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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and we are recording live at the
9th Annual Health IT Digital Health and RCM
Conference.
I am joined by doctor Jim Blum this
morning who is the chief health information officer
at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. So,
doctor Blum, thanks so much for joining me.
Would love to have you start off by
introducing yourself a little bit further. Well, thank
you. Thank you for having me this morning.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So I'm the chief health information officer at
the University of Iowa
and,
predominantly, I'm charged with making sure that we
acquire the best technologies possible for the care
delivery in our in our system.
And that may be everything for making us
more efficient to improving our quality,
to help making our providers' lives better. So
it really spans the gamut
of,
the typical chief,
chief health information officer role.
Wonderful. Well, Iowa is my alma mater, so
go Hawks. Glad to have you on this
morning. We'll see we'll see how the football
season goes. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't
know my I don't I'm not not holding
my breath this year, unfortunately.
No. Me either, but we can hope for
the best. Yes.
Alright. Well, let's start our conversation with AI
adoption. It's exploding right now in health care.
So I'd love to hear what the most
significant or promising application
of this technology is right now in your
view. And how is this informing your organization's
innovation strategy?
Yeah. So we've really invested very heavily in
AI in the last 12 months. Last year,
I think I had the privilege of joining
you folks and said this was gonna be
the year, and it it is the year.
There is no doubt. So in this year,
we've unleashed,
a torrent of AI technologies across our enterprise.
Everything from predictive analytics that we've both purchased
and acquired to look at patient deterioration,
identify patients that we could potentially intervene on
and improve their care,
all the way through addressing provider burnout with
ambient technologies and chart binding technologies to help
make it much easier to assess the patient.
I think the early investment where we're really
gonna see
the most significant impact in health care right
now is on that later end. We've got
really good data coming out of Iowa demonstrating
just how much these technologies reduce provider burnout
in a very short period of time.
And I think that's a very welcome change
in health care after the past 4 very
turbulent years.
Absolutely. And switching tracks just a little bit
toward data.
Currently, healthcare leaders are managing greater volumes of
data and more devices across a growing number
of care settings.
So this is a complex environment, and I'd
love to hear what clinical integration tools or
practices you're seeing drive improvements in patient outcomes.
And I'd love to hear specific examples of
that. Yeah. So we have really taken a
focus on centering our patient data around our
EHR.
So our approach right now is to really
bring we're at Epic shop, is to bring
everything we can into that Epic environment and
use it wherever we can to analyze and
present that data.
We are making a shift in sort of
our advanced analytics.
We are moving,
we we were a Tableau shop for advanced
visualizations.
We're moving more to Power BI, which I
think is a welcome change for better integration
with the Microsoft suite of tools.
We also have found a way to leverage
our internal
super high performance computing capabilities at the University
of Iowa to really do a lot of
model development.
That is,
I think gonna play very nicely with the
soon to be released Togito
cloud from EPIC that will enable us to
really integrate that data,
use SQL for more real time type works
as opposed to the traditional
modalities that are required for EPIC to do
real time analytics.
And as we discuss adoption of AI and
growing data and new technologies,
our IT teams become critical. So how can
health care organizations better support both their IT
and clinical teams as they carry out innovation
efforts? And what are the common pitfalls that
you've seen? Yeah. I I think
I think it's the key thing you said
there is integration. Right? The
my observation is that in health care, we've
done a even though there are people like
me sitting there trying to straddle the fence
of,
of being
a tech person and being a clinician,
there's a lot of
misunderstanding
as to from the clinician side as to
what's actually possible
and a lot of misunderstanding on the IT
side as to what's actually useful.
And so really when you get those teams
together, and I think when you put the
user and the pay whoever that user is,
whether it's the clinician,
it's the patient, it's one of the ancillary
services that's that's,
being that's interfacing with the IT system.
When you get those people that are the
users at this
at the
at the point of innovation,
and you really design the systems around them,
that's where you wind up with the maximal
impact.
The thing is you need to have those
users cognizant of what is possible. Otherwise, you
spend a bunch of time talking about how
unicorns are gonna come and fairies are gonna
make life wonderful and those types of things.
And and someday, I'll have gold delivered from
Fort Knox to my house. But until that
day,
we gotta understand what's actually possible before you
can go ahead and design the solution.
Absolutely. And as we wrap up the conversation
today, I'd love to hear your top piece
of advice for healthcare leaders as they prepare
for these further advancements
in technology and the greater demands for care.
I think I think where health care leaders
can really make a difference is making sure
they have an educated clinician workforce
that is able to sit and do that
design with the IT teams.
Also, I think we've had a historical approach
to the way that we implement technologies
that a lot of organizations wanna pilot things
for long periods of time.
And I think there's
that's a very justifiable thing to do. But
once you make the decision to invest,
spending months rolling out a technology
just is too long. Right? Months to years.
And so finding ways to shorten that time
to integration
is really key. That's how you maximize that
investment in your investment dollars.
Spending, you know, 1,000,000 of dollars a year
on contracts where you're only partially implemented doesn't
do anyone a favor.
Absolutely. Well, doctor Blum, thanks so much for
joining me this morning on the Becker's healthcare
podcast.
Again, we're live at the 9th annual health
IT digital health and RCM conference. Thanks so
much. Thank you.