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Zafar Chaudry: (Intro) So I think the future of healthcare lies in the effective collaboration between the human and AI. So you can free up clinicians to focus on the uniquely human aspects of care.

I'm Drex DeFord, a recovering healthcare CIO and long time cyber advisor for some of the world's most innovative cybersecurity companies.

Now I'm president of Cyber and Risk. At This Week Health and the 229 Project, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time. Our keynote show is designed to share conference level value with you every week. Now, let's get started with today's episode

Obviously there's good reason for all of that. So, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

Zafar Chaudry: Thanks for having me. Always. Uh, happy to chat.

Drex DeFord: I'm glad you're here too. Tell me a little bit about your background. You have an unusual background compared to a lot of other CIOs that are in healthcare and in children's healthcare.

So gimme the lay of the land. How'd you start? How did you wind up here? And some of the great jobs that you've been through on the way.

Zafar Chaudry: Yeah. So I started my career as a physician, and truth be told, the choices I was given by my parents was physician or dentist. And I thought maybe a physician will be better than looking in people's mouths all the time.

So I got off some shifts and learned about technology and then realized this might actually be a thing way back then. But slowly eased and as people say, defected to the dark side, I became a technologist of worked in. Startups that went dot bomb, some startups that did go dot bomb.

Drex DeFord: How was the Gartner experience? You must have seen this. What I've sort of figured out sometimes is that when people go through Gartner, they get like 20 years worth of experience crushed into like, whatever, three years. It's so much

Very high intensity. They train you on how to assimilate information very quickly, how to articulate it, how to present it, how to be that trusted source. Because remember, they're selling advice and how do you put a price on advice? So they really do hone you into somebody different. And I'm really glad I took that journey, but it was very high intensity.

Did almost a million miles on a plane and. Just over three years working in different regions with different governments, with different health systems, sort of became their in-house epic specialist. So I've seen a lot of things. One thing I've sort of seen in the journey is everybody says healthcare is different, but the way in which medicine is practiced is the same.

Got to build some new projects, so did that, and then got headhunted back to the uk. To Cambridge where I was, the CIO for a couple of years. Primary goal to get Epic into the uk, fully baked and running. That was the first instance of Epic in the country. And whilst I was sorting that out, it was a combination of epic outsourcing to HP that needed to be so streamlined and resolved.

'cause protecting kids and taking care of them is a very easy ask. So I really enjoy working here at Children's and. We're a well-known organization as you used to be here at Children's too. Drex. I did, yes. Once upon a time.

Drex DeFord: That's right. I have to tell me. So I'm just carrying

Zafar Chaudry: your torch forwards.

The mission is incredible. I tell this story all the time. Like you get onto an elevator with a mom, with conjoined twins and a little red wagon, and you have no problems yourself and you completely understand what your job is today. And it's to help those patients and families get better.

Zafar Chaudry: Yeah, and one thing I've sort of learned being here at Children's. is w e really don't have bad days. Right. When you're sitting in the hospital and you are having a bad day and a sick kid walks up to you with multiple tubes coming out of their body and they actually smile whilst, you know they're in extreme pain.

So hats off to kids they are very courageous in how they deal with illness. And I wish we as adults had the same level of courage as we deal with our work. Agree.

Drex DeFord: They are the picture of resilience.

Zafar Chaudry: Absolutely.

Drex DeFord: Very optimistic and always figuring out how to bounce back no matter what.

Yeah. I wanna ask you a question. In the world of digital health. all the stuff that you've seen, what's the eureka moment right now? What's the one piece of tech or tech and process that has sort of made you say, well, that changes everything?

Zafar Chaudry: This wouldn't be a discussion if I didn't mention the word AI, and I'm not sure that is my eureka moment though, but I'll mention it

And then when you process that data and you show how seamless information can flow between different healthcare providers. Coupled with empowered patients, patient access over their data, which then leads to drastically improved care coordination, reduced errors, enhanced patient engagement. To me, that's the synergistic combination and that secure exchange unlocks.

My Eureka moment, right?

Drex DeFord: Everything's connected to everything else. And that may be, I'm with you. I think that's a pretty amazing eureka moment. And kind of speaking of innovation I opened up LinkedIn today. I saw a post from Google talking about their.

Zafar Chaudry: Yeah. So absolutely right. So Drex, when you worked here you would've remembered that Seattle Children's over the 117 years we've been in business.

We lead in the space of writing pediatric care pathways. And over the years we've written hundreds and hundreds of pages of PDFs, of different ways of treating a multitude of conditions. And when you come to Seattle Children's as a new physician, a resident physician, you have access to those pathways.

And so we took all of the PDFs that we ever have written. In the clinical pathway arena, and many of our pathways are used around the world as a standard 'cause we just give them away.

So we said let's partner with Google and build a tool that could interactively help our clinicians answer the questions on how to take care of a patient based on the symptoms that they presented with.

And this tool now is interactive. So I can see a patient in the ED and I can say I have a patient who's 12 years old that has these symptoms. Shortness of breath, fever, cough, whatever. The patient has a weight of X, what should I do? And then what Gemini does, it takes the data it's only our evidence it doesn't use a larger model than that.

And it says, well, have you thought about this or it'll ask you questions to get closer to the diagnosis and the treatment program. And through that back and forth interaction between clinician and AI, it gets you to a point where you very quickly can get to a diagnostics, what labs you need to do.

Drex DeFord: it doesn't give you one of the prebuilt specific pathways, but it actually helps you create a pathway that's right for you and your patient.

Zafar Chaudry: Yeah so it understands. So it doesn't generate anything itself, but what it does is it understands the data we've put into it. And then it queries your thought mechanism to get you to a point where the treatment plan is correct for your patient. So if I could show you a demo, it's quite interesting to see how it will ask you leading questions to get you to where you need to be.

And it will also reference where it got that material from, in which document in which part of the whole set of pathways, Uhhuh. And the beauty of that is, is in the past you would literally have to go through, in this case, if it's asthma, you'd have to review the entire asthma pathway before you could get to some sort of conclusion.

patient with asthma. Might need a chest x-ray. Might need nebulization treatment. Might need hospitalization based on acuity of condition, so that's pretty cool.

Drex DeFord: It's like you've got a mentor. Yeah, that's sort of helping talk you through your thinking process for your diagnosis. It's very how did you guys go about doing this?

Zafar Chaudry: yeah, so it's a multidisciplinary team and we have a full program of AI work that we're doing. We have a review board. The review board is made of multiple clinicians from research to hospital, and they decide what to prioritize.

So yes, the idea came from clinicians. The informatics group had this idea. We then looked at whether we could afford to do it. We then talked to our partner, and Google is our primary partner for all of our analytics. 'cause all of our analytics now are in Google Cloud. And Gemini is our primary partner.

The AI didn't hallucinate on that particular data, but it is all purely based on our evidence, nobody else's so we're not pulling in anything from the internet. It's our instance. It's PHI protected. So it's all in there. And then through multiple iterations, almost six months worth of work design testing.

We've gotten to a point where we're very happy with the output of the tool, and now the tool is ready for primetime hence the announcement. And actually this is being announced this week at Google next as the keynote announcement from Google. I think it's a good example of somebody has a great idea, but IT is a true enabler and it's definitely clinically led.

handheld device. You can run it on your laptop, you can run it on your computer on wheels. Yeah. So that's what we're launching. It's ready to go. And it's been a fun project because when people see true benefit of what you can do with the technology, that's really what we're in the business of, right?

Drex DeFord: So it'll work for the, to the benefit of the folks at Seattle Children's will this be one of those things that other pediatric hospitals will be able to tap into the same capability and use it?

Zafar Chaudry: Yeah, absolutely. But the way we look at it is we built the framework. If you want to replace our pathways with your own, ah, you can't, because Google has built the framework with us, it won't take a huge lift.

but the framework is built now.

Drex DeFord: I can't wait to see the post game papers. I'm sure that there're between the researchers and the academic folks who are there, there will be a lot of great research reported out on that.

Zafar Chaudry: This is one of the ones we slated to track and publish the before and after, so it will take some time.

But yeah, we'll absolutely scientifically publish it.

Drex DeFord: Fantastic. I wanted to ask you kind of at this, talking about AI didn't mean to get on the AI path, but it is fascinating the battle between human doctors and artificial intelligence. I don't know if it's a battle exactly, but you know, I feel like

Zafar Chaudry: I firmly believe there isn't a battle to be won. But rather a synergistic partnership to be forged. If you're looking at team human versus whether you are team AI, I don't think they're in competition. I think they bring complimentary strengths to the table. ' cause human clinicians, they offer what?

So you can augment human capability, you can free up clinicians to focus on the uniquely human aspects of care. So job displacement yes, it's a concern, but it needs some proactive solutions focusing on retraining, adapting roles to leverage the strength of both of these things.

Drex DeFord: Yeah. Given new technology coming along, I would say we've gone through this many times.

Folks get upskilled to use the new technology, which makes them usually happier with the work that they're doing because the technology helps them be better at it.

Zafar Chaudry: you've gotta step up or step out, right? Yeah. So yeah, I get the whole, if you look at the Kubler ROS curve, you know the denial.

Because if you think about how a clinician queries a patient in a conversation. It's different than how you would query an AI. This whole concept of prompting, I think what you're gonna see is next generation of physician who hopefully in medical school will start learning the art of prompting so that not only can the clinician speak to the patient in that compassionate human way, but also use the tool to prompt.

Drex DeFord: I wanna go down the personal path here.

Last kind of couple of minutes that we've got. You're a sci-fi fan, right? I.

Zafar Chaudry: Yeah, pretty

Drex DeFord: sure I've read that about you or heard that from you. What are you reading right now? What book are you on?

Zafar Chaudry: I'm not actually reading any books on sci-fi,

Drex DeFord: What are you watching?

TVs, movies. What's your favorite?

Zafar Chaudry: Well, I would say that I am a, in the middle, so I'm sort of a hybrid between Star Trek and Star Wars, and if. If most people would tell you about me, they'd probably say, I'm Darth Vader. I'm the evil one because I'm always pushing change. And people tend to say, well, he brings a lot of change.

And so he's sort of akin to the dark side. But I think when you look at the Star Trek universe and you think about. Watching that over the years, when it started in the sixties and beyond.

Drex DeFord: uhhuh,

Zafar Chaudry: right.

When I think of the cool things, if I was thinking about. What is a great invention that I saw on a TV show? Yes it's gotta be that medical tricorder, right? That device that bones would use to scan you and then it would just tell him everything wrong and then you could take some action.

And what's really interesting is when you look at the internet of things now. All these sensors Yeah. That you can put on your body. And actually I saw a GoFundMe startup for a device that actually brings in six or seven functions into a single device that will look at blood pressure, pulse, a whole bunch of things, and then tell you what may be wrong with you.

Drex DeFord: I completely agree. It is kind of amazing to go back and watch sci-fi shows. It almost makes me think sometimes that the things that sci-fi writers come up with and put into their TV shows or their movies drives. A lot of the scientific investment and exploration like it, it starts as this hair-brained idea on Star Trek and now it's Apple Watch and a bunch of other stuff that just continues to be created and invented.

And guess what? It's the thing now. That's what everybody's doing, between virtual hospitals, hospital at home, remote, patient monitoring, stuff like that. Yeah. That's what people are now really doing. Big health systems are really doing that stuff now. And it took us, what, 30 plus 40 years to get from that show to where we are now.

Even if you remember their screen panels, they would touch things on the screen and guess what? We've got that now. Yeah. So I think, I wonder if they knew we didn't know or they knew. Yes. It's hard to know.

Drex DeFord: It's a big setup.

Zafar Chaudry: I sometimes feel like somebody knows something I don't know.

And then they let us know at some point when they're ready for prime time.

Drex DeFord: Right. Hey I, it's always great to talk to you. I really appreciate you being on Dr. Shari. Come back anytime. You're always welcome.

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