Talking Data Normalization and User Experience with Jessica Beegle, former CIO of Lifepoint Health

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: Former SVP & Chief Innovation Officer

Organization: Lifepoint Health

In your role as Chief Innovation Officer, what were your key priorities?

My priorities laddered up to the priorities of the organization. It was my job to think through, with the board and executive team, how modern technology could support the organization in achieving its most important goals.

For us, and many other health systems post-pandemic, the key areas were:

1. Removing unnecessary burdens placed on our clinical teams and staff

2. Increasing patient volumes

3. Improving operational efficiency

4. Driving patient loyalty and retention

Within those priorities, were there any specific solution categories you were looking at?

Two areas I was particularly excited about, given my tech background and because these solutions helped solve real, painful problems on the ground were:

• AI ambient scribes to alleviate burdens put on our clinicians

• Health data platforms to organize and normalize messy, siloed data so it could be made actionable and useful at the bedside and across the enterprise

Let’s start with the AI ambient scribes; can you share what solution you selected and why?

When you think about most technology in healthcare, “surprise and delight”—the feeling you get when you open a new iPhone or log into a Google application—is not something that comes to mind. Most clinicians will tell you they have a solution that “kind of works,” but wasn’t designed around the user or job-to-be-done, thus leaving a gap they and their teams need to fill. This disconnect explains why there are so many workarounds (many times on post-it notes) you’ll see as you walk the halls of a local hospital.

After evaluating all of the solutions in this space, we selected Abridge. They not only brought a sense of surprise and delight to our clinicians, but their models were trained on high quality healthcare data—a huge priority for our team—which helped to ingrain a level of trust with our users, the clinicians. While many in healthcare have been burned by new technology in the past, it was refreshing to hear our first user say, “This tool is really life changing for me. Not only did I get to look at my patients during their visit and focus on why I became a doctor, but I also erased the extra 3 hours of charting I’d have to do tonight. Instead, I’ll be spending quality time with my family.”

From a technical perspective, there are two big questions I’d recommend anyone reading the newsletter ask as they are evaluating solutions in the GenAI market:

1. What data does the solution train on? An AI solution’s outputs are only as good as the data inputted and you’d be surprised how many GenAI solutions aren’t trained on high quality healthcare data.

2. How does the solution approach privacy and security of health data?

We think the Abridge team has done an amazing job at this, as well as creating a beautiful user experience that, at the end of the day, solves a really hard problem around physician burnout.

Tell me more about why you prioritized building out a healthcare data platform—what did that enable for you?

Health systems sit on a tremendous amount of really messy, highly regulated data located in various silos across the organization. Organizing, normalizing and making data accessible unlocks a tremendous amount of opportunity across the enterprise. The key is making this data useful for team members across the board, whether it’s enabling a local CEO, local CMO, staff managing an operating room, a surgeon, a patient, or the Board, in a way that drives value for his or her own job-to-be-done.

We brought Palantir and Google on specifically to help us with this. They enabled us to make decisions that were driven by real-time data, both at the enterprise level and to support workflows at the local level. For example, they helped us drive better operating room scheduling efficiency, which resulted in a direct bottom-line impact.

Adoption of new technology is often a major challenge for health systems. What advice would you give to leaders currently navigating the rollout of a new solution?

I’d encourage readers to spend extra time thinking through the “last mile” adoption hurdles. Even with the perfect solution to a particular problem, you are asking people to adopt new technology or workflows, which means they need to change their behavior. Behavior change is hard in any population, but especially in healthcare where there are so many competing priorities and people are being asked to do more with less every day. I’d also encourage other leaders to start with the user problem and work backwards to find the right solution - technology is a wonderful tool, but depending on the problem you’re solving, you may not need it. Lastly, leading with empathy is vital.

My aim, as well as that of other chief innovation officers that I’ve worked with, is to help companies developing new technologies focus on the right problems to solve and then translate the value of their new tech or solutions to traditional healthcare organizations so the two groups can drive towards the same goal: helping improve the way millions of people give and receive care.