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: Fantastic, and we appreciate it. Chris, maybe we can start off with talking about how LifePoint Health is leveraging AI to manage, to streamline just the vast amounts of data generated across your network. I don’t think you can talk about data without talking about AI these days, or talk about AI without talking about data.
Chris Hutchins: One percent right on that. Yeah, there’s a number of ways that we are using it here at LifePoint. And I think to first start, is what I want to kind of speak on just for a moment, if I can, is the mission that we have. And this kind of goes into our thought process as we turn, we start to think about where we want to leverage technologies and AI. Our mission: making our communities healthier. And so, that’s the lens that we are looking through to determine which technologies are things we should be looking at, which AI pilots, proof of concepts, or whatever we choose to engage in. We’re having some really interesting success with things around operation efficiency, and it kind of starts with some of the things that you would expect around governance. And we have that on our agenda to chat a little bit about today. But the interesting thing is one of the business partners we’re working with, they’re using AI to accelerate the normalization process in our logistics data. We’ve had an ongoing work effort for now a little over a year, to try to get operational visibility in near real time to patient throughput in our organization. We’re in 31 states, I believe, from the acute hospital standpoint, and all of our hospitals are in rural America. And so, it’s really, really important for us in the communities that we’re in to take care of our patients. We have to have good visibility into the availability of our beds and make sure that we’re able to move patients through as we have a significant amount of transfer requests. Again, we’re in these parts of the country where there may be a couple of options, but there’s a significant distance to travel to get to another one, or the closest one. We have to do our best to make sure that we can say yes and accept that patient. So, what we’re doing there is really aiming at the operational for throughput but giving the line of sight to our operators out in the field into when we expect to bed to be available. But it’s got to be in real time because they’ve got to have an understanding, okay, we don’t have a bed now, but I can see in about 8 minutes EBS is scheduled to be released. So, when they’re taking the calls, they can actually answer with some confidence. Up until we started to do that, it was really kind of challenging for them to give a solid answer because, typically, hospitals do have a high occupancy rate. But if you can’t see the timing of those steps there in between, it’s really hard to make a good call. And you don’t want to guess wrong and have somebody come, and you don’t have a spot. So, anyway, back to the normalization concept, that’s one of the things that we have to do because there’s so much variability. When you build a hospital, you implement your systems. No one’s thinking, I couldn’t be part of a large health system one day, right? And so, I’m going to come up with a set of standards and tell all my friends, and we’ll all do it the same. So, it’s that challenge that replicates itself over and over again. When you’re bringing onboard a new hospital to the organization, there’s a set of standards that they’ve applied in their legacy systems, and now we have to kind of figure that out and come to a common language so that we can actually look at this as a system. And so, the pace that these folks are moving to normalize is mind blowing. It’s much, much faster than anything I’ve ever seen. And it makes sense because they’re just plowing through just gigabytes plus of data very rapidly with software and technology. And they’re able to normalize things at a pace that I couldn’t do with a whole team of people even two years ago.
Todd Foley: Yeah, and I think that’s probably one of the things that’s remarkable, right, is that all of the traditional approaches using the latest and greatest in database technology, when it comes to challenges around integration and being able to map schemas and basically transform data, the ways that we do that historically have always started with people looking at the data and figuring it out. And that’s the long pole in the tent everywhere. But you have really unique challenges, right? With that kind of just large set of systems. A lot of them, as you said, grew up independently, without a lot of thought to consolidation. You’ve got the data integration challenges that everyone has, just maybe 100 times as many. And the impact of that is even more magnified by just the fact that you are, a lot of times, the only health care provider or the primary health care provider in these rural communities. So, something as simple as bed inventory has a huge impact. I mean, if you have to travel hours to go from one location to another, that availability has to be real time.
Chris Hutchins: Yeah, it’s a challenge that, I think everyone has, for the most part, of health care at some point in their evolution. Really figuring out where does real-time capability becomes imperative. And things like managing patient throughput, accepting transfers, our ability to do that, having clear line of sight into our bed turnover and the timing and all the components that are involved with that, and, of course, emergency services. Those are the areas that are really the most challenging, particularly in rural areas, because it’s expensive to have that real-time data replication. And there’s a higher risk if you’re connecting directly to the data sources because these are the systems that people are operating in 24/7. Well, it’s definitely a challenge, but I think there’s a lot of things coming that’ll kind of facilitate this speeding up. How it’s funded, I don’t know, but our regulators always have good ideas on what we should do. Just how we’re going to pay for it.
Todd Foley: Well, I think, you know, you mentioned something when you were talking about the risk of connecting into operational systems, right? Where people are using those systems to make literally life-and-death decisions. But it’s not just the risk of service interruption, right? Whenever we’re talking about health care data, there’s tremendous risk of compromise from outside actors, constant concern around security, even the partner you’re working with around normalization. How do you overcome some of those challenges that are often a barrier to doing some of the things that you’re doing and want to do?
Chris Hutchins: I think the short answer to that is that we’re taking a very cautious and deliberate approach to it. We’re looking at the things where we can be reasonably confident that all of our safeguards are in place. So, first and foremost in everything that we evaluate, are we have a the strict set of guidelines that we test everything by with our CISO, our CTO, risk and compliance, and legal. I mean, everyone’s kind of plugged into these processes as we’re evaluating what we’re going to tackle. It’s no surprise that, given the climate that we’re in and all the nefarious actors, as you mentioned, that activity seems to be just growing at an unfortunate the pace, and the risks are getting higher. So, we have to be super vigilant about making sure the safeguards are there. We try to make sure, as often as we can, there’s very limited opportunity for anyone to see the data outside of our firewalls. There’s some challenges there, but we work through the remote access obstacles that sometimes are there. We have to be creative at times to figure out, okay, how do we work this out in our agreements, all of our legal documents that we have to have. Make sure cyber is at the right level everywhere. Make sure that all of policy-centric things that we have to do just to function as a health system. But, I don’t know if there’s 100 percent guarantee of that safety when it comes to accessing data. We’re hearing certainly a lot more about it these days, particularly in the healthcare space. There’s a lot of regulation discussions going on, some I’m aware of, and probably many that I’m not. But we have to make sure that we have a line of sight and, whatever we’re doing, we’re cognizant of the need to be able to adapt and adjust to regulatory changes and requirements that may come.
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.
