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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Bucharest Healthcare
Podcast, and we are live at the 9th
Annual Health IT Digital Health and RCM Conference.
I am joined by Roberta Schwartz, who serves
as the EVP
of Houston Methodist Hospital, and Sarah Pletcher, who
is the chief digital health officer at Houston
Methodist Hospital. So thank you both for joining
me today, and we'd love to have you
start off by introducing yourselves a little bit
further.
Sure. I'm Roberta Schwartz, and I serve as
executive vice president. I run our large academic
medical center,
in the Texas Medical Center, about a 1,000
bed hospital. And I run our innovation activities
for our 8 hospital system
in Houston, Texas.
And I'm Sarah Fletcher in the chief digital
health officer role. I have things in my
portfolio that include virtual services,
some of our leveraging of remote monitoring,
care redesign,
really lots of innovation efforts throughout the system,
especially those leveraging digital tools.
Wonderful. Well, thanks for joining me. And we'd
love to start our conversation off with AI
adoption. So this is exploding in health care
right now. 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 feel like anything
that folks wanna talk about right now or
everything that people wanna talk about is,
ambient listening. So I'm not gonna pick ambient
listening, because I feel like everyone else has
probably talked to you about that already.
So I love the
work that we're doing in the audio
and video environment
where we are
both,
listening
and watching
various events
and then using the video
or the information,
the artificial intelligence that comes off of that
to help us become more efficient
and or
watch
various
activities that are happening
around our patients or with our patients.
And I think at a high level,
it's anything
where we're getting that huge payout in
managing complexity
and mountains of information
and giving time back, whether it's time to
the patients, whether it's time to the care
team, whether it's time to the burned out
physician.
The good news is there's so many opportunities
within AI,
to really maximize both of those fronts. And
I think that that's really what we're looking
for when we're choosing our strategic portfolio
is how can we stay on top of
this immense complexity,
and then do so in a way that
provides a better experience for our patients in
our care genes.
The other thing that I really like is,
the work we're doing around predictive analytics,
where we're able to actually take now this
big amount of data, this enormous,
plethora
of things that happen every minute, every second,
every moment, every medication,
every vital sign, and actually using that information
to predict whether or not our patients are
gonna have a fall, gonna have a readmission,
going to need a next level of care
in a particular location that's gonna help them
and using the information
to guide us
rather than just judgment. Because, again, you get
so much information that comes in
on
a, momentary
basis
that it's it's hard for our physicians to
keep up with the,
bazillion things that are in the medical record,
both from today's visit, but also in the
hundreds
of pages of medical records that have happened
in the last month, year, and 10 years.
Yeah. I mean, that's the reality. Right? There's
so much already there. So the spinning straw
in the gold is really the promise of
a lot of these tools, to take what's
already in there, but just curate it,
create insights, and put it in the right
hands at the right time,
with the right human in the loop, in
order to really leverage the power of what
we already have.
And so switching gears just slightly,
I would love to kind of
talk about data. So healthcare leaders are managing
greater volumes of data and more devices across
a growing number of care settings.
And in this complex environment, what clinical integration
tools or practices are you seeing drive improvements
in patient outcomes?
And I'd love for you to share specific
examples of these.
We're doing, work with one of your companies
here, health data analytics,
HDAI,
that is
working it pulls in all of our data.
It then twins it against,
like, 20 to 30 years of Medicare records
as well as all payer claims data and
then uses that information
to actually give a,
set of scores to our doctors, likelihood of
mortality, likelihood of being readmitted, likelihood
of,
having long lengths of stay.
It gives them insight about things that are
in the medical record that may or may
not have been missed. Or,
in patients like this, you may not be
looking for these conditions.
In that case, it serves that information up
to our clinicians
and
basically provides it to them in a a
almost a dashboard like reporting and says, hey.
These are things you may wanna keep an
eye out for. It's provided
huge amounts of our doctor
information to our doctors presurgery
to get these patients prepared and talk about
what they need to do to optimize these
patients and or whether or not it's really
a good idea to do surgery on these
patients. Can they survive it?
Yeah. And I think and, I mean, there's
so many examples. Another one is we have
a wearable device that all patients wear when
they come in the hospital, and it's collecting
high frequency vital sign data. But rather than
just deliver this whole new mountain of data,
it's at it's applying algorithms and protocols against
that data and leveraging a central team
so that we're integrating that insight,
across our system to, again, allow better care,
but actually less burdensome time on the care
teams trying to provide that care.
We're also leveraging cameras in our operating rooms
and in our inpatient rooms that have AI
capabilities that, again, allow us to really consider
data around
throughput
and efficiency
and,
corridors of care to be able to drive
improvements in, our hospital and in our operating
room experience.
And with greater volumes of data and AI
adoptions, our IT teams
have become a lot more critical. So I
would love to hear how you believe that
healthcare organizations can better support both IT and
clinical teams as they carry out innovation efforts.
And what do you see as the most
common pitfalls here?
Yeah. I think we are certainly one of
the new groups of people that are burdening
IT,
and asking a lot of them. And we're
asking a lot of them because now as
we put in
4,000 cameras into our infrastructure,
building out this Internet of things,
in both the patient care rooms and or
sending the patients home with them,
we're doing a lot. And the in what
we found is the infrastructure of our organization
had to change
from one that was kind of an on
prem,
you know, boxes in a data center to
one that was really
would
have the ability to to have
multiple points of use,
both in the hospital environment and home, and
that's that's a challenge.
I think one of the pitfalls is is
siloing and also sort of managing new complexities
of contracts
and data management
and technologies that some folks haven't seen before.
And so really to try to improve that,
recruiting and fostering
people and a culture where your IT leaders
get genuinely excited about the clinical
side and improving the care experience. And you
have clinical leaders who are genuinely interested and
willing to learn about IT where they can
kinda come together and maybe not be fluent
in one another's language,
but at least make an effort to be
conversational
in one another's language to really help you
integrate,
across the teams because
Roberta's right. The the complexity of these of
these new endeavors is great. So you need
you need all the people in the village
leaning in to try to solve a common
problem.
And as we wrap up our conversation,
I would love to hear your top piece
of advice for health care leaders as they
prepare for further advancements in technology and greater
demands for care.
You know, our health care leaders and our
innovation leaders as well as IT need to
be bold and not back down.
And if we all kind of are out
there being bold and not backing down when
it gets difficult,
then we will push through and drive transformation
in our industry.
And I would just say beware of the
pilot. It's okay to start small, but you
really do need to be dreaming and planning
big,
in order to move beyond,
the death of a 1,000 paper cut pilots.
Wonderful. Well, Roberta and Sarah, 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.