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Hello, and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast
recorded live at the 9th annual Health IT
Digital Health and RCM conference. I'm joined today
by Jay Scott Smitherman,
chief medical information officer of ambulatory services at
Providence.
Jay, to get us started, can you please
share a bit about yourself, your background, and
your role at your organization?
Hi. Scott Smitherman.
I serve Providence as the CMIO for their
employed medical group, the you know, in the
outpatient space. We're, you know, large organization on
the West Coast, about 10,000 employed doctors.
And I have responsibility
for,
you know, all things related to the EMR
and the outpatient space.
So AI adoption is exploding right now in
health care. In your view,
what's the most significant or promising adoption of
this technology right now, and how is this
informing your organization's innovation strategy?
Well, clearly here, one of the biggest hot
topics is ambient documentation.
I we at Providence have been piloting and
using,
Nuance's product, DAX,
and we have gotten up to
almost a 1000 users now,
20,000 encounters per week.
And this is really transforming,
how physicians do their documentation. You know,
everybody's talking about physician burnout,
and, you know, there's so many technologies that
nip around the edges, try to remove a
click or 2 here or there. But this
here's a, technology that's really transformational
in terms of taking a big piece of
clinicians work that time spent making their note
and and and taking it almost entirely off
their plate.
So on a daily basis, health care leaders
such as yourself 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, do you have an example or 2
you can share?
You know, we're really excited about the potential
for
AI to help
in all of these complex workflows. One of
the biggest dry, drivers of doctor burnout right
now is in basket. In basket messages coming
in. You know?
Physicians are being buried under requests.
We've rolled out AI tools to help categorize
those messages as they come in and then
help drive workflows,
so that fewer messages need the physician's attention.
And the ones that do are better worked
up and,
and, you know, can be processed with just
a single touch. And we've seen, the application
of this tool
cut our response times for in half,
and then along how long it takes us
to respond to a patient and how many
messages a medical assistant can process per hour,
etcetera.
So how can health care organizations
better support IT and clinical teams as they
carry out innovation efforts, and what is what
are some of the common pitfalls here?
One of the most common pitfalls I see
is, you know, seeing a shiny object, a
a a cool piece of technology
that doesn't necessarily
solve a clinical problem or a a an
operational problem that we have,
or is at least is not on the
top of your list. And so the close
partnership between your innovation team,
informatics,
and operations
to decide on what are the highest priority
pieces of technology to pursue,
because, you know, time spent pursuing a lower
priority means that the the the bigger ones,
aren't getting addressed.
Mhmm. Doesn't mean you shouldn't keep an eye
out for what, you know, what's happening in
the industry,
what what new things are being developed,
but you need to make sure that you're
focused on your organization's top priorities in these
tough times. Perfect. So, you know, being in
your role in an ambulatory setting, how does
that impact your view of, you know, the
adoption of new technologies? And are there any
sort of, like, you know, AI tools or
technologies in the ambulatory space that you might
be really excited about coming down the pipeline
5, 10 years that, you know, might not
be as exciting to people outside of the
ambulatory space?
I don't know if it's a difference between
ambulatory or acute, but what I'm really excited
about you know, I I talked a little
bit about ambient documentation
Mhmm. And and getting the doctor's notes done.
And I I see that as just the
first step. What I'm what really excites me
yes. That takes takes the documentation off the
physician, and that's a huge burden reduction.
But, you know, what we can do in
the future, now that we have an AI
listening to the doctor patient conversation in real
time
and serve up clinical decision support, serve up,
you know, tools in the EMR,
help with coding, help with HCC guidance, all
of these things on that are, you know,
are crucial
and and really care transformational besides just burden
reducing,
that were that you know, all of this
that was science fiction 3 years ago. Mhmm.
And now, you know, while not there yet
and nobody, you know, is no you know,
we all can see a clear pathway
with tools that exist
now that these things are going to happen.
And so over the next 3 to 5
years, I am really excited to, you know,
get Ambient in everybody's hands
and and then take the next step of
of integrating it deeply with the EMR,
bringing in contextualized
data where, you know, the the AI knows
things about the patient beyond what it just
what it heard Right. And then, you know,
then taking the next step of clinical guidance.
So, you know, in your role and in
your experience and in what you've learned over
the years, what's the biggest piece of advice
you would have for other health care leaders
as they prepare for, you know, some of
these further advancements in technology and greater demands
of care? You know, it's crucial to have
the clinicians who do the work at the
table with you as you're evaluating new technologies,
new initiatives,
that, you know, you really need to make
sure you really understand the the problem,
you know, sending your your COO or your
CFO to a to a to a meeting
like this. How lovely though it may be,
if you don't truly kind of understand the
problem at the ground level. I I think
that the folks who are gonna be successful
in the future are not just the ones
who invest in the right technologies, but are
able to truly integrate that
all the way down to the you know,
from the patient level when they're you know,
patient interaction all the way down to the
the physician seeing the patient.
And, you know, everybody talks about integration, but
what that really means and is it smooth.
And those are the folks who are gonna
be successful who are able to understand it,
you know, soup to nuts. Well, doctor Smitherman,
thank you so much for taking the time
to join us today. But before I let
you go, do you have any final thoughts
or advice you'd like to leave with our
listeners?
No. The the future looks bright for health
care. I think, a lot of, you know,
current challenges, but
I I'm excited to be in this role
right now to to have a chance to
participate in this kind of AI revolution, and,
you know, just excited to see what tomorrow
looks like. Well, I love the excitement coming
from you. So thank you again for joining
us today. I hope you have a lovely
rest of your day. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank
you.