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Welcome to This Week Health Conference. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, a set of channels and events dedicated to leveraging the power of community to propel healthcare forward. Today we have an interview in action from the Fall Conferences on the West Coast.

Here we go.

Hi, we're here at the Chime Fall Forum with another interview in action series. I'm Sue Shade. I'm the principal at Starbridge Advisors and also one of the moderators for the town hall show on This Week Health.

And today, I'm Tressa Springman. I should say Tressa has stopped by. Tressa is the Chief Information and Digital Officer at LifeBridge Health. So, good to see you again. Good

morning, sir. Thanks for having me. I kind of caught you

off guard. That's alright. First off, what's top of mind? What are you looking forward to besides all your board responsibilities here at

the fall forum?

Well, I love the keynote on compassion. Awesome. Because I think we've got to figure out more creative ways to motivate our staffs and ourselves Awesome. Keep us healthy, ideally, from what I heard, by focusing on others, and I think that's key. I'm assuming the exhaust is going to be better engagement from our team, and better patient experience.

And I don't know any health system that doesn't have that as a top priority.

Absolutely. I thought it was very inspiring. Yeah. And I'm going to read, do you know Dustin Hufford? I don't. He's the CIO at Cooper. Oh, wow. So, I gotta just send him a note and say, Well, they referenced you are fortunate to have him as CEO.

Yeah. Yeah, it was awesome. I'd love to see the slides.

Isn't it fascinating, because of course, PIVOT, Other Priorities, Artificial Intelligence. We're going to PIVOT, yes, go. Right, but like when we talk about compassion and empathy, and then we talk about how do we create economic capacity by employing thoughts and technology so that we're more efficient.

It's interesting how they have to play off each other. Yeah. Right?

So talk about AI at Lightbridge Health. What are you doing and what are you planning to do? Governance.

Okay. That's where we're starting. Look, I think like many other peers of mine, we have a lot of artificial intelligence.

Perhaps not as much generative, but whether it's robotic process automation or machine learning tools, alerts in our EMRs, we're employing it and have been on the regular for a number of years. But as the recent, I guess, excitement around the innovative capabilities around generative and what it can do to bring joy back to healthcare medicine.

I think one of our key responsibilities is balancing that innovation with the risk. Right. Because there is. Right. And we've got to take a proactive role in our organizations. We've got to step into it and help our own organizations figure out where we want to land on that fulcrum of risk and innovation.

And then create a framework for whatever your culture can support. Right. Do you have

governance in place already? No, we're working hard at it.

Yeah, we're working hard at it. And, I mean, it's hard. We're starting with scope. What should we even bother with? You know, what is of sufficient risk that it should command our attention?

you know, it's a ready, fire, aim type situation.

Okay. Do you know Jeff Gottney?

I do not. He's the CIO at Rush Hour. She's just throwing out all these names so I look like I don't

know anybody. No, no, no, no, No. So I will connect you with him if you want. Okay, great. I'd love it. I've interviewed him for the town hall and they seem to agree.

To have a very good structure and governance already I on ai. That's great. Very integrated with what they were already doing. That is great. So I, the one I'm most impressed with recently. Yeah, Yeah. Next year I would love it. Okay. Okay. So besides ai, what are you looking forward to with your team next year, 24?

Well, I think strategically we're challenging ourselves about where we've come from and where we're headed. We're on a new strategy journey and if we dig deep, we're seeing a. There's a lot of consolidation in acute care hospitals in the U. S. Really complex care is really expensive.

And the way to manage that expense is to specialize. There's one school of thought that believes in some number of years you'll have a highly specialized acute care organization and then you'll have the everybody else. And we're trying to decide what does that mean for us. in the Baltimore market, we've got a lot of great, high quality Qualified, quaternary, acute care organizations.

And yet there are a lot of community needs, wellness, etc. That frankly remain unmet. And we all know that's 85 percent of our lives. so I don't know where we're going to land on that journey. But that excites me. I think it's going to open up a lot of new possibilities. And as usual, it's going to continue to expand how we think of the delivery of health and wellness to our communities.

Okay, great. Anything exciting from... This year, 23, that you want to comment on in terms of some of the innovations? Wow.

There's so many things that we've dipped our toe in the water into. You know, I know it sounds really modest, but when we do think about an acute care organization and the potential expense in it, we all understand, just like telehealth, that technology exists for every single patient area in a hospital expenses aside.

To have two way audio and two way video. You know, we've heard it through a number of innovators, etc. We're on that same journey, and I look very much forward to a day when every one of our inpatient rooms has the capability of two way audio and video with any care provider, with family members nursing, sitters, and a lot of other use cases you've heard about today.

And then finally, really having that backdrop. I mean, what a great time when you know you've got a patient who's a fall risk because the placement of them in the bed isn't what it was or should have been. There's so many things we can do. I just hope, I love what Howard Messing said about expense management.

We can't let these capabilities become a barrier to everyone in healthcare just because of the cost. Absolutely. I'm worried about that kind of two tiered system, and we just have to make sure that doesn't happen. But I'm excited about the Art of the Possible,

so thank you. Oh good. Okay, well thanks for stopping by.

Yep. Alright. 📍   📍 We want to thank you for a wonderful year. As you know, we have celebrated our five year anniversary at This Week Health, and we are going to enter our sixth year of doing this. And we set out a goal to raise 50, 000 for childhood cancer this year, and you did not disappoint. We have raised close to 60, 000 this year for childhood cancer, and we really appreciate you.

We appreciate you. The community coming together. And we hope to do more of this next year. We hope that you'll join us. 📍 📍   📍 All right, back at the Chime Fall Forum with another interview in action. I'm Reid Steffen, VP and CIO at St. Luke's Health System, and I'm joined this morning by my friend Andrea Daugherty, who is the head of digital health at SHI International. Andrea, how are you?

I'm wonderful.

Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to

chat with you. All right, right at the top, like a quick elevator pitch. Who is SHI International, and what's this new role you have? Yeah,

SHI is a global IT reseller. The healthcare vertical is relatively new. My role is head of digital healthcare and so really focused around clinical and technical strategy for our healthcare customers throughout the U.

S. and global.

Okay so we're a couple days into the Chime Hall Forum. What has kind of captivated your attention? What's inspired you, surprised you, trying to bring the sense and the learnings of the conference to those who aren't able to attend? Well, of course,

you know, the hot topic everybody's talking about is generative AI.

I've heard that once. And who's really doing it and what that really means. But you know, I've had some really interesting conversations in terms around like, you know, generative AI, its applicability in some of the health systems, but also, the need for, or lack thereof, for legislation around that.

And so I attended the policy early session this morning and Donna Roach and and Dr. Bill Feaster all shared some very interesting perspectives around kind of what they anticipate will happen between the FDA. yOu know, as we continue to develop and roll out generative AI.

What

was the sense of that group about the EO that got released by President Biden? Have people read it? Did they just use AI to summarize it? Like, what's kind of the take?

Yeah, I don't think anybody's truly convinced that when they wrote it they knew what they were talking about, quite frankly. You know, and we've seen this a number of times, right?

You know, government, doesn't matter which administration it is, will release it. And a lot of times it really is in good faith. But, you know, they have to go back and amend. And this is only just scratching the surface, right? With any new technology, right, I think we kind of put our best foot forward.

But recognizing it's going to continue evolving. There's going to be a lot of amendments I anticipate in the future.

Any discussion about liability? That's been kind of a topic of discussion. If you use this and there's a bad outcome, like, like who's liable? Is it the technology? Is it the system? Is it the provider who uses the technology?

Thank you.

Yeah, actually that's been, I've had a couple of discussions about it, you know, and I think it's an interesting, everybody has an interesting perspective, right? Depending on the care setting or if it's, you know, there's a lot of retail vendors that are getting in the healthcare space and, they're trying to streamline or disrupt really healthcare in the way that it's delivered.

And so you have to really think about, where, as a patient at least, I think about, what's more important for me? Is it the technology or is it the care that I receive? Yeah. And I think we'll... We'll continue to see some debate back and forth, especially over this next year.

There's a lot of new players entering the market so we'll see, yeah.

Yeah I think in the, some of the sessions I've been in, there's been this discussion of it's not about the AI, like it still is a, it will always be a human to human experience. Experience, 100%. And the AI is just a, it could be an accelerant, a new conduit, but the focus needs to remain on that human to human effort and

activity.

Efforts, yeah. You know, I really think about it as, a kid, right? You know, I grew up in a, I'm a millennial, so I'm dating myself a little bit, but I can't remember really a time in my life where I didn't have technology. Now granted over the past 25 plus years, we've seen that technology develop, 10, 20, 50 fold, and, but my experience with my provider is still just that, right?

I go in, I see the nurse, I get my vitals checked. It's really the technology is just enhancing that experience. And I think that's what, at the core, that's what we have to remember. In healthcare, the patient's still at the center. It doesn't matter how much technology, you still have a human that you're taking care of.

There's a life in your hand. And I think as long as we keep that at the forefront we should be okay.

So let's talk a bit about the practical application of Gen AI. Yeah. And you said a couple of things. So what I hear consistently in what we're doing Gen AI and the Epic in basket to auto generate messages, ambient listening, which has been really fueled in terms of lowering costs and making it more productive on day one with Gen AI.

Things like... Microsoft Copilot interweaving into your kind of collaborative tools experience. Yeah. Outside of that, are there any compelling pragmatic use cases that you're hearing about or seeing customers do?

You know, a lot of the focus I feel like has been around physician providers and less around nurses.

Okay. I know that there's a pilot, Copilot pilot for nurses coming out and I'm very intrigued to hear how that goes because nurses do just as much if not more documentation as physicians and they're constantly running around and Oftentimes, I feel like they're an afterthought when it comes to this new emerging technology.

And so, I'm really intrigued to see where that goes and kind of as co pilot, more and more folks start to adapt co pilot for physicians seeing what happens in the nursing space as well. Yeah,

I think that's spot on. When I talk to our nurses, their biggest complaint is the burden of clinical documentation.

Yeah. And I it's much higher than providers. Yeah. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And we just keep adding other things to them. Yeah. Okay. Hey. Awesome. So now monitor for handwashing compliance and do this while you're there as well. So they are like drowning and they're desperate for not just solutions, but they also want to be at the table helping design the solutions, not just have us come in and tell them, Hey, here's how we're going to solve your

problem.

Alright,

well Andrea, thanks for spending a few minutes with you. Thank you for

having me, always a pleasure. Enjoy the rest of your conference. Thank you so much. Take care. You're the

Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and experience with the community and we greatly appreciate it. We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

They are CDW, Rubrik, Sectra, and Trellix. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.