December 2: Today on the Conference channel, it’s a double Interview in Action live from the 2023 CHIME Fall Forum. First, Saad Chaudhry, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Luminis Health speaks with Muhammad Siddiqui, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Reid Health. They discuss Muhammad’s organization newly implementing 700 new features of Epic within five months thanks to provider-based project management. Next, Sarah Richardson, SVP, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Tivity Health speaks with Nayan Patel, Managing Director, IT Strategy & Performance at Avis Advisors. They talk about his work with U.S. Heart and Vascular and he shares his perspective on labor compression in terms of health IT and the role of humans in decision-making even with AI advancements. Finally, he highlights the need for embracing multilingualism in medical solutions for improving patient interactions.
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Welcome to This Week Health Conference. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, a set of channels and events dedicated to leveraging the power of community to propel healthcare forward. Today we have an interview in action from the Fall Conferences on the West Coast.
Here we go.
Saad Chaudhry, I am the CIO for Luminous Health in Maryland, and I'm here at 2023 CHIME Fall Forum doing an interview in action. I am a poor stand in for Bill, so hang in there with me. me, I have Mohammad Siddiqui, who is the Chief Information Officer for Reed Health in Indiana. Welcome.
Oh, thank you so much for having me here.
Yeah. So, uh, what's your favorite thing about the Chime Fall Forum?
I think the meeting, all the good friends, all the peer CIOs learn from each other.
I mean, I know we are following each other on LinkedIn and Twitter and exchanging a lot of emails. Putting the face and shaking the hand like you do is always good to have.
See, I like doing these interviews because they're good for my confidence. So, what's some of the things that, or maybe one thing that you feel that you're most proud of?
What are you really proud of that you've done this year at Reed Hill?
So the EPIC refuel project, and we talk about it for many years. We were running a little bit behind the time when it comes to the EPIC features. And you know the EPIC is coming out with a lot of new features every month nowadays, right?
And AIR used to be. So we were running behind. Our goal start was in three. It took us five months to go to goal start nine. And we're really proud of something that we have implemented over 700 new features in a span of five months.
Wow, that says something about the entire leadership, because something like that is not just an IT project. Absolutely.
And I think the secret ingredient there for us was we put our providers in the driving seat. Our task force chairs were CNO, CMO, and they would drive the project. So it wasn't really an IT project per se, it was a provider's project, and that's why we are successful.
Yeah, and so there's a key to success right there. This is the key to success. Yeah. So third, very easy. Favorite dessert?
You know what, so I'm actually from Pakistan. I love desi kheer, which is basically the rice pudding. I love it. It's
delicious. With the sashes on top. Absolutely. Thank you for stopping by,
my friend.
Thank 📍 📍 you.
Good morning, I'm Sarah Richardson, Tiviti Health, but I'm also so fortunate to be here today with Nayan Patel. So, Nayan, thanks for joining me today. Thank you. And if you could share with us a little bit about the organization you're currently serving, that would be a great start.
Sure, I'm serving U. S.
Heart and Vascular. Okay. Just wrapping up in a consulting engagement there, and it's a PE backed firm buying out some cardiology practices. Just expanding the network across the U. S.
Yeah, absolutely. So, Tell us about how that fits into the model here in terms of like payer and provider and the different initiatives that you're working on to continue to bring the healthcare industry forward.
So
the biggest thing right now is it's related to, you know, realizing revenue that is being left on the table. And so we are working to come up with an enterprise support model. That will take advantage of the different systems and really kind of like a Costco, Samsung model, right? Take advantage of the economies of scale.
And so we are focusing on a number of things. The biggest one is just alignment to the business. And cost containment, that's the big one right now. So just trying to figure out how we can keep IT spend in a way that we can manage for this large enterprise support model. So
it's funny to hear about cost control and IT spend.
It makes people feel like you're cutting back in order to not be able to do some of the things like innovation and AI and whatnot. When you think about how the practices you're putting in place allow innovation. for things like AI, et cetera, to be brought forward. How is that showing up in the work you're doing today?
So AI is a hot topic, right? It is. Generative AI. I actually correlate that to just labor compression. Okay. I mean, everything around AI is really around labor compression. And so, but what does that mean in terms of labor compression related to health IT, right? So if you're trying to make our physicians lives easier, less clicks for them to do, less time to do whatever they need to do.
And if AI can help with that, that's what we're trying to do. So that's increasing productivity. Second thing is related to helping learn faster for everybody that can take advantage of it, whether it's the clinicians or the staff that supports them, you know, AI can really help with the learning side.
And the third piece is related to delegating research. We're always trying to, you know, Find things and information, and AI can really streamline some of that, and that's all about labor compression.
I love that you've taken that perspective from labor compression. People also hear that and they worry, but you're talking about it, the labor compression also allows you to create new capabilities for the organization to do things in a new and different way.
How does that carry forward into 24, as you look to what's coming in the next few months? And it's interesting because recently I saw I think it was on Instagram of all things, how Nike has ditched the, you know, five and ten year plan for the three month iteration as an example. When you look to 24, how are you thinking about planning the work and what are you most excited about?
Yeah, well,
I mean, if you go back to the labor compression, the one thing that's still involved in place is at the end of it, you still need humans for the final decision making. So that's what you can't forget about, right? So the human element is never going away. Everybody may be worried, but that's what we will always try to figure out.
What makes sense for the environment, the organization, whatever you might be in. And so, you know, trying to think about for us, the biggest thing is app rationalization. How can we consolidate things, you know, to really, you know, Do that cost containment, but find it in a different way. And really think about all of the different elements that come into play.
And generative AI is going to help us get there. That's one of the things that's going to happen. then going back to just aligning it with the business. I think, you know, I was telling people in some of the focus groups the other day, or yesterday, that There is no technology project out there, unless it's a data center specific thing.
Everything is just a regular business project with a technology enabled solution. And so we're just the enablers, and making that alignment back to the business is what we need to do. And the stakeholders in the business need to be accountable for what their expectations are. of whatever solution we're trying to put in place.
You can tell you and I know each other pretty well because we literally have the same perspective on just about all the conversations and things we're hearing and saying here. I'm like, yes, what he said. But I love that because it's easy to get caught up in the hype. It's easy to be, like, chasing the new object and the practicality of really successfully implementing them into our organizations sometimes takes that step back approach to say, hey, we only have to do one or two things really well in this space as we go forward because everything's about the enablement and it's still about the human factor.
Where that's your reputation, your relationships, the trust, the credibility, and sincerely in the patient care perspective, that human touch will never be replaced. Yeah. By something that matters more than the empathy that we can provide and the compassion at the bedside. You just said something
pretty important too, like the element of focusing on what you need to focus on right now.
And there's a lot of shiny new objects out there. So, we don't need more shiny new objects. We need to take the ones that we acquired over the last few years and really harness them. Utilize them and get the true advantage out of them. Get that ROA out of just the ROI out of those products that we just purchased.
And so harnessing that and making what we have more efficient and better is really what we need to focus on. Yeah,
because where's the money being spent truly if you ask? It's on the ability to give the clinicians more time. Yep. And not always on the brightest newest technologies. So you don't have to be cutting edge to be fast follower to still make an incredible difference what they're seeing here this week.
Yeah. So last question. for you. We are well into Fall Forum 23. It's been an amazing experience this year. It feels like the energy of pre pandemic is back again. Yeah. What have you loved that you've seen the most so far? So,
you know, obviously we all love the relationships that we get out of here. And what you get out of these relationships is nuggets.
You get little golden nuggets to take away, to see if it's something we can apply. And two things that kind of have stood out so far. One is having mobile apps or websites or our solutions actually have language translation built right into it. The ability to toggle between one language to another is gonna become more and more important.
And it's not because people don't want to learn the other language. Everybody grows up with whatever their comfortable language is. And here in the US we know, you know, Spanish is, you know, getting more and more fluent. And I'm in Texas, so it's very widespread. I'm in California, right? So stuff like a language and a lot of the clinicians are not trying to be rude.
And no mellish is intent. That's, they're just comfortable speaking in Spanish. Yes. And so you, and for them to understand what they're looking at, if it's in Spanish, it's going to be easier to explain to patients as well. And so having a toggle switch, it's going to be interesting how that goes. You don't have to get the exact translation, but if you get it 80 percent there, it's going to help make that conversation go a lot better with the patient.
Well,
and then you can focus on the cultural aspect, because not only is there a language opportunity, there's a cultural opportunity in bed there as well. And if the physician doesn't have to struggle with the EMR, and they don't have to struggle with the language barrier, then all of a sudden they can start to address people and meet them where they are culturally, which is such a huge thing.
And I say, you know, I'm in California, it's like a second language. In some cases, it's a first language for our populations, as is like Korean, and Tagalog, and Mandarin, and others. And so, I love being able to add the element of the translation, as much as the adaptation of the cultural elements into what we produce.
provide every day. And it's so interesting. Technology, once again, is an enabler in that. At the end of the day, what does it come down to? Two humans. Yeah,
people in process, right? Absolutely. The second thing I learned was interesting that was, well, as we're preparing for all kinds of cyber security protection needs, now the term that I just heard yesterday was, well, there's evil GPT out there.
Yeah. So the bad actors have more power to do evil as well. So we've got to figure out how to combat
that. Adversarial AI is what Drex to Ford shared with me from CrowdStrike yesterday. And I was like, that wasn't on the slide I heard yesterday. So now I've got these like eight versions of AI. Now I have a ninth, which is adversarial, which is the one you got to be thinking about.
He was literally sharing, like, if you use voice protection for your passwords, for a lot of your financial institutions, which is very common, you and I aren't enough podcasts. It is not hard to go recreate our voices. That's true. Although I don't think I have a bank account. So there is that. Well, we're on the same page then.
Yes. So great to see you. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Be well. Thank you.
Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and experience with the community and we greatly appreciate it. We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.
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