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the description. We are excited to welcome you in October.
This is Laura Ddo with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Joad Khan,
chief Data and Analytics officer at Tufts Medicine. Johan,
it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Happy to be here, Laura.
Now, I know, uh,
is is an exciting time in healthcare technology with all the different evolution
of artificial intelligence and,
and different ways to connect both clinically as well as operationally.
But before we dive into my questions,
can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and your background?
Yeah, Laura. My name is Jot Khan.
I'm Chief Data Analytics Officer at Tufts Medicine. I have been in, um,
provider space for or a decade now, working mostly in data and analytics space.
I have, um, computer software background, uh,
worked in this area for almost 20 years now and bring a lot of
expertise into understanding, curating data, data solutions,
data warehouses, and now recently a lot of, um,
data science related work using ML and ai.
So I'm very happy to be here to have this discussion and, um,
talk about what we are doing at Tufts Medicine with respect to understanding our
data and analytics and how we can bring about positive change in healthcare
using data and analytics.
Fantastic. Well, I'm excited to, to learn more now, given your role,
uh, chief Data Analytics Officer,
what are some of the big opportunities that you're seeing at Tufts as well as
the headwinds that you have your eye on?
We are focused,
first of all to provide frictionless access to our patients.
What I mean by that is understanding our patient populations more
intimately, what modalities of care they would prefer,
and how they would like to access services that Tufts medicine provides with
respect to their care, their wellness, and in unfortunate cases,
even for sickness.
So that's really our focus has been our focus and will be our focus for some
time to provide the right access to our patients,
understand how we can do capacity optimization or for,
for a patient so that they have access when they need and how they need,
understanding what best works for them in terms of touchpoints in the health
system. How is, how are our referrals working today?
How can we make that more efficient for people to get the right care at the
right time?
And also understand how we can provide a good fully integrated,
um, care transition plan for our,
if in their journey,
they would need different types of care,
whether it is care within our four walls of prosperous systems,
or whether it is care that we can provide them through our ambulatory services
and for some of our patients, how we can provide care for them at home.
So along this journey, there's several touchpoints and transitions that happen.
We are really focused on making sure that we understand how that journey is,
how that best fits and works for our patients,
and provide them in a very frictionless fashion. That's our focus right now.
We see a lot of opportunity in that area. And also, like you said,
headwinds meaning how do we do that? How do we integrate technology?
What type of right, uh, interventions we provide for the patients?
How do these transitions work? What, how smooth these transitions are?
What information needs to become available for our physicians and our providers
to make informed decisions about the transitions of care overall, we are really,
really focused on making sure access to care is frictionless for our patients.
Absolutely. I know that's so important and, and certainly being able to access,
um,
care in especially for those who traditionally have had a hard time accessing
healthcare or have had a, a large number of barriers. I know that, um,
is so important today, leveraging technology and, and other means, partnerships,
et cetera, to do that. So, um,
it's great to hear that's been such a focus area of yours. Now,
when you look right now, um, going forward,
how are you thinking about growth and development and adding value to the
overall organization technology? And it touches pretty much every department,
every initiative from clinical to administrative to operations and, and more so,
you know, what does that really look like for you?
How are you thinking about growth and adding value? So.
Like we talked about access, these are all related, um, topics. You know,
access is important and when we provide or when we aim to provide
frictionless access for our patients,
we are also trying to understand what does it mean?
What does it mean for our providers? How are we addressing, um,
burnout for our physicians? What are we doing?
How are we using and leveraging technology to make sure that we are making the
back office work for our physicians smooth? What are we doing to automate,
um, some of the key areas where physicians really have a hard time?
Meaning instead of providing care to the patient, having a conversation,
organic conversation with the patient about their care.
Are physicians really doing that or sort of inundated with what they have to do
with respect to completing the notes? Um,
what they have to do with respect to make sure the charges are captured
properly, documentation is complete.
So we believe augmenting a lot of that work with proper technology,
with key solutions that will help reduce the physician burnout will also
help us increase access in care.
And that will really provide the growth and the value add to the organization,
both from our health systems' point of view,
as well as being a patient focused organization from our
patient's point of view.
The other thing that is key in understanding about, you know,
thinking and understanding about growth is really to sort of connect
transformational research that's happening as test medicine with the actual care
and actual operations within our, within our clinical departments.
So how does that work? What research is being done?
How that re research can be translated into actual clinical operations today?
What type of last mile integration is required?
Those type of solutions we believe are very,
very important and needs the needs to focus the,
if these initiatives are led by our,
we also believe that if this initiatives are led by our physicians,
then it becomes so much more effective.
So we are positioning all of our work today on these aspects of our,
our work. Meaning how do we augment, um,
the work the physicians are doing with appropriate technology,
with right technology that's driven by our providers.
How do we keep our patients center of that focus and provide the access that
they need? We believe if we approach it from this perspective,
it'll allow the organization to grow as well as provide the right
value that we would need to provide to our patients. Hence, um,
hence making sure, again,
coming back to this idea about providing frictionless care and Tufts medicine's
vision for providing frictionless access to the patients.
That's how we are organizing ourselves, Laura.
Got it. That's really helpful to know and definitely is so interesting, um, to,
to think through that,
those access points and keeping patients at the center of the care.
I know it can be easy sometimes to, um, be distracted by some of the peripheral,
uh, things happening around the healthcare space. Um, but,
but certainly keeping them front of mind in any decision you're making is, is,
um, really a helpful barometer. I'm sure as you're trying to think through what,
um, you know, is gonna be helpful,
beneficial from the technology side as well as the strategic planning side, um,
which is great to hear. Now, I know that there is a lot happening in healthcare.
Um, it's unique time,
both with resources on the financial side as well as personnel and staffing. So,
you know, when you look at, um,
how you are thinking through what you want to invest in, um,
in, in, in what risks you wanna take moving forward,
what really stands out to you? Um, what's still important to do right now,
even as many organizations are tightening their budgets and really trying to
figure out how they can, um, move forward in, in, uh,
ESP during financial challenging times?
Well, that's, that's a great question. It's a very important question to ask,
and I'll tell you why many times when you see how things are changing
around you, specifically with respect to as you started, uh,
introducing this podcast about what AI is bringing in
or how it is affecting for, uh, our industry, specifically healthcare industry.
It is very important to understand and note that we don't want to implement
technology or the next,
next shining tool out there just for the sake of doing that.
We want it to be more purposeful.
We want to be more driven, again, to provide the right access to our patients.
So we evaluate from that perspective,
we understand and believe that all of the innovation that needs to happen around
healthcare has to be organically grown from within the organizations and from
that focus of the patient. So, so that's,
that's how we are orienting and finding our in investments.
We are making purposeful investments in areas of technology that
are really,
really meaningful for the change that will being very transformational and
positive change for our, for both, like I said,
for both our patients and also our providers,
including the leadership within the organization,
our key healthcare leaders that are running and managing the operations for
them, providing proper tools that are meaningful,
that are led by actual problem solving solutions, is the key.
So our focus always has been to understand what that is.
How do we take the technology today, the new innovations, the ai,
the ML work that is being done,
how do we understand that from the context of our problem that we are trying to
solve? What is at hand and how does it apply to the problem?
And if it really helps us bring the technology that to solve the specific
problem, then we are all for it.
We'll go ahead and make a very aggressive approach to make that problem,
uh, to actually use that solution to solve the problem. So, so that, that is,
that's why it's such an important question.
We really want to embrace the changes that are coming, um, with the technology.
We want to embrace it in a way that it is purpose purposely meaningful and
brings about a real difference. Now, what do I mean by that?
I actually would want to
use specific examples In our case, like I was talking about access, right?
We are in,
we are using methods and ways now to help our patients get access
to our providers by doing a lot of ML AI work,
because that's our key area of focus.
We believe that if we can provide sentimental analysis of patients,
what patient wants, what their,
what diagnosis or what symptoms they're presenting to bring a problem,
map them to specific specialty, and within that specialty identify the patient.
Our providers who are subject matter experts for the,
for the care of plan in that specific specialty,
we would want to match them to that specific patients. Again,
making those touchpoints with the healthcare system very efficient and
effective.
We believe that using technology to solve such a problem would be an amazing and
a purposeful endeavor,
enhance our focus on bringing in machine learning,
AI-based technologies to improve scheduling, improved capacity management,
improved access to our patients, to the right care,
right care that they may need. That that's how we are organizing ourselves.
We are really looking at technology and the innovation that is coming about,
and we are embracing it in a very purposeful,
meaningful fashion to bring about real changes in,
in how we are providing solution. Does that help, uh, Laura in,
in with your question?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that makes a lot of sense. You know,
and it is really powerful to hear and understand the thought process there in
how you really evaluate the technologies and,
and the different initiatives that you dive into. Because as you mentioned,
you know, it really has to have a clear case for improving patient care in, um,
making things easier for the clinicians and, you know,
adding value to the overall organization. So, um, that,
that's really amazing to hear and definitely something to be excited about and
be proud of. And, you know, before we wrap up our discussion, I,
I wanted to look into the future just a bit more as well.
Where do you see some of the best opportunities for growth and development, uh,
yourself as chief data analytics officer,
as well as the teams that you work with?
Yeah,
so I would actually just add a couple of points to what we just talked about
and segue into your, into your last question.
As we look into technology, as we embrace AI and ml,
we are also, um, very
aware that there are ethical issues of how we need to implement
ai. Um,
we want to make sure that our implementation of AI and ML and any new
technology for that matter, uh, is more augmented,
provides the physicians the type of solutions they may need
to make their, um, make their work much effective and easy.
The second is we want to make sure we augment it in a way that it helps our
patients. It's really, really important that we keep that in mind.
Last but not the least, we are also focused on making sure that
there is ethics, um, at play.
We also make sure we understand that all the solutions are, I said this before,
N I p, it's very important that these are all driven by our providers,
they physician driven solutions, not necessarily technology driven solutions.
We,
we strongly believe that technology is an enablement for our physicians to bring
about the right type of service that they didn't want to provide the patient.
So having said that,
now coming back to your question about what are the best opportunities for
growth in the future, it's really, like I said, to,
we want to meet our patients where their needs are.
That's really where the opportunities are today. In traditional healthcare,
most of the services were driven by, you know,
like sick care.
They were driven towards taking care of patients who are mostly sick.
We want to shift that.
We really want to become a health system where we are engaged with our
patients along their journey as long as they're, well, you know,
as, as long as they're healthy.
We want to be integrated in their journey at that point and understand how we
can help them stay healthy.
We want to help provide them best care apart from providing
sick care. We want to provide them a way that they can stay healthy, be healthy,
and stay healthy for as long as they need to.
And only help them obviously when they're sick, or not only have them,
obviously when they're sick. We want to be part of their entire journey.
Our patients,
we understand this shift from patients that are also consumers and
they may interact with health system,
ask customers sometimes when they need to ask patients, other times they,
they need to, we need to realize that all of us,
regardless of who and where we are, we are patients. We all are getting,
um, old every day, every hour, right? So that,
that understanding and,
and making sure that we are connected with the patients throughout the journey
is where need the best opportunity is.
We really just don't want and wait for the patients to get sick and come to the
hospital. That used to be the traditional way of thinking,
and we wanna shift that. We wanna be connected with the patients
in the entire journey for, you know, as, as long as we are connected with them,
we believe that we'll be able to help them stay healthy as long as they need to.
So that's really the focus in, in, in a nutshell,
we wanna be able to meet our patients where their needs are and be connected
with the, with our customers throughout their journey, uh,
of their being well.
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. You know,
and it is really helpful to think through, um,
what that patient journey looks like and being very supportive of them.
From your perspective, how has that paradigm shift happened? Obviously,
the technology can support it, but in,
in looking at the teams that you work with and, um, you know, just the,
the culture at Tufts, uh,
ha has it been pretty easy to adapt that patient-centered mindset or, um,
you know,
have you had to try different tactics and and has it really been a journey, um,
to get to where you are today?
No, it is definitely a journey. I, I, I don't think it is easy,
but at the same time, I don't think that it is impossible. It,
it just requires a focus. It requires a mindset,
it requires that culture to be permeated, um,
within the institution.
And leadership at Tufts Medicine is very focused on that. Um, so it is,
it is, it is definitely doable. We have made a lot of progress in that area.
I am not saying that we are there yet,
but we will get there as long as we are intentional about it.
As long as we are focused, um, continue to keep, uh, stay focused,
I believe we'll get there and, uh, and I have all confidence, uh,
with, with the team that I work with, uh, with the leadership that I work with,
that if anybody can do it, this is the team that can do it. And,
and hopefully we will,
hopefully we are already showing some of those outcomes and we'll continue to
show positive outcomes in that area.
Fantastic. J thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
This has been a really fun conversation and I'm looking forward to meeting you
in person at WA as well at our Health IT Digital Health and Revenue Cycle event
in October. I,
I know a lot of these things we talked about today are really gonna be front and
center of the conversations to dig even deeper, um, into these themes and,
and have a more robust conversation around them. So I'm looking forward to it.
And thank you so much for your time today.
It was a pleasure, Laura. Thank you so much. Yes, looking forward to seeing you.
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