Philips is a health tech leader focused on
innovation that improves the health and well-being of
people. Our health care technology and informatics solutions
help care teams diagnose, treat, and manage more
patients with greater precision, speed, and confidence across
the care journey. With Philips, clinicians are empowered
with streamlined insights in the moments that matter
for every patient. Better care for more people.
Philips.
This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Health
Care Podcast, and we are live at the
9th Annual Health IT Digital Health and RCM
Conference.
I am joined right now by Rich Zane,
who is the chief innovation officer at UCHealth.
So, Rich, thanks so much for joining me.
And to get us started, could you please
share a little bit more about yourself, your
background, and your role?
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Really thrilled to
be here. I'm Rich Zane. I'm the chief
innovation officer for UCHealth, which is the University
of Colorado Health System,
14 hospital system based in Colorado, almost $9,000,000,000
in revenue.
My role as chief innovation officer is really
to interface
with technology companies solving pragmatic problems and building
solutions and then participating in value creation. I
also have another role as chair of the
department of emergency medicine. So the lens by
which I interact with these companies is really
from the lens of a physician
and what's best for our patients. So we're
very patient centered in the way we adopt
and utilize and deploy technology.
Wonderful. Well, thanks for taking the time to
be here. And first question,
AI adoption is exploding in health care right
now. So in your view, what is the
most significant or promising application of this technology?
And how is this informing your organization's innovation
strategy?
I think it's important that when you speak
about AI,
we understand what definitionally
we're referring to. And I bet that almost
everybody listening to this or here at this
conference will have a different definition of what
AI is. And the reality is that in
health care, like most industries, we've been using
AI for at least a decade.
The hype curve has certainly
increased and the curve is steeper than it's
ever been. But I think what's really important
when we think about AI is that we
really think about intelligence.
And just like AI, intelligence can mean everything
and nothing. And to us, it means making
better decisions in health care. So what AI
will do is allow us to adjudicate almost
infinity variables,
make better
decisions in health care, whether that's choosing pharmacotherapy
at the bedside,
deploying capital, organizing operating rooms, infusion centers,
more accurately doing revenue cycle. That's what AI
is to us. How it's deployed
is just simply math, not magic.
And on a daily basis, health care leaders
are managing greater volumes of data and more
devices across a growing number of care settings.
So in this complex
environment,
growing number of care settings.
So in this complex environment, what clinical data
integration tools or practices are you seeing drive
improvements in patient outcomes? And can you share
a specific example of
that? I would
love to.
So when we think about integration, we think
about workflows.
And when providers
deliver care, we have some guiding principles about
how we do that. One is we will
never make a provider leave their workflow. And
for us, our workflow is our electronic health
record. The other is the adoption of tools
cannot make it harder, has to make it
easier, has to be the path of least
resistance, it has to be bulletproof right. And
if we're gonna give a doctor one more
thing to do, we're gonna take 2 things
away.
So for
us, we use
AI in clinical workflows around intelligence. And a
great example for us is how we think
about incidental findings.
So if you have a chest x-ray because
someone's worried about pneumonia
or because you have been a smoker
and we find an incidental finding, very frequently,
those incidental findings are difficult to follow. So
we partner with a company that uses computational
linguistics
to follow these incidental findings, and we get
the patient connected with the right care and
the right time at the right place a
100% of the time. We've done that now
for lung nodules. We're doing it for thyroid
nodules. We're doing it for pancreatic
cysts and nodules,
for pap smears, really any screening test that
can have an incidental finding that requires a
follow-up, which prior to this deployment of technology
was really impossible for any single human or
group of humans to keep track of.
And when we adopt AI
and are managing greater volumes of data, IT
teams become critical. So how can health care
organizations
better support IT and clinical teams as they
carry out innovation efforts, and what are some
of the common pitfalls you see?
So from a perspective of how we integrate
and use our IT teams, we're very fond
of saying that our innovation strategy is our
IT strategy, is our quality strategy,
is our virtual health strategy,
etcetera.
So they are part and parcel of the
team. Just like a doctor, a nurse, an
executive, IT is really crucial
to how we deliver health care.
Some of the common pitfalls
are that if you ask someone what their
ideal state would be,
and they don't have to be a novice
in IT, but they simply want to develop
a tool or use a tool, there's a
1 in 3 chance that that tool already
exists and they don't know about it. There's
a 1 in 3 chance that they have
a great idea. We have something that can
be optimized to meet their needs, and there's
a 1 in 3 chance that's just impossible
technologically. So it's understanding
what the guardrails are around technology, being able
to execute, bring into workflows, change management, and
make sure that the tool is actually useful.
And finally, as we wrap our conversation, what
is your top piece of advice for health
care leaders as they prepare for further advancements
in technology and greater demands for care? To
really take a deep breath,
technology is a tool that will help us
deliver better care, faster, cheaper, but it's never
gonna replace
human interaction and human adjudication.
So it's really just a tool like anything
else,
and it's really the tool
that is being deployed, not
replacing humans or replacing interaction.
Well, Rich, thanks so much for joining me
today on the Becker's healthcare podcast. Again, we're
live at the 9th annual health IT digital
health and RCM conference. Thank you. Thank you
for having me.