Hello, everyone. This is Jacob Emerson with the
Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
Thanks so much for tuning in today where
we're gonna be talking about how MedStar Health
is transforming care with artificial intelligence and telehealth.
So to dive into some pretty big topics,
I'm joined today by Bill Sheehan, who is
the chief innovation officer at MedStar Health. Bill,
thanks so much for taking the time to
sit down with us. Oh, thank you. Thanks
for having me, Jacob. Absolutely. And before we
dive into everything we wanna talk with you
about, can you tell us a little bit
more about yourself, your background in health care,
and what it is that you do today
at MedStar?
Yeah. It's
been a really interesting journey. So I started
my career in health care as a firefighter
paramedic in New York.
York, spent about fifteen years in public safety,
leading to about a decade led leading a
county based emergency services system up there in
New York. So I have a provider background
in that sense and then came down to
MedStar about twelve years ago, all in our
innovation pillar, but leading different things like learning,
training, education,
simulation,
digital care delivery, and now I serve as
the chief innovation officer for the system. Fantastic.
So,
let's get to the heart of what you
do in the day to day at MedStar.
We hear from health systems all the time
about their struggles with fragmented digital tools,
underperforming
patient portals.
So from where you sit at the health
system, what are some of the biggest missing
pieces and how most systems are approaching innovation
and how MedStar specifically is working to fill
some of those gaps? Yeah. It's such an
interesting question. As we look back at the
experience of the pandemic and the rapid adoption
we saw in digital tools, both on the
consumer side,
and on the provider and health system side.
What was missing, and I think this is
a bit of the the secret sauce to
answer your question,
is a a purposeful
an opportunity to step back. Right? In that
crisis moment, we had to change.
But I think coming out of the pandemic,
there's this imperative on us as health systems
to really take a step back and and
rationalize our care model, truly go through a
care model redesign
that is in service of patients and access
and,
making health care easier to navigate and higher
quality and and safer, using digital tools, which
have all kinds of capabilities that can help
us with those things.
And then on the health system side, really
thinking about the processes and how we use
people and and processes differently,
in the ambulatory setting, in the acute care
setting,
to leverage the power of those technologies.
But at the end of the day, I
think the key here is
technology is just technology. Right? And unless you
can really take that step back and focus
on the people and process changes,
it's difficult
to realize all of that opportunity and value
that that we all know exists in in
digital care. Yeah. And it really gets to
the heart of what we hear from individuals
like yourself all the time of always keeping
the patient that's at the end of this
in mind. In terms of challenges,
around what we're talking about, we've heard you
speak publicly about balancing innovation with
legacy infrastructure,
technical debt, things like that. So how do
you ensure that these new initiatives like AI,
telehealth, digital tools in general, those are not
just layering on more complexity, but actually driving
scalable transformation?
Yeah. And I think this is what we
spend a lot of our time thinking about.
Because if you ignore the context that we
operate within today, which has all of those
pieces you just mentioned, it has,
legacy hardware infrastructure.
Health care is a very fixed,
you know, kind of real estate based,
you know, for for many years.
And so layering technology on top of that
tends to find cracks that you didn't know
existed in that infrastructure and that foundation.
And similarly, I think our our people in
process has long been highly manual and,
not as digitized as we would all want
despite the introduction of things like electronic health
records and meaningful use. Sure. And so I
think, again, coming back to the point of
really thinking deeply about what's possible with current
infrastructure,
current
limitations in that, and then really going at
those edges of where we can make the
movement fastest and have the greatest impact on
patients or on clinician well-being, etcetera,
by by just with context of all of
that, finding the right places. Yeah. And and
I think we've we've spent a lot of
time at MedStar Health focused on ambulatory transformation.
Mhmm. It's a little easier from that infrastructure
component than big legacy hospitals.
But the truth is our hospitals need it
desperately too. So that fixed infrastructure,
you know, we need to make it more
efficient, easier to navigate, and, really help, help
distribute expertise differently with these incredible new tools
that are at our disposal. No. Absolutely. It
makes a lot of sense. And in terms
of, navigating some of these challenges, we hear
pretty much every week, if not daily at
this point about health systems across the country
accelerating partnerships with tech companies that can often
be more nimble than the health care sector.
So what role do you think that these
partnerships, both at MedStar, but also, you know,
the industry level, how are they playing a
role in promoting this innovation you're talking about?
How can they help to operationalize
digital care at scale?
Yeah. And it's really important, and I think
our our partners are essential to our success
here. There is no doubt about that.
In that same moment, there are too many
point solutions out there. Right? As we think
about the the landscape of,
of, digital technology. I mean, there's thousands of
companies solving, you know, hundreds of problems.
And I think the the most important thing
I would say is it's really important to
understand how the solutions that you're the partners,
the solutions you're working with solve more than
just one problem. Yeah. Right? And, you know,
you can call this lots of different things.
People call them platform plays, etcetera. But it's
it's really, to me, about thoughtful partnership between
the technology companies
and us as health care providers to have
them know us, right, and really understand the
challenges and the opportunities in this digital care
transformation space in our journey of care model
redesign and the people and process components here.
And I've said this many times, but I'll
say it again here. I really wanna hear
from those partners how hard this is. Because
the truth is it is very hard work
to change
what our large ingrained processes and the way
we've operated health care for so long, And
the right partners get that and dig into
that work with you Yeah. And and really
help make sure that the technology isn't layering
that burden that you referenced. Right? It's really
layering
the support for the move from our current
operating model to the to the new operating
model.
And it's it's about more than just that
button push. Right? It's so much harder than
that. Sure. No. It's, it's great advice for
all the other systems listening and,
in getting very similar partnerships and and really
wanting that acknowledgment,
that this is a difficult sector to change.
Bill, before we go, what else are we
missing? You've got the ears of a lot
of other health system leaders from all over
the country right now. What else do you
wanna share with them from where you sit?
Yeah. I think it's, you know, in that
spirit that I've already been speaking about and
true taking a step back and and redesigning
our care model, I think there's a moment
for us as health system leaders and our
technology partners,
to really
find the the kind of parts of our
organization, substantive parts of our organization
that are ready for transformation
and bring not one, two, three, four solutions
to that, but really holistically
redesign those processes with
principles in mind that work will be more
automated in parts of our business as we
go forward. Artificial intelligence or, you know, even
robotic process automation or other aspects of automation
will play a larger role in how we
take care of patients as we go forward.
Digital technologies, telehealth,
you know, remote care delivery, remote monitoring,
these pieces are not singular things. What they
are are pieces of the larger puzzle
of what the care model of tomorrow in
three, five, ten years looks like.
And if we don't have clarity of that
vision and that point on the horizon,
we run the risk in any individual project
or implementation
of not serving that purpose, appropriately or or
well enough.
And so that requires you know, I often
say you can't do innovation and transformation to
the business in health care. You have to
do it with the business.
We need the operators of those parts of
the business, whether it's ambulatory, acute care, nursing,
physician
enterprise, to be at the table understanding that
vision at the endpoint very clearly
and working with us to get from here
to there with our technology partners,
and with our patients, quite honestly. Yeah. Absolutely.
No. It's it's great last piece of advice.
Really appreciate you taking the time to share
those with us, sit down with us, and
and sharing insights about what's going on under
your leadership at MedStar. So thank you, Bill.
Thanks, Jacob. Thanks for having me. And we'd
also like to thank our podcast sponsor, Evisit.
You can tune in to more podcasts from
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