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Welcome to This Week Health. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time.

Now, onto our interview

(Interview 1) All right. I am so excited to be at HIMSS in Las Vegas. There are 30, 000 people here this year. So I feel like it's made a huge resurgence and super excited to be with you, Julie. So thank you for joining me for an interview. Would love for you to share a bit about you and your role at University of Chicago and also what brought you to HIMSS this year.

I've heard about MDClone over the years, so it's a footprint that's continuing to grow. What was the genesis of your partnership with them?

That's a great question. Actually, I went, I was able to visit their headquarters in Israel a few years ago when we were really looking for a solution to a post COVID financial crisis in our academic medical center and we really needed data at our fingertips faster in order to make data driven decisions.

And so when I was invited to go check out the product, I be honest, I was a little skeptical at first sure, that can it do all of these things that we want it to do, which is, Protect our privacy, put the data into our hands faster but it could. And so I ended up being very engaged with their product development team while I was there, just excited about it.

And brought that back to the university and our health system and said, hey, we really need to give this a go. I think there's an opportunity here to really change how we work with data.

You can make great clinical decision support decisions with it primarily because it's part of the equation and it's not the equation. So it's all these like the rapid Evolution of what's happening in the agentic space, et cetera. How are you simulating all of that into your practices, whether it's governance, whether it's use cases, and how are you finding

things

coming together at University of Chicago?

And when you have a product like MDClone, you can ask that question, see the answer, know immediately if you need to pivot. We like to say did you have a cocktail napkin idea, right? Like you dreamed up this really great question and you think you want to move it forward, but how do you actually do that if it takes six months to get the data into your hands?

And so when you have this type of self service tool and literacy around how to use the tool and appropriate governance, we spend a lot I think that's where we're stuck in many ways, is how do we democratize data and also trust people to use it appropriately and quite frankly, not sell it, right?

We don't want people selling our data. But how do we do that? And I think that's where we're really spending our time and effort right now is on putting it in the right people's hands to make the right decisions, but also putting the right governance in place to protect our

What are you doing from a data bias perspective as you use more and more data?

Yeah, we always start with the patient first. And then we start with what do we need to know about those patients. So we source our data primarily from our medical record, data warehouses, and ancillary systems that touch the patient. I think a lot of folks We don't forget that each systems that touches a patient generates its own set of data, and it's not always put in the medical record an optimal way.

So on my side of the house in the research world, we actually try to source it direct from source, and then feed it into platforms from external sourcing we're a big research powerhouse, right? So really follow the science, and we follow our researchers. Right now, the sort of socioeconomic, sociodemographic impact is huge.

It sounds very basic, but you really should know. Everyone in your medical record who's dead or alive. Quite frankly, most institutions don't because that's just how it works. So we work with that type of data and our physician scientists to say, Hey what is it you want to know and what do we need to bring in?

And it's very iterative. Once we find a data set, we work with it and then we bring it back into the warehouse to make it available for everybody else. So it really drives from the bottom up and then the top.

When you went into this partnership and you had certain expectations for the things that you had seen, how has it exceeded your expectations and what are some of the things on the horizon that you're like, now that you have that trust built with them as a partner, what comes next?

Yeah, so it's funny. I gave this talk with their invitation a while back and , I left one word on the table, partnership. So that's how I ended. I actually feel like I'm a part of MDClone's family in some strange way. I get hugs when I come, they truly do care about what they do.

About some of my ideas about the various data sources that we have on just our campus alone, that would be really interesting to somehow figure out how to get into a platform so that we can work with things like socio demographic data in a more robust way. Where we're situated at the University of Chicago, we partner with, the city quite often.

And so we have not publicly available data sources, but agreements in place that allow us to do some research with these data sources that may or may not otherwise be available to study. And I think that would, for me, be an exciting next move, is to say, how do we use environmental data from our capsules all over the city of Chicago?

How are you also using a lot of this data and information to get in front of what is coming in terms of the physicians? Two things. Shortages, that's clinical across the board, but also burnout. How the tools and the way that you're feeding tools for information helping a couple of these systemic issues that we're seeing all over the country?

Yeah, I would say not with MD Clonin, but hopefully we'll be able to get there with this with a partnership with the data is that we've actually purchased or are partnering with Abridge, which is a tool here on the ground of our partners. Okay. And I'm not yet as familiar with it because I'm not at the bedside anymore, but it's the ambient listening tool.

Does a predefined note take away from the learning opportunities, but may not be a part of the hospital's sort of implementation mission. And one of the things that we're doing in my group is partnering with that implementation team to bring that data in to study those questions.

The research questions that maybe aren't within the first pass of implementation.

What else about being here are you looking forward to seeing and getting out and about? Heck, it's only really the first day that we're all here, some of us have been here for a few days for a myriad of reasons.

Yeah. And as you think about the things you're also looking to solve for, conversations you want to have, what does a successful end of week look like for you here at HIMSS?

it's networking, it's meeting new people, hearing how they're doing things or solving the same problems. Just with our MDClone collaborative partners alone, I've spent three hours today troubleshooting, talking about their governance structure.

So I really look forward to talking to other folks on the floor about those endeavors. There's a lot of really cool stuff around here that I can't wait to go and check out. But as an old clinical nurse , I always like to go look at some of the cool new bedside tools as well and dream about, How it used to be, but we didn't have any of this fancy stuff at the bedside, but it's not as much of what I do anymore.

With your impact at University of Chicago, you've been there almost 18 years, you noted. Clinician by trade, all about the data today. When you do see a great bedside tour, you do see something that you're like, Gosh, I wonder if we're thinking about that. How do you still bring those ideas forward into your organization?

And so if there's something cool and fancy that should be floated, after 18 years, I'm certainly not afraid to say anything drop a line with somebody. But it's not my position to make those partnerships, unfortunately. I have more influence, on the university side.

So long as, though you get to bring a lot of great ideas back, share your knowledge, it's the whole point of coming to the conferences, sharing the knowledge, and just knowing that we saw something or had a conversation with somebody. You never know when those things bubble back up and are super helpful.

Thank you so much for sharing about your journey with MDClone. Again, I've heard about them off and on for years, and I love what they're doing and you hear it about it first hand. Yeah. How a major university is leaning in to how you're improving patient care, demographics, all the different pieces that need to come together.

Thanks

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