Speaker 0: This is where health care leadership comes together. Becker's sixteenth annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago April. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former president George w Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit beckershospitalreview.com and click on the events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.

Speaker 1: This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant physician leader. We're joined today by doctor Bashir Agboola. Doctor Agboola for for for more than a decade, served at Hospital for Special Surgery, becoming the vice president, associate CIO, and chief technology officer. Just an absolutely brilliant person.

He's now doing some consulting and some other things, but an absolutely brilliant career. Doctor Agbula, can you take a moment and introduce yourself, and and tell people a little bit about what you've done and what you're doing today?

Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Scott. Thanks, for the opportunity to, chat with you and and your audience. It's been it's been a minute since our last conversation. So, as you mentioned, I was most recently at the hospital for special surgery, for a long stretch. And before then, I was with Memorial Kettering Cancer Center also in New York City.

Currently, I am with Interdigm. At Interdigm, we're a technology consultant and advisory firm. We advise health care systems and enterprise enterprises on digital transformation, AI strategy, infrastructure modernization, and governance. Our focus is really not just on deploying technology, but operationalizing it, ensuring that investments in AI, cloud, cyber, data platforms all translate into workflow a workflow integration and financial performance as well as improved patient experience. My careers in health care technology has largely been at the intersection of technology, operations, and executive leadership, helping organizations move from experimentation to sustainable execution.

I'm not a clinician. I'm a technologist and business leader, but I've spent, a long time hanging out with doctors and, clinicians enough to know what their pains are and, to to assist them in the mission of, efficient care delivery. Happy to happy to talk more.

Speaker 1: No. Thank you. As hospitals' health systems utilize technology, work with technology, what's working? Where does AI meet the hype? Where does it not?

What's going well?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm really excited at the prospect of AI, helping with some of the pinpoints we have in health care. You know, often health care gets to bad rap as being sort of a laggard to technology adoption. But in the case of AI, the industry has actually been really at the forefront in in certain aspects of, AI adoption because there are some real challenges that we can address and, realize value quickly, with, with AI. So, I'm excited, for example, at, one of the big problems that we struggle with in health care, which is with the workforce and and clinician burnout.

And we we all we've all heard about the how much time clinicians spend, doing, things other than being in front of a patient and caring for a patient and being present with a patient. And so we we've seen examples where, for for example, with things like ambient, AI scribes, where the AI listens to the, conversation between the clinician and the patient and is able to capture clinically relevant information for insertion, into the, the medical records of the patient. I mean, that's just it's one of the fastest growing instance of technology adoption that I have seen in my career in health care. And and it's the impact is dramatic. Giving time back to physicians, improving the quality of their interactions with their patients.

And that's just one example of where AI is helping to solve real world problems in health care, and then there are many, many more in in the works.

Speaker 1: Where do you see for we see sort of cascading use cases for AI. Talk a little bit about where you're the most excited about some of those use cases.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So, so the, clinical documentation, as I I just described in the case of Ambient AI Scribe is one. Predictive analytics is another area that act and that act interestingly, that's one area that we've been working on for many, many, many years in the background before the whole, excitement about g and a that g and a I created a few over the last few years. Predictive analytics is one of the areas where AI can actually help to bring about the promise of personalized medicine that we've talked about for a long time. In healthcare, we have lots of data.

Fragmented data, you know, data in dark places. But, we're learning, and we're learning to bring the data together. And with that, to do predictive analytics, off of that data that would allow us to personalize the care that each patient would get, you know, develop, therapeutics that are tailored to the peculiar needs and the peculiar physiology of a patient. And that's that's another area where, we can we can finally, over the next, I hope, few years, come up with the the promise of, personalized, medicine.

Speaker 1: Thank you. And talk about doctor Abolak. What are you personally most excited about currently? Where are you most focused and excited this year?

Speaker 2: So, there's a lot to be excited excited about, you know, in the midst of all the hype that's out there. And there there's always so much hype in technology and so much buzz. But for me, personally, I've I've been really excited at the opportunity to work on building structured governance frameworks, to, assist technology leaders and executives in in optimizing their technology investments. And I I I I did some work last year, some research, some doctoral level research work on the effective strategies for, health care leaders to optimize their their technology investments. Because we we we live in a particularly in health care, we live in a, capital constrained environment.

In in health care, our spend, as a percentage of revenue is probably about maybe a thought to about half of what you might see, for for health care, for technology that is, compared to what you might see in other industries like the financial services sector. We'll probably spend, like, four to 5% for many systems, as opposed to 10% or more in financial services and some other sectors. So, so the it's important for technology leaders to to know how best to optimize the spend in technology in health care. So I'm I'm excited and focused on, unearthing the best strategies that some of the best technology leaders out there have found, to make sure that every digital dollar that they spend is well spent towards achieving, the aims, the the quadruple aims of of of health care.

Speaker 1: Thank you very, very much. And and talk a little bit about doctor Bill. You've had this great career. What advice would you give to emerging leaders? What do you tell them?

Speaker 2: So there's a few things. So one, I'll I'll start with the, an advice, a statement of that I learned years ago. And I've and and I love to to repeat this quote as often as I get the chance to. This is a quote attributed to a former head of strategic planning at the Royal Dutch Shell, many decades ago, he said something to the effect that your ability to learn faster than the competition might be the only sustainable advantage you have in the future. So I I that I think that's a powerful, statement.

So both as individual leaders and as organizations, we have to adopt the practice of being fast learners. So we have to learn. So I would say to leaders that you have to learn. There's a lot that's changing right now. You know, so as leaders, you have to learn technology.

You have to learn finance. You have to learn the core business operations of the enterprise that you're part of. So learning broadly and learning fast would be my, first advice. The second advice would be to think in terms of systems and not silos. You know?

There there's, systems thinking isn't, recognized, as a as a capability and a strength as as much as it should in our enterprises. And we often tend to just think very narrowly within our our peculiar domains. You know, the technology teams might just think solely about technology and the finance thing, teams, team leaders. Think in terms of systems because, any enterprise, any modern day enterprise is not one thing. It's a it's a it's a a a system of parts that work together, and decisions made in one part of that systems would have effects elsewhere within the larger systems.

So always think in terms of systems when you think about digital investments and, in in digital innovation. Thirdly, I would say, in order to build credibility as a leader, you really need disciplined execution. So so what what do I mean by that? It means, you have to be sure that there is a a a structured governance that that you use to manage what you set to do for the enterprise. Doing technology for the sake of technology or just because it's the latest innovation isn't good enough, and it would not build credibility.

But having a a structured governance where you have stakeholder representation across your enterprise, the voice of the customer is at the table. And perhaps most importantly, you tie what you're trying to do to the, enterprise strategy. It needs to support the enterprise strategy. It can't be something isolated from it. So having that and then implementing and realizing value iteratively, meaning you implement, you you test, you measure, you readjust, you derive value quickly, give value to the represent value to the organization quickly, and adjust as necessary.

That builds credibility within the organization. That that those those would be some some of the, advice I'll give to, to leaders.

Speaker 1: Well, yeah. I I love that. And just for our readers taking or listeners taking notes, would you synthesize those few pieces of advice just in a in a thirty seconds for a listener taking notes?

Speaker 2: So so learn always and continuously. Keep learning. Learn fast. And learn broadly. Build credibility through structured disciplined governance.

Tie what you do to corporate strategy. It must not be disconnected from what's important to, to the enterprise.

Speaker 1: Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Doctor Agbola, it is great to visit with you, Basheer. What a what a tremendous career and tremendous leadership. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us today

Speaker 2: on the

Speaker 1: Betteridge Health Care podcast. You're just fantastic.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much.