- Welcome everyone to the Becker's
Healthcare podcast series.
I'm Mariah Moham, writer
and moderator with Becker's Healthcare.
I'm absolutely thrilled to have with me today Dr.
Mazo, vice Chair for Practice
and Clinical Affairs in the Department
of Pediatrics at Duke Health Doctors.
It's very nice to have you on the podcast today
to get us started with you mind please introducing yourself
and telling us a bit about your background.
- Well, thank you Mariah, for the opportunity.
Um, as you said, I am the Vice Chair for Practice
and Clinical Affairs in the Department
of Pediatrics at Duke Health in, uh,
sunny Durham, North Carolina.
I'm a pediatric cardiologist by training, um,
but spend, um, the majority of my time
as a healthcare administrator
and leader, um, overseeing strategy
and operations for our clinical practice network across the,
um, primary service area
and across the state of North Carolina.
- Wonderful. Thank you so much
for giving us that background.
So stepping into 2024, uh, of this year, there is a lot
of innovation taking place,
but there are still some challenges.
What are some of the biggest issues you're following in
healthcare, uh, this year?
- So in terms of the innovations that we're intrigued by
and that we're following,
I think like most other institutions,
we're thinking about the application of
artificial intelligence to our clinical practice.
We have a partnership with Microsoft here at Duke Health
and we're just starting to implement some of the tools
into practice itself.
For example, we are, um, opening up the chat-based tool
that I think most people are familiar with through
what they've heard in the popular press.
We're opening that up in a way that has some guardrails
around it so that our clinical teams can begin to use
those tools to enhance or supplement their work.
One area that we're really interested in is the,
the enormous volume of patient initiated messages
that our physicians
and our advanced practice providers get every day.
Responding to those messages is a huge effort requiring a
significant amount of time,
taking people away from their face-to-face
patient work time.
So we're utilizing these tools to create some, uh,
templating to create some opportunities for people
to generate automated messages that still contain content
that's relevant to the work.
Um, so we're taking away a little bit
of the actual investment of time
and replacing it with a more streamlined approach,
which hopefully will allow our clinical providers to do
what they do best and that is spend a lot of time
face-to-face with their patients.
- Yeah, that's great. That partnership
with Microsoft definitely sounds like it can improve the
day-to-Day operations.
What are you most excited about
and also what is making you nervous,
whether it's something you're personally working on
or something that you're seeing in the news?
- Something we're really excited about is we are
transitioning from one technological platform to
co a patient feedback to a new platform.
So traditionally we've used surveys that have gone out
to patients, whether they've been inpatients in our
hospital, whether they've been in one
of our procedural units,
or if they've been seen in one of our clinics.
Traditionally, they would get an email based
or a traditional snail mail based survey
to fill out one to two weeks
after the episode of care, which has so many disadvantages,
not the least of which is when the survey is
so far removed in time from the actual episode of care,
there's always the, the worry that the response
of the survey doesn't really reflect
what the experience was.
And it also makes it really hard for us
to act on those survey results.
So we are gonna be going to a new platform,
it's a Qualtrics based platform where patients
and families will be able to give us feedback in real time.
So while they're in the hospital
or while they're in the procedural suite
or while they're in one of our outpatient practices,
that's gonna be able to allow us to get
what we hope is really timely feedback
and actionable feedback, we'll actually be able
to harvest those data at the point of care
and see if we can do some innovation, some service recovery,
some modulation of our offerings right at that moment,
um, and then see if those innovations, if those changes
actually impact the responses that we get.
So that's really, really exciting.
You know, we are very good at collecting data,
but we don't always have an opportunity to put
that data into actionable form
and this is really gonna change the game in that respect.
- Yeah, absolutely. It definitely sounds like it.
And Doctor, before I let you go, the last thing I wanted
to ask you is, what will the most effective healthcare
leaders need in order to be successful in the next two
to three years, would you say?
- In the next few years,
the most successful leaders are gonna be those
who can cogently, articulately,
and accurately explain to people the reasons behind
what we're asking them to do every day.
It's gonna be more than simply making a
financial case for care.
It's gonna be more than simply making a connection between
value and the delivery of care
or the utilization of resources,
creating value to enhance care.
It's gonna be actually about explaining the very basis
of the work, giving people a sense of inspiration,
giving people a sense of meaning in their work.
The, um, generation of people
that we're hiring today into our clinical practices,
physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses,
medical technologists.
They're interested in the elements of the job that most
of us have traditionally been interested in.
Things like compensation and benefits
and things of that sort.
But they're even more interested in many cases
in understanding what our organizational values are,
how we really live out those values in our day-to-day work,
how we practice what we preach.
I think young people today want
to find meaning in the things that they do,
and the best leaders will be those
who can actually show them what that meaning is
and show them directly how it connects
to their day-to-day work.
- Absolutely. Thank you so much
for those final thoughts, doctor.
This has definitely been an amazing
and informative discussion.
So again, I wanna thank you so much
for coming on Becker's Healthcare
and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
- Thank you, Mariah. It was a pleasure.
- It's so important for leaders at the top of organizations
to keep learning, stay sharp, grow their networks,
help our audience better do this in a more simplified,
personalized, and meaningful way.
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