← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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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
This is Grace Lynn Keller with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast and we are live at the 10th annual Health IT, Digital Health and RCM meeting. I'm currently joined by Nabeel Sefdar, who is the Chief AI Officer at Emory Healthcare. Nabil, thanks for being here. Would love to have us start off by having you share a little bit more about your work in healthcare and your background.
- [00:49]
C
Yeah, sure. Thank you, Grace. I am a radiologist with a background in imaging informatics and clinical informatics and that has led me to my current role as the Chief AI Officer for Emory Healthcare and Emory University. You may be wondering how do you get from point A to point B? And if you recall, radiology is one of the most digital specialties and one of the areas which has been early adoption, where early adoption of AI has been really prominent to the point where many people have speculated that we could go away as a profession. Well, I was interested in that out of self preservation and I thought I'd learn more and in fact had been involved with some research, implementation, deployment, governance in AI for quite some time had been working with Emory Digital. And so now I have the privilege of serving on a team that helps design governance for the system, helps to manage the portfolio of AI efforts that we are doing across different types of applications, whether they're clinical or operational or marketing, patient facing or internally facing, and really helps to evaluate performance, evaluation, determine roi, all those great things.
- [02:15]
B
Wonderful. Well, let's start our conversation talking about AI. Nearly half of medical practices reported using AI in some capacity in the past year and it remains a key topic for health IT leaders. So from your perspective, what are the use cases that are making a difference right now and how are you leveraging them in your organization?
- [02:33]
C
Yeah, I think you know many, many of us who are at a conference like this or are discussing this with each other at Healthcare Systems across the nation are familiar with the top three or three or four use cases. So we've had a lot of success with ambient AI. We've been using FDA cleared AI in areas like cardiology and radiolog and hopefully soon pathology. As well as we do our digital pathology transition, we see early success with agentic chatbots who are Reaching out to patients to help remind them to make sure they fill their prescriptions, their get their medications after a discharge. We've also had some good early success with those same types of agentic agents, chat agents, reaching out to patients to help them, help walk them through taking their blood pressure at home and then making sure that they're in a range which is safe for them and if not, quickly escalating to a human who can help them navigate to the next appropriate steps. And what we've realized is there is an incredible demand for the technology that is powering our daily lives now. So many people, physicians, nurses, technologists, administrators, managers in healthcare, are using something like ChatGPT, something like Claude, something like Gemini at home in their everyday lives. They want to have that same efficiency of work in their, same efficiency in their work as well. And so we are also bringing them safe kind of HIPAA safe harbor tools to be able to use that, those types of frontier models, those LLMs, those chatbots, and their daily work as well. So a lot of opportunity, a lot going on, a lot more opportunity in areas like rep cycle, marketing, access, et cetera. Where we're dipping our toes in the water there as well.
- [04:47]
B
Sounds like it. And as virtual care expands from AI enabled tools and remote monitoring to broader digital health platforms, introducing new technology brings challenges. So what advice do you have for leaders navigating everything from governance to patient engagement? And can you share an example of how your organization has balanced innovation with operational constraint?
- [05:07]
C
Yeah, this is, I think there are two extremes in governance which are to be avoided. One is the absence of AI governance that will get your institution, your organization, into trouble. You know, that looks like basically everything goes, you know, data deals at will, AI deployments at will. If somebody has the budget, they can move forward and do what they want. And there's no systematic oversight, there's no risk posture, there's no statement of principles from top leadership about appropriate use of AI. On the other hand, governance can be so restrictive that there is only a single committee which becomes a choke point in the system for the deployment of AI, of novel AI solutions. And any large system needs to be more nimble than that. So what we've had success with is helping specific functional areas, departments, clinical specialties, etc. To develop their own AI governance. Whether that's in imaging, whether that is in access and rev cycle, whether that is in pathology or clinical informatics, you know, they're the experts that know what they need. They can be helped to understand what the priorities of the organization are. What that alignment looks like and really we should trust them to make appropriate decisions, especially if we provide them with the triggers that would indicate a need for a higher level of scrutiny or review. At which point it can be decision around AI can be kicked up to another governance group. So that's been our strategy is let people make decisions about AI, but give them clear guidelines about what is and what is not inbounds so they can kick up the decisions that are a little bit more risky. Maybe something that's more patient facing, more autonomous, more agentic. Maybe if there are conflicts of interest or if we suspect that there's unauthorized use of AI for, for further scrutiny.
- [07:13]
B
And shifting gears slightly, how are you seeing recent legislation, both state and federal, affect healthcare organizations and health IT specifically. And have you adjusted strategies in response?
- [07:26]
C
Yeah, great question. So you know, keeping an eye on regulations is challenging. First of all, you have to know the players. You know, there's Congress, there's state legislatures, there's cms, hhs, onc, even ocr, the Office of Civil Rights. All of these are relevant agencies for healthcare and AI and healthcare. So it can be a full time job to keep an eye on the regulations affecting digital and AI in a healthcare environment. We are lucky to have an office that looks at these things and so we've been partnering with them. But also our AI team has been looking at these regulations very carefully. What we have seen, a couple things we're keeping track of is earlier in the year the federal government at some point said that they would try to bar states from having AI legislation. That seemed to go away in July. There are over well over 200 pieces of potential legislation or legislation and state legislator legislatures across the country. And we're watching those carefully, especially in the big influential states. California recently passed SB53 which would require some of the large AI foundation labs that create frontier models, the LLMs to publish their safety protocols, their safety profiles. We're waiting to see what kind of impact that's going to have on us in healthcare and to those that use their products as derivatives through APIs or through other means. And what it means when you're trying to fine tune a model for healthcare a lot to keep track of. It's an active process right now. I think we're able to proceed because we do have safe areas like the areas that are FDA cleared the FDA clear devices. It's also an evolving area. The FDA has been changing its thinking as time goes on, so we're keeping an eye on that as well. Really what this you know, my advice is to keep an eye on it, to talk to your vendor partners, to talk, if you have an office of regulatory affairs, to have close coordination with them and potentially even impact your own state's legislation, if appropriate.
- [09:53]
B
And final question, as we wrap our conversation up, what is your top piece of advice for healthcare leaders as they prepare for further advancements in technology and rising demands for care?
- [10:02]
C
Yeah, I mean this is a, this is a journey in which it is harder and harder to look out the front windshield and see far down the road. Things are changing fast. So it's a curvy road and you need to be very agile and nimble. I think it is important to get alignment with the leadership of your organization. We often focus on digital governance, IT governance, or maybe even data and AI governance. However, corporate governance is important, more important than ever. And aligning AI strategy with corporate governance I think is critical. And then also having lots of connections to those on the front lines, nurses, physicians, providers, administrators who are doing the work to make sure that we are not imposing AI or other solutions on them, that really they're a part of the process, they're engaged early on, they're co developing solutions, co creating solutions. Those are integrated well into their workflows and then that we celebrate the wins that they have as they use these tools in their everyday lives.
- [11:10]
B
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me today on the Backers Healthcare podcast, sharing these thoughts again. We are recording live at the 10th annual Health IT Digital Health and RCM meeting.
- [11:19]
C
Thank you.