- Prepare to dive into the forefront
of healthcare innovation at our 14th annual meeting coming
up on April 8th
through 11th at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, with thousands
of industry leaders converging over four dynamic days
of discussions on crucial topics from health IT
to executive leadership.
It's where the future of healthcare takes shape.
We can't wait to connect with you in person
and engage in these important conversations.
- This is Laura Dedo with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Richard Zain,
chief Innovation Officer at uc Health.
Dr. Zane's, a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- Lovely to be here. Thanks for having me.
- Now I know we'll get into a lot of the different things
that you're doing there at uc Health and,
and really what you're looking ahead for.
But before we dive into the broader discussion,
can you tell us a little bit more
about yourself and your background?
- Sure. So I am a practicing physician.
I'm an emergency physician.
Uh, I chair the Academic Department
of Emergency Medicine at the University
of Colorado School of Medicine.
I also, I'm a professor at the medical school
and the business school, and as chief innovation officer,
I work with the senior leadership team at our health system,
which is a 14 hospital system based in Colorado to
identify problems where there may
be a technological solution.
And sometimes, most of the time it's a combination of
process people and tools.
And the tools are, are where we look
for technological solutions.
When we do that, we think about
what our ideal partnerships look like,
and our ideal partnerships are the problem statement is
valid and there isn't an out of the box solution
that we have a potential partner
that understands the problem statement
and we culturally are aligned, uh,
that we're gonna be a customer,
a co-development partner and an investor.
And when we find a problem statement that needs to be solved
and a partner that is as interested in solving the problem
as as we are, and we can meet all three of those criteria,
we usually can hit it out of the park
and then we help that product or that company scale.
Because if it's a problem for us, it's a problem
for the other 2000 hospitals
or systems in the United States.
- Well, that's so fascinating and
and I really think that's an interesting approach
and a great approach to have that win-win situation
of being able to work with companies that, you know,
really are solving problems or challenges for the system
and, and then again, help them grow and scale
and learn from, you know,
that real world application within uc health.
So that's really cool.
I, I'm wondering, can you dive a bit deeper
and tell me about one of the most successful partnerships
or projects from the last year or two?
Uh, what did you do and how did you measure the results?
- So I like to say that I, I have one
of the most interesting jobs that exist in healthcare.
And the reason I believe that is
because I get to be creative with other creative people
to address problems that
very frequently have palpable solutions.
So even though scientists are remarkably creative
and work incredibly hard
and are highly challenged, sometimes they wait years
or decades for things to come to fruition.
I get to say that so many people did not die,
or people's lives were, were better
or we were able to care for more patients in a,
in a more cost effective way
through the projects that we do.
So that's really why I love, uh, what it is that I do.
And the best problems are the ones
that are identified at the front lines, not problems
that I think may exist, not problems that companies come
and tell me I have, uh,
but problems that people who are responsible
for the work say, Hey, we can't get through this problem.
Uh, do you think you can help us think about a solution?
And when we do that, the first thing we do is have people
articulate a problem statement
and in a pretty structured way, meaning
here is the introductory sentence, not introductory,
five paragraphs or five pages.
Here is the quantification of the problem.
If we were able to solve this,
we would find two more cancers
or we would find 2000 more cancers because
although two is important, 2000 is really compelling.
And then here are the other systems that attempted to,
to solve it or not.
And we'll do an environmental scan
and we'll go across the country usually,
uh, through connections.
Sometimes we'll get on a plane
and see if anybody has actually solved it.
And if they have, we're gonna
learn and we're gonna implement.
We're not gonna go and start a company or we're not gonna go
and partner with a company to start a new product.
Uh, but if they haven't solved it,
and it's a problem for us,
we know it's a problem for everybody.
So those are the types of problems that are most ideal.
And you know, we're as strategic as,
uh, we can be.
Very often we're opportunistic,
meaning another system will say,
Hey, have you heard of this company?
Or a company will come to us
and we'll say, wow, that looks very interesting and,
and we'll do a deep dive.
Uh, but that's how we function.
And then we think about how we keep in our guiding
principles of how we deliver work.
Meaning how does it affect the patient?
How does it not make care more expensive and complex?
How do we preserve provider workflow?
How do we make it easier and not harder for our providers
and how do we make it better for our patients?
- That's such a great point.
And you know, I really appreciate that thought process
because so much goes into, um, having those kind of, um,
ways of trying to make sure you're solving the right problem
and, and, uh, really being impactful
and meaningful with how the solution is rolled out now,
what are some of the top priorities that you have
for the next 12 months or so?
What will really be top of mind for you?
- Well, what we're working on now is broadly,
we spend a lot of time
thinking about the virtualization of care.
And when people say virtual health
or telehealth, they have an immediate picture
of a doctor in front of a computer speaking
to a patient on the other side, that's not what we mean.
We mean using intelligence and intelligence.
Like innovation can mean everything and nothing, uh,
but using math, whether it's AI
or whether it's prescriptive analytics
or generative AI to do the work
that would usually require people to do so that the people,
um, can use human brains to adjudicate.
So what we like to do is think about
human adjudication and think about what we can automate.
So we think a lot about automating care
where there are so many confounding variables
of single human can't possibly adjudicate 2000
or 2,500 variables.
And then we do the same with administrative automation.
Things like how do you do capacity management
across 14 hospitals?
How do you load balance acuity across different units?
How do you do revenue cycle and automate it?
Uh, how do you interact on a, on a patient basis,
uh, with, you know, a verbal, uh, like a,
a series like, uh, interface.
So that's a lot of what we work on is making it easier
for our patients, making it more accurate and safer
and more automated.
And broadly that's what we look at.
And we do everything from helping
providers choose pharmacotherapy for their patients so
that when they prescribe a medication,
not only is it the right medication,
but it's also a medication that their payer
or their pharmacy benefits manager actually covers.
So we don't have a third
of the prescriptions being left at the pharmacy
'cause the patient shows up
and realizes there's a $500 copay.
We know exactly what that copay is gonna be
and we can have a conversation
with the patient when it's gonna be something
that is substantive for that patient.
So our pharmacy left behind rate went from, you know, 20
to 30% to almost zero
because we are able to drive patients to medications
that are clinically equivalent
and covered by their their payer.
Uh, we've been able to do things like harness, you know,
linguistic modeling and AI to keep track
of incidental findings.
And incidental findings, um, are scary
because there are thousands upon thousands of tests done.
And even though the tests are done for a specific reason,
sometimes tests identify other things
that need to be followed up.
If I do a chest x-ray on you
because I'm worried that you have pneumonia,
I will say you do or don't have pneumonia.
But if there's also something there could be a nodule
and a nodule on a chest X-ray could be cancer,
then we need a process to be able to, to keep track of that.
And there wasn't great processes
and this is a national problem.
So sometimes the report will be written,
the report will be forwarded to a primary care doctor,
even if that primary care doctor didn't order that test.
And then it would rely on the primary care doctor
or their assistant to read the entire report, make note
that John Smith has a nodule
and needs to have a follow-up chest x-ray in a year
or even a CT scan to follow that up
and then multiply that times all the types of tests
that people get, whether it's chest x-rays or pap smears
or mammograms or biopsies
or blood tests or MRIs.
The MRIs are done for a specific indication,
but there's often something else that is seen.
So how do we keep track of that?
We invested
and partnered with a company called Eon Health
that does exactly that.
And what we found is that we went from pretty good,
um, following up incidental findings, not great,
pretty good maybe okay to 98.3%,
which is hundreds upon hundreds
of either cancers being eliminated from someone's
problem list or identifying a cancer way earlier than it
otherwise would've been identified.
So that is a big win for us and our patients.
- Absolutely. It, it is really impressive and,
and what a great and empowering story of how, you know,
the team can work together
and bring technology in the process, um,
to be a huge difference maker
and move the needle for um, patients who really,
as you mentioned in the beginning of our discussion,
are having their lives saved by the fact that these techno
or that their, um, cancers
and illnesses are identified early
and then the right treatments are, are administered.
So that's really powerful and great to hear.
Uh, before we wrap up, I'm wondering, you know,
if you look into the future
and just all the possibilities as technology continues
to evolve and as healthcare, um, evolves as well,
how do you anticipate that your role in teams will change?
- I think that there will be exponential pressure
because of the fundamental alterations
and the finances of medicine that we've seen post pandemic.
I am very fond of saying
that it's white knuckle time in healthcare
and it's white knuckle time in healthcare, uh,
health systems are not able to generate the amount
of margin that they need to be sustainable.
And there are exceptions to that rule,
and that is the biggest change.
And healthcare cannot be
or can no longer be the last bastion of industry
where deploying technology increases complexity and cost.
We need to deploy technology to decrease complexity,
to decrease cost, to make things safer, better, faster,
meet patient patients where they want to be in a way
that they can actually afford, that society can handle
that type of a cost.
'cause the cost now is not sustainable societally.
And one of the things in addition to payer reform,
pharmaceutical reform is going to be understanding
what technology can and should do
and where that line between technology
and humans interfaces.
- Absolutely. Dr. Zane, thank you so much
for joining us on the podcast today.
This has been a fascinating discussion
and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
- Thanks. Bye.