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November 11, 2024: Vik Patel, COO at Tido Inc. joins Sarah for the news. Vik shares his journey from hospital IT to founding Tido Inc., discussing the nuanced challenges of integrating AI and the role of strong governance frameworks in avoiding unintended biases. Together, we tackle questions of strategic prioritization, from the intricacies of data migration and legacy archiving to the pressing need for reliable, responsive tech solutions in high-stakes clinical environments. Through the lens of real-world applications, the episode raises important considerations about balancing innovation with practicality in healthcare IT.

Key Points:

  • 04:09 The Importance of AI Governance in Healthcare
  • 07:27 Challenges and Solutions in Healthcare IT
  • 20:00 Practical AI Applications and Integration
  • 30:49 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

News articles:

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Transcript

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

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Today on Newsday.

hospital [:

Now, let's jump right in.

Thanks for joining us on Newsday today. I am joined by Vik Patel from TIDO Inc., who is the Chief Operating Officer and a new partner with This Week Health. Vic's a seasoned health technology professional with over 15 years of experience.

In his role, he oversees company operations, focusing on delivering innovative solutions that enhance patient care and operational efficiency. I also love that he is the host of This Week in Health Tech with 57 episodes under his belt, where he discusses current trends and developments in health technology.

Vic, welcome to the show.

s well, and that's why, this [:

So there you go. I don't know if you knew that.

I didn't. And there's a lot to be done. Even on your podcast, you think you talk about integration response, monitoring, interfaces, care, which is the thing that obviously all your practitioners are going to care about. When you joined TIDO Inc.

in:

So you may not, maybe another fact, I'm also the founder of TIDO Inc. I worked in a hospital for a long time and, learned some of the challenges, around getting the data to the clinicians at the right time in real time.

o find the issues, right? So [:

What is the situation? Can somebody look into it? Just some of these things, which you would think should be built into the applications in terms of self diagnosing and such, but no, that's not the case. So I learned some of those things, working in a hospital and that's where TIDO Came along, the whole idea of TIDO and helping develop some of these solutions from an integration standpoint, from data management.

And today, we are a team of around 30 people mostly all engineers. Our integration team, our data conversion, data archiving team, and automation team. And all of our team members are based in North America and U. S. and Canada.

the patient outcomes are not [:

Oh, it's great. When you think about the purpose by which you created something, you saw a need, you filled it and then kept growing it from there. And foundationally, as you're talking about the news, we pulled up the first article to discuss, which is Dr.

Patrick McGill urging health systems to establish AI governance early. Here's what's super interesting. And he's the chief transformation officer at Community Health Network. He talks about the necessity of establishing governance frameworks early in implementation of AI with health systems to enhance effectiveness and mitigate bias.

ent as well as what needs to [:

Yeah, no, great question. And what community health care, and what Dr. McGill is undertaking, I think it's very important, right? Because everyone's talking about AI and the AI tools. And that's a sexy thing to talk about every conference you go to, or in all the conversations.

But the data governance, I think is the key. And what I usually tell CIOs when we are talking about this is, Hey, do you have any data scientists on your team to help you with this? Because even with our solution, even with our MIDRE solution, which uses AI to find and take action on issues with integrations or application issues, even that, we have our AI models, and so does all the other tools that the health systems are now deploying.

ing in a whole new team, and [:

Are things different now after the update? That's not easy to do. Yeah, I think all the policies and procedures and the guardrails that they are talking about for the AI use definitely make sense. And again, I would say, if you, by the way, if somebody's looking into getting into a career in healthcare, IT, today, as a student, if you are in a university or, and you're still trying to, make a decision on which way you should go, go become a data scientist, right?

that's a great career if you [:

I agree. And when people ask me constantly about career direction or ideas, or even at what age can take a new career trajectory, and I'm like, if you have a background in AI and or cyber, And really getting both of those.

And there's so many ways to get the education, training, and even certification, if that's what you're seeking, those are the most in demand spaces, in addition to really understanding how the cloud and how all these different ways that you distribute your workload is really important. And you mentioned MIDRE, and I don't want people to lose sight of the fact that Managed Integration, Detection and Response System, you're utilizing AI to monitor and support interfaces because you don't want patient care to Interrupted.

m that cyber and reliability [:

Yeah, no, great question.

So for us personally, like our MIDRE solution is designed to eliminate the dependence on the end users to find issues, find, production, application and integration issues. It is a cloud solution, obviously. We use Microsoft Azure AI functionality for the backend of the MIDRE solution.

But for us, we make sure that EHRs, is not going into our solution, into our AI modeling, right? The way we have trained, Our model is all based on de identified data. I think that's a key. So that should be one of the questions for any AI solution, in, in terms of, hey, are you going to be using our PHI for training your models in the future?

er thing too is in our case, [:

Do I need to call a person? And which person should I be calling so that we can take an action as soon as possible? And, triaging and resolution and coming up with a resolution for the issue. So yeah, for us, we have. take in every action that we can so that we are not creating an issue for the health system, as you said where a lot of the third party have been at fault for health systems where, it wasn't the actual health systems network or therefore it was more one of their partners.

linicians to either increase [:

Does having a physician in that role change the dynamic of what needs to happen inside the system for it to be successful?

Oh, a hundred percent. I think if you think about, from a CIO telling the clinicians or the doctors or nurses versus a CIO who is, who was a doctor, who was a practicing doctor or still is a practicing physician, I think that makes a whole lot of difference, right?

So it's not just about a person with a technology background pushing a solution through and it's Hey, we need to use this. It's cool. It's going to help us in such and such way. But If it's actually a physician who has the experience and who can see the benefits in the long run of using such a tool, I think it will make a huge difference, right?

person driving a decision in [:

In that decision making in terms of how the application will work. I find many times it's technically driven, developers who are not actually. At the front lines dealing with patients, making some of these decisions. I don't know. I want to ask you like, from your previous role, how do you see that in terms of bringing some of these tools to the CMIO or to the clinicians in terms of, hey, we.

This will help you guys, but how do you make sure that the adoption happens?

ftware development, you need [:

But you also have to have a business owner and a product owner. And you can choose if the product owner is a clinician or how involved they are in the operations and the business owner really understanding the strategy of what needs to happen. But if those three things aren't true, you're going to create products That are going to be twice as difficult to adopt.

You're going to have a lot of things to fix after you bring these different sprints live. And it's really key to make sure that those three are aligned going in. Reciprocally, I've worked in organizations where the CMIO, it either is or isn't on board with certain aspects. And at the CMIO, if their role isn't to increase physician adoption of technologies, then clearly delineating what their role is and making sure that you have other champions on the clinical side of your teams for.

pend so much time and energy [:

That was amazing. I can see why you're a seasoned CIO. That was really good. I love now that we get to

help partners and CIOs come together to solution it. So as you think about what we do at This Week Health is bringing people together to find solutions, create communities and solutions. And it works.

You'll walk out of an event with us and be like, I just met 15 CIOs or CISOs or CMIOs. That I now have a relationship with and the sale comes after. You have to create a bond with humans before they really want to work with you. And that's true everywhere. So as you think about having strong, governance in place to make great decisions in an organization, And more and more people are being asked to do application modernization, which can be a road map to better outcomes in the article that you and I discussed.

significance of application [:

The assessment, migration to the cloud or other appropriate environment, updating the overall technology, ongoing optimization. Too often CIOs and organizations get stuck in the ongoing optimization, the expectation that if I'm going to modernize this application or this environment, it's a one time thing.

you fixed a couple of years [:

that allows them to make really sound decisions that are financially feasible in a long term environment.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And like you said, the goal of The modernization is to make sure that the needs of the users, both the internal users and patients, are met and one of the ways we do this.

So . Our approach is using archival solution.

, purchasing a new tool that [:

But, however, the archival solution should be, such that it's easy to import the data from those legacy systems and also easy to access the data from your new EHR. And our application, we make sure that within two clicks or less, you are able to get to your legacy data that you need.

So we were able to use the latest development technologies and with single sign on from your EHR, whether if it's EPIC or Cerner or Meditech or Athena, we would allow you to single sign on into TIDO Archive and Using the user context and patient context, it lands you right on that patient within TIDO's archive and you are able to see that patient's legacy data and the doctor doesn't have to click around to find the the right information.

n the TIDO Archive solution. [:

here's the thing, I've been, CIO in multiple environments, and you've got systems that are parked in a closet somewhere that are just on technology, honestly, like waiting to die, or thinking about it.

How do you balance the equation or the cost analysis of moving critical applications, even if they're critical old and they're required to be saved, to the cloud for data management? And I think about. Even as technology rapidly enables us to move these archaic old systems, it might be just sitting in a rack somewhere, sitting in a closet somewhere.

How do you walk your clients through what maybe is a leave behind, a lift and shift, or a true transition to the cloud?

especially in the cloud, the [:

That's the way, I would recommend looking into that. And on top of it, again, having an archival solution where it will allow you to easily access the legacy data. But, that is a way to have two different data sets. The hot storage and the cold storage. So if you know that, you know what, the last two years of data is probably the most relevant data that you will need access to, put that in hot storage.

Yes, you will pay a little bit more because it needs to be available right away instead of the cold. But all the other ones, the really old data, save money on it, right? And it's still in the cloud. So now you don't have this old, like you said, server sitting in a cabinet somewhere, and somebody needs to look after.

Yeah. That's the way we are recommending and working with health systems.

ng. I love to joke about Vic [:

I was like, Oh, that's a system that such and such that we can't, we have to keep alive and this was years ago, so it wasn't like easy to archive and it just lives there. And so nobody opens that door. And I was like, really, we can't move this to newer technology. We can't think about a way to do this in a better, different way.

And at the time it just wasn't feasible to your point of an exorbitantly expensive to try to move it over. And so we kept it alive, but it was almost like, You can't just throw a meal or two every couple of days behind the closed door, which really isn't true, as a system was running, but there was yellow caution tape on a door that was like, those are some archives.

Don't go

in there. Yeah, you

love that we're beyond that [:

This is an article from Daniel Barchi, who is the CIO at Common Spirit. And him talking about how you manage the hype. By prioritizing real world impact, and then it's like tuition and education. It's an investment with returns that are ongoing, but really having clear goals and ensuring that it aligns with organizational objectives for patient care improvements.

And he says, treat it like strategic investment, focus on practical applications, start with strong governance, which we've talked about. Tell me a little bit though, Vic, your perspective on how you do have the strategic focus that brings the right efficiencies and helping organizations think about it in terms of an evolving investment.

u know, that's a no brainer, [:

I think what he's trying to say is, don't lose your focus, right? Don't just go and every time. If you are at a conference, obviously now every vendor, by the way, has AI enabled products, which I find mind boggling. And, right after the pandemic, I remember going to HIMSS one of the first conferences after, and I was like, What?

Everybody has AI now after the pandemic? What was the change? Why was it so easy? And it's not. When you start asking some of the tougher questions, under the hood, it's actually not AI, and people don't really even understand, many people, the difference between machine learning and AI, so when you ask some of those questions, it's oh yeah, no, it's just more RPA, it's just robotic automation.

e they used AI to create the [:

They know, they're not just gonna, just sign up just because somebody is pitching a product with AI built into it. But I think, back to this article, what he's saying is that, favor the practical AI applications, right? Something that's going to actually help you and maybe, what we have, I feel like our AI application is practical because there's hundreds of interfaces, obviously there's hundreds of clinical applications in the hospital, and similar to cybersecurity monitoring, we are offering real time monitoring off the functionality, off the interfaces, off the applications.

l in this case, it's easy to [:

So you can actually see the practical results and then you learn about AI, as he says, it's like tuition, you're learning as you go. And then over time, you will be able to, once you have the right team in place with data governance and the policies and whatnot, I think it will become easier to pick out the right solutions.

and integrate them within your health system.

And not go after the areas that are higher risk. There are certain spaces where you realize that you can be cutting edge and still take a low risk approach to bringing ideas into your organization, which is why I love that you chose an article about ChatGPT over prescribing treatments in the ED.

things that are routine, AI [:

It can be more nuanced. And I would think, especially in the emergency department setting, thinking about that quickness, that call to action that really requires the human element, because that's high turnover, high volume. There's not a repetitive type of patient coming in the door with the same diagnoses.

And as you think about the risk and pitfalls of where to implement AI, what resonated the most for you with this article?

Yeah, I think it was definitely scary, to be honest, reading this article in terms of, AI and what I find. It always answers you if you ask a question, or, there's always oh, here's three things that you can do instantly and, again, there's a lot of horsepower behind it there's a lot of these answers.

that comes to it, but still, [:

And then you question it. It'll go back and indicate, oh yeah, no, that was inaccurate. Sorry, let me correct myself and here's the other two answers. And another example, again, I'm just giving other examples, like what the article is suggesting in terms of the models not being accurate.

But there was recent, where a lawyer used ChatGPT to fight a case and obviously it was a huge failure because JGPT created cases that never existed. Anyway, so going back to this, I feel like I would go back a little bit to our last article where, and what you were saying, start with the solutions that are less risky.

want to be on the sidelines [:

And then as we learn more and more sample, you can always deploy it at a smaller scale. And then once you see the practical results, once you see the reports of actually, yep, this is working as per the benchmark, and it does help our clinicians, then we, then you can actually roll it out to more users.

your organization can thrive [:

So the ED at this point, As an example, is off limits for the use of this version of AI. And you say, I am going to use it for chart prep, for documentation, for the ability to understand if there's preventative care that's being missed. What are areas that you can validate that don't introduce harm both to the patient or to the organization?

Yeah, these exactly like the physicians in ED They don't have time to what Chad GPT is spitting out. So 100 percent I agree with you

etter uncover whether or not [:

Yeah, so it, that comes down to some questions to understand what's under the hood, right? So is the solution acting more like an ML, machine learning where it's actually, using the data, it's able to identify patterns, right? And it's able to help you in some of the decision making, or is it actual AI where it's taking the next step of not just identifying the patterns, but actually making a decision in terms of, oh, I need to create such and such order based on what I'm seeing, right?

So based on this result, maybe this person needs this type of follow up. So that's where or is it, in even there, that could be a difference because you could train, only certain things and it could become more like an RPA. So if it sees certain keywords, it's going to go and create.

ders, because that's all you [:

There's hundreds. If you go in Microsoft Azure and online, and if you can just look up all the different models available. So start with some of those basic questions and then maybe, depending on your contract situation with this vendor, maybe they can actually show you the actual data and the algorithms and step you through it.

n the compeTIDOrs can easily [:

So I think definitely not easy. But I feel like if you have the right policies in place and the right questions to ask, even before you go any further into like how and who's going to use this solution, I think that'll definitely help.

You bring up such a great point, though.

Think about this. If we're going to go into business together, and I ask you those exact questions that you just shared with me, we've already gone through loads of paperwork. And NDA being a component of that conversation is more than completely appropriate. And you can walk away from deals. There's times when people can't meet their security requirements, and you're like, I'm sorry, we can't do business.

Now you're saying, Hey, The level of transparency and trust that's created when you have that kind of reciprocity with your partners, that's what creates a partnership versus having a vendor solution. And you get that better than anybody. And I'm so grateful that you had a chance to come in and do Newsday with me and also be a partner with this week health.

e the fact that you have all [:

Amazing. Yeah, no, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. We should do this again and another news day in the near future. But yeah, thank you again for having me. And really look forward to maybe if you get any questions, maybe we'll have some follow up questions or comments from some of our listeners.

We often do, and the best part is you're a part of our community, and so they know where to find you as well as follow up with either information about the product or anything that we discussed today. So thank you again. We'll do more News Days. We'll see you at future events. More than anything, we appreciate you being a part of This Week Health and the 229 community.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to News Day. That's all for now.

ng in our industry and while [:

Thanks for listening. That's all for now

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