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Hello, and welcome to the Becker's Health Care
9th annual health IT digital health and RCM
conference.
I'm joined today by Ann Cavallari,
chief medical information officer at SSM Health. Ann,
thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for having me. To get us
started, can you please share a bit about
your background and, your current role at your
organization?
Sure. I am trained as an emergency medicine
physician, moved into an information
informatics role,
almost around 8 or 9 years now. The
past 6 of which were at SSM Health.
It's a nonprofit Catholic health care system that's
based out of St. Louis, but spans
across the Midwest in Wisconsin, Southern Illinois,
Missouri, and Oklahoma.
Well, AI adoption is exploding in health care
currently.
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?
I will say the clinicians always wanna talk
about ambient documentation,
which is blowing up in interest
and utility.
I still think the technology
is best in automating certain functions that humans
have trouble doing repetitively.
That is in the imaging space,
being a parrot on a provider's shoulder to
have overread
insights into imaging studies and or in the
pathology world where you're looking through slide after
slide after slide, looking for different cancer diagnoses,
cancer cells that the human eye can catch,
but algorithms
don't fatigue in the way the human eye
or human mind can. So I think some
of those
applications
will be
huge and institutions,
in the years to come.
So on a daily basis, health care leaders
are managing greater volumes of data and more
devices across a growing number of 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 can you
share an example or 2?
So I think we have to take care
in our
lust for
the AI and digital
in making sure we have
definitions of the problem we want to solve
and apply the technology to it. Too many
people want just technology for technology's
sake rather than really filling a niche.
And one of our smaller innovations is using
a
imaging tool to preread
radiology, CT scans, MRIs
to look for
more dangerous
diagnoses
that one could miss,
like pulmonary embolism. And then not only do
we have the technology to do that, we
craft workflows around that to support the technology.
So it isn't just the technology
standing alone expecting to do all forms of
health care
management,
but you you it is working within
a larger workflow of clinicians,
operations,
and consult services.
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 here?
So
as long as my bosses and my bosses'
bosses aren't listening to this,
I would love to see
some
education
of senior leadership teams
that are not in tech or clinical,
where they often struggle or don't have a
lot of interest in tech and often have
more
conspiratorial
attitudes sometimes or mistrust
of what we are trying to do in
tech. And every year I have to take
all these modules within my health care organization.
What is Stark law? What is compliance? What
is HIPAA? I'd love to see some of
those teams also have to take what is
tech? What is AI?
Where are the dangers? Where are the benefits?
Mhmm.
And that's that's what I'd love to see
for better transformation of those services.
So with your experience, what's your top piece
of advice for health care leaders as they
prepare for, further advancements in technology and greater
demands for care?
Be choose wisely is what I would say.
In that
too many
of the tech spaces are feeding very niche,
very singular
services,
and
you can't look at that across the health
care system and make that scale. The cost
is too high. So once again, what is
the problem you're trying to solve? Do you
have support around that from operations and clinicians
to apply the technology
and support the technology long term?
And
if it is
acting poorly, performing poorly, take it out. That's
the other thing. We never wanna take things
out when they aren't performing well.
So that's what I would say about that.
Well, before we wrap up today, it's, do
you have any final thoughts you'd like to
leave with our listeners?
I would like to say,
as we infuse more and more technology,
let's let humans do human things and technology
do technology and automated things, and that will
bring wellness and humanity back into medicine.
And thank you so much for joining us
today on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. It's been
an absolute pleasure, and I hope you have
a lovely rest of your day. Thank you
much for this opportunity. You have a great
day also. Thank you.