Co-Developing AI Solutions with Graham Walker of Kaiser Permanente
This is part of our weekly executive insights series where Elion CEO Bobby Guelich speaks with healthcare leaders about their tech priorities and learnings. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.
Role: Emergency Physician; Co-Director, Advanced Development
Organization: Kaiser Permanente TPMG
Can you give an overview of your role as it relates to healthcare technology?
I’m the co-director of advanced development for the AI and innovation group within our medical group, TPMG, which supports around 10,000 doctors and 40,000 other healthcare professionals. My role involves working with our IT and operational teams to bring in new technologies, like AI, to help modernize our care and address challenges such as burnout, staffing shortages, and shifting patient expectations.
As you think about modernizing how you deliver care, what areas are you focusing on first?
It’s a broad mandate, but a lot of the vision comes from our CEO, Dr. Maria Ansari, who’s made it clear that we need to transform how we deliver care—whether to manage an aging population, meet new patient expectations, or deal with burnout and staffing issues.
We’re focusing on a couple of specific operational areas:
Becoming less top-down: Giving frontline staff a direct path to share ideas with leadership.
Introducing new partnerships: Historically, we’ve done almost everything internally, building most of our systems ourselves. But increasingly, we’re recognizing the value of partnering with tech companies who can provide expertise we don’t have. However, we don’t want just a vendor relationship; we’re looking for true partners who understand the unique needs of our value-based care business model and are willing to collaborate to create solutions that fit our needs.
Kaiser has been public in its selection of Abridge as your AI ambient scribe. Beyond that, what other areas or technologies are you focusing on?
We aim to be a fast follower—we’re too big to be early adopters, but we’d like to be near the front of the pack. We were one of the first and largest health systems to deploy AI scribing tools.
We’ve also had a longstanding relationship with Epic, which plays a key role in our strategy. For example, we’ve been testing Epic’s AI tools for secure messaging since the beginning of the year and refining them to fit our needs. Our focus is on using that messaging tool in a way that makes sense for us, which is answering patient questions as directly as possible and avoiding unnecessary appointments.
Many companies wonder how to position themselves in relation to Epic. Any advice for vendors pitching to healthcare systems like yours?
I often tell startups, “Avoid going head-to-head with Epic.” Epic won’t acquire you—they’ll just outcompete you. However, there are areas where Epic isn’t focused, though these can be difficult to perceive from the outside, especially if you’re not a clinical informaticist. So, there are good opportunities for specialized vendors if you know where to look.
If I have a criticism of Epic, it’s that they tend to get 80% of the way there with their products. Given the breadth of their product surface area, they can’t focus deeply on niche workflows. Solutions that get the clinician from 80% happiness to 100% happiness are a good space for startups.