that's really, in my mind, the heart of medicine that we can't ignore.
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Will Riley
Matt, it's been lovely talking to you. Do you have any other thoughts, anything else on your mind before we. Before we close?
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Matthew Love
No, it's just. It's great to be here with you and talking about this exciting topic. Healthcare is an exciting time, right? Pediatric healthcare, children's healthcare is super exciting. So many things ahead for us, for the industry. So many things ahead for Nicholas Children's. It's exciting time.
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Will Riley
Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for taking some of your time to talk to us. We really appreciate it.
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Matthew Love
Thank you.
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Will Riley
Thank you, thank you.