At athenahealth,
we know your ambulatory practice wants healthier,
a healthier business, healthier care teams, and healthier
patients.
But the complexities of modern health care tech
make it hard for you and your care
teams to focus on what matters most.
That's where athenahealth can help.
Our AI native all in one solutions reduce
administrative burdens,
streamline billing and payments, and deliver critical insights
when clinicians need it most.
That means fewer clicks, more time for patients,
and stronger bottom lines. Practicing medicine is complex,
but running a practice can be that much
simpler with athenahealth.
See how simpler is healthier@athenahealth.com.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare podcast.
This is Scott King thrilled today to be
joined by a very special guest, Teresa Ash,
system director of digital health with UCHealth.
Teresa, how are you doing today?
I'm great, Scott. How are you? I'm good.
I'm good. You know, we actually got a
little rain. It's actually cooling down in Chicago
a little bit. We have, had some kinda
like an extra summer
Yes. I think you could say. So it's
definitely Same thing here in Cincinnati. We're we're
dealing with the rain now, but it's a
it's a welcome change. It is welcome. It's
gonna feel like fall. It's gonna feel like
Halloween, but any hoot and holler, let's get
down to health care. Okay. I know there's
a lot we wanna we wanna dive into,
a lot of kinda important trends and and
topics. But, Teresa, before we get started with
all that, can you please just tell us
a little bit about yourself and your background
in health care? Sure. Yeah. I'd be happy
to. First of all, thanks for asking me
to participate in this, podcast. Health care,
is something I'm passionate about, specifically
looking at digital health operations.
And it's such a growing field
that I'm
always willing to take the opportunity
to jump in and share my experience.
So, my background's
unique in the health care digital world.
My training is in pharmacy. I am a
pharmacist
and started out as a clinical pharmacist
working, for a health care
system,
specifically focusing in chronic disease management
and ambulatory
care.
And through that focus, which was
unfortunately longer ago than I would like to
admit, twenty years ago,
when that was really still
just kind of in its infancy,
having pharmacists work in those areas,
I was able to be on the front
end of developing some digital technologies
and digital
applications and interfaces
to help manage chronic conditions for patients.
That
paved my way into an interest in overall
digital
applications and programs
and
products
that help manage care
for patients
or enable the workforce to better care for
patients.
So my current role is as
system director of operations for digital health.
So I always like to say I I
serve as the
Rosetta
Stone
between
clinical
and
IS and T or digital health teams
to help implement those tools
or improve those tools that we're going to
leverage to make patient care easier
or make our
employees on the front lines more effective and
more efficient to allow them to do the
best work they can when caring for patients.
So it's been an interesting journey to this
point, but
I'm in on the front line of some
really cool initiatives right now as we look
forward to the future in digital health.
Thank you, Theresa. It sounds like you're kind
of at the forefront of of helping
with an emerging digital health tool. Can you
kind of give us a little bit of
those specifics there, and and how rewarding was
that to be a part of that? Sure.
Yeah. Absolutely. So
the current tool that I'm I'm really working
on right now is, you know, utilizing AI,
to help improve the digital,
patient experience,
and also improve our efficiency for the workforce.
That is obviously the future and where we're
headed. And, you know, we're really focusing our
current use case that's,
most recently out of the box is looking
at,
disposition planning for patients who are admitted into
the hospital and moving
that
plan, and that initial
request for placement
up earlier in the patient's hospital stay
to prevent,
you know, week long hospital stays that are
only there so we can get approval
to transition someone to post acute care.
Utilizing
AI tools and
data learning and machine learning, we're able to
identify those patients
upon
admission who would be good candidates
for placement
in,
post acute care, such as rehab facilities or
into
skilled nursing facilities,
and really guide that transition
much quicker
and provide the patient and the family caregivers,
with some clarity on where
the planned discharge is to allow them to
prepare for that, but also get them discharged
from the hospital much sooner as we don't
have to wait on those approvals,
to come through.
Yeah. You know, we we hear with
people utilizing AI in in systems that, obviously,
there's
an increase in efficiency, and and you get
more time to do other things you need
to do. But this is your practical use
case that kinda talks about more than just
efficiency and saving yourself time. You're actually saving
beds and times when those beds will be
used and better uses for them. So,
certainly certainly a lot of rewards there.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Let me ask you. As
virtual care expands from you, like AI enabled
tools that kind of been discussing and and
remote monitoring monitoring to
broader digital health platforms,
introducing new technology brings challenges. So what advice
do you have for leaders navigating everything from
governance to patient engagement?
And can you share an example of how
your organization has balanced innovation with some operational
constraints?
Yeah. Absolutely.
So I, you know, I think the first
thing that we've done to balance innovation with
operational constraints
is to create
the position that I'm in. So this is
a new position
to UCHealth,
and the position was purely created to help
streamline the process of getting these digital technologies
and the digital tools
to the frontline staff.
My background in pharmacy and hospital operations allows
me to have a really robust understanding of
what the end users are experiencing
with these technologies
and how to better leverage them to make
them as efficient
and as useful as possible.
The other piece is, you know, with rapid
innovation
comes the need for
rapid change management
and control
of the overall process of implementation.
There has to be some strategy
behind
why we're moving forward with specific tools at
specific times.
And it seems like every time we have
an AI governance
team meeting,
we have another
five or six
AI tools that may be native to other
applications or stand alone tools that get brought
forward for review.
Everyone, no matter what department or what team
you're on, is getting inundated
by AI tools,
to utilize.
And so that's where it's important to have
that really robust steering committee.
And the way that we've rolled it out
is to be intentional about including
a wide swath
of stakeholders
in the steering committee.
We're not just looking at
operations. We're not just looking at, folks in
digital health or folks in,
clinical care, nursing or imaging.
We've included membership from human resources,
information technology,
case management, capacity management,
finance and and revenue cycle management,
patient safety,
and strategy,
in order to make sure that we're making
the best decisions
when we move forward with a product
that will
match our overall strategy for UCHealth,
but also will provide the most benefit
for each dollar we're spending with
these new technologies.
You said your role is new,
the the system director of digital health position.
I'm just curious. What do you see as
your biggest responsibility in that new role, and
have you kind of seen other systems adapt
the same role? Yeah. I think my biggest
responsibility is to help drive that strategy
to meet the overall strategy of the organization.
We tend to think of ISNT as kind
of firefighters in the past,
where if there was a problem
with a system, we could go in and
fix it. But there wasn't always a roadmap
to the future
there. And, I think there has been an
EMRs, but not necessarily in some of the
other applications. And I think that's a big
component of my position
that's
been really beneficial to bring in,
to the overall organization.
And I was recently at the Becker's conference
in Chicago just last week
where I met,
several other people who were in similar positions,
as me at other organizations,
and they said exactly the same thing. The
benefit
of this position is that we've got one
foot in strategy and one foot in digital
health, so we can really drive change and
leverage
the tools that we're using,
to meet our strategic goals.
Well, that sounds great. I'm so glad you're
able to have those conversations at the HIT
and RCM event last week. Yeah. It was
great. Certainly AI and all this emerging technology
was a a big topic over and over
again. I had some great conversations
as well.
Just you kinda touched on this a little
bit, but how are you seeing
recent legislation both at a state and federal
level
affects
health care organizations and and health care IT
specifically,
have you had to adjust some strategies in
response?
Yeah. Obviously,
you know, legislation is gonna continue to to
push and drive health care and IT strategy.
One thing that we did pretty quickly was
make sure we had our legal team
involved with our AI
steering committee
to make sure that we were meeting
the requirements of the current laws
and understanding the legislation that was coming down
the future.
Those were the big things. The other big
piece is strengthening I. T. Security
to align with, you know, reporting requirements or
just overall safeguards for data.
Data is obviously a hot commodity. And, you
know, we continue to evolve our data governance
here at UCHealth in order to make sure
we're utilizing that data ethically,
and by following all
required laws,
to make sure that it's safe and protected.
Absolutely. And my last question for you, Theresa,
what's your top piece of advice for health
care leaders as they prepare for further advancements
in technology
and rising demands for care?
Yeah.
That's a great question. So I think the
biggest
thing is we have to remember,
at the end of the day, that these
tools are just tools.
They can't fix a broken process.
So a lot of what we do with
the digital steering committee is
question,
is this where we need to put a
tool or is there a process opportunity here?
So
we will deploy, you know, front facing engineers
or process engineers to overall
look at the process for a specific activity,
determine if there's opportunity to improve the process.
If not,
design what the new process looks like when
we have the tool on board. The tool's
only gonna be as good as the process
that it's
partnered with. So if you don't adjust the
process to utilize the tool, the tool won't
be utilized, and it'll be ineffective.
So I think that's the the biggest thing
is to make sure we're
not just looking at the tool or the
investment that we're making from a digital health
standpoint,
but working with our partners,
to identify the process and what that process
should look like so we can make sure
the tools are effective.
That means a lot
of forward
thinking, agile mindsets,
and,
cross functional collaboration to make sure,
those processes are understood.
Tristan, thanks so much for joining us on
the podcast. It was a great discussion. I
look forward to working with you again soon.
Absolutely. Thank you.
At athenahealth, we know your ambulatory practice wants
healthier,
a healthier business, healthier care teams, and healthier
patients.
But the complexities of modern health care tech
make it hard for you and your care
teams to focus on what matters most.
That's where athenahealth can help. Our AI native
all in one solutions reduce administrative burdens,
streamline billing and payments, and deliver critical insights
when clinicians need it most. That means fewer
clicks, more time for patients, and stronger bottom
lines.
Practicing medicine is complex, but running a practice
can be that much simpler with athenahealth.
See how simpler is healthier at athenahealth.com.