Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's
Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to
the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. Fantastic to have
you. Today, we're talking about unlocking
data and efficiency, how a major health system
transfer workflows
with data fabric and AI. And I'm so
excited
to be joined by Sarah Galyon, senior director
of health care solutions at Intellistax. Sarah, thanks
so much for being here today. It's great
to have you. Yes. Thanks for having me.
I'm excited.
Absolutely. For those that might not know you
yet, at least, could you just share a
little bit about yourself and and your work
in health care?
Yeah. Sure. So I've been with Intellistac for
about a year now. Prior to that, I
worked for the University of Tennessee Medical Center
for seventeen
years. I did a lot of things when
I was there. Most of my adult life
spent there, but, most of my tenure was
focused on digital transformation,
process improvement initiatives, and, like, clinical informatics.
I had the privilege of working alongside
and learning from some of the most,
brilliant minds I would consider in health care
process improvement.
So that was a really unique opportunity.
And then through that work is how I
got to know the folks at Intellistac,
because we use their products
in the hospital for a lot of our
digital solutions.
So and now I am here,
trying to help kind of spread the message,
so to speak, to a wider audience.
Right. And we're certainly spreading the message today.
Excited to hear about all of your expertise
and then some of the things that we're
going to discuss today. The name of the
game for health care for health systems right
now seems to be to do more with
less
from workforce shortages, finance always. Right? Finances, patient
expectations, etcetera. It it's really tough.
In this environment, how do you see technology,
and that includes AI,
helping teams work more efficiently and focus on
what matters most?
So the first thing that comes top of
mind for me is is a quote by
Hal Wolf, who's president and CEO of HIMSS.
He said in a keynote speech a few
years back, technology alone
doesn't do anything.
It's people, process,
and technology. All three have to come together.
And I thought that was just brilliant
at the time because it's so true. Like,
you you've got all these tools and things
that you you wanna use,
but you can't just throw tech at the
problem and think it's gonna fix it. Right?
In this particular scenario, I don't really see
this as doing more with less as much
as I see it being smart about providing
your very highly valuable staff and team members
with the right tools to be as efficient
as possible.
There's a man called Oliver King Smith, who's
the founder of SmartR AI,
and he refers to AI as assistive intelligence.
And I think that's a much better way
of thinking about this kind of technology because
when we think about AI, it can be
very intimidating.
But, really, it's there to enhance your overall
productivity and allow you to shift your focus
away from ancillary tasks
and work more towards that kind of higher
caliber of work.
There's a, I think, a major opportunity
to streamline workflow processes and efficiencies
using tools like that,
specifically in the administrative
space of health care.
There's so much that goes on in patient
care coordination
that most clinicians are just kind of blissfully
unaware of, just to be frank. And that's
just kind of the way it is. There's
this unfortunate kind of division between the clinical
side and the administrative side of the house.
So kind of just an example of this,
I was working on a project,
helping
a physician practice transition to CPOE,
And
I got a lot of resistance,
from the physicians. They did not wanna have
to use a computer.
And
one said to me point blank, I
I don't wanna have to do this. All
I have to do right now is tell
my nurse what I want and it magically
happens. Like, those words came out his mouth.
Magically
happens. And so I had to explain to
him it doesn't magically happen. Like, your nurse
is now gonna spend two hours of her
day coordinating
with the Surgical Suite,
with,
your administrative staff, with your schedulers, with the
patient trying to get this all set up
so your patient can come in for their
procedure.
Whereas if you would just take five minutes
and put the order in, now we can
automate a lot of that on the backside
using that as the trigger.
Right?
And he was completely unaware that that was
a possibility.
So
there's so much that goes into preparing a
patient for arrival to a facility and also
a lot of follow-up work
after their visit's over. And there's a lot
of opportunity now to kind of let the
computer take care of a lot of that
manual stuff
that allows you to then transcend to a
higher level of work. Right? So now the
nurse doesn't have to spend two hours of
a day chasing people around and trying to
coordinate and orchestrate things. The computer can kind
of kick off those
those workflow patterns and and, you know, trigger
certain notifications and and kind of keep people
in sync with what's happening
while she can go now put her focus
back on other patients. Right?
So I know people are kind of afraid
that they're gonna be replaced by AI, but
I would argue we're not even close
to being there yet.
But your job will evolve into something else
through the incorporation of it.
And I think that
we should be using it to offset
that work burden, not thinking it's just gonna
replace entire jobs.
Well, it comes back to the trifecta that
you mentioned. Right? People process technology, and I
feel like this it's doing more with more
instead of the do more with less. Right?
I think that's very, very key.
From your work, as you look at some
of the partners that you're working with and
certainly your own work, you made this experience
firsthand. You have this experience firsthand.
What are some of the results that these
organizations are achieving when they're changing the approach
and they're not just saying, hey, nurse, can
you do this for me? They're actually handling
handling on their own. And what are some
of the success factors that stand out for
you
that have really been able to make these
changes stick?
So making the changes stick,
there's
a few things that there's a lot that
goes into play.
Let me,
I'm gonna tell a story real quick and
Yeah. Go ahead. Help illustrate this. Back in
the height of COVID,
we had,
instruction at UT Medical Center that we needed
to stand up a monoclonal antibody unit.
This was an experimental IV infusion therapy that
preceded the vaccine, and it was intended for
folks that were already sick with COVID.
And the goal was to keep them from
getting bad sick, technical term,
and ending up in the hospital.
It wasn't intended to be a cure. It's
just to help bolster their immune system so
that they could fight it off. But
our instructions were if you can service eight
to 10 patients a day, that would be
good enough. And we've looked at that and
went,
eight to 10 patients. They're like, why even
bother? Eight to 10 patients isn't gonna put
a dent in this problem. Right?
And we knew that the real driver
of
volume was gonna be how quickly can we
triage
the referrals
to get the patients through the system and
into the schedule. Right?
So
we brought
everybody together and
talked about it with the people that we're
gonna have to be administering the medications, the
pharmacists, the nurse,
the schedulers, you know, everybody that was gonna
be involved in this, and we designed
a system. We used a combination of digital
tools in the EHR and also products from
Intellistack as well,
to design and implement a referral and triaging
system that would allow us to quickly capture
the referrals
and streamline scheduling and eliminate those bottlenecks so
we could get people through faster and then
scale as needed.
At our peak,
we serviced around a 120 patients a day.
Our clinic was open two full years, and
we triaged over 10,000
referrals during that time.
Other health care facilities
in that area
who also were offering this therapy closed in
six months,
and as far as I know, never saw
more than eight to 10 patients a day.
So
the reason that worked was a lot of
contributing factors. Right? But one of the biggest
ones I would attribute to, not just the
tech,
but we brought in
the people that were gonna do the work.
And we talked to them, and we tried
to understand,
from their point of view what they were
gonna need in order to be successful. Right?
So
to me, that's what really makes it stick
because you can throw
whatever tech you want, and it doesn't matter
how cool it is, you could build a
rocket to the moon. If nobody knows how
to fly the rocket ship, you're not going
anywhere. Right?
So
I I always tell people you've got to
talk to the people doing the work
and,
give them a seat at the table and
a voice to provide input on how to
design and implement those processes. If they're involved,
you will have a much easier time, getting
buy in and adoption for the implementation.
That's one key factor that's been emerging as
well for us in a lot of conversations
is the adoption piece. Adoption is crucial, especially
for AI success
in this space, which is so, so critical.
Looking then to again, you've highlighted this process
and and how it worked. When we look
at leadership and and specifically health care leaders,
obviously,
what is one step that they can take
now to better prepare for this future that's
obviously driven by technology and specifically
AI to ensure their organizations are set up
for lasting efficiency gains?
So
I have a a saying that I like
to throw around a lot, which is
managers theorize about problems,
and the frontline worker actually knows what the
problems are.
Not just knows what the problems are, but
they know what the work grounds are. Right?
So it kind of goes back to, one,
you've got to involve the right people, and
two, don't assume that AI is gonna be
the magic potion that solves all of your
problems.
You need to do your research. You need
to talk to people and figure out start
by identifying
what problems, what bottlenecks, what inefficiencies
are you
trying to solve for. I would start there.
I wouldn't I wouldn't dive off the deep
end of the pool and let's find some
cool AI and figure out how to how
to, you know, pigeonhole it into our organization,
because it may not be the thing you
need, right? That's backwards.
Figure out what you wanna make better. Figure
out by identifying what problems you wanna solve,
and then you can go and start researching
what AI tools are available. It doesn't even
have to be AI. It can be anything
supportive that will be
a value
to, like I said, support the process. Because
that's all
AI does. That's all technology does. It supports
the process that you already have in place
and have decided on. So if you try
to pigeonhole something in there without taking a
look at the bigger picture, you're gonna get
failed implementation every time. You know, I think
the best AI tools are the ones you
never see. Yeah. Absolutely.
A quick follow-up to this. I think this
is an important question that I wanted to
ask because I think it's key to this
conversation.
What's at stake
if this doesn't happen?
If they don't do this, if they don't
follow the red thread? What's at stake here?
Candidly, I think
many
health care
organizations
operate under kind of this
comforting notion that health care as an industry
is recession proof,
and
to a certain degree it is because everyone
will always need health care in some form
or fashion,
what they tend to forget is your individual
organization
is not recession proof.
Just because the industry is not going anywhere
doesn't mean that if you decide
not to take steps to make improvements
doesn't mean that your particular organization will be
around in the future. Right?
And to be fair to to health care
facilities, I think a lot of people think
they've got deeper pockets than they really do.
Right?
From what I've seen, most hospitals, even large
systems, have very narrow operating margins. They don't
have a lot of money to throw around.
So
you've got to be intentional and deliberate about
where you're spending.
But the wonderful thing about AI, even though
it's been around a lot longer than I
think people realize,
it's at a maturity level now where
it can be implemented and
offset, you know,
your office manager who's been asking for three
extra people to support the volumes for the
past four years and never gets approved.
Well, is there a way that we can
implement AI to offset the need
to hire those people so that the people
she's got
can be more more efficient and improve the
patient throughput.
And
then not just stop the hemorrhaging of losing
money, but now we can maybe start
making money. I mean, health care is a
business. We don't have to like it, but
it is.
So that that would be my thoughts on
that is is if if you
if you wanna maintain the status quo, the
world won't move on without you. That's just
the way it is.
Especially
around technology and AI. I think that's especially
true in that space. Sarah, thank you so
much for your time and insights. What a
fantastic conversation. Thanks for being here. Yes. Thanks
for having me. Absolutely. And we also want
to thank our podcast sponsor at Telestack. You
can tune into more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare
by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.