Todd Foley: Hello, and welcome to the CDO Magazine interview series. I’m Todd Foley, CDO & CISO with Lydonia. Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Chris Hutchins, SVP, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at LifePoint Health. Chris, good to see you again.
Chris Hutchins: It’s a pleasure to see you too, Todd. It’s been an interesting few weeks, a lot of activity around CDO Magazine, and a lot of great discussions. So, really excited to be here and to chat with you today.
Todd Foley: Just continuing initiatives that most organizations have had, you mentioned, being able to look at some of the operational efficiency, and you use the case of better availability detail. But are you seeing other things where some of the traditional challenges, or some of the things you’ve already done leveraging data to apply to operations, or post-discharge care, or any aspect of patient care while they’re in the hospital, where you’re seeing things that used to be a heavy lift that at least have the promise of becoming easier with newer approaches?
Chris Hutchins: Yeah, there are actually some things going on that I’m personally excited about, because the one of the reasons that I chose to be in healthcare is I just had a chance to be around physicians and hospitals when I was growing up, and it’s been a personal mission and passion for me to find ways that I can support the individuals who are face to face to delivering patient care. And as we think about the last decade or so, from the advent of the electronic health record, we’ve kind of, with the intent of making things easier and improving things, we kind of move things in a direction, certainly unintentionally, to where we’re asking more of our physicians in terms of having them document things. We took Dictaphones out of their hands for most, almost everywhere, several years ago, right? They could dictate the note really quickly at the end of a visit while they’re walking to see their next patient. And then, this transcription is going to transcribe it and key it into a report that gets filed in on their paper based electronic health record. Yeah, so now, fast forward, we’re having to figure out how do we go back a little bit and make that piece of it easier for them and automate the transcription components of it. There a few different sites that we’re testing ambient listening with. Some really good partners. To me, that’s probably one of the more exciting ones, because it does get to relieving some of that administrative burden, where the physician can just be about the having the conversation face to face with the patient now and let that get recorded and transcribed, then, at the end of either end of the visit or the day, whichever is going to be the optimal time for them to review it. They’re going in and looking at something that should be very, very familiar. They might have to dial it in a little bit if there’s some superfluous noise that doesn’t get identified and put aside. But it’s a much quicker exercise for them to verify. Yes, that is exactly what took place in that conversation with the patient, and they can send that off, and it can be evaluated from a coding perspective. Now there’s autonomous coding that’s starting to be really effective as well. But these things can shorten the cycle time that it takes to get that information out so it can enable much more efficient billing and processing from that standpoint. But more importantly, we’re giving back some time to the ones that are delivering the care. And things like that- there’s some fun, I don’t know, we may have kicked the tires on this in some locations, but I’m not certain – but I am hearing other organizations talk about the use of GPT capabilities pre-visit timeframe. So, if you’re looking at your patient you’re scheduled for tomorrow, I got to get refreshed here, what’s happening with this patient? Being able to just, with natural language processing, key in, “please bring me Todd’s most recent test results,” or, “when was the last time he had his eyes tested?” I mean, these types of things can make it really quick and easy where historically, back in the day, of course, you want to potentially volumes of data in the documentation, but even with the electronic health record, you kind of have to go back through and look one visit at a time. Maybe your EHR has some good standards, some reports that are easy to get to. But again, it’s just more and more time being added to them to go do this work. So just really shrinking that time down so that they’re able to focus on what they actually went to medical school for and maybe be home in time to see the kids before bedtime, maybe have a meal with your family. These are things that they’re not asking a lot from us, but those things really matter. Their quality of life and their job satisfaction is hugely important.
Todd Foley: Well, and quality care, right? It’s not just about seeing more patients, it’s about being able to do it with greater understanding and with a higher level of care. I think the dirty secret, and you hit on it, is that we’ve been applying technology in healthcare for a long time with the right idea of being able to provide more consistent care, capture and provide information, and avoid challenges that come from not having the right information handy. At the same time, the average physician—I think the most recent stat I saw—was that the average physician is spending so much time in the EHR and away from contact with the patients. I think the stat I saw was somewhere north of 4,500 clicks a day, which is not the intent, I don’t think. And if you can minimize that and maximize the patient-facing time, anything you can do that helps with that, I would think would be good. Even if it came to giving them Dictaphones back, AI certainly has that promise, and the ambient AI stuff. It sounds like you’re working with are key parts of that. But Chris, that just means you’re going to have more data to work with and probably the opportunity to do more with it, too, right? To be able to analyze that data in ways that maybe aren’t prebuilt reports in the EMRs today.
Chris Hutchins: That’s absolutely true. I think one example that I’ve seen—I mean, the things that I think are moving the quickest are really back office type operations—and it’s really looking at things that we can really streamline and shorten the time that it takes to consume the information that you need. We have a ton of regulatory requirements for quality reporting. Those metrics typically are based on the numerator and denominator, and there’s a limited combination of terminology that you’re going to be looking for to define either of them. So, one of the most effective uses that I’ve seen is building a lot of trust and confidence and, honestly, some enthusiasm with clinicians. It’s when we’re using that technology and we’re looking at the discrete notes and the unstructured notes, and we’re getting a much more accurate score for these metrics. One of the interesting pieces that we’re able to address with this is we’re taking subjectivity out of the equation to do that, right? If you’re a coder and you’ve been used to how I dictate and how my documentation is done, it’s not going to take you all that long to go through it, and you’re probably going to get a pretty accurate score. Now, introduce Dr. Joe next door, and he dictates and does his documentation a little bit differently. There’s some nuance to it. If you’re just used to working for me and reading my documentation, you’re likely to have a little bit of an adjustment period to really get as accurate with someone else’s. But the reality is we’re talking about a large number of physicians that a single coder might be supporting. And there’s just human error always possible in that, and there’s also risk that we take with that as well. Coding errors are not only problematic from a reimbursement standpoint, but sometimes they can be problematic when there’s an audit going on. Now, we don’t want to have inaccuracies like that, but CMS is going to take a look into their audits like they typically do and just to determine, are you coding accurately, and does your documentation support what you’re coding and what you’re building, right? So, it kind of has really good two-sided benefits. You’ve got one where there’s a higher degree of trust and clinician to validate something that they will be able to tell whether they did it or not. It’s familiar to them. We’re not inferring a diagnosis or anything like that. Really good place to start.
Todd Foley: And the reality is that when there are challenges with coding, or with reimbursement, or challenges with the payer, whoever it is, that can lead to delayed care as well. Which is something you want to obviously avoid. I think the subjectivity thing you’re talking about is really material, too. I think we see that there’s this capability that most organizations have where the people who have been doing coding, and, as you said, working with particular physicians for a long time, are remarkably accurate, right? And the challenge happens when you have to change what they’re used to doing or what they’re comfortable doing. And that happens a lot with the level of attrition that we’ve seen just across the industry in all roles, but especially, I would say, with coders. The time to get to that level of comfort and that level of accuracy for somebody new is not short. So, if you can accelerate that, provide an additional set of eyes—even if they’re artificial eyes—to help with that, or just to make recommendations or catch things as people are going, it’s interesting how people are applying this sometimes flexibly. It’s not that people are using AI to replace a lot of what people are doing. They’re really focused on trying to augment or help or provide a set of built-in suspenders for what they do.
Chris Hutchins: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think another way is that this kind of capability can help us, and it is really an early detection for certain disease states. And that’s something that we’ve been working on here for a while. We’re getting some pretty promising results from that. Obviously, that’s a really important thing for us to be able to do. With technology in the rural areas of the country, it’s even more important, in my opinion, that we try to figure out how to use that technology because we don’t necessarily have the number of specialists available in a community to address a particular problem that’s arising. Typically, if you’ve got any kind of cancer, sadly enough, it’s not detected early in many cases. And by the time it is detected, they’ve got to go to a specialist and probably have to travel somewhere. If we’re detecting things earlier, then that’s preventing the progression that would require them to get admitted somewhere else for that specialty care. To me, that’s exciting. It’s like diagnostics, not diagnosing the patient, but flagging something that tells you that this could be a problem. You need to look at it. Let’s make sure that we have this person in and let the physician talk to them and examine them and see if there’s any reason to test on it. Because, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my own experiences, even in larger parts of the country where they have large health systems, where it’s tough to get an appointment. And when you feel like you’ve got something that could be seriously going wrong, you don’t want to wait for three months. You’d like to get an answer relatively soon.
Todd Foley: Absolutely. And anything that helps with that throughput, that bandwidth—even in areas that do have the right specialist for whatever the consideration is—they only have so much time in their day. And anything that helps them be more efficient or helps give them maybe another look as they’re going through things. I think we hear a lot these days about the efficacy of AI and around image analysis and radiology and things like that. It’s only going to get better.
Chris Hutchins: No, I totally agree with you. There’s definitely a need. Back to our mission, really about making our communities healthier. We’re talking again about communities that are very rural and they’re not going to have the same resources typically available to them in close proximity, like you again, some of the larger metropolitan areas. And we’re talking about all kinds of different technologies that are just prevalent out there. And there’s plenty of resources to pay for it. So that makes it really imperative for us to figure out what are the things that we can do that can be effective there. We’re going to make sure we’re investing in our communities. That’s one of the things I’m very proud of our organization because they’re really backing up that mission with how we invest and take care of our communities, including the fact that we pay taxes in the communities where all of our teams are living. And on top of that, we’re investing in infrastructure. We’re investing in technologies. We’re trying to do everything that we can possibly do to bring the innovative developments into those areas. And we don’t want it to be an obstacle because people are living outside of a big metropolitan area. It’s just a really important part of the mission, and I’m really proud of the way that that’s being handled. The North Star is staying front and center even with all the technologies. Because no one’s coming through our doors because we have cool tech or we have really, really deep need dashboards. It’s really about their experience. We need to make that as frictionless as possible.
Todd Foley: Chris, thank you for joining me today. For those listening, please visit cdomagazine.tech for additional interviews. Have a great day and a great weekend.
Chris Hutchins: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure, Todd.
Tod Foley: Thanks, Chris.
