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: How do you collectively measure success or measure impact? We’ve had healthcare metrics for a long time, but there are some other things we want to take a look at when we look at not just the efficacy or the impact, but also the suitability of use of different types of AI and different technologies. Let’s use as an example, kind of the idea of ambient AI, in being able to take that sort of conversational summarization and transcription and start to apply it. Are there new metrics that are being created? And how tough is it to get all of the groups involved in the evaluation, support, and deployment to be looking at the same things?
Chris Hutchins: I think that’s one of the things that we’re going to have to tackle. And we’re, again, early in this process and we’re taking it very deliberately, so that we can really be thoughtful about what are going to be the meaningful ways to measure. Totally different scenario, but at one point, I found out that one of the measures that was being used for productivity in one of my teams was opening and closing tickets. Like, how many tickets did you process? Well, that’s indicative of somebody going in and opening and closing a ticket, but that doesn’t tell me anything else, right? So, the measure’s got to be the right one. And, back to what I mentioned earlier, we’re measuring the time that somebody’s actually in the system and they’re actually working on their queue to clear it. That in and of itself may not be that meaningful because I don’t really know necessarily how many patients the clinicians saw that day. I don’t know if they had surgical cases that are not obvious to me looking at the visit summaries. There’s just a lot of different things, so this is going to take some time. And I think the challenge is that we all kind of have to accept a little bit of some work that maybe we feel like the moments outside of our wheelhouse. But we have to dig into it to understand and to make some really good decisions around what we can measure as the right thing and what does it mean if there’s any kind of variance with that measure. Measure something for the sake of it? If there’s not going to be an action triggered from it, then that’s not going to be a supplier. It is a slow effort to go through, but there’s a lot of people who have to be involved that it’s not their primary job or function necessarily to think about it, but the expertise they do bring to the table is absolutely essential.
Todd Foley: You’re definitely moving forward in what I would think anyone would call the right way to do it, in a very thoughtful way, but also looking for those opportunities to gain benefit. Before we wrap up, thank you for taking the time today with CDO Magazine and talking to me. But before we wrap up, anything else you’d share? I think this has been very informative for me, and informative for our audience. It’s just interesting, right? I think everyone’s kind of approaching these challenges nowadays in a different way, and the path that you find yourself on is one that is being reinvented in many places at the same time. I guess my ask would be, if you had any guidance or counsel for others in a similar position, what would it be right now?
Chris Hutchins: I love that question. I think that our audience has a lot of people like you and I, who are really heavily focused on data, the quality of it, how we’re using it, whether it’s appropriate, whether it’s responsible. I just encourage anyone that’s listening, be courageous and be the voice of, “Let’s find out what we can say yes to.” There’s a lot of things that we’re going to know off the top of our heads we don’t even need to think about right now because the compliance team has already flagged it. We’ll get to some of those things. If there’s things we know for sure out on the table, let’s go find the things that are. And if we’re focusing on the things that are really going to help drive efficiency, drive some really obnoxiously boring work out of the queue, because it’s just so routine and mechanical and real space that it’s a time suck that no one wants to have, no matter what your job is, if we can take a lot of that grind out and let it be meaningful, I mean, just think if analysts can actually do analysis and not data wrangling for 60 percent of their time. But those are the things that we can do. And there’s plenty of folks that are going to work on the other angles, and we need them, we need to lean on them and trust them. But at the same time, we do want to make sure that we’re identifying those opportunities for our colleagues that are working hard every day in the organizations that we’re in. It’s not only just healthcare, it’s virtually every kind of industry where your Chief Data Officer, you might be the first champion to make these things really move ahead. But if you play your cards right, you’re going to win over some people who didn’t become champions in your organization as well. But it takes a village. This isn’t a solo career. You’re going to have to work really tightly knit and collaboratively with your colleagues. But, again, just be courageous and don’t be fearful to try to move things forward, and for goodness’ sake, reach out to your friends that you’ve met through CDO magazine gatherings and online, whatever networks that you may be plugged into. We’re all in this together. We’re all trying to figure out how to safely and responsibly use these capabilities. And we’re going to find really great ways to improve things for all of humanity over time, I believe.
Todd Foley: Well said. A call for courage. 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.
