This is Laura Dirda with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Simon
Nazarian, executive vice president and chief digital technology
officer at City of Hope, Nassim
Eftikari,
who is the chief AI and analytics officer
at City of Hope. Nasim, Simon, thank you
so much for joining us on the podcast
today.
Happy to be here. Great. Thanks for having
us.
Fantastic. Well, I'm looking forward to learning more
about everything you're doing at City of Hope.
I know it's a fantastic organization, really innovative
and on the cutting edge of what's happening
in cancer care today and more. So I'm
excited to dig in. But before we do,
can you tell me a little bit more
about yourself? Give us a a bit of
your backgrounds and then, a little bit about
City of Hope too.
Fantastic.
I can start.
Hi. My name is Simon Nazarian,
and, I'm the executive vice president and chief
digital and technology officer
for City of Hope. And,
you know, it's a exciting role we're playing
today,
especially, since City of Hope,
was founded in 1913.
We've been focused on providing compassionate care to
people in need.
And, you know, we really focus on what's
best for our patients, and that guides everything
that we do.
And in the past several years, City of
Hope, has experienced tremendous growth.
We're one of the largest and most advanced
cancer research and treatment organizations in The US
and, ranked among the nation's top cancer centers
in The US. We're very proud of that.
You know, City of Hope's, NCI designated
comprehensive
cancer center
received the highest rating, from the NCI,
and that puts us, City of Hope, in
the top echelon of the nation's,
you know, 57
NCI designated comprehensive cancer centers.
And,
the
and we are system wide, so we are
in five major metropolitan
areas,
including LA, Orange County, Chicago, Atlanta, and Phoenix.
And, 86,000,000
people live in
communities with close access to one of our
facilities.
K?
And, you know, in my role, I,
you know, oversee,
digital technology enterprise platforms
that really support,
care at scale. So anything that has to
do with technology rolls up to my organization.
And, you know, in partnership with Nasim, really
focused on how innovation actually moves from
a idea to adoption, you know, in a
very complex health system.
Right? And we wanna make sure that, you
know, we build a durable infrastructure
and just, you know, not one off pilots
that don't scale.
Thank you, Simon, for that great introduction of
City of Hope. I'm Nasim,
chief AI and analytics officer.
I
lead,
meaningful application of machine learning AI, under Simon's
leadership
in all areas of patient care,
research, precision medicine, and operations.
I've been with the company for nine years
now, and,
and my background is in computer science and
machine learning.
That's amazing to hear. And, you know, really
great to have that experience at City of
Hope and then be able to support its
growth, which has been, you know, outstanding over
the last several years.
I'm curious. Could you tell me a little
bit more about the most important initiative that
you've led in the last year or so?
What did you do, and what were the
results?
Well,
I would say that, you know, we have
a very strong focus on, governance and our
operating model when it comes,
to advance the an emerging technology. So,
the most in important initiative wasn't just a
single tool.
It was really establishing the, you know, conditions
for AI to scale responsibly,
within our organizations.
So, and and really focusing
on,
reframing
our governance
as an enabler, not a barrier. So, I
would dare say as a partner, not a
police.
So, you know, help clarify the decision rights,
you know, embedding the right guardrails,
and,
really moving governance closer to where the work
is actually happening.
So this is not a bolt on anymore
for us. It's within the structure of our
organization.
And,
you know, we wanna make sure that, we
do the right things for,
for our folks and really focus on scale
and velocity
and, really partner with our organization.
Nassim, anything you wanna add?
Sure. So I,
I wanna,
add a little bit to the governance piece.
We we've been,
we've been giving a lot of thought to
how do we safely and responsibly
apply these technologies, but also balance the speed
of innovation.
Like Simon said, we have safe and responsible
use of AI.
We have had a lot of, like, you
know, very,
tangible exciting initiatives that we've been leading over
the past year, like using generative AI for
patient onboarding,
for clinical trial matching,
and and many other things in digital pathology
and precision medicine and others.
But one of the most important things that
I keep thinking about day in day out
is and and it ties into governance a
little bit and scale and velocity is how
do we
really orchestrate
all of these different AI tools and these
days, AI agents
that every organization
is adopting for point solutions.
So
we we wanna be, we wanna get ahead
of it so that
in, like,
in a year or so, we don't have,
tens, hundreds, thousands of agents running around the
organization, each doing their own thing, and they
cannot talk to each other.
So I think, in terms of governance and
also technology,
a big top of mind for me is
now how do we manage,
all these AI agents and tools, not just
agents, but AI tools and agents. How do
we orchestrate them to work effectively with one
another
and, and optimize the whole system rather than
just one part of, like, a
a local optimization of we solve this problem,
but then we shift the bottleneck somewhere else,
and then we have to solve that other
problem.
That makes a lot of sense. You know,
it's truly fascinating to see all of the
different possibilities that are out there with AI,
but you're right. Being able to have the
governance process and having visibility into everything that's
going on, the different agents, and
sharing that with the entire organization so you
can smartly and effectively,
incorporate
AI without too much risk coming back to
you. So, I think that's critical and so
helpful to understand that process that you've taken
and really built into,
what you're doing at City of Hope. Now
looking ahead for the next year or so,
where are some of your big priorities and
headwinds that you're focused on? What's really top
of mind for you?
Oh, man.
A fantastic question.
I think Nasim really hit it. A major
priority is, scaling agency across the organization, but
responsibly.
It's
really important for us to, empower our researchers,
our clinicians,
and our teams,
to be able to create and run their
own agents. Right? You know, they for them
to
be trained and,
skilled to act with confidence,
to,
you know, use all of our intelligent tools
responsibly,
and make decisions closer, to the work. And,
you know, one of my mantras at the
office here is that, innovation is federated,
and, we believe that,
this really will help us, make that come
true because
we have to rethink the decision rights
when we scale this agency and not just
deploying a basic technology. Right?
And the headwind here is, you know, most
organizations
are built for a centralized permission.
Right? And, this work, you know, AI specifically
requires distributed responsibility.
So how do we
shepherd the organization and work together in order
to go through that kind of a change
management?
If it's if it's Simon's priority, then it's
my priority. So on on my end,
to enable this, one of the biggest thing,
this year,
is AI, literacy, fluency, education.
How do
we educate our workforce to
work off of a shared knowledge base so
that they can have this agency that, Simon
is aspiring to? When we started,
after the, AI boom,
suddenly AI got democratized and everyone
with very, like,
in a very user friendly fashion could interact
with AI, and that was amazing. That raised
a lot of awareness about possibilities,
but also, I think, exposes
us and any other health care organization to
a lot of risks. So we had to,
hug AI close for some time
and started educating, educating, educating so that people
know if you're using this AI tool, it's
great. It can make you more productive. But
when you put something in it, it goes
on the cloud. The data is now publicly
available.
So you don't put PHI into these publicly
available tools. You should be using our enterprise
instances of
of, these AI assistants. So we started,
using every tool that we have available to
us from from emails that Simon and I
send out to formal trainings
and certifications, and we're still doing that. So
I think that for me,
I want to,
I want all of our workforce to have
that level of, fluency in AIs that we
can really
give agency to everyone to then build their
own agents and don't cause, or or
be less prone to causing an unintended harm.
So that's AI education top of mind for
me.
That makes a lot of sense and, you
know, it's so critical for the organization. I
think for some, it might be an easy
leap, and for others, it takes a lot
more to really help them understand what the
AI is capable of doing and then understand
the risks and and being able to act
appropriately because of it.
And and so I think that's really critical
and cool to understand, you know, how you're
developing those programs and then spreading it across
the organization.
And and within that, kind of mindset, what
do you think the hardest thing about all
of this, that you'll have to do in
the coming year will be?
The hardest thing,
Simon, I'm going to steal your thunder here.
The hardest thing has always been and will
I I think for the foreseeable future, it
will always be change management, adoption,
changing the culture so that
so that these tools
make the intended impact that we're hoping they
would make.
Bringing,
onboarding AI, tools,
always requires a lot of changes to people's
day to days and workflows, and we're talking
about people who are already
extremely busy and,
and a lot of time set in their
own ways.
So, I think that's, something that in our,
executive leadership team, and enterprise,
technology group, we're always thinking about change management
and how do we change the mindset and
that make that culture shift that AI can
be successful. Because I think the technology is
there for the most part for a lot
of things that we wanna accomplish, but, does
it really get adopted and used and make
the impact? That's the big question.
And, and you've done a great job, Nassim,
in in really facilitating the organization because,
you know, we really wanna you know, our
focus is on ensuring quality, trust, and usability,
that key pace as these systems are growing.
So and technology is really helping, you know,
reduce the cognitive and administrative burden
or, for our teams rather than adding to
it.
Right? And, when you move from a
a tech enabled mindset
to a tech forward organization,
that requires new ways of working, you know,
new decision making norms, and a lot of
cultural adoptions. And,
you know, and and, frankly, success depends on
trust,
you know, clarity and champion,
and the champions across the organization.
You know, this is not something you mandate.
You gotta work together and then ownership move
it forward. And
it's been a a really interesting journey for
Nassim and I as we, shepherd this through
the organization.
And that's amazing to hear. And, you know,
truly, it sounds like,
that move from the tech enabled mindset to
the tech forward
organization is something that so many health systems
and hospitals and health care organizations across the
country are are looking to do. And so
your framework here in in some of the
ways that you're looking at it from the
leadership perspective,
really is so helpful to understand.
I'm curious. Before we wrap up, I wanna
talk about growth too. Where do you see
some of the best opportunities for organizational growth,
especially as you're bringing in more of this
education, more of these opportunities,
and more,
of that
tech forward mindset,
across the board?
You know,
for me,
it's really focusing on, you know, what I
call blended intelligence
when we talk about organizational growth,
especially in health care,
right, to bring the best knowledge
to the point of decisioning and letting, you
know, human wisdom apply the context values
and the judgment
at that
point. So and, you know, this is where
AI,
really has the,
capability
to amplify human,
wisdom,
right, not to replace it.
And that's where we want to be and
make sure that we're very responsible,
about it.
K? And the one last thing is, I'll
add, and I'll turn it over to Nassim,
is that this is also the opportunity where,
as we discussed before,
for, innovation to be invisible.
Right? So if we are doing the right
things for our patients and our providers
in a way that,
we're allowing them to practice their medicine at
the top of their license and our patients
to have the best experience,
and,
we'll take advantage of it. Thanks, Simon. So
Simon,
hit on the one of the most important
aspects of growth, which is enabling people to
be,
not only more productive, but also enjoy what
they do day to day and keep, take
away the mundane,
repetitive parts of their workflow so that they
can operate at the top of their lessons.
So that's one aspect of growth.
Another aspect of growth, at least for City
of Hope, is patient access.
We want to we want more patients to
have access to,
the world class care and research that we
provide, and we are using a lot of
technologies, including AI technologies,
to make that possible so that in every
community center,
even outside of City of Hope, people can
have access through our technology
to the world class care and research that
we provide.
That's been something that has been top of
mind,
always for me over the past nine years
and and so and finally, technology is there
to be able to enable it in a
very reliable
fashion. So that's also something that we are
focusing on.
I love it. Thank you so much, Nasim
and Simon, for joining us on the podcast
today, and I'm looking forward to seeing you
both as well at our annual meeting. I
know you'll be
doing a session, a fireside chat,
with one of our editorial leaders just about
everything we talked about here today and digging
deeper into some of these areas that are
so important when you think about technology and
AI in health care and clinical care as
well. It's just, incredible to see the opportunities
and how you've been able to really maneuver
around it at City of Hope. So I'm
looking forward to learning more and seeing you
in a couple weeks.
Thank you. Looking forward to it. Same here.
Thank you so much.