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Thanks for joining us. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a channel dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. Welcome to our serious healthcare's patient room next briefing campaign. I'm excited to get our. Topic today going it's with Intermountain healthcare's journey into the future of predictive analytics, touchless tools in AI, we're joined by Billy pros, emerging technologies and innovation strategists at Intermountain. This podcast series is gonna culminate with an excellent webinar panel discussion, and we're going to have experts talking about., the really cool technologies that we're covering in this series. So it's patient room next. How it improves care, efficiency and care efficiency being so critical these days, check it out. And the description box below for registration information, you can also just hit our website this week health.com and register there. We wanna thank our sponsors for today's serious healthcare CDW company for giving us some time with Billy to discuss patient room. Now onto the show.

All right. Today we're joined by Billy Prows, enterprise information system architect at Intermountain, and we're gonna continue our discussion on patient room. Next, Billy. Welcome to the.

So glad to be here, bill always enjoy being able to talk about these things with you. Thanks for having

I'm looking forward to this conversation. I love the stuff that iron mountain does. We've talked to so many different people there over the years. And love the stuff you're doing on social determinants, love the stuff you're doing with graphite and other things. There's so many really cool things going today, patient room next.

This is an interesting subject I guess we'll start here. How is the patient room evolving at Intermountain and what might we see in the next couple years if we are walking into one of your patient rooms?

Yeah. This is something that is it's often referred to as patient room next because it's ever evolving. And we don't by any means, have it figured out, but we're working on a number of initiatives designed to help the caregivers, the patients and anybody working in that room. Citing a couple of those things. We're looking to create standardization. I, I think one of the challenges that many health systems have is you tend to have a patchwork of different technologies that are within or make up a patient room.

And that variation in the room makes it very difficult to roll out quickly, new innovations. And so. One of the things we are doing and continue to do is to drive standardization within our hospital rooms so that we can innovate fast. Couple things that we're working really hard to do is, is quiet down the patient room. I mean, nothing's less healing than an environment that's really noisy and that's distracting. And. We really wanna wanna quiet that down.

Yeah. And we know, we know how important sleep is to the recovery process. It's hard to do that with all the noise that that goes on.

Yeah. And we're not exempt from that. We're looking to leverage some of these great new technologies that are out to offload the care of burden from our care. To allow them to focus on the really complicated things. We hear the term working at the top of your license. Well, it's hard to work at the top of your license when you're in the background needing to do a lot of administrative tasks like documentation.

So we're trying to introduce technology into those patient rooms to automate some of those things, both for the caregiver for the patient. And for the loved ones that are in the room enabling technology to take those administrative tasks again, we think is going to provide. A a better environment for all individuals and allow people again, to humans to tackle the things that we really want humans focused on tackling.

Yeah. So those are awesome objectives. We've talked to Fred, Holsen a little bit about computer vision, computer listening, sensors, the technology is emerging really rapidly in this field. If we were to visit your room, say in a couple years, what technologies are you experimenting with working with that you think we might, we might see?

Yeah, we we love Fred's vision and share a lot of Similar beliefs and passions that Fred does, we do. We are doubling down on ambient intelligent technologies. That couple computer vision with natural language processing, natural language, understanding context, awareness to offload those tasks.

And we really think it's not an if, but when kind of like the autonomous vehicle industry cars will become fully autonomous at some point. And we're getting there that same technology we think is proving to have going to have significant impact in the healthcare setting, to where. And interaction between caregiver and patient can occur.

And when they walk outta that room, all of the documentation can be done in advance. things like. Walking in and addressing workplace violence events. If those events are beginning to unfold and we can use things like biomarkers from speech and this computer vision technology and NLP to listen for and identify those types of events and call in people in advance from those workplace violence potentially escalating.

So we, we do. think That those technologies are going to have a dramatic, dramatically positive impact on again, offloading that work from our caregivers.

Yeah. You've talked a lot about the clinician experience and I love that it's interesting to me because when you walk into A patient room and there's a lot of different kind of patient rooms right there. Patient room can be in the home. It can be in, in the clinical setting, in the acute care setting. But the right now the technology is like in your face there's technology everywhere. The technology we're talking about seems to be starting to melt into the background and. Do a lot of the same things that all those big bulky devices that we wheel around and stuff have done for years including in some cases providing another set of eyes where we haven't been able to have a set of eyes, cuz there's just not enough people yeah to go around. It really, the care setting could look pretty different in the next couple of years.

Yeah. absolutely. And I like that you pointed out the patient room next is we think about, and you tend to focus on the hospital patient room setting, but really that patient room setting is wherever the patient may be.

That may be in a sniff that may be in a long-term care facility clinic at home or traveling abroad. And so as we. Thinking about these different technologies. It is in, in, we're also thinking about how can we take those same technologies and make them accessible to the caregiver along the, the total continuum of care.

Cuz we see as we move from fee for value to value. The acuity of our patients in our hospitals, logically is gonna go up and there's more and more incentive to be proactive in delivering care to them. And in order to deliver to do that, we want to be in the home with them. We want to be looking at trends.

We want to be connected to wearables. We want. Be proactive in their care. And I think it'll be a great day. I use wearables of all different types, but the data is still not really useful to the it's only useful to the extent that I can interpret it. Wanna be great when your provider calls up and says, Hey, Billy, we're recognizing some unusual trends.

We'd like to talk with you. Why don't you come on? Let's have a tele, televisit to where we can, we can discuss these abnormalities. I think that's when it gets really, really exciting. And the underpinnings to enable that are certainly there. And it's behooves us to think about that patient room next is really anywhere the patient is.

let's talk about the campus setting and we'll close out with this. So if we come to an Intermountain, one of the hospitals there how might not only the patient experience, but the family experience be different for them. As we see some of these technologies come forward.

One of the things that we hear often is the family wanting to be updated. More regularly on, on how the patient is doing and being able to get services from caregivers right now. We have such a big staffing shortage. It's hard to give. Our caregivers our patients, the information they want in real time. And I think we see a lot of these technologies emerging enhanced communication technologies that enable better real time awareness as to the status of the patient of loved ones and thereby reducing some of the angst and stress that oftentimes happens. In a patient room setting when resources just are really tight to getting the service you need in the timeframe you want it,

Billy always great to talk to you. It's interesting cuz we talk about this clinician shortage and I just finished and interview and we were talking about this. The numbers are staggering, like really great places to. Could have a couple thousand open positions that, that they can't fill. And that alone will drive us to do things differently in the care setting, because what we were doing just last week or last year isn't even viable anymore. Like we just don't have the hands to continue to do do the things we were doing just a couple months ago.

Yeah. Isn't it. Sadly crisis creates innovation. And I think one of the exciting things about that unfortunate scenario is that healthcare in general is prioritizing technologies that enable the ability to offload the burden. For instance, from nurses, from doing those menial task. So that we can free them up to do the thing that they're really, really good at empathize with somebody think in a complicated way, AI, computer vision, all of those things certainly can offload a lot of that work, but it's never gonna empathize or I shouldn't say never. It's not likely anytime soon that they can empathize with the patient and make them feel at ease and listen to. So the more this staff shortage goes on, I think it's enabling us to spend more and more on time looking at those technologies that enable.

Automation we actually set up a, an intelligent automation center of excellence. That's designed to have a suite of tools and drive some of the use of those tools throughout the organization. Again, to offload those administrative type of burdens to let our caregivers work at the top of their license.

Absolutely Billy, thank you again for your time. Really 📍 appreciate it.

I love talking with Billy. Love the stuff they're doing at Intermountain. Just another great discussion. I wanna thank our sponsor for today's series healthcare, a CDW company for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Don't forget this whole series ends with a great webinar. We have four magnificent leaders, Anna Baker, Garber, former C for ACA, Dr. Stephanie LAR CIO cm. I dual role at monument health, Fred Holsen director of healthcare at sir healthcare, a CDW company. And of course, Billy pros, emerging technologies and innovation strategists at Intermountain, who you just heard from, and we're going to. About more of these technologies and tools that are being implemented. Really cool use cases, love how this is coming together and what the patient room is going to look like in the very near future. If it's not already being transformed in that way. So exciting hope to have you there there's a registration link in the information blow. You can also go to our website this week. health.com. Click on the webinars in the top right hand corner. We have upcoming webinars. Love to have you join us. 📍 It's September 29th at one o'clock Eastern time Thanks for listening. That's all for now.