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the description. We are excited to welcome you in October.
This is Laura Deda with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Ash Goel,
senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Bronson Healthcare Group.
Dr. Goel, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
The pleasure is mine. Thank you.
Now, I know we have a lot to talk about.
There's so much happening in healthcare and technology is moving so quickly.
But before we dive into my questions,
can you tell us just a little bit about yourself and your background?
Yeah, absolutely. Um, hello everyone and, uh,
thank you for the opportunity to be on this podcast. Uh,
a little bit about me. I am, uh, a
now ancient, or at least I used to think that I would never get there,
but now getting there, uh,
physician executive that has been in healthcare for about 25 years
and in leadership roles in the C-suite for the last
15 years,
primarily working on strategic investments,
opportunities around consumer innovation,
looking at technology as a mechanism to deliver
better care more efficiently to the patients
throughout, not just the US but also across the world.
I've had the fortune of, uh, working in three different continents,
uh, as a clinician and as a physician leader as well.
In this last role that I currently am in, I lead,
uh,
the technology innovation analytics and
the wider spectrum of, uh,
consumer and digital strategy for the organization here in
southwest Michigan, which, uh,
serves about 12 counties and we are continuing to grow and
very proud of the work that we do in this, uh, arena.
Well, that's fantastic to hear and definitely it seems like a great mix of your
expertise to be focused on, um,
the technology and in patient care as well as the patient experience.
And I'm so interested to hear more about that and what you're doing at Bronson.
So, you know, when you think about, uh, where you're at today,
what are some of the opportunities that you're excited about as well as
headwinds that you have your eye on right now?
I think headwinds always create new opportunities, right,
which is where I thrive.
I would start with the broader concerns that are bound around
us, which is just where we are at in the economic cycle,
and we all hear words around recessions looming.
The performance of the markets is getting challenging and more
volatile to predict, and certainly the geopolitics is not helping.
And that trickles down into healthcare.
When most of healthcare came through in a
remarkably positive way through the pandemic,
I would argue that the reverberations of the various
impacts of the pandemic are still being felt throughout the healthcare
ecosystem, uh,
certainly in the us And that has been creating a
significant challenge for all healthcare organizations, including ourselves,
where we are seeing narrower operating margins.
We continue to struggle with, uh,
resourcing and managing to keep up with the volume
of the work,
whether it is because of pent up demand from clinical care
that was not delivered,
or new expectations around the clinical care or in general,
the ability of people in the clinical and non-clinical
spaces in hospital operations to be able to do their jobs effectively.
These all have created tremendous amounts of,
uh,
challenges and at the same time created multiple opportunities
for asking the question of how we can do things differently.
I think I'll point out one other thing along the way,
which is something that perhaps in short spans of time we don't recognize,
but in the longer term, we uh,
always think about from hindsight that this could have hit us in the face
and we would know better to recognize it during that time. And,
and that's about consumer or societal expectations.
Healthcare has been a laggard in adapting to that
change. Uh,
partly because we are always beholden to
the regulators and the traditions of healthcare delivery. Uh,
we end up moving slower than what our patients and our consumers want us
to, and that's where the opportunities come in. You know,
you think about the world of, uh, retail,
you think about the world of social media where the here now is so much
more salient for us, and we still keep thinking about,
uh, how we deliver care from the 1980s,
1990s model.
The generational shift that is happening is producing these opportunities
that I can talk about here, uh, towards the later part of this podcast to,
uh, to answer your questions.
Oh, fantastic. And you know,
I think all of those things you mentioned are really important and it is just
interesting to, uh, keep in mind how you,
from the technology leader can really have an impact on all the different
departments and, um, organization patient care, connecting with patients.
So it's exciting to see how the technology is evolving as well as the thought
process around what the IT leader does.
So given all those challenges that you just mentioned,
how are you thinking about growth and development,
especially adding value to Bronson going forward?
What does that look like for you and,
and how can you really position yourself to, uh, you know, put your,
add that value that's gonna be meaningful in the future?
Yep. Uh, I, I think if I had a crystal ball,
I would say I know the answer to that one, but I have an idea of what I think,
which ties back to the, uh, headwinds that we talked about.
Uh,
I think for us to focus on how we can
more effectively and efficiently meet
our consumer base needs and their changing expectations
is where the opportunity for growth comes in.
And to me,
that is about investing in platforms that allow for
delivery transformation,
which focuses on the consumers and the caregivers that
take care of the patients that come to us,
or more importantly,
we are thinking about or should be thinking about how we go to them.
Uh, I, I use a paradigm of, uh, proximity,
which is something that I'll take a leaf out of the pages of business
management and just say it's about predicting demand before
demand is created and meeting the demand where it is needed.
So it is about going proximal, going closer to where the demand is generated.
And for us,
that means continuing to use the disruption of
technology to provide for efficient delivery of care
where people need it or where people wanted.
That may be, for example, in the primary care space,
simply in understanding are we taking care of patients
in the best circumstances, uh,
on a regular basis,
how many of our patients are being seen in preventative
care versus acute care? And how are we managing chronic diseases,
whether we are using tech platforms to predict outcomes
or leveraging existing technologies to deliver
those, uh, care opportunities in patients homes.
Uh, it can also be in the acute care side where we look at
continuation of the journey of tying things together for patients and
caregivers to optimize how the care is delivered. You know,
we still have lot of opportunities for, uh,
both efficiency because we have waste and also errors in
the system. And an example of that,
most recently for us was we invested in provision of
a very, I'll call it dated technology,
but something that I know is not being done, uh,
in the majority of the health systems is barcode med
administration in the OR suites where anesthesiologist
do not use the standard method of verification of
medications, uh, which is used everywhere else throughout the health system,
right? That's a simple example of improving quality using integrated technology
or giving people a view into their data
during the acute care visit,
whether it is knowing where their next appointments are,
knowing what medications they are on or for the providers
to better understand if there is, uh,
change in acuity of the patient to give them prediction scores.
And then also spending a lot of time investing in efficiency tools
for people so that we can minimize wasteful clicks
and integrate data in a way that gives the right information at the right
time to providers, nurses, and other staff.
We've seen a wholesale shift in reduction of,
uh, fixed devices.
We started taking an approach of a multi-channel
user facing experience in our employee space,
which is where we want to give staff one
device that should do almost all of their work, if not all of it.
It should be their phone, it should be their pager, it should be their, uh,
barcode scanner. It should be also their documentation device for
especially nursing where they are
a very busy, and b also intensely,
uh, spending time on computers trying to document the care that they give.
So those are the things that we are working on in the tech arena.
You know, it's about changing our approach to the platform that the pro
that the different employees use and also changing the experiences,
uh, for our patients so that they have access to more information and they have
ability to, uh, view, uh,
what is happening with them for them,
not to them.
I love that. I,
I think that's such a great mantra and definitely something that can guide any
time type of initiative and, um, investment that you're all making.
And to that point, you know, I,
I know as you were talking through some of the challenges,
healthcare resources are certainly scarce and valuable within the
organization. So with that in mind, how do you approach, uh,
thinking through moves that you still wanna make,
investments that are still worth making,
even in a somewhat challenging financial and and resource scarce environment?
We guide ourselves through centering on
what is the highest best use of people's time and highest
best use of technology and investments,
capital and otherwise into the technology platforms by
really looking at what the best alignment to
organizational strategy would be.
And that goes upstream to planning and influencing what that strategy
looks like. Now we have four, um,
pillars that we design over a strategy around.
One is around people that is employees and patients and
their experiences.
Second is around our ability to deliver,
uh, transformative care.
And that's measured through quality of care
and ability to create high reliability
organizations as we deliver that care.
The third pillar is around, uh,
fiscal stewardship and growth.
Are we growing in the right areas and are we investing technology to support the
growth in the right areas?
And are we producing efficiency in how people
are able to deliver the care that they need to do?
And then the fourth thing, which has been the biggest, um,
opportunity for us in the last three years, pandemic driven,
or perhaps even otherwise market driven,
is around increasing access for people.
Cause we are so overwhelmed
by our capacity to be able to produce the kind of
value that our patients need,
we end up getting backlogged and even sometimes providing basic
care to our patients. We had there for a while,
significant deterioration in our numbers as it relates to,
you know, the next available appointment or the time to seeing a
doctor in the ED or things like that.
We've invested a lot in
creating capacity optimization in our eds,
our patient throughput in our hospitals,
in our eds and ORs,
and now we are focusing on ambulatory access in both in
primary care and specialty care and leveraging tech because we use
a very integrated approach throughout our organization.
We can tell at any point in time what our capacity
looks like,
and we are actively investing in now fine tuning it to,
for example, understanding acuity and understanding bottlenecks.
So that's how we are trying to define our true north and our
investments. We weighed up against those pillars. Then we put,
uh,
any initiative or program through a discussion of what
pillar impact we have and how much we expect it to.
It's not just about dollars and cents because we believe that,
uh,
technology and growth and people's experiences
and improvement of access that requires investments and the value
comes from those investments. Uh,
it's not about cutting our nose to spite our faces because we can do that in a
appear that our, you know,
financial bottom line is remarkably improved,
but that's not at the cost of, uh,
what we truly think of and believe in,
which is providing services to the many,
many communities that we serve.
That's a really great point, Dr. Goel.
Thank you so much for talking through all of that and really, um,
outlining what it looks like to be able to continue to invest in the care and
the team and the patients, um, regardless of,
of the broader financial situation. So that, that's really inspiring. Thank you.
Before we wrap up our discussion, I just have one more question for you.
Where do you see the best opportunities for growth,
whether it's you in your role as CIO or your teams going forward?
I think
the answer is going to be in three different areas.
Okay. One,
I believe that healthcare and particularly healthcare technology
enterprises can broadly invest in partnerships,
partnerships across, uh, other technology vendor partners,
and certainly with industry vertical partners such as peers,
to build a better mousetrap for how we
collect data, how we produce value out of data,
and how do we use that data to inform our,
uh, consumer, our patient journey, and our business imperatives.
Uh, that's where I think, at least in the healthcare technology world,
our future lives. Uh,
second thing that I would say is from a healthcare enterprise,
the growth is going to come from creating a disaggregated
approach to healthcare delivery.
And what I mean by that is that we need to continue to
push into delivering care where it is needed.
And, uh, you know, I can imagine a future of being,
we already are some ways in people's devices,
but being in people's homes, you talk about hospital at home or other things,
I would even imagine a, uh, future where we have,
I'll call them pods that fit in neighborhoods
that are essentially fully automated, unmanned,
where people can walk in,
connect to provider or providers or
bots or AI on demand to get what they need without
having to walk through the 10 different hoops they have to jump through to get
to clinical care or asking and asking a question. They need, you know, think,
think about those experiences because the waste of having
people come to us is not where the future is.
The future is us going into people's homes, their neighborhoods,
their devices, all of those.
And the last thing I would say is that
our growth opportunities in the future for the entirety
of, uh,
US healthcare ecosystem is going to be driven by
how forward thinking we can be in
meeting the expectations of the consumers differently.
We are limiting ourselves by designing solutions
to what we think today as the answer to our problems today.
And I think,
and I believe very strongly that we need to be thinking about what
the 15 year old person today will demand when they
are of prime age of looking for healthcare. You know,
when they hit 35, when they hit 40 or 45. Uh,
we are trying to design healthcare for people that
may no, may no longer be our customers, uh,
by the time technology is ready to serve them.
So looking out in the future and delivering care to,
that is where our opportunities of growth will come from,
and I think we will be hard pressed and challenged by our tech
partners, uh, in, um, the big tech companies who are going there.
And healthcare,
certainly healthcare technology should be actively partnering and investing in
those.
Fantastic. Dr. Goel, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
This has been a really fun conversation.
I look forward to connecting with you again soon.