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Hello, and welcome to the Becker's Health Care
podcast recorded at the 9th annual health IT,
digital health, and RCM conference in Chicago. I'm
joined today by Laura Petula, deputy CIO at
the department of veteran affairs.
Laura, to get us started, can you please
share a bit about yourself, your role, your
background, and your organization?
Sure. Thank you so much for inviting me
here today. And, as you said, my name
is Laura Petula, and I am the deputy
chief information officer for the Department of Veterans
Affairs, the electronic health record modernization integration office,
also known as EHRM IO.
I love to say that I am a
geek. I'm a nerd, and I love being
weird, and I embrace every single one of
those,
characteristics.
I also love people, and I love to
serve. And that's what draw what draws me
a lot to the department.
I've been in the IT space for over
30 years, and over 20 of them, I
spent at the Department of Veteran Affairs serving
our beloved veterans.
So as a self proclaimed nerd, somebody obviously
with your ear down, like, listening to what's
going on in the industry, you know, as
I'm sure you're aware, AI adoption is exploding
in health care.
In your view, what's the most significant or
promising application of this technology right now,
And, how is this informing your organization's innovation
strategy?
So AI has woven its threads into the
fabric of our lives since 19 fifties or
or a little bit before that too.
But what sets this era apart is the
depth and breadth of its integration in today's
world.
We have huge challenges today in diverse environments,
and so I think that AI is allowing
us to help break some of those challenges
and barriers.
Like, for example, telehealth has brought them a
lot of good changes. We can now reach
people who are in rural communities who would
have had to travel a 100 miles or
more in order to receive care. So accessibility
and some equity has also been brought to
the table because of AI. And it has
had a a profound impact on individuals
like me.
I have a chronic condition, and AI helps
me monitor that and and and be able
to coach myself to ensure that I am
healthy. And many of these are are rule
based products and services as well.
But the impact of AI in health care
extends beyond just reaching individual experiences.
As I said, it is about breaking barriers,
and also,
I anticipate that the growth will continue.
Some of the three concepts that I usually
that I have
is,
I talk about empowering
patients,
sense making of data,
and access to all patients. And so we
will be empowering with AI capabilities and more,
not just AI, AI in the general term,
it's empowering patients to participate actively
in their health environment, as well as their
healthcare team. And since making of data and
information so their patients, clinicians,
and administrators
can focus on defining the best strategies for
the best healthcare outcomes, and finally,
access to all patients,
right, That regardless of their socioeconomic
background or factors, location, or otherwise,
we can be removing some of those physical
barriers to health care and allow them to
have a healthy life.
So
on a daily basis, health care leaders are
managing greater and greater volumes of data on
more devices across a growing number of health
care settings and populations.
In this complex environment, what clinical data integration
tools or practices are you seeing drive improvements
in patient outcomes and operations, and operations? And
can you share an example or 2?
So data is everywhere Mhmm. Today, and I
love data. Right? Data has been one of
the things that I've focused my career
for for many years.
And I believe that the greatest opportunities for
data might be,
is is how do we make it useful
to clinicians, especially in the health care space.
Right? How do we make it useful to
clinicians,
and how do we, also make it meaningful
and with the highest quality that we can
provide?
So as you know, we're implementing an electronic
health record a modernized electronic health record,
and, we currently manage around 70 terabytes of
information. So if you can think about that,
it's about maybe 23,000
high definition movies, you know, that can could
get stored there every day. We have that.
We manage that. We curate that. We make
out of the quality, and we make sense
of that data for for our clinicians. And
one of those examples that we have in
VA is, a a product, a combined product
that we have, we call it VX 130,
which is all of the information from our
own medical centers. We have a 130 different
medical centers.
We put it out into one big place,
and that's what we call VX 130.
And that information
now is being used for large language models.
We curate it. We we we also bring
it and make it avail available to our
our physicians
through a tool that we call Google.
And Google basically allows you to
search a patient and from that patient and
all the these notes that you and it
is across all of the longitudinal health record,
and it tells you exactly
what, diagnoses, what node, what lab result
was exactly that around that talked about die
diabetes. So that's making information
meaningful
to clinicians so that they don't have to
be sifting through all sorts of data for
hours to find out any of this information.
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 in this area?
Well, so
so with VA,
we have a long history of many decades
of innovation.
So for me, one of my main goals
as well is to make sure that not
only people love the electronic health record, which
is in itself a challenge because nobody loves
their their EHRs,
but I also wanna make sure that innovation
is at the forefront of anything that we
do. Not because we're implementing a a a
COTS product are we going to stop innovating.
We will need to continue to see
how do we become the those enablers for
the organization
so that we can continue to ensure
VA has that,
innovation
spirit and continues to deliver innovative solutions for
our veterans and our clinical workforce.
Out of curiosity, when it comes to adopting
some of these
newer technologies or innovations,
how does that differ at, like, an organization
like the VA versus a traditional health system?
So if you can imagine, VA, we have,
like I said, about a 132
different medical centers. Right? The way that we
grew up, and this goes to culture,
in VA, we were all different organizations,
let's say
50 years ago, right, 40 years ago, where
every one of those
facilities grew up with their own culture, grew
up with a
a baseline of a product,
but they each customized it to serve their
needs. Like our our facilities,
they know or whatever comes in because of
the the work that we do, they might
have come in when the the granddaughter was
being born, and now the granddaughter is in
college. Right? So all that cultural,
understanding of who the veteran is, we need
to take into consideration when you're implementing a
modernized technology.
You wanna make sure that you preserve the
culture of caring and the culture of making
sure that the patient is always at the
center of everything that we do while at
the same time making sure that our clinical
staff can really transform the way that that
they're doing work. So
this is a massive undertaking,
but the clinical community is really the one
that is really changing the practices and standardizing
the practices. So the clinical practices are changing.
They are evolving.
They're look looking and using new technologies.
They're looking and and understanding
what other concepts can they bring to the
table.
So I don't know that it is
markedly different than a very large organization,
that is trying to, change the the main
difference, I think, is that
VA grew from,
if you would, islands
of medical centers that they started to come
in through the years. We started to centralize,
and now we're starting to really modernize many
of those technologies.
Okay. I like that answer.
What would you say your top piece of
advice for health care leaders
is as they prepare for, you know, further
advancements in technology and greater demands for care?
I would say that one of the main
advices I would give
is be diligent
and be very, very disciplined.
You wanna make sure that as you're
bringing a new technology, as you transform an
entire organization,
that you know exactly
who you're doing it with,
not who you're doing it to, right, but
who you're doing it with, how you're doing
it, that you do have
groups of people that are working with you
to make these changes.
Make sure that you have a really good
process of identifying any changes,
and documenting the changes and how those changes
are going to be,
used. One of the things that I've talked
to all of my folks is always
you know, many people look as to what
are the resources you're gonna use, what are
the activities that you're gonna do, and what
are the outputs that you're gonna produce.
We always want to extend that. We don't
wanna get get stuck on the output. We
wanna make sure that we actually look as
to what is the outcomes that we're providing
and what is the value that we're delivering.
And so if you have that in mind,
I think that your focus will always be
towards doing the right things right and delivering
the right things to the right folks. Mhmm.
Mhmm.
Well, Well, Laura, thank you so much again
for joining us today on the Becker's Health
Care podcast. It was an absolute pleasure, and
I I hope you have a lovely rest
of your day. Oh, thank you so very
much.