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- This is Kate Cruz recording live at the eighth annual
Becker's, HIT Digital health and RCM conference in Chicago.
I'm with Paul Testa.
Paul, to get us started, can you share a bit about yourself
and your role at your organization?
- Thanks, Kate. My name is Paul Testa, as you said.
I'm the Chief Medical Information Officer
for NYU Langone Health.
And in that role across the health system, I sit
between the clinical practice,
the patient digital experience,
and our IT teams, what we refer to as MCIT
and I, uh, we've created the Department
of Health informatics within MCIT to sort
of bring together informatics, innovation
and all those asundry tools.
- How long have you been doing that?
- I've been in the role for about six years.
I've been within clinical informatics for about 12
and I'm coming up on 19 or 20.
I'm losing track at NYU Langone.
- So I'm going to switch our questions up around here.
So having, you know, been in your position for six years,
one of our question is five years from now,
what do you think will be the most significant change in
healthcare delivery and operations?
I'd be interested to hear, you know, your perspective from,
you know, maybe when you started at this position,
what you kind of thought we would be at today,
and maybe how that affects
how you view five years from now
or just anything else that's come up
- That's a great change up.
So five
or 10 years ago I took note
and was impressed by how leadership viewed technology
and health informatics as a strategic differentiator for us,
um, and how it was going to be used to engage our patients
and our clinicians and our workforce.
And it came true Covid certainly accelerated it.
You often hear people talk about the big covid pivot.
It was never a pivot. This is foundational work
that was done over the last five to 10 years to get us ready
for something as horrific as that was for us in New York.
So how does that inform the next five years?
Not a great crystal ball guide,
but I, I think what got us there
is a discipline to commit
to doing certain things really well without distraction
and that at the power of no
and the power of innovation at scale,
which can all great be buzzwords and certainly,
but like how do we just do a few great things
for our patients, but for all 9 million of them
and all of our 375 locations at all six hospitals,
this one patient, one record, one experience.
That's sort of our standard
and I think it's the continuation of the discipline. Okay.
- Yeah, I like that. Thanks for sharing.
Um, gonna jump around on our questions a little bit more,
but I'll try to not throw any more,
uh, surprise ones at you.
Um, so you talked a little bit about leadership.
What is a piece of advice that you would give
to healthcare leaders today, specifically
regarding digital innovation?
- I'm gonna return back to the concept of discipline.
As soon as we put the word digital in front of it,
we think it's different than it.
And that's why I love to see the convergence of the titles
CIO and CDIO
because we can innovate all we want with, with new shiny,
bright digital tools, but if it affects 12 patients
and not 120,000 patients, we haven't done anybody justice.
So I think to exert the leadership,
to maintain discipline around how we see digital
as very much part of it
and not some distraction that takes us
to do something cool in the corner,
but innovate at scale on platform,
we'll really reap benefits for our patients,
for our clinicians, for how we do our work.
- Definitely, definitely.
When you think of digital innovation in healthcare right
now, what is exciting you the most and why?
- Good question. Um,
I get excited really easily about a lot of things.
Uh, right now the convergence
of technologies we never would've thought were clinical.
By that I mean robotic process automation,
large language models, natural language processing, um,
email, slack, uh, platforms around communication.
They're all racing together in this incredibly cool,
interesting big knot of cool tools, um, that will make us
not recognize what we're interacting with in five years.
- Yeah, that's really interesting.
It goes back to, uh, the first question
that I asked you, uh, at your organization.
What are the top priorities for technology
and what are the issues that it's trying to solve?
- So NYU Lingon as a, as a enterprise,
I would suggest doesn't have technology priorities.
We have institutional priorities
and we use technology to affect those to an end.
So it's not about implementing ai, it's about
how do we provide the highest quality, most safe
care in the most equitable way.
How do we provide world class care?
And there are all these touchpoint
that we fold technology into it.
How do we ensure there's digital health equity in
communities that cannot access smartphones
or don't have broadband access
or who don't necessarily understand why we're asking certain
questions that they may find to be invasive,
be it digital or analog.
So I think as the discipline, again, to go back to that term
of using technology, digital
and other to make real our enterprise goals is
how we succeed in using digital health. Mm-Hmm.
- . Yeah. Um, I really like that perspective.
Thank you. Um, if you could provide specific examples
of instances where the integration of informatic solution
led to improved patient outcomes
or enhanced patient provider communication.
You've already kind of gone over some examples of these,
but is there a specific one that you'd like to touch on?
- I think the one a lot of us talk about
that I'm really proud of is how fast
we scaled digitally in the face of covid,
but in the time cycles of news
and healthcare, that was three years ago
and we showed we could scale and impact care
and we could provide care beyond the borders of our walls.
And now how do we sustain that?
I think if I had to look at examples
that make me particularly proud is
whenever I hear the story being told of
how we achieve high rankings in quality
or safety, um, the highest rankings
of quality safety, which we can be proud of.
The story is always told with the infusion of technology,
how do we leverage appropriate analytics?
How do we visualize information to our providers?
How do we give our patients information to arm themselves
and engage in their own care in a way that is both
appropriate for them and equitable for their communities?
And how do we nudge behavior for both the clinicians, docs,
nurses, technologists, and our patients?
That's the best part. Yeah.
- What technologies have you seen patients really
enjoy or find, you know, a lot of benefit in
- Sort of the amplification of care?
Right. So it, it's amazing to watch my mom who's a patient
interact with SMS.
It's really, it's not brand new digital sexy,
but being able to nudge an SMS message
that's redundant a mess.
An SMSA text to a patient to say, Hey,
we see you just had an MRI ordered
or a CT ordered using in the background,
acknowledging they like to go in the morning,
they like to go at this location.
Um, this, this location has the right machine for them.
We can just nudge a text with three options for them
to select and all they need to do is reply.
I'll take spot three and they're scheduled.
And then that gets surfaced back
to the NYU ongoing health app and we have a closed loop.
I am continually amazed at how powerful,
just good old fashioned text messaging is.
- Yeah, definitely.
Um, you know, people are on their phones all day,
so they get it in a second
and you know, it's,
I I don't think people feel like the formality of replying
to an email or, you know, talking
to their doctor on the phone. Easy
- Breezy text. Yeah,
- Exactly.
And so that, that's really interesting.
Um, well as we kind of wrap up here, thank you
so much for your time today.
Is there anything else you want our listeners to know?
- I am grateful for the ability to do what we do digitally
with patients and their willingness
to meet us halfway or further.
Um, and I think it's just gonna get more interesting from
here on so long as we're sort of authentically
engaging with them and acknowledging the risks.
Yeah. Both equitable and social. Definitely.
- Yeah. All right.
Well thank you so much for your time today.
It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank
- You so much.
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