Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Making AI Safe for Healthcare w/ Dr. Holly Urban
Transcript
- 0:07John Driscoll: Welcome to Care Talk America's home for incisive debate on healthcare, business, and politics.
- 0:13John Driscoll: I'm John Driscoll, the chairman of Yukon Health, and I am delighted this morning to.
- 0:19John Driscoll: bring Holly Urban, Dr. Holly Urban to the show to tell us a little bit about the practical applications of Gen AI in practice today in healthcare.
- 0:29John Driscoll: Welcome, Holly.
- 0:31Dr. Holly Urban: Thank you so much.
- 0:32Dr. Holly Urban: It's an absolute pleasure to be here.
- 0:36John Driscoll: Holly, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your journey to, in healthcare and to Walters clear what got you to this point.
- 0:43John Driscoll: Then we'd like to get into the practical applications of what's going on with AI and, and the practice of medicine today.
- 0:51Dr. Holly Urban: Okay, great.
- 0:51Dr. Holly Urban: Yeah, so, um, I'm a little bit unique in that I'm a third generation physician.
- 0:57Dr. Holly Urban: My grandfather was a gp, my dad was an orthopedic surgeon, and, um, I was trained as a pediatrician and I, um, was practicing in pediatrics and working in quality.
- 1:08Dr. Holly Urban: And, um, this was about the time that Joint Commission rolled out.
- 1:13Dr. Holly Urban: Um, medication reconciliation and at the hospital I was working at, they had an IT shop that sort of.
- 1:21Dr. Holly Urban: Designed a whole, uh, electronic system to do medication reconciliation, um, which is where you compare a patient's medications that they're on at home to, against what they're on in the hospital, and make sure that there's no contraindications or that everything's, you know, that they're continuing the medications they need.
- 1:37Dr. Holly Urban: It's a, it's a big patient safety effort.
- 1:40Dr. Holly Urban: Well, our IT department developed this system with no clinician input.
- 1:43Dr. Holly Urban: They threw it over the fence to quality.
- 1:45Dr. Holly Urban: They said, Dr. Urban, can you please go roll this out to the hospital?
- 1:49Dr. Holly Urban: It didn't go particularly well and I kept saying what I, I recognized the power of using technology for patient safety and better patient outcomes, but it had to be done with the clinician involved.
- 2:01Dr. Holly Urban: And so why didn't they design this or why didn't they do it this way?
- 2:05Dr. Holly Urban: And it just sort of ignited in me this passion to be more involved in designing software.
- 2:10Dr. Holly Urban: So I left clinical practice and started working at an EHR vendor about.
- 2:14Dr. Holly Urban: Little over 15 years ago, and since then, I've, uh, stayed at, um, working in healthcare IT at EHR vendors and now at Walters Klu
- 2:23John Driscoll: Med reconciliation thing is quite a big deal.
- 2:25John Driscoll: If you remember the, I think it was the, um, the academies report to UR is human.
- 2:31John Driscoll: Which indicated that we were losing as many people to, uh, death and injury, to unmanaged, reconciled meds of as many as the equivalent of 2 7 40 sevens crashing a week.
- 2:44John Driscoll: That's right.
- 2:44John Driscoll: And we, we really were, that that was a massive issue and I think people don't realize that there without some sort of.
- 2:51John Driscoll: Digital overlay and informed connection, connectivity to the doctor at the point of prescription.
- 2:58John Driscoll: Getting the meds your, your per your, your, your beds.
- 3:02John Driscoll: Right.
- 3:02John Driscoll: Particularly for anyone with any complex condition who may be on four or five different meds or anyone over the age of 70, typically on five or six different meds.
- 3:12John Driscoll: That's a, that's a, that's a massively important task.
- 3:15John Driscoll: And you're saying that they basically, the IT department.
- 3:19John Driscoll: Designed it, you know, sort of took its own shot at it and then, and yeah.
- 3:22John Driscoll: And threw it at the doctors.
- 3:24Dr. Holly Urban: Right.
- 3:24Dr. Holly Urban: And sort of did it in a way that didn't reflect their workflow, that didn't reflect, you know, how they're interacting with the system that didn't interact, that didn't, um, was it, um, integrated with their current systems for ordering medications or prescribing medications.
- 3:38Dr. Holly Urban: So, you know, I think it's a good lesson that's.
- 3:41Dr. Holly Urban: It's not a new issue where you're talking about technology.
- 3:45Dr. Holly Urban: It has to work in the workflow.
- 3:47Dr. Holly Urban: It has to work and be integrated with your current systems in order for it to work.
- 3:51Dr. Holly Urban: It's not enough to have the next greatest shiniest technology if you don't have those things.
- 3:57Dr. Holly Urban: Um, also taken under account.
- 4:00John Driscoll: Well, I think what's, what's exciting about your approach is that workflow isn't just the digital workflow, it's actually the way patients interact from the point.
- 4:09John Driscoll: That they try to make an appointment to show up in the office to actually kind of go through the system.
- 4:15John Driscoll: And it's everything doctors do, most of which are, are physical and manual assisted by digital.
- 4:21John Driscoll: Mm-hmm.
- 4:22John Driscoll: And, and so in integrate having a doctor sort of at the center of solving what's the doctor's problem, it's who to make a lot of sense.
- 4:30John Driscoll: Uh, and so how did you get.
- 4:33John Driscoll: From there to, you said you joined one of the EHR companies.
- 4:37John Driscoll: Obviously EHRs are the electronic health records that sort of are the, that, that, that, that, that, uh, I guess define us as patients or I guess at it's at their best and, and define this as bills at their worst.
- 4:49John Driscoll: Um, what, what, which, which, which health record company did you join?
- 4:55Dr. Holly Urban: So I started working at a company called McKesson on their Horizon clinical solution.
- 5:00Dr. Holly Urban: Um, at the time they were up there and competing with Epic and Cerner.
- 5:04Dr. Holly Urban: Um, they sort of have fallen off and, um, they actually shut down that whole horizon clinicals line.
- 5:12Dr. Holly Urban: But from there I went to two evidence-based content companies, um, zinc's Health, which does evidence-based order sets and MCG Health, which does, uh, evidence-based medical necessity guidelines.
- 5:23Dr. Holly Urban: Then from there I went to Oracle, Cerner, where I was the CMIO for their federal business.
- 5:28Dr. Holly Urban: So,
- 5:28John Driscoll: which it's, it's, it's fascinating that you went from one big challenge, which is this, the re reconciling meds and automating that, which really did save a lot of lives to evidence-based pathways because I think what's what might shock a lot of patients.
- 5:47John Driscoll: Or non practitioners is how often the ev the, the, the, the guidelines that are informed by data, evidence-based guidelines aren't really integrated into workflow.
- 5:58John Driscoll: What was that experience like and how effective were you?
- 6:02Dr. Holly Urban: Yeah, I mean, it, it, it, it's one of the reasons why coming to Walters CLO as a dream job for me because, um, of the up-to-date product, it's the most commonly used clinical decision support, you know, we have.
- 6:13Dr. Holly Urban: 600 million views of our content a year.
- 6:16Dr. Holly Urban: Um.
- 6:17Dr. Holly Urban: But in order for it to really be at its best is when it's actuated within the workflow.
- 6:24Dr. Holly Urban: So it's, you know, it's one thing for you to be ha go out to a referential site where you're gonna go and read a website.
- 6:30Dr. Holly Urban: It's much more impactful when it's actually within your workflow.
- 6:33Dr. Holly Urban: And that can mean, you know, within the workflow, the electronic health, health record.
- 6:39Dr. Holly Urban: Really excitingly some of the new work we're doing with the ambient vendors, um, such as a bridge where we're actually gonna have that up-to-date content within that ambient workflow.
- 6:49Dr. Holly Urban: Um, so that it's absolutely enabling that clinician to not only use these ambient vendors, which what typically what these ambient vendors do is they're recording the conversation between the patient and the physician, and then they're using generative AI to draft a note while.
- 7:07Dr. Holly Urban: Since they're the physician's already in that workflow where they're drafting their note, it's a good opportunity to say, how can we leverage some clinical decision support to make sure that they're leveraging the most recent evidence-based recommendations, that they're making good decisions for their patients so that they can have better patient outcomes.
- 7:26Dr. Holly Urban: Yeah, I, I think, and
- 7:27John Driscoll: just to.
- 7:28John Driscoll: Could contextualize this, Holly, I think it's about 17 years between the time that yes, a academics have have determined that there is a particular guideline or or form of therapy and it becomes general practice.
- 7:42John Driscoll: So with all of and, and.
- 7:44John Driscoll: And if anything, the amount of knowledge around what works and what doesn't is actually increasing at a time when doctors have less and less time to absorb it, particularly in the context of the patient visit, which in many cases is, you know, I don't know, seven to eight minutes.
- 8:00John Driscoll: And so all of the prep work and.
- 8:02John Driscoll: Data work that, that, that happens to a patient going into a visit, um, is not really informed by that clinical insight that has to be really provided by the, the, the NP or the doctor or the specialist at the time of that relatively short visit.
- 8:21John Driscoll: And I think the exciting thing about the.
- 8:24John Driscoll: Clinical insights that you could, you can actually make that visit more intelligent, more impactful by leveraging the best information.
- 8:34John Driscoll: I think that's, that I think is why, you know, as I understand it, what Walter SLU is doing with UpToDate is really creating accessible, digestible insights that are constantly being updated around what actually should.
- 8:49John Driscoll: As part of practice to make the doctor's job a little bit easier.
- 8:52John Driscoll: Is that the right way to think about up to date?
- 8:54Dr. Holly Urban: Yeah, absolutely.
- 8:55Dr. Holly Urban: Yeah.
- 8:55Dr. Holly Urban: You, you hit the nail on the head.
- 8:57Dr. Holly Urban: I mean, medical knowledge has grown exponentially and, and the complexity is getting to the level where there's no way one individual physician can carry around all this information.
- 9:08Dr. Holly Urban: So not only just keeping on top of the medical literature, but then also being able to.
- 9:13Dr. Holly Urban: Remember all the complexity and that's why the technology is so exciting to me because if I can say, if I can help break down sort of what are these patient specific contextual details that are gonna impact your decision and then offer you like.
- 9:29Dr. Holly Urban: Here's the most recommended therapy.
- 9:32Dr. Holly Urban: Here's the recommended medication in a way that it's in the workflow where you're making those decisions.
- 9:37Dr. Holly Urban: I mean, that is so powerful.
- 9:39Dr. Holly Urban: Again, the whole goal is to make sure that patients have better outcomes, um, and that they're getting the most recent therapy to, to achieve those good outcomes.
- 9:48John Driscoll: Well, and, and, and then to your point, unless it's provided digitally, you can't update it in real time for what actually is happening at the NIH or at a particular cancer center or at a, or a particular insight into how a drug might interact with different populations in different ways.
- 10:06John Driscoll: Um, so how do you may maybe now as we, as we, as we step into that next phase of ambient listing, I'm not sure people realize how common.
- 10:17John Driscoll: These ambient listener listening pieces of software like Nuance, a bridge, Suki.
- 10:23John Driscoll: But maybe the, we could, we could, we could contextualize this by saying that in, in some of the better practices historically.
- 10:32John Driscoll: Doctors would actually employ scribes people.
- 10:34John Driscoll: That's right.
- 10:35John Driscoll: Almost along the lines of, of the ancient Greece where the doctor would be trying to do the work and someone would be literally typing or writing it down to help substantiate and inform the patient record.
- 10:49John Driscoll: Now that we've got these wonderful, this wonderful ability to, to, to, to, to, to listen.
- 10:56John Driscoll: Technology, what is that?
- 10:58John Driscoll: Just maybe describe that, that ambient, what, what is ambient listening technology?
- 11:03John Driscoll: What, just describe that and then we can get into a little bit of how, how that connects to Walters clear up to date.
- 11:10Dr. Holly Urban: Okay.
- 11:10Dr. Holly Urban: Sounds great.
- 11:11Dr. Holly Urban: So what the te at that, at the heart of the ambient scribe technology is using generative AI to listen to the patient visit.
- 11:19Dr. Holly Urban: So.
- 11:20Dr. Holly Urban: As the patient's in the room, as the physician's having the conversation with the patient, it's listening and it's capturing those details.
- 11:28Dr. Holly Urban: And then it's the generative AI technology.
- 11:31Dr. Holly Urban: Then drafts a note.
- 11:32Dr. Holly Urban: In current state electronic health records.
- 11:35Dr. Holly Urban: Physicians take an enormous amount of time.
- 11:39Dr. Holly Urban: Writing notes, it's, it's, there's a huge administrative burden associated with it.
- 11:44Dr. Holly Urban: Oftentimes, they're having to do it at night.
- 11:46Dr. Holly Urban: They call this pajama time.
- 11:48Dr. Holly Urban: And what these ambient scribe vendors have found is that by listening to the conversation with the patient, I.
- 11:54Dr. Holly Urban: Using general to draft a note, which is then reviewed by the physician to, and then signed off.
- 12:01Dr. Holly Urban: It decreases the amount of time and related to documentation burden, and it's really addressing burnout for physicians as well, because they're not having that huge administrative burden of manually writing out all these notes.
- 12:15John Driscoll: I think the other thing, Holly, that's, that, that's important is it returns us back to where a doctor can actually look into the eyes of a patient.
- 12:22John Driscoll: That's right.
- 12:22John Driscoll: And have some level of emo you know, it's where technology actually can improve the human interaction.
- 12:28John Driscoll: Yeah.
- 12:28John Driscoll: And, and it's to go,
- 12:31Dr. Holly Urban: yeah.
- 12:31Dr. Holly Urban: We've seen that with, with session.
- 12:32Dr. Holly Urban: Like saying, thank you for letting me like.
- 12:36Dr. Holly Urban: Look eye to eye with my patient and not be sitting and looking at a computer while my patient's across the room.
- 12:41Dr. Holly Urban: So it's very exciting.
- 12:42John Driscoll: Yeah.
- 12:43John Driscoll: My, my, my 91-year-old mother always notices whether someone's making eye contact, and it's a huge, it's a huge difference to her.
- 12:50John Driscoll: And after she's tr trying to figure out where people did their training, she really wants to know that they're actually connecting to her.
- 12:56John Driscoll: I,
- 12:56Dr. Holly Urban: I think we all do as patients, we want our physicians to see us.
- 12:59Dr. Holly Urban: And so if they're not.
- 13:01Dr. Holly Urban: Being forced to type or work on an electronic health road, but can actually look at us and talk to us and not worry about that.
- 13:07Dr. Holly Urban: Um, it's really, I think, very powerful for physicians and patients alike.
- 13:11John Driscoll: So you've got, you know, you, I think you've got alliances now with a bridge.
- 13:15John Driscoll: Mm-hmm.
- 13:16John Driscoll: Which is the epic is the dominant, um, academic health center, electronic health record.
- 13:23John Driscoll: Um, Zuki has got, I, I think at least a, a lot of, uh, more, um, ambulatory
- 13:29Dr. Holly Urban: mm-hmm.
- 13:29Dr. Holly Urban: Uh,
- 13:29John Driscoll: folks.
- 13:30John Driscoll: And these are all technologies that provide that listening layer that can then translate it into a note that's connected.
- 13:37John Driscoll: And I guess how does, how does.
- 13:39John Driscoll: How does, how does UpToDate interact with that in an automated way?
- 13:44Dr. Holly Urban: Yeah, so it's, it's something that we, um, have been working on very closely with them because one of the things about these ambient scribes is there's a lot of them.
- 13:53Dr. Holly Urban: So they're looking to say, how can we differentiate ourselves in the market?
- 13:57Dr. Holly Urban: And one of the ways is by providing advanced clinical decision support within the workflow.
- 14:02Dr. Holly Urban: So the ideal.
- 14:04Dr. Holly Urban: The state, ideal state is that as the physician either reviews a chart prior to the visit, they would then tap into the UpToDate knowledge base, our very deep, very rich knowledge base, and we could say, Hey, maybe you need to this.
- 14:19Dr. Holly Urban: I can see that the blood pressure's been high over the past three visits.
- 14:22Dr. Holly Urban: Maybe you need to consider a second line therapy for blood pressure, and then here's some ones you might wanna suggest.
- 14:28Dr. Holly Urban: So it's all about taking both the contextual information about the patient and then providing sort of guidance within the workflow to make sure that they're making the right decisions.
- 14:40John Driscoll: So I, is that something that interacts, were the agents interacting with the data and then providing the doctor effectively and a, a, a backup intelligent alternative?
- 14:51Dr. Holly Urban: Yep, that's exactly right.
- 14:52Dr. Holly Urban: Yeah.
- 14:52Dr. Holly Urban: And it, and it's grounded, right?
- 14:54Dr. Holly Urban: It's all based, it's not the sort of the generalized knowledge that you're gonna find in a, in a standard LLM um, solution.
- 15:02Dr. Holly Urban: It's all grounded on UpToDate so that you know where it's coming from.
- 15:06Dr. Holly Urban: You know that, that.
- 15:07Dr. Holly Urban: Trusted source that physicians have trusted for 30 years.
- 15:11Dr. Holly Urban: Um, it's has a very, the basis and trust so that they can really believe in the recommendations.
- 15:17John Driscoll: Well, and I, and I think you raise a really important point that sometimes folks don't, don't necessarily don't tie into that the actual.
- 15:25John Driscoll: Um, contextual sources for the large language models are not, are, are not always clear and in fact are almost impossible to back propagate because of the nature of the way deep neural networks, which are the, the, the reasoning, um, machinery inside the large language models.
- 15:44John Driscoll: That's how they work.
- 15:45John Driscoll: They take an enormous amount of information.
- 15:48John Driscoll: Um, we, we assume they get it mostly right, but in healthcare it needs to be absolutely right.
- 15:54John Driscoll: There's also a probabilistic element in the LLMs that you, that you, you really have to control for, because in healthcare you really want that next correct.
- 16:06John Driscoll: Second or third line therapy tied to the facts of, of the, of the research and the work that we've done.
- 16:13John Driscoll: And so I, I actually think, you know, you're, well, it's agentic at one level, Holly, what you've got with up to date is something that, you know, doctors can actually lean into.
- 16:22John Driscoll: And that, that's why I think the, the power of what you're doing is that you can actually.
- 16:27John Driscoll: Go right to the sources and doctors can then test whether the recommendations are things that they can, they, that are based on science and, and, and the best, best, best current practice, which is what I think is very powerful about Walters Klu being connected here.
- 16:41John Driscoll: Now, how does, how, how does Walters Klu get paid?
- 16:44John Driscoll: I mean, I know that the, for the ambient engines, you know, you, you, those are subscriptions, um mm-hmm.
- 16:50John Driscoll: That are either bought through an ER, like.
- 16:54John Driscoll: Connected to like a bridge in the case with, with mm-hmm.
- 16:58John Driscoll: Epic or, uh, Suki on a one-off basis.
- 17:01John Driscoll: Um, like how, how do you guys get compensated for being connected to this?
- 17:06Dr. Holly Urban: Well, we, you know, we have relationships with large health systems, um, that we call our enterprise customers.
- 17:12Dr. Holly Urban: And so some of this were just.
- 17:14Dr. Holly Urban: Doing to reinforce their existing subscriptions.
- 17:18Dr. Holly Urban: Um, so to make sure that they're getting continuing as, as this technology evolves, as people's workflows adapt, especially as they're adopting, um, new solutions like Ambient, um, that they're able to leverage that, uh, clinical decision support that they're already paying for within the workflow.
- 17:35Dr. Holly Urban: We're working out the, the very small details of the, of the licensing, but um, in general, we wanna make sure that they're able as they move forward, to continue to leverage.
- 17:44Dr. Holly Urban: This information source.
- 17:46John Driscoll: So a, a hospital system would already have Walters core, effectively a subscription to UpToDate, um, to get access to the best clinical information.
- 17:56John Driscoll: And then this would be, you know, this would be part of that in some way, shape, or fashion.
- 18:01Dr. Holly Urban: Correct.
- 18:03John Driscoll: And so is your goal to be connected to all of the ambient listening technologies out there?
- 18:08Dr. Holly Urban: Well, that's a good question.
- 18:10Dr. Holly Urban: I don't, you know, we have announced partnerships and I think we really wanna make sure that, um, clinicians and their patients are getting the value from our current partnerships.
- 18:19Dr. Holly Urban: Um, we are working on ways that we can, um.
- 18:24Dr. Holly Urban: You know, create a solution that's more scalable so that we could work with multiple ambient vendors.
- 18:30Dr. Holly Urban: Um, again, just to make sure that no matter where you are as a clinician, you're able to leverage that, um, important clinical decision support solution that's, that is up to date.
- 18:41John Driscoll: Where do you see, you know, the, the Agen ai, you know, you're, you're, you're a doctor.
- 18:47John Driscoll: You've, you've practiced, you've, you've seen the, the pluses and the minuses of the integration or disintegration of technology in healthcare.
- 18:55John Driscoll: Where do you think, we're stepping back a little bit, where do you, how, how important do you think these LLMs and healthcare AI agents are going to be to the actual practice of medicine going forward and.
- 19:07Dr. Holly Urban: So I, I think you said it earlier, I think that to some degrees we're too excited, but in other group degrees, maybe we're not excited enough.
- 19:15Dr. Holly Urban: I mean, as just example, this whole discussion of the ambient scribes of the, of the notes technology, I mean, this is great, but it's really just fixing kind of.
- 19:25Dr. Holly Urban: One point solution.
- 19:27Dr. Holly Urban: You know, why, why are we not thinking more broadly about how we can use AI to improve the overall workflow?
- 19:34Dr. Holly Urban: I mean, one of the reasons why physicians struggle so much writing notes is because there's such a heavy dependency on downstream, on collecting quality measures, on billing, on coding, um, on, you know, authorization requests.
- 19:48Dr. Holly Urban: I mean, there's just such a, a, um.
- 19:52Dr. Holly Urban: An administrative burden associated with these notes, and that's why there's such a struggle with them.
- 19:57Dr. Holly Urban: So why wouldn't we use AI to try and improve some of these administrative burdens so that note doesn't become sort of this.
- 20:05Dr. Holly Urban: You know, monolith of, of, of administration requirements.
- 20:09Dr. Holly Urban: You know, if we can let AI listen to the patient doctor conversation and capture what happens, what if that all could just flow then to a bill and it doesn't, wouldn't require all these manual.
- 20:20Dr. Holly Urban: Steps of a CDI solution and coding, et cetera.
- 20:23Dr. Holly Urban: So when we're talking about really using technology to fix healthcare, why aren't we doing it in a way that would lessen the administrative burden and let clinicians focus on that patient and focus on their clinical tasks?
- 20:36Dr. Holly Urban: I
- 20:36John Driscoll: mean that, that, that is the ultimate promise here.
- 20:40Dr. Holly Urban: Mm-hmm.
- 20:40Dr. Holly Urban: That
- 20:40John Driscoll: doctors return to just being doctors and not, you know, the patients aren't, aren't, I mean, aren't, aren't looked at as a bill to be generated.
- 20:48John Driscoll: Right.
- 20:48John Driscoll: And data isn't there just to populate and then be argued about by the managed care folks.
- 20:54John Driscoll: Yes.
- 20:54John Driscoll: And the billing agents aren't on both sides, but I think that what you're doing is really a great first step.
- 21:00John Driscoll: A, to improve clinical practice.
- 21:02John Driscoll: Yes.
- 21:03John Driscoll: And b, to potentially accelerate us to get to that point where, where, uh, AI is seen as a partner, not just a a, just a, a new or impediment to workflow.
- 21:12John Driscoll: So, um, I'm really glad that you, we got a chance to talk about what you're doing right now to improve clinical workflow in the doc doctor's lives.
- 21:21Dr. Holly Urban: Well, great.
- 21:21Dr. Holly Urban: Well, thank you so much for having me.
- 21:23Dr. Holly Urban: I've enjoyed the conversation.
- 21:26John Driscoll: That's it for another episode of Care Talk.
- 21:28John Driscoll: If you liked what you heard or you didn't, we'd love you to subscribe on your favorite service.
- 21:32John Driscoll: And thank you, Holly, for joining us and we're excited about, uh, how, how all of us are gonna navigate this journey of AI to improve healthcare going forward.
- 21:41Dr. Holly Urban: Great.
- 21:41Dr. Holly Urban: Thank you.
- 21:42Dr. Holly Urban: It was, it was great to talk to you.