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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 am currently joined by Afroz Hafeez, who
is a manager of telemedicine at Rush University
Medical Center. So thank you for taking the
time to be here, and would love to
have you just introduce yourself a little bit
further as we get started.
Thank you so much. Pleasure speaking on Beth
Becker's podcast, and appreciate being here at the
conference. It's been a phenomenal opportunity.
My name is doctor Efrzafiz. I'm a leading
telemedicine at Rush University Medical Center. It's been
a transformative year working with the well rounded
team to launch multiple services within virtual care,
and it's a phenomenal opportunity to look at
how care could be directed towards community, especially
coming in from on the west side where
we have significant health disparities as well. So
outcomes is of our, utmost importance for our
patients and that quality of service.
Wonderful. Well, to get our conversation started here,
I'd love to begin with AI. Adoption of
this is obviously exploding in health care, and
it's huge in the telemedicine space.
So 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?
I think beginning with our strategy,
our committee that's working on developing out innovative
integration, AI tools, We look at what are
the the gaps of care at the current
moment and what we could do
to have that care seamless for our patients
and to improve that patient experience
and have that provider usage much more focused
on quality of that care. Beginning with, you
know, from an AI angle, we are, looking
at integrating a chatbot,
essentially a as a clinical symptom check checker
to give that point of direction for patients,
whether it be virtual care or in person
setting, as well as what type of virtual
services based on those symptoms appropriately. As of
right now, we have virtual urgent care, virtual
specialty care, and virtual primary care launched. And,
we're scaling across the board amongst the specialties.
And we hope to land the patient appropriately
as we kind of integrate that chatbot.
And shifting just slightly into the data side
of things, currently, health care leaders are managing
greater volumes of data and more devices on
a growing number of care settings,
and this has become a very complex environment.
So what clinical data integration tools or practices
are you seeing drive improvements in patient outcomes?
Well, yeah, being observant using data analytical tools
ranging from Maestro to Visian, I think we
identify what those utilization numbers are, where where
our disparities of cares might be, and where
we can essentially have that PI in our
operational effectiveness as well. It gives us an
opportunity to leverage what types of tools we
could substitute and where we could need to
identify a little bit more of an alignment
on that virtual care setting as opposed to
pushing out access at times. Allowing for our
virtual services help close some of those gaps,
especially
with virtual care turnaround time
of same day with our patients for virtual
urgent care and virtual primary care with an
average of 3 weeks at this present time.
Specialty is also,
reasonably immediate.
So that's one way of where how we're
closing and using our data,
led being evidence based to close those gaps
appropriately.
And as we talk about increased volumes of
data,
AI integrations, all of those things, the burden
on our IT staff does grow.
And so how can health care organizations better
support both our IT and our clinical teams
as we're carrying out this innovation?
And have you seen any common pitfalls in
this area? Well, at Rush, we've taken a
well rounded scope between involving the appropriate stakeholders,
the clinical leaders, administrators, as well as our
IT resources, and recognizing what that prioritization looks
like in an evolving landscape.
There's ample opportunity for ideas ranging from Ambient
to AI and other tools. We could integrate,
you know, that's how, we've able to come
to recognize the importance of ritual care and
how we prioritize that as a transformative mission.
And, you know, successfully, we've been launching
and trying to close those gaps accordingly. So
I think how that prioritization
and that hands all hands on deck approach
is very important in this time.
Absolutely. And as we wrap up our conversation
here, I'd love to know your top piece
of advice for health care leaders as they
prepare for further advancements in technology and greater
demands for care.
I believe being evidence based and looking at
some of the pioneers in the industry, you
know, we've involved having grand rounds with some
stakeholders
across the country,
such as Stanford and others, to see what
how they've taken that transformative experience and it
really impacted care in their region. We're looking
at virtual care integration into ED as an
example,
where they've seen 70%, reduction in wait time,
and we have a crisis on our end
as as as we go across the country.
So that's certainly an opportunity of significance where
we could integrate virtual care. We were looking
at telemedicine
kiosks as maybe outpatient posts of of sorts
to land those patients and see if we
could potentially close gaps and ease the burden
off of the our ED as well. So
I think partnerships and being evidence based is,
certainly
a great direction for all health care organizations
to go in.
Well, doctor Hafeez, thanks so much for taking
the time to join me today on the
Becker's Health Care podcast. Again, we are live
at the 9th annual Health IT Digital Health
and RCM conference. Thank you.