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This is Laura Derna with the Becker's Healthcare
podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by
Shaqueb Akhtar,
senior vice president and chief digital and information
officer at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Shaqueb, it's
a pleasure to have you on the podcast
today.
Hi, Laura. Great to be here. Thanks for
having me.
Now I'm excited for our conversation because I
know you do some really amazing things at
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and, certainly,
I'm looking forward to getting your perspective on
how things are growing and evolving for the
future. But before we dive into that discussion,
can you tell us a little bit more
about Children's Hospital Philadelphia and what makes it
unique?
Sure.
You know, I think the Children's Hospital Philadelphia
is a very unique place in the world.
You know, our mission is to really
bring life changing research to the communities that
and the patients that we
serve and to drive breakthroughs. So I think
what makes CHOP really unique is just the
unbelievable,
research,
clinic and clinical expertise
that,
and and and the centering that we have
around patient care.
Those three things together really drive a have
driven a long history of
strong clinical care outcomes and driving innovation and
breakthroughs,
in in in developing new research therapies
or pediatric care.
And so it's really special place to be.
I'm surrounded by very intelligent people every day
and do my work, and that inspires me
continues to inspire me every day.
That's great to hear. It definitely sounds like
an amazing environment to be part of providing
care for such an important community.
Now I'm curious. From the last year or
so, what are some of the accomplishments you're
most proud of?
Yeah. I'm glad you didn't ask me to
just, stick to a singular.
You know, the demand for what we call
our team here, digital technology services, has just
been, you know, exponentially increasing.
And so there are a few things that
I think, you know, I'm very proud of,
with the work that the team has done
and accomplished last year. One is,
we completed our epic refuel. So this is,
essentially,
going back to foundation epic. We achieved
honor roll,
and then also goal stars level eight with
that. So that's, you know, standardized a lot
of our clinical operational workflows
and helped folks save a ton of time.
And the work that you're doing introduced new
new automation features
and, streamlined the workflows across the enterprise.
Second is our digital care models work. So
this is work in which we're essentially trying
to
provide, virtual care services to our to our
patients. And so,
we have a we have built a remote
patient management program
that now has close to 9,000,
children enrolled. It allows them to essentially get
discharged from the hospital
earlier, go home earlier,
have their care needs taken care from at
home. We've seen some amazing results in terms
of reduction in length of stay,
reduction in readmission with that work, and a
couple of even life saving catches,
which is always just really satisfying to see
that that work is making a difference.
And now we're expanding that, you know, to
be broader than just remote patient management, virtual
care, virtual nursing.
We launched that, program,
this past year as well and and things
of it, and now we're planning on scaling
it.
From a data analytics perspective, which if anybody
knows me, that's, you know, always been close
to my heart.
We I'm very proud of our team. We
just celebrated our complete or celebrating this week,
actually, our completion
of the mic the migration of our data
analytics platform, which we affectionately call Helix to
Snowflake.
And so that was a incredible amount of
work to essentially look at all of our
data assets,
validate
their quality, refactor them, and then migrate our
data warehouse as well as our,
data assets to leverage this new platform,
which we think it will now drive, you
know, faster data and analytics, data and better
data driven decision making across the enterprise.
And then last but not least is the
progress that we made with AI. They, you
know, we've done an incredible amount of work
in that space over the last year. It's
been enormous focus, like, for us,
like, for so many others.
We have rolled out what we call chop
GPT, and it has now,
a little over, I believe, 900 users. We
may have, increased that a bit. But, essentially,
it's our version of chat GPT that's compliant.
We've also been on the kind of the
forefront with Epic to release some of their
generative AI,
functionality. We were the first organization in the
country to scale what's called ART
by Epic, which is essentially
generative AI drafting responses to patient messages, which
is a huge source of
administrative
burden for our clinicians, and this allows them
to just respond to those patient notes faster
with a little bit less of a burden
than them having to analyze the note. We're
now we are also going live this week
with something called note summarization, which allows
is is generative
AI summarizing many notes,
for clinicians in Epic and allows them to
to do their reviews of patient charts faster
and,
look through the patient history
and potentially,
discover things that are really helpful as they
as they care for their patients. So a
lot of progress that I'm really proud of
across all of our teams.
That's amazing to hear. You know, certainly awesome
to have that kind of results with, the
work you're doing with Epic in those clinical
workflows and then some of the other digital
care models as well as seeing really, really
strong results on the clinical side as well
as
making things more efficient for the caregivers. And
then I love your synopsis of everything you're
doing with AI. I I know that's such
a huge,
huge priority for so many health systems right
now is figuring out how to leverage it
in the right way and incorporate it strongly
within their broader
teams. And so the idea of CHOP, GPT,
and and everything you're doing there is is
really cool. Thank you for sharing that with
us. Now,
amazing things you were able to accomplish in
the last year. What is happening ahead? Like,
where do you see some of the big
growth opportunities for your team in the next
twelve months or so?
Yeah. I think it's a good question. I
think that, there is going to be no
shortage of opportunity. Our space,
both in terms of technology and health care
are evolving so quickly. You know, I see
that,
whether it's AI, automation, machine learning, other forms
of AI,
health care is,
continues to be a,
an industry that's really ripe for disruption,
and can really benefit from these tools, and
in our in our modern technology. So I
think
few things, three areas of focus, which I
think, are big opportunities for the team. One
is I think we're experiencing
an AI and automation moment in health care
where
health care systems
are now looking at AI and automation as
a potential source to,
solve some of the larger problems we're experiencing
in the industry. For example,
you know, decreased payer re reimbursement,
decrease revenue. How do we use AI automation
to capture more revenue,
and drive efficiency across the teams to help
reduce some of the labor costs that we
see? So,
I think that there is a large AI
automation moment that our teams are gonna lean
heavily into. How do we what is the
state of AI? Where are the tools that
are proven to to provide
really strong ROI
for our caregivers,
our operations,
operational folks in it across our entire workforce
to really drive ROI.
So that is an enormous opportunity for our
team to lean into,
learn those tools,
expand and implement them in use cases that
are really
powerful for our health system.
The second is, I think, the cloud opportunity.
You know, we've seen many other health systems
move to cloud over the last few years,
but now even Epic, you know, providing
their platform to be available in in,
in multiple,
cloud service providers. And so we're gonna have
a large focus on migrating many of our
workloads
from our current data centers to the cloud,
which is a significant shift and will help
us reduce the cost of technology to the
health system so those dollars can be deployed
elsewhere,
but also just increase our ability to scale
and at the speed that we can deploy
new technology. So we are very focused on
a cloud migration without a very large cloud
migration that'll take place over the next couple
of years.
And then last, I think this is applicable
to my team, but almost, you know, every
other tech team in the world right now,
which is reskilling.
You know, given
the, new technologies and,
you know, how fast
technology is evolving, especially,
the AI,
space,
there's a there's a large opportunity, I think,
for all of us and to be continuous
learners and to reskill ourselves to meet,
to learn these tools so that we can
be more effective and support our organizations better
in the long term. So we have a
very strong focus on
creating a what we're calling a digital literacy
curriculum across the enterprise. So give you one
example. We released an intel intelligent automation course.
It's available to all 20,000 people at shop
today, and it covers, you know, the basics
of AI, automation, etcetera.
We plan on expanding that to a number
of different courses, and we're establishing a specific
reskilling program for the digital technology services team
to learn these technologies and and,
and be able to implement them safely, effectively,
and at speed.
So there's a lot to do, but it's
exciting work.
Absolutely. Wow.
Just really, really amazing to hear, especially
thinking through, as you mentioned, AI moving so
quickly. And,
I love the structure you put around being
able to provide those reskilling continuous learning opportunities
for many folks across the board. I think
that's so critical in being able to keep
up with the pace of change and then,
to giving folks the ability to grow their
careers.
I'm curious. What are some of the challenges
that you're considering in navigating through right now
as well?
I think one of the biggest challenges
is, and I think this is not unique
to our teams, is the ability to prioritize.
You know, the the demand
for digital and technology
services has just
increased
dramatically,
as we see how these technologies can be
applied to help us meet our strategic objectives,
they're critical.
And so I think the largest challenge we
have is we're working across every layer of
the stack, technology and infrastructure and the migration
of the cloud I mentioned. You know,
our applications, rationalizing them to make sure we're
taking full advantage of any features that are
available within our applications.
And then, you know, kind of the top
of the stack, which is analytics,
really building analytics products that allow us to
make very strong, trusted, data driven decisions. And
the last is in this AI and automation
space, you know, really taking these tools and
applying them, which causes, you know, disruption across
the enterprise, but there's an insatiable demand. And
so I think our number one challenge is
bandwidth on the teams and prioritizing
what really matters,
and will drive and move the needle,
towards the goals that CHOP has broadly and
is really critical to our strategy. I think
that's one. The other the other large challenge
I see is just the change management
associated
with implementing these technologies. You know, this is
no longer
IT
implementing,
you know, a new
piece of infrastructure or a new piece of
code.
It is when you're talking about AI and
automation, for example, we it is fundamentally going
to change how
clinical and operational teams are doing their work,
and those folks are really busy
doing what they do best, which is caring
for patients. And so
finding time in their schedules to help educate
them, train them, work with them, and partner
with them to say, what is the impact
to your operation
if we were to deploy this tool? And
it has to happen early on. It has
to happen during those projects, and it has
to happen at the end to make sure
that we've deployed those technologies safely and effectively.
So I think operational readiness and change management
is going to be a challenge and something
we're preparing for
by creating playbooks with our HR partners and
others
that utilize change management
frameworks to help preplan,
track how we're doing during, and then, you
know, attract the impact of some of this
technology
on our staff and our workflows to make
sure we're really going in with eyes wide
open. But, you know, I think bandwidth on
my teams,
as well as bandwidth for operations and then
really being strong in the change management space
is gonna be a challenge in the next
twelve to twenty four months.
It makes a lot of sense especially given,
what we've talked about in terms of all
the different projects you have upcoming in in
some of the cool things as well. I
can imagine to continue to optimize and find
ways to,
to really make the best use out of
them throughout the organization.
Now before we wrap up here, what is
the number one thing that you're doing to
set CHOP up for long term success?
I think one of the one of the
the things that we're doing that's really important
is making sure that all the work we
do in DTS is value driven for the
organization. It is directly linked to you know,
this is something we've been, really focused on
to ensure that it's, the work that we
do in technology is not for the sake
of implementing technology,
but it is truly connected to our enterprise
strategy,
our strategic objectives,
and it and the outcomes that we, as
an organization,
track and that are really important to us
from a
operational clinical performance standpoint. And so
our work means, essentially, what we're doing, whether
it's our AI strategy or automation center excellence
or even digital literacy, which I mentioned, each
one of those things maps directly to our
enterprise strategy.
And and we are now developing outcome metrics
that would essentially reflect
the impact of the work we're doing
directly
to the enterprise metrics that we care about
most. So I think that's the best service
we can provide to connect our work directly
to
our our mission, which is research, education,
and providing the best clinical care,
while also, you know, driving efficient and effective
operations. And so we are highly focused on
making sure our strategy is connected to that,
and we're measuring the impact of the work.
I think that's the number one thing we
can do.
Makes a lot of sense. Shaqib, thank you
so much for joining us on the podcast
today. This has been a really fun conversation,
and we look forward to connecting with you
again soon. Thanks for having me.