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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and we are live at the 9th
annual health IT, digital health, and RCM conference.
I'm currently joined by John Senkler, who is
the regional CMIO at UnityPoint
Health. So, John, thanks so much for joining
me today. Would love to get us started
by having you introduce yourself a little bit
further. Yeah. Excellent. So, yeah, my name is
John Senckler. I'm a physician, regional CMO at
UnityPoint Health. Also, physician informaticist,
and my physician role is a hospitalist physician.
So I've been in that organization
for 6 years now,
and, it's going it's going great. Wonderful. Well,
thanks for taking the time to be here.
And let's start our conversation this morning with
AI. So adoption of this is exploding in
health care.
And in your view, what is the most
significant or promising application of this technology right
now? And how is that informing your organization's
innovation strategy?
Yeah. I think the most promising application of
this is to help providers get back to
the bedside.
I think that's one of the huge burdens
right now is we have all the workstations
in the patient's room, and you have the
you have you, the computer, and the patient.
And so now let's take the computer out
of it and just have you and the
patient.
I use Ambient AI on the inpatient side.
And as I use that, I'm sitting at
the patient's bedside, and I still have a
tablet that I can show the patient their
information,
but it's an educational piece. It's not because
I have to review it or write down
notes or anything like that. I'm just there
fully invested in talking to the patient.
So I think
that's the most promising thing right now.
I do see this evolving because there's so
many companies here that we've seen that have
an ambient AI solution.
That's what's gonna be that next step
to further amplify that technology, whether it's orders,
diagnoses, suggestion,
diagnosis suggestion, or or something like that. We
didn't know it yet. I think that's what's
most exciting.
And changing course just slightly to data.
We're seeing health care leaders managing greater volumes
of data and more devices across a growing
number of care settings. And this has become
a very complex environment. So what clinical data
integration tools and practices are you seeing drive
improvements in patient outcomes? And can you share
a specific example of that?
Yes.
You know, I think this is a tough
question. And, really, I think it's as important
having good teams involved. And for me personally,
in my role in the organization,
this falls into kinda more the IT side
of things, but having that good communication between
all the different teams and making sure the
right hand knows what the left hand is
doing.
And, you know, that's that's where I see
that happening. It's just more integration
and more people coming together to get definitive
plan to protect this data because there's so
much data out there and we gotta make
sure we're doing the right thing with it.
Well, you set me up perfectly for our
next question.
With the the mention of IT teams and
how that's critical with our data and with
technology adoption and innovation.
I'd love to hear how you believe that
health care organizations can can better support our
IT teams and our clinical teams as we
carry out these innovation efforts. And do you
see any common pitfalls with that?
Yeah. And, you know, I'm obviously biased being
the CMIO.
Technology is everything, and, the EHR is everything
too. And so my biggest thing is just
making sure
clinical informatics is seen and seen as a
valuable
resource and tool because
what's the most common thing we all use,
and that's the EHR.
And so acknowledging that and
making sure we're at the table when complex
decisions are being made. Like, hey. Should we
go with this vendor? Should we do this
or that?
We could be there to help provide input
so we're not making, you know, frivolous purchases
on some shiny new object.
So I think that's one of the biggest
way health organizations
can support
their clinical teams is by having informatics involved
more to help identify some of these things,
especially with the pace that all this stuff
is happening. I mean, it's crazy. Last year,
you know, I bet half these companies weren't
even here. And so
being able to keep over that pace of
change
is gonna be really important, I think.
And as we wrap our conversation up today,
I would love to hear your top piece
of advice for health care leaders as we
prepare for further advancements in technology and greater
demands for care.
I think my best piece of advice would
be don't wait.
Dip your feet in the water. They'll say,
if you don't wanna be first, but you
don't wanna be last. And so that's very
dependent on your organization too. I've seen some
organizations here that are like, they wanna be
the tip of the spear.
I'd rather be a little bit further down
on the spear, but it's great for people
who have those aggressive organizations
because it they drive innovation. And just like
I just said, you know, all these things
are changing at such a rapid speed. So
you don't wanna be left behind.
So just get started, surround yourself with good
people,
and start developing these teams and policy too.
Because policy is a huge, huge important factor
that I think often gets overlooked because these
are,
you know, powerful
new technologies that you need to have some
guidance with them too.
Absolutely. Well, John, thanks so much for joining
me this morning on the Becker's Health Care
Podcast. Again, we are live at the 9th
annual health IT, digital health, and RCM conference.
Thank you so much. Thank you.