Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's
Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to
the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. It's fantastic to
have you. Today, we're talking about what surgical
readiness means for ASCs
in an AI driven era. And I'm so
excited to welcome doctor Christian Paian, CEO and
cofounder of Revel AI Health. Doctor Paeyon, thanks
so much for being here today. It's great
to have you.
Great to be here and to be talking
about this.
Definitely an AI forward world as as you
said. So I'm glad to hear you. Absolutely.
And I love that I have you on,
and I do wanna give you a chance
to introduce yourself to our audience because you
have a
a position as an innovator, but also as
a surgeon yourself.
So if you could just introduce yourself and
tell us a little bit about your background
and your work in health care. Absolutely. So
Christian Payan, I'm a CEO, cofounder of Revel
AI Health. The other hat I wear is
I am a practicing orthopedic trauma surgeon at
Duke University School of Medicine where I'm on
faculty.
I'm also on faculty at the Margolis Institute
for Health Policy.
A lot of my focus is on care
transformation,
value based care, and trying to understand how
tech enabled services are going to change the
way that we deliver health care. So I
do a lot of things,
but at the at the cross section of
everything I do is this idea of delivering
better care that's value based and seeing where
technology plays a role.
Yeah. Absolutely. And and you know this yourself.
Right? We see a lot more higher acuity
cases
for organizations,
but we're also seeing them operate with a
lot leaner teams, which doesn't necessarily correlate.
When you look ahead five years, how do
you define surgical readiness right now? And where
does clinical AI meaningfully
change that equation for you?
I I think that today, we're defining surgical
readiness
mostly at the point of care. We're saying
is the patient medically cleared? Is the OR
set up? That we got our vendors in
place. That's that's great. All of those
aspects of care are necessary, but in my
opinion, it's it's insufficient. Right? The patient expectations
are changing.
Five years from now, surgical readiness should really
mean the entire
perioperative
arc, that entire experience is orchestrated
from the time that a patient is scheduled
through through the recovery milestones
after they leave the hospital or the ambulatory
surgery center.
And where I think AI is really going
to help improve this arc
of surgical readiness
is at any point in that journey that
you need good communication
and context around your patient.
There's so much administrative
work and labor that goes into
the process of getting a patient ready for
surgery.
And then really with technology
that is placed smartly
in a way to engage with patients and
offload staff from having to make those touch
points, but they can also surface those issues
to the clinical team ahead of time, we
can make a big difference.
I think what's really going to change five
years from now for ambulatory surgery centers is,
yeah, we're going to be doing more of
these high acuity cases in the outpatient setting,
and that means we're going to need more
contextual information to make sure that we're doing
it safely. And AI is going to play
a big role in extracting that information from
the chart and making sure that the information
gets communicated to the clinical team in a
way that's simple for them to understand, and
most importantly, to the patient so so that
they understand their expectations and that so nothing
falls through the gaps the way it might
today in what is a more fragmented system.
I do wanna follow-up on this really quickly
because I it feels like it's a very
personal issue for you, I feel like, because
you know both sides. Is that correct? And
and why is that such why is it
so important to you personally from from your
position where you're at?
Absolutely. I am, like you said, kind of
working on both sides of the coin here.
I'm I'm thinking about how we as a
health system at Duke can strategically
shift a lot of our cases to the
outpatient setting, including some of our fracture cases
that we've traditionally thought of as needing to
be done in the hospital. And I wanna
make sure that the experience is good for
our patients,
and that this this shift happens safely. Now
the other side, right, wearing my entrepreneurial hat,
I work with hospitals
and health systems and organizations
that are at all different levels of technical
readiness or clinical
protocol readiness.
So for me, it's it's really trying to
bridge that idea of what we're doing in
an academic medical center as everything evolves to
the outpatient setting while trying to understand how
you can embed technology into the patient experience
and the clinical infrastructure
to make it a lot easier. So, yeah,
for me, it's definitely, I think, an issue
that's really personal because I want my patients
as a surgeon have a good experience.
And then from an infrastructure perspective,
I'm hoping that we can build something that
is scalable and really changes the experience for
patients to be less fragmented
and for organizations that are honestly, in many
ways, struggling, right, with labor needs and constraints,
to be able to do this in a
in a way that's automated and allows staff
to spend more time on patients and less
on paperwork.
You mentioned something really important, which is the
technical readiness piece. And this is one of
my favorite topics to talk about because we
saw so much of this in 2025.
There's a ton of AI pilots.
All every organization wants to do it. Right?
They start projects, and then they sort of
fade. There's very few examples of sustained impact.
We're seeing some, but very few across the
nation right now, especially for ASCs.
For ASCs today, what are some of those
AI use cases, with clinical AI use cases
that you're looking to that are actually delivering
value,
and what separates those from the pilots that
don't scale?
You're absolutely right. I mean, there's this gold
rush of use cases and pilots, and
the pilots that become platforms are few and
far in between.
I think that in the ASC space, there
are a lot of labor challenges right now.
So people aren't necessarily looking for technology
to ping their clinicians with more decision support
at the point of care. Where I think
sustainable innovation is going to happen from a
clinical AI perspective in the ambulatory surgery center
is around patient communication and engagement automation
and trying to help ambulatory surgery centers
prepare for this era of asynchronous longitudinal
quality data. And I'm really talking about patient
reported outcome measures.
I think that we were somewhat fortunate in
the final rule that got passed by CMS
to not have information transfer and Pro PM
be launched onto ambulatory surgery centers, but that's
coming. Every single model that's come from CMS
is asking us to report on how our
patients are doing around their procedure, and that's
a ton of labor costs. I think this
is a place where clinically I is going
to make a big difference by automating these
touch points,
pushing that information
into the electronic health record, surfacing it to
clinicians so that they can have better a
better idea of how their patients are doing
after procedures.
And maybe most importantly and not often highlighted,
I think,
improving the patient experience, making it so that
patients feel like they have an always on
conversational assistant that can explain to them why
they're filling out another form, why they've gotta
fax three or four things to their primary
care doctor. And I think that if we
can deploy those kinds of use cases, we'll
see scalable
and lasting technology in the implementation of clinical
AI for ASCs.
You mentioned my favorite f word, the facts.
It's still being mentioned in 2026
in podcasts, so make sure that you know
what a facts is. If you don't, you
probably
you talked about you talked about scalability here.
What's that one factor for you personally
that's most important for organizations to scale?
Workflow integration.
You you have to integrate and understand the
clinician and the patient's perspective inside and out.
If you and we've seen this. Right? We've
we've deployed technology in the past at Revel
AI that didn't take into account
the change management that's required,
the deep understanding
of the workflow.
I think that if we can find those
use cases that honestly, at first, will not
feel like they're scalable because you've gotta get
in the trenches. You have to speak to
nurses.
You have to secret shop and live the
experience of surgical readiness as a patient, and
then see where technology can embed in a
way that's going to remove friction and not
add it over and over and over again
throughout
a region and then the country for this
setting of care in ambulatory surgery centers.
I will say,
you know, there is something else that's very
important. It's interoperability.
And I think that
a common theme that I'm seeing at in
outpatient surgery centers is there's information
living there on one system of record, and
then there's information living everywhere else, and patients
are trying to
compile it.
Ambulatory surgery centers
are struggling to
synthesize all that information.
And so as I talk about scalability with
workflow integration, it's gotta be paired with access
to the system of record and allowing for
a gintech systems and AI to contextualize this
information and make it meaningful.
To be able to do that, you've touched
on it earlier in the conversation, you need
data, and you need good data.
Yeah. Yeah. We talk about, you know, quality
reporting, and and it's sort of a this
this compliance exercise that a lot of folks
are talking about, but it's also a leading
indicator for readiness for a lot of organizations.
How does AI shift quality data from that
retrospective
reporting piece to then real time clinical insight
in specifically the perioperative setting?
I think that this has been a missed
opportunity for a long time. Right? To your
point, we've thought of quality reporting as a
checklist, something we've gotta get off our
our plate. Where I think AI is going
to make a difference you know, this is
still a checklist. Right? We've gotta get it
done. But let AI do a lot of
that chart abstraction, the submission to CMS, which
traditionally has been a really laborious and,
administratively burdensome task.
And then let organizations,
people, shift their attention from collecting these measures
to understanding through continuous collection what those measures
mean. Right? Start using patient reported outcome measures
or your ED visit rate at your ASC
to
fuel care transformation.
I think that's where clinical AI is going
to really embed and make a difference. It's
gonna automate that
piece
of
of the puzzle for us that to date
has been a headache, and instead, make it
a place that we can focus our attention
to improve patient experience, to improve clinical outcomes,
and hopefully to shift staff effort away from
repetitive tasks that are administrative in nature and
instead towards revenue generating activity and activity that
is improving, again, the patient experience and the
clinical experience. That's that's where I see,
really a lot of change coming
soon if we can if we can get
it right.
And it'll it enables organizations to be proactive.
It enables organizations to look to the future
instead of always running behind, so to speak.
And and speaking of that, specifically,
for ASC leaders who want to be AI
ready, who want to do this right, rather
than being AI reactive and reacting to all
of these trends too late, quite frankly,
what priorities should they focus on over the
next twelve to twenty four months to support
that safe, scalable adoption that we've touched on?
You you, hinted at this. I think
we have to shift from being reactive to
proactive.
We can't wait until the penalties kick in.
We have to recognize the signals from the
regulatory bodies,
from, you know, what our own sort of
bottom lines are telling us. And I think
that there are really three priorities ASCs should
look for, over the next twelve to twenty
four months. One, get your data in order
or at least understand where the gaps are
in your data. Are you on one system
of record? Are you processing
EHR information from multiple providers?
How are you gonna take that data and
organize it in a way that provides context
to your patients, improves your outcomes, and lets
you be ready for those inevitable quality reporting
measures that are coming your way?
Start thinking about workflows, right, that you want
to augment,
or replace, and think about how technology is
going to play a role in that workflow,
transformation.
And then I think the third thing that
ASCs need to think about is defining their
culture. A culture of iteration and innovation is
going to be extremely important. There's so many
cases that are coming towards ASCs. It's like
a good problem to have. But if you're
not careful,
this case mix that's going to
all of a sudden show up at your
facility could really change your workflows in a
way that you're not ready for, affect your
bottom line, and I think that could be
a a really big problem. And with those
three things in mind, what ASC leaders should
start to be doing now as well as
over the next twelve to twenty four months
is identify your partners and and start to
iterate with them before,
you know, a percentage of your reimbursement is
on the line so that you have that
chance to iterate, to change your workflow, to
get your data in order so that when
the stakes are real, you're not playing catch
up. Right? So those would be my recommendations.
Right? Like, be at the cutting edge of
this stuff.
Find use cases that you can silo and
innovate and partner on, and then prepare for
the future instead of just reacting to the
present.
Doctor Pan, it's so great to have you.
Thanks so much for taking some time for
us. We'll have to come back and do
an episode on partnership. I feel like that
warrants its own, its own episode.
Agreed. Yeah. They're bad partners. Like, you know,
you gotta know how to vet a partner.
That is true.
Doctor Pan, again, thank you so much for
being here today, and we also want to
thank our podcast sponsor, Revel AI Health. You
can tune in to more podcasts from Becker's
Healthcare by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.