Innovating with AI and Beyond It with Justin Brueck of Endeavor 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.
Name: Justin Brueck
Role: System VP, Innovation and Research
Organization: Endeavor Health
I know Endeavor has really prioritized innovation as an organization. Could you start by sharing a little bit about how you think about innovation?
At Endeavor Health, we want innovation and research to be an ownable part of our identity. Healthcare feels like it’s moving at warp speed because of all the new entrants, changes in regulations, and breakthrough tech. In the middle of that disruption, we remain committed to providing seamless, top-notch care to our communities while enabling our clinicians to thrive.
That said, we can’t ignore the changing landscape, so we are driven to constantly look ahead and push ourselves to think about what’s possible. In my opinion, there’s never been a more interesting time or need for radical transformation in healthcare than today.
We focus our innovation work around four areas:
Making care ‘on demand’ – when, how, and where patients receive care, on their terms
Enabling next gen care models via new technology and process redesign
Empowering and building resilience into our care teams
Leveraging our data assets to curate insights that will change the way we make decisions, but also power personalized care delivery.
We have a strategic advantage—and a market differentiator—when it comes to innovation. While we put a strong focus on academics and have an academic affiliation with the University of Chicago, we are not an academic medical center ourselves. This slight difference allows us to focus the majority of our efforts on translating innovation and research from the “bench to the bedside” or even from the “startup to the patient.” We have found this to be something that community hospitals are uniquely positioned to do with our connection to our communities and our nimbleness to activate.
For example, some more academically-inclined institutions take a “not-invented-here” approach when it comes to innovation. Basically, if they didn’t invent it, they won’t use it. I’m glad we take a different approach. We believe some of the best ideas can come from the most unlikely sources, whether internal or external. We also look to partner or even co-develop solutions with new-to-healthcare thought leaders and, in turn, create new value through product development or commercialization. It’s really a win-win. As one example, we are co-developers with GenomicMD, a company who leveraged our genomics expertise to advance a product that enables us to be the first organization in the country offering clinical grade Polygenic Risk Score (PRS) testing at scale. That’s not the type of innovation seen in most community health systems, and I’m proud of our team making it happen and available for our patients.
Within those four areas of innovation, how do you go about setting priorities or choosing specific initiatives?
Our team has to remind ourselves to solve for problems we have today, not get distracted by solutions in search of a problem. I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m just as guilty as the next when it comes to getting excited about the next big thing. But, if we want to be relevant and demonstrate impact, we have to solve problems that people have right now.
In that vein, we went to our nursing colleagues recently and asked, “Of all the problems that you’re experiencing in your day-to-day, where can we help you?” Their answer was around how we help them spend more time doing what they love to do most, which is caring for our patients. Ultimately, that collaboration resulted in the selection of Artisight for a pilot at two of our campuses to really understand how virtual nursing—coupled with advanced computer vision—can be incorporated as part of care delivery in the future.
Another example is our Endeavor Health Cardiovascular Institute. In April 2022 we had physicians who were saying, “We want to do something different with cardiac rehab. We want to ‘go digital’ and use remote tech to meet patients where they are.” From that prompt, innovation and operations got to work. We looked at existing platforms but ultimately realized that nothing was exactly what we were after. Fast forward to today, and we have successfully launched and scaled a co-developed virtual cardiac wellness and recovery program with Motiv, a Redesign Health-incubated company, which has now completed over 3,000 appointments since launching less than a year ago. And, because we were able to think holistically about the care needed, it includes a behavioral health component to help patients who have not been able to fully process what can often be a life changing event. The patient stories and outcomes are amazing.
With respect to AI-driven solutions, are there any particular areas you’ve been focusing on?
There’s a lot of opportunity around data and AI to predict and address social determinants of health—or to find disparities in our patient populations that need to be addressed. We were recently recognized for our work using AI-enabled natural language processing when patients came to our ER to identify those who may benefit from a consult for social work. We know that there are patients who come in who’ve resided at multiple addresses in quick succession, or are struggling with other socioeconomic burdens. The problem is that the information can be buried across multiple encounters and our clinicians do not have the ability to piece the story together easily. Through leveraging these new technologies, our analytics team’s solution was able to identify those patients at highest risk, prioritize and actually intervene.
Looking forward, I’m excited about our new investments in digital pathology, and really want to become one of the leading health systems as we move into the next evolution for lab and diagnostic medicine. Think about today—the majority of diagnoses are made based on understanding the type of cells and counting the number on a slide. Can you imagine a world where we have computer vision doing that instantaneously? Coupled with all the metadata surrounding that patient, digital pathology is going to open the gates to a radical new way of diagnosing disease.
We are also currently exploring what GenAI solutions could enable from an operations perspective—think back office and other functions that can be optimized for efficiency and accuracy. We are still in the early stages of learning, but our goal is to leverage the infrastructure and human capabilities that we’re building through digital path to create an enterprise solution that scales across many use cases, whether clinical or business.
A final comment: I do think that with AI—while it has tremendous potential, and it’s no doubt going to transform the way we do a lot of things—all comes down to implementation. I often tell people that we aren’t facing a technology problem in healthcare, we are facing a gap in operational buy-in, ownership, and scale.
As you look forward, are there any other areas where you expect to see significant impact from technology?
Personally, I see the next generation of medicine in genomics. It was a buzzword five years ago and everybody interested in precision medicine was ramping up resources behind its potential. Of course, that was pre-pandemic, when health systems had the margins to do it. All of a sudden we went through COVID, and then AI came out as the next big thing to latch onto. Genomics has somewhat been downshifted for most systems as a result.
Our team’s core innovation focus still remains on the problems we have today. I’m not saying that chatbots or AI agents aren’t going to be helpful in terms of educating and caring for patients, but at the end of the day, 20 percent of our health is based on our genetics, yet most clinicians don’t even look at it. I think genomics will become a critical aspect of personalizing care moving forward, and will ultimately play a significant role in the shift to more value-based care models. I’m proud that our system has really leaned in as one of the earliest adopters and is paving the way to make genomics part of how we care for all patients in the future.