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This is Laura Dirdo with the Becker's health
care podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined
by Praveen Chopra,
chief digital and information officer at Amplify Health.
Praveen, it's a pleasure to have you on
the podcast today.
Oh, it's a pleasure, Laura.
Absolutely. Well, I'm excited for our conversation. I
think this will be a fun one, and
and certainly there's so much happening in the
health technology space. Things are changing so quickly.
So, you know, it'll be really interesting to
hear your perspective on where we're at today
and and what you see for the future.
But before we dive in, I'm wondering, could
you tell us a little bit more about
Amplify Health and what makes it unique?
Yeah. Actually,
Amplify Health,
I think is the name is fairly new.
It came about,
through
a combination of
two very well respected health systems in the
Midwest,
Cognizant Health System and Better Health.
We serve,
Laura, over
four states, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota,
and Michigan.
We have over 11 hospitals and,
or,
one of the clinics.
So it's a combination of both urban and
rural health, majority being in the rural health
setting.
And I think what, makes us
unique
is I think about our intentional focus on
leading with love and empathy
to deliver
convenient care close to the home
with top notch quality.
So that has been our mantra, and I
think that is really, something that makes us
unique. And we are very proud of what
we do.
Well, that's amazing to hear. You know? And
certainly,
just such important and but also in ways
challenging communities, especially within
more rural health care space.
So, you know, amazing work that you're doing.
I'm curious. Could you talk a little bit
about an accomplishment that you're most proud of
from the last year or so?
Oh, absolutely. You know, I I I had
so many things going on,
and I think that I I start by
saying a quote. I think may,
we live all in interesting times.
And you've heard a lot of, hype about,
AI.
So I'm gonna talk about,
AI, but I have a different slide to
what
and why we are proud of what we've
done.
So to me, I think, if you look
about the the the goal like, there's a
lot of hype about AI and let's,
use it.
We took a different tack altogether,
and we actually think about AI and automation
in the same way.
And,
we said, instead of chasing technologies,
let's focus on problems and,
opportunities
and how does that fit in.
So one of the coolest thing that came,
from our,
experiment was, we said
we had this question and idea. How can
we,
empower
all our employees in such a way that
they can unleash the creativity
in solving problems.
So we,
created an ecosystem. We call it,
AI workspace.
And we started by training and educating
our staff on what AI is, what automation
is, and what is that responsible. I think
the key emphasis is responsible to use of
AI and automation.
And we didn't know what we're going to
accomplish.
And,
we were absolutely blown away with the outcome
we saw. I think we saw
the, employees' creativity,
unleashed.
I have a couple of examples. So the
things that we did not expect,
one of the interesting example we saw was,
we have a huge cancer biobank.
We've been,
collecting specimen for, oh, gosh. Not fifty years.
And they are, on paper, they were digitized,
and they were available. And I think,
our,
researchers started pulling that information on our AI
workspace that we created.
And the comments were, oh my god. I'm
able to do things in days that I
thought will take me months.
So the key thing was how do you
organize and tag the the cancer bio bag
in such a way that it can be
searched and we can really apply towards,
I would say, converting,
research into actionable insights that can have direct
clinical outcomes.
That was really phenomenal.
That's one example.
The other thing we're able to do is
that,
in health care,
is panel management is, like, a really important
thing for a field provider.
We wanna think about how can we
keep our panels accurate, but not only that,
how can we use as a baseline to
do the gap loader? So what we were
able to do is really find out how
do we,
using the the tools and AI and automation,
how do
we keep the patients,
active and accurate on the panel? But not
only that,
how can we use a combination of text,
email,
and phone calls
to inspire our patients to come to visit
with us to whether it is a vaccine
shot, whether it is about doing a wellness
visit. By doing that, we saw phenomenal,
I think, outcomes. We you know, the example
was we thought that
so many of our patients are inactive, but
we will be found out by having this,
automated approach. We're able to at least,
reengage fifty to sixty percent of our patients
to come back to us and,
do their wellness visit and and get the
vaccines and get,
other care gap closure activities done. So I
think that was pretty
cool, and I think the the journey has
just started.
I think we have the the right governance.
We are,
helping our, staff to get more educated on
how to use the tools in a more
effective way. And I think the story is
just beginning. And the most interesting part is
our,
we submitted this
experiment in
for the
c I o hundred award, and we are
delighted to share that we got chosen to
be one of the the CIO hundred,
award winners,
by this the
the CIO
Maxium, which I think is owned by Foundry.
That's amazing to hear. Congratulations. What a a
great accomplishment. And especially
looking at it, as you mentioned, just some
of the,
the unique challenges that you're facing today in
being able to, bring in the technology, but,
really great use cases and results, it sounds
like, especially in the clinical
realm, which I know, you know,
is not always the easiest or first place
that health care organizations try to bring in
new technology and AI just because of the,
risk involved in the clinical care side. So
that's really cool to see. Yeah. Yeah. This
is really good, I think. Because to me,
I think it's employed the power of,
thousands of people trying to figure out how
to solve problems or seek out opportunities
when they have the right tools and the
right training, the right
education. So that was probably, like, really, really
good for us.
Yeah. Absolutely. No. That's amazing.
And from your perspective, you know, when you
look into the future, where are some of
the biggest growth opportunities for you and your
team in the next twelve months or so?
So a couple of years ago,
Laura, we started on a agile transformation journey.
And I think now,
after the merger,
we became a new enterprise.
The opportunity for us to how do you
now
speed up
the agile transformation.
The the biggest thing that we're learning is
that instead of, you know, organizing our teams
around, say, applications, you think about,
radiology
or maybe cancer
or you think about,
urology,
we're thinking differently. I think we are organizing
our teams around value streams.
The value streams is more about, okay, let's
figure it out. How do we
create value
for our, patients, for our community, for our
employees?
And how do you eliminate the the the
waste out of that thing? So how can
we have a cross functional team,
small teams, around value streams?
And secondly, about we call it the the,
I call it the the tier journeys.
So how do you,
think about patient engage with us from pre
care care to post care?
How do we go about,
employees from
pre hiring to hiring and then their retirement
management?
How do we engage with, physicians
and clinicians,
when they come,
onboard,
to be part of our great health system?
How do we provide them the tools to
make sure that they don't have the cognitive
load and their experience is great engaging with
the the technologies we have? So that's how
we're thinking,
about the entire thing. And we're finding out
I think we've had, like,
really, I would say four or five, agile
teams.
What we found out is,
first of all, I think we created, like,
a a self organizing team. So can we
have a cross spoken team of, like, 10
people or so,
focus on a problem?
And
allow them, I think, psychological safety and ability
to make decisions to prioritize the work that
needs to be done to get an outcome.
And we were absolutely,
I think,
astonished by the outcome we got. We got
results,
faster,
better.
And, at the same time, we saw that
the
the staff and the employees who were on
the in the self organizing team,
they felt empowered to make decisions.
They felt empowered to prioritize,
the work backlog to make sure,
they could focus on the the thing that
is go most aligned to the the value
creation of the outcome, want to achieve.
And I think, at the end of the
day, I think we got a lot of
meaningful and effective outcomes.
But I think the icing on the cake
was, I call it, the
pleasing and beautiful outcomes.
Like, people seeing, and say, you know what?
I'm so happy, and I call it the
huggable experience.
So by doing that thing, we're also creating
a huggable experience. People are happy,
and they're more engaged. So I think that
to me is really
interesting,
find.
We love to experiment. We love to,
I think, think about what what we can
do to improve. We learn fast, and I
think that is something that we are thinking
is really good and we'll, continue to,
speed up
how we, think about organizing team,
around agile transformation.
That's really cool to hear. What another great
example of ways in the operational sense that,
you know, you've really truly been innovative,
in forward thinking with those agile teams. I
love that in you know, the idea of
that huggable experience is such a a cool
way to kind of think about things and
really brings the humanity back into,
what you're, you know, doing in a very
real level.
And so I love that. I love having
those technologies. You know, the way you're approaching
it seems really smart and engaged. When you're
putting together these agile teams, what do you
have to think about or consider to get
the composition
right or and and get the results that
you're looking for?
So I think thinking there is actually a
method to how we go about doing it.
So what we found out
that, first of all, there is a team
which is, fully dedicated towards the outcome, and
it's cross functional team.
So we cannot think about, oh, yes. Only
made up of people from technology.
Then we think about,
who should be lending that clinical expertise,
who should be lending the operational expertise,
and, for that matter, who should be lending,
the the financial expertise. So I think we
think about the team. I said, what is
the skill set we need to actually get
the maximum outcome? So that's how we start
with the question.
We don't start with, okay, let's put our
team together. We think about, okay, in order
to get this result and outcome, what skills
do we need?
And then based on that thing, we think
about, okay, what does a development team look
like?
And we go and, talk to, various,
leaders within the organization, and we,
build the team. And the team also needs
traction leadership. So,
we
have a a a role called solution owner.
The the the role of solution owners is,
day in and day out thinking about what
is the best way to get to the
outcomes, and what are the environments that are
coming in the way for us to get
to the outcome. And and then we also
think about scrum master. And scrum master is
more like a person who's doing all the
triaging, and their role is when they have
a latitude.
They they are not, concerned about the levels
within the organization. They said, this is an
impediment we need to focus on. Oh, by
the way, we need to go and talk
to our, operations team. Well, maybe we need
to talk to someone in finance. Maybe, they
need to talk to, someone in technology.
And they can, really, speed up decision making
and, I call it I think we it's
sort of something called a twenty four hour
rule. If there is an impediment that is
coming in the way for us to get
to the outcome, we need to be able
to get to an action plan within twenty
four hours.
Yeah. Irrespective of,
the levels in the organization, and I think
the other thing we talk about is how
do we escalate with honor to make sure
that, we are
laser focused on getting to the results that
we want to accomplish.
Fascinating to hear. Thank you so much for
shedding a little bit more light on the
process of putting together those teams and how
you really stay disciplined and accountable for the
outcomes,
that you're looking for in in really truly,
bringing those technologies to life. I I know
lots of big opportunities, it seems like, ahead,
but
I wanted to ask you as well about
some of the challenges you're anticipating. What do
you see coming down the pipe? What are
you planning for, when you look at potential
roadblocks, etcetera?
Yeah. I'll actually think about I was thinking
about this question quite a bit. You know,
everyone knows about solar tsunami.
That's real.
Think about almost 25%
of the working,
people within The US, they are retiring.
So it has created a really interesting challenge.
So in my mind, the the demand is
high,
both for,
different kinds of skills. So think about the
skills that were relevant, five years ago are
no longer relevant in the future. I think
we have to,
descale and reskill
our employees.
Not only that, the number of people who
are available to do work, they're going to
retire and they will take experience with them.
So what we're trying to figure it out,
I we I call it the x factor.
You know, I think the technological advances are
the x factor.
People who can think about the future of
digital workspace.
How do you use,
the various aspect of artificial intelligence,
or more so like, augmented intelligence?
How do
we use,
the x factor in bridging the gap?
How do we create a pipeline program to
make sure that we are training people from
all the way from high school to colleges
on the new skills that that is required
for us to be successful. So that to
me is very important
for us, and we're trying to,
figure out a way to strategies
of,
using the technological advances,
and also, I think getting the right talent
from anywhere. And think about in the rural
area, it's difficult to attract the talent, but
having some kind of flexibility,
for us to be able to attract people
from the four, different states and give them
the flexibility to do the work. So I
think it's a combination for us still as
a combination of,
people coming on-site and also, able to work,
remotely.
And I think what we're doing through our
agile transformation is really keeping the people connected.
The kind of things we also do,
it's a really cool thing that we do
is, you think about all the innovation that
comes from water cooler discussion.
So I think it was a really interesting
idea of of doing,
a virtual water coolers. The virtual cooler cooler
is that, okay, it's a space or the
time,
given to the employees just to talk.
They get together,
I think different people,
once in a week, and they're not talking
about the workload. They're just talking about,
connecting and figuring it out. How do
we improve engagement?
How can we solve problems?
And then,
we're just sharing,
their experience with each other. So I think
that is really,
good, I think,
results we got from,
thinking about how do we train our employees
to fill the gap, that is coming as
a result of sort of solar tsunami.
Absolutely. I know. I think that's a really
great point to just being very future looking
on how,
incorporating that AI into the workspace and and,
being able to think and strategize at a
a high level,
with the technology and how that impacts people,
what people will still need in order to,
forge those connections that create engagement and create,
you know, the type of environment that you're
looking for even the digital space. That that
seems really significant, especially thinking through, you know,
how much technology has already transformed and and
where it still has,
opportunities and potential
to grow in the future.
Yeah. And I think that lines, Laura, lines
with our like,
try to keep things simple.
They've done they're not simple execution, but it's
it's
simple that we can latch onto. So one
of the things that
we really focus on is people first and
focused execution.
So in my mind, I think if we
don't have a engaged,
involved
team
who really care and health care is all
about relationship.
People need to care and they need to
feel a sense of purpose. So I think
we focus on making sure that our staff
is engaged. So that kind of things that
people think about and, like, soft things, are
not good for technology. And I think the
other way around in my team is a
softer part. We need to focus more on
to, I think, create a future of, health
care. We talk about,
psychological safety. We talk about empathy.
We talk about we before we. We talk
about how do we create space for having
fun and laughter.
We do that work intentionally. It's not, oh,
by the way, we need to do that.
And once we do that
and we also said, at the end of
the day, we have to get the outcomes
too. We have to have tangible outcomes, whether
it's about
increasing employee engagement from x to y,
improving
quality outcomes,
from a to b,
delivering cost savings.
So we have a very balanced approach also
on,
focused execution. So that I think
is hard, but I think having that tension,
creative tension is good for us to make
sure that we
continue to,
attract the right talent to work with us.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that, in in the
focus on, you know, the right kind of
positive energy, positive creative tension that makes a
big difference in in moving forward quickly and
meaningfully.
Now before we wrap up here,
I wanted to ask, what is the number
one thing that you're doing right now to
set up the organization for success in the
future?
So to me, I think the number one
thing that, I think about all the time
is
as we're going through,
I think,
margin implementation. So I think about things are
becoming real now.
We,
think about coming together
and then there's
classic things. So what do we do with
electronic health record? What do we do with
ERP?
And we can get lost in tactics of,
unifying EHR and ERP. So the things that
we put forth as our guiding principle is
that
while we have to focus on foundation building,
we cannot lose sight of that catalytic impact
of information and technology.
So,
the focus we have over the the next
year or so, we are, probably a few
months, we are unifying electronic health record. But
we are not doing it,
as a more like a technical thing. We
are unifying in such a way that we
bring the best of both organizations together and
build towards our foundation system,
which is a proven way for us to
get the the the best outcome,
aligned with triple a. So, making sure that
we have the best health, convenient health, top
quality, and also we are managing our cost
in a very reasonable way.
And similarly,
we're using the same principle for,
enterprise resource planning integration. And, I think that
the the kind of,
the tagline we have is how do we
become, user centered, data driven, and automation infused.
So when we do that, I think that
that, again, creative tension we have in making
sure that as we unify
the the
the underlying platforms together, the one plus one
is more than two.
It can be three. And I say why
why not can be
two to the power of, three?
So we talk about, I think,
geometric progression
and how can we create that
environment where
we can position our organization for transformative change,
which, all of us know that is,
well needed and is kind of, embedded within
the health care.
Absolutely.
That makes so much sense. Praveen, thank you
so much for joining us on the podcast
today. This has been really a fun and
inspiring conversation, and I look forward to connecting
with you again soon.
Thank you so much, Laura. It was so
much pleasure,
speaking with you and, sharing my thoughts.