Latest / Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT / Sara Vaezy, EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Providence

Transcript

Sara Vaezy, EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Providence · Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT

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  Thanks for listening. Now here's the episode.
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  - Hi, this is Kate Cruz at Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
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  I'm with Sara Vay.
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  Uh, to get us started, Sara,
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  can you share a little bit about yourself
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  and your role at your organization?
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  Sure. Uh, well, it's great to be here today.
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  I, um, am the Chief Digital Officer
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  and the Chief Strategy Officer at Providence.
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  Uh, Providence is a large, uh,
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  health system based in the Western United States.
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  We have 51 hospitals, over a thousand clinics,
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  and we're vertically and horizontally integrated, of course.
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  Um, so we cover seven states, um, from Alaska, Washington,
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  Oregon, California, Texas, New Mexico, and Montana.
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  And, um, in my role, I especially, um,
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  from a chief digital officer perspective,
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  I'm really responsible for that front end,
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  that digitally enabled front end of the organization, um, so
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  that we can be discoverable by the folks in our communities.
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  We can get them into our system when they need care.
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  We can establish long-term relationships with them and, uh,
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  and sort of build that, um, build that, um,
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  consumer grade experience that we're so used to in other,
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  um, in other facets of our lives.
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  So I have responsibility for marketing, digital experience,
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  and a product development group
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  where we build technology to help do that.
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  You sound very busy, . Yes.
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  Well, thank you for sharing. When you think
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  of digital innovation in healthcare right now,
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  what excites you the most and why?
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  There are actually a lot of things that excite me, um,
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  in digital, and it's been, you know, I've been
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  with Providence for almost eight years,
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  and we've gone through ups and downs.
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  , I would say, uh, in terms of digital enablement
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  and digital health, uh, in, in healthcare.
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  Um, whether it be care delivery related
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  or sort of around care delivery.
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  Um, but we've gone through some ups and downs
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  and I think we're, um, coming out of 2022 where there was
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  a lot of pressure on health systems, uh, financially,
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  you know, coming out of, uh,
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  or the continuation of two plus years of covid
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  and sort of the knock on effects.
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  So, um, you know, last year was a difficult time this year,
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  health systems are continuing to work on kind
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  of the core improvement,
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  but how digital supports that is, um, is really exciting.
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  So some, a couple of the things
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  that I'm very excited about are just sort of this notion
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  of like platforms that support consumer grade experiences.
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  Uh, for many years we were more in the,
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  I would say like point solution land
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  where there were these lots of solutions cropping up,
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  but no systematic way to put them, you know, to surface them
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  to users and, um,
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  and to create that really great consumer grade experience.
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  So those types of platforms
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  that are emerging, I'm very excited about them.
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  Uh, no technology conversation these days would be complete
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  without talking about generative AI
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  and large language models, um, in particular.
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  And we've started to use them
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  to support our personalization efforts to support
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  how we navigate patients
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  and consumers throughout our system.
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  Um, in particular by understanding their intent at like a
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  really deep level and then connecting
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  'em with the things that they need.
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  So, uh, those are two really big areas
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  and I think, you know, it's kind of easy to say, hard to do,
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  and we're still at the very early stages,
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  but it's, um, it's a really exciting time.
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  It's been really interesting to hear organizations
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  and their different approaches to generative ai.
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  Um, 'cause like you said, everyone's talking about it,
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  but everyone has a different perspective use for it.
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  Um, so thanks for sharing that.
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  Um, at your organization,
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  what are your top priorities for technology?
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  What are big issues that you're trying to solve?
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  Uh, absolutely.
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  You know, I'll, I'll give you a couple different, uh,
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  lenses, um, to apply to this problem.
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  Uh, uh, or rather like just how you do tech enablement.
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  We have a whole host of work
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  that our chief information officer,
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  um, owns within the system.
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  And that's primarily around sort of core infrastructure.
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  Think about how we partner with Microsoft around cloud,
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  for instance, or our platform partners from an EMR
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  or from an ERP, um,
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  enterprise resource planning perspective.
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  So that's a lot of work that his team does, um,
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  separate from what the chief, you know, my, uh,
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  digital role is focused on.
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  Um, they also focus on caregiver facing.
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  We call all of our employees caregivers.
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  So they focus on, you know, um,
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  supporting our caregivers in, uh, with technology
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  to reduce burnout or to support care model redesign or, um,
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  or, you know, support our core operations from a talent
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  acquisition and retention standpoint.
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  So there's a lot of activity happening there.
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  It to modernize, um, uh, kind of
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  get single platforms
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  or more coherent inter um, enterprise infrastructure,
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  like technical infrastructure to, um, to make our ability
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  to innovate on those, um, populations like our caregivers,
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  much more rapid, much more effective.
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  Then the work that my team owns is really focused on,
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  again, our consumers.
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  So, um, so from a technical perspective, we're focused on,
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  actually, let me back up and say
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  what we're focused on from a business
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  or from a enablement perspective,
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  we're focused on, um, discovery.
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  So, and in service to driving, um, new customers,
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  new patients, new consumers who need care into our system.
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  So, you know, uh, sort of the crude way
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  of saying it is new customer acquisition.
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  We're focused a lot on engagement
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  and, uh, we're focused, uh, on kind of establishing
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  that relationship once you've got,
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  once you've earned the right,
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  and that helps to drive things like, um, uh,
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  long-term value capture and things like that.
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  So from a, so again, we're, we're doing things like around
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  identity driven engagement, which means know your user
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  and then surface up, um,
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  and serve up the contextually relevant
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  personalized things to them.
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  Um, do so in a frictionless way
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  or reducing as much friction as possible.
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  And then, um, use that to drive kind
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  of ongoing relationships, um,
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  that may not exclusively be in the, I would say,
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  clinical transaction domain,
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  but it helped to establish that relationship.
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  Yes. So very important stuff.
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  Um, what is one piece of advice you'd give
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  to healthcare leaders today regarding digital innovation?
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  Well, uh, , uh, as I mentioned,
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  the 2022 was a really difficult year.
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  And, um, I think it was also positive in that it reinforced
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  the need to be focused
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  and to really know what you're trying to solve for.
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  Um, we, we had, um, you know, digital was a bit
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  of a hot, you know, area,
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  but not necessarily, um, hadn't really demonstrated value.
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  And, um, we were many systems across the country
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  and ourselves included, we were kind
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  of dabbling in some places.
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  Yep. And, um, what I learned last year,
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  most importantly was focus on the core thing
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  that's gonna help the core of the system survive.
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  Mm-Hmm. . And, um, that's a recipe for success.
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  Um, so focus, don't dabble
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  and then do so in partnership with others.
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  Tech enablement is, uh, very resource intensive.
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  So, uh, we couldn't do, uh, a lot of the work
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  that we've done without our cloud partnerships, our, um,
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  our other sort of infrastructure partnerships
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  that then allow us to build technology on top
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  of them in a more scalable way.
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  Yeah, great advice and some great points. Thank you.
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  Um, could you provide examples of specific instances
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  where there, where the integration
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  of informatic solutions led to improved patient outcomes
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  or enhanced patient provider communication?
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  Uh, I have a great example on this one.
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  Um, and I'll again kind of, uh, anchor it on the problem
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  that we've faced, which is that over the course
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  of the last almost four years now since Covid started, one
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  of the things that we, um, as an industry did was
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  to support getting our patients online with us.
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  And, um, what that meant was we trained a lot of folks
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  to use things like telehealth to message
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  with their providers.
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  Now, that's a good thing in some ways and in another,
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  and there were unintended consequences.
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  One of the unintended consequences was that we, um, uh,
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  saw a huge explosion of messages being sent
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  to providers in their in basket.
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  The, and for folks that may not know the in provider in
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  basket is like their inbox, right?
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  Yeah. Um, and those messages were being generated
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  by patients in the EMR.
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  They would go into, in our case, MyChart,
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  and they would send their provider message
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  about all sorts of things.
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  Some of them are clinical things, some of them are like,
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  I need to reset my passwords.
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  Some of them are, um, I need to,
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  but check on my medication refill.
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  I need to book an appointment.
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  You know, all sorts of different things.
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  And, um, and so, uh, what that amounted
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  to was this explosion of in basket messages.
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  Um, and it became very
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  unsustainable for our providers, right?
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  They've gotta deliver c clinical care, like then adding this
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  to their plate is, um, really challenging.
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  So, uh, we've viewed the problem in a couple different ways.
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  Our how to tackle the problem in one way,
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  you can actually support a patient in getting their question
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  answered or their task completed, um,
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  without them having to send a message.
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  And, um, we call that message deflection.
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  And what we did was we put a chat bot in front of, in,
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  in MyChart, in front of our experience,
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  and, um, enabled our patients if they were thinking about
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  sending a message to instead converse with the chat bot.
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  And the accuracy of these chat bots has gotten even better
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  with LL, with LLMs, which are large language models.
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  Um, and we have been able to satisfy, um, a lot
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  of their requests
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  or their needs without them ever having
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  to send their provider a message.
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  That's awesome. So that's like one
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  of the things I'm most excited about.
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  We've got some early results, for instance, over 20%
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  of administrative messages were handled via
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  this, via this mechanism.
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  So, uh, so that's pretty cool. Yeah.
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  And it's a really measurable benefit to the, uh,
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  to our clinicians or their care team
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  so they don't have to do it themselves.
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  Yeah, absolutely. I can't think of anything that would
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  speed up burnout much quicker than 300 plus emails a day.
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  Exactly. , um, five years from now,
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  what do you think will be the most significant change in
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  healthcare delivery and operations,
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  and how can leaders prepare?
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  Um, you know, I think that, uh, the realities
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  of the last couple years have sort of started to set in, in
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  that, um, the importance of, uh, partnerships
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  and connected ecosystems of care.
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  Now those are like, that's kind of a lot of jargon,
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  but really what that means is we're going to fully start
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  to realize that patients
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  and consumers don't just go to one place.
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  We've been talking about it for a long time,
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  but, um, I think we're like the, you know, um,
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  we're fully actually experiencing it now and,
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  and realizing its implications.
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  Um, and like one of the things that we've realized is that,
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  uh, consumers use about five different healthcare brands a
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  year for a variety of different things.
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  And they're often doing that on their own, right?
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  They have to navigate it on their own.
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  And so, um, engaging systematically in partnerships
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  that allow all of these different brands to, um,
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  benefit from working with one another in service
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  to a better patient experience, I think is
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  what we're gonna start seeing more and more of.
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  Um, like there are a lot of other, of course, systemic
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  structural challenges in the healthcare system.
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  Like, for instance, how care is financed, right?
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  Like that's a, that's a very difficult
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  in potentially intractable problem,
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  but connecting the dots, I think for patients, um,
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  around common frameworks like, uh, like consumer engagement
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  that's supported by single sign-on, for instance.
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  Like, I think we're gonna start seeing that.
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  Um, I know we are working on it actively.
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  We actually just announced, um,
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  our fourth incubated technology that's working on that, um,
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  that notion of identity driven engagement.
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  And so I think that's the biggest single biggest change
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  that we'll see in the next five years.
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  Yeah. That will be huge.
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  Well, Sarah, Sarah, thank you
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  for spending some time with me today.
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  Is there anything else our listeners should know?
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  I think it is a, um, we're at a time, you know,
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  there's like ebbs and flows in terms of change
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  and, um, movement in, um, in every industry.
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  And I think we're coming up on a time where there's going
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  to be a lot of change and, um, that can be both exciting
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  and scary and it's really up to us to, um, uh,
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  drive it in a way that's beneficial to our communities.
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  So I'm really looking forward to that.
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  And I think, um, you know,
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  from a delivery system standpoint,
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  from a technology underpinning standpoint,
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  we can collectively do that.
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  Awesome. Well, thank you again for all of your time,
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  your insights, your advice.
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  Really enjoyed it. And thank you so much. Thank you.
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