Advancing Health Podcast

00:00:00:11 - 00:00:22:04
Tom Haederle
Hospitals and health systems are continually advancing innovation and using technology to transform patient care and improve health outcomes. Examples include better methods of collecting and organizing mountains of data, as well as partnering with universities to advance research. Artificial intelligence plays an ever-growing role as well, a trend that many leaders in the field consider the only way forward

00:00:22:05 - 00:00:44:07
Tom Haederle
in a time of diminishing resources. Will the wider use of innovative tech make care more impersonal and put a damper on the human connection between patients and their doctors? Experts say no. In fact, just the opposite.

00:00:44:10 - 00:01:07:12
Tom Haederle
Welcome to Advancing Health, the podcast of the American Hospital Association. I'm Tom Haederle with AHA communications. In this month's Leadership Dialogue series podcast hosted by Dr. Joanne Conroy, CEO and President of Dartmouth Health and the 2024 board chair of the American Hospital Association, we learn how Banner Health has gone all in with its commitment to embracing technological innovation.

00:01:07:15 - 00:01:20:05
Tom Haederle
Artificial intelligence and other technologies can relieve caregivers of many of the tedious aspects of their jobs, freeing up precious time to spend building relationships with their patients and greatly increasing patient satisfaction.

00:01:20:07 - 00:01:46:15
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Thank you for joining us today for another AHA Leadership Dialogue discussion. It's great to be with you. I'm Joanne Conroy, CEO and president of Dartmouth Health and the current chair of the American Hospital Association Board of Trustees. I'm looking forward to our conversation today with my colleague Amy Perry, president and CEO of Banner Health. That's headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona.

00:01:46:17 - 00:02:19:03
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Amy has a passion for innovation and research and has embraced Banner's mission of making health care easier so life can be better. Her career has been spent championing a people-first approach to health care. And as you'll hear, that approach extends to innovation and research that will make care better. Banner is a not for profit health system with 33 hospitals, including academic medical centers that provide access and health care services to over six states.

00:02:19:06 - 00:02:42:21
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And it is so well-suited to advancing innovation and research that improves the lives of patients, families and the communities that it serves. What is the role do you think that technology plays? Because I know Banner is investing big in technology to kind of help us move from aspiring to deliver greater value to actually doing it.

00:02:42:23 - 00:03:11:21
Amy Perry
Yeah, I think it's the only way forward for us because we need to do things dramatically different. We don't see the reimbursement moving at the rate that it costs us to deliver the care that we need to. And at Banner, and I'm sure similar to other nonprofits, we deliver $760 million in free care and uncompensated services a year so, three quarters of $1 billion dollars,

00:03:11:23 - 00:03:38:17
Amy Perry
how do you make up that kind of difference? And we're going to try to do it through technological innovation. So our board has agreed to put aside $1 billion dollars, that's a really big amount of money that we're planning to invest in technology. We're nine months into our strategy. And number one is,  and it's no big surprise, it's really organizing our data.

00:03:38:20 - 00:04:05:01
Amy Perry
And when you have a big health system like Banner that has really grown over the years, you find that there's a lot of data platforms that have been plugged in throughout the years. And so we need to create one data platform, and that's what we're working on right now. We are, you know, unifying our data fields pulling all of our -I mean, massive amounts of data.

00:04:05:03 - 00:04:36:16
Amy Perry
We see 3.6 million unique lives every year. So you can imagine the data - that's more than 10 million encounters on an annual basis. So the amount of data that we need to manage is just extreme. So we need to do that. We need to have proper indexing. And with that platform, with that foundation, we believe we're going to be able to do all of the wonderful things that we hope we're going to be able to do with AI:

00:04:36:16 - 00:05:01:05
Amy Perry
ambient listening, making it easier for our caregivers, letting our caregivers really work at the top of their license. So our technology plan is not only exciting. I think it's mandatory for our future sustainability, not just at Banner, but everywhere, because we're going to need to learn to work with less.

00:05:01:07 - 00:05:31:21
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
When you think about data and using data to make the right clinical decisions, and then all the AI, generative AI, ambient listening, all the chat bots, things that you almost say replace vacancies with technology, how do you marry the two, and how would you describe that patient experience once you get that marriage of the data as well as the sexy generative AI?

00:05:31:24 - 00:05:37:26
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
You know, having Hal in the room with you to guide you to care for your patients.

00:05:37:28 - 00:06:05:13
Amy Perry
Yeah, it's a great, great point. First of all, I don't think we're really going to be replacing humans with technology any time soon. I think what we want to do is enhance the lives of the people that are providing the care, and allow them to work more efficiently so we can increase our access. You know, in Arizona, which is our largest market, it's one of the fastest growing cities in the US.

00:06:05:13 - 00:06:47:03
Amy Perry
So just keeping up with the growth, what I'm hoping is that we can do more with the same number of people because we will, and not completely, but with less of a 1 to 1 addition, because we will be adding technology to make people's jobs more efficient. You know, I love ambient listening and having a one on one, eyeball to eyeball conversation that gets, you know, automatically absorbed into the chart, helps build and document and do all the tedious work that keeps our caregivers from being able to have that pure relationship with their patient,

00:06:47:05 - 00:07:21:22
Amy Perry
that really gives them the joy that they came into medicine to have. And so I'm hoping that technology actually brings humans and our human interaction closer together, because it's doing the tedious work so our people can build the relationships that they care about. So, I just feel like all of this, including device integration, all of the fundamental things that we need to do to be able to improve eye contact, be able to improve the human experience.

00:07:21:22 - 00:07:26:09
Amy Perry
And I think it's going to have a dramatic impact on patient satisfaction.

00:07:26:12 - 00:07:53:23
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Yeah. When we talk to our providers that are using the ambient technology, it is they're never going back, right? It's interesting. They initially say they it's a little bit more difficult because they're used to like filling out a framework. And now they're just having a conversation. So they have to kind of adjust their perspective a little bit. But they love it because it does

00:07:53:23 - 00:08:30:12
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
just as you have said. It removes a lot of the tedious work. But there is tedious work that I think we're hoping that AI will do for us, you know, outside of the patient visit. And that is not only a back office billing where we've actually had AI in revenue cycle for years, but probably in writing code so all of our platforms will talk to each other, as well as actually getting patients to the right place, minimizing the number of calls that they have to make or people they have to talk to.

00:08:30:14 - 00:08:40:01
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Is there a downside to all the technology, though? Is there something that we should be concerned about and/or is Banner concerned about?

00:08:40:04 - 00:09:04:23
Amy Perry
Absolutely. I think that the number one concern that we have is quality assurance. And so pretty much all of the AI that we've implemented, in fact, all of it has what we call humans in the loop. So we don't have any autonomous AI because we just are not confident with the data sources to make sure data in, data out.

00:09:04:25 - 00:09:33:20
Amy Perry
So everything we do now does have, a quality assurance review, a human review, a make sure that we don't get too confident at this stage in the development that the technology is going to be right 100% at the time. So what we're really hoping is that it just elevates each of our abilities, whether it's in a business function or in a clinical function, but doesn't completely replace it.

00:09:33:22 - 00:10:11:06
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Talk a little bit about research. When I think about AI in research, I'm thinking it almost helps the patient kind of become a better patient, become more educated about the conditions they have, maybe access clinical trials if they're candidates for them and/or almost make every single interaction be kind of part of medical knowledge. But that's probably maybe overly simplistic as you look at really data and AI in research at Banner, what are your hopes for what that can do for you?

00:10:11:09 - 00:10:37:20
Amy Perry
I think it'll have an incredible impact in a very good way. And you know, we have a very large relationship with the University of Arizona, three medical campuses and a lot of incredible researchers who need quality data to work through their ideas and to follow through in determining the potential for clinical trial candidates, things like that.

00:10:37:20 - 00:11:06:07
Amy Perry
So our ability in the future, to be able to identify people who could benefit from a emerging technology and emerging drug and emerging treatment. I mean, I think we're going to be able to be so much more proactive because of the ability to have a computer scan all the data, find people that would be candidates for solutions that may not have existed when they were first diagnosed.

00:11:06:07 - 00:11:30:28
Amy Perry
So I think that data, again, it all goes back to data, which is why that's the core of our technology plan and making sure that we're creating availability and access. Again, so much of this is access - to the trials that we currently have open, which is, you know, hundreds of trials through our relationships and through our amazing, principal investigators here.

00:11:30:28 - 00:11:54:09
Amy Perry
And I'm sure you see the same thing, you know, working in an academic health system like you do. You know, just being able to match patients that could benefit from these emerging technologies. And that's just in and of itself, impossible without these kinds of data intervention bots, the kinds of things that are going to help us streamline that.

00:11:54:11 - 00:12:12:03
Amy Perry
And then, of course, you know, the vaccine development, the kinds of things that were never even contemplated years ago are now facilitated with, you know, large processing, the ability to process just huge, large data models. So I could not be more excited.

00:12:12:05 - 00:12:37:11
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Yeah. You know, there are certain areas that just are hotbeds. I think our radiology, you know, they've been using AI for a long time. Maybe people are not aware of it, but almost a second set of eyes, on you know, every single image. And our pathologists, are you know, doing amazing things. And as our organization says, oh, we have to get our arms around artificial intelligence.

00:12:37:11 - 00:12:58:10
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And I feel like saying, hmm, it's out of the gate and halfway around the track already. And how do you actually support our researchers who are doing things  at both of our institutions are amazing. I think the world that's facing us is going to be filled with technology and innovation, and we all just have to be a little bit nimble and open to change.

00:12:58:13 - 00:13:20:01
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
But you are so well positioned to do that. So we want to thank you for sharing your valuable expertise and insights. You've had a remarkable career and have served in just an incredible array of payment systems that you're perfectly positioned to make a real impact at Banner in the six states that you serve.

00:13:20:05 - 00:13:22:25
Amy Perry
I feel fortunate. So thank you.

00:13:22:29 - 00:13:36:14
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Well, thank you for doing everything you do, Amy. And until next time, thank everybody for tuning in. And I look forward to seeing you at next month's leadership dialogue. Have a great day.

00:13:36:17 - 00:13:43:24
Tom Haederle
Thanks for listening to Advancing Health. Please subscribe and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you

00:13:43:26 - 00:13:44:27
Tom Haederle
get your podcasts.

00:00:00:09 - 00:00:36:07
Tom Haederle
Clean air, peace and quiet, and quick access to outdoor activities are among the draws of practicing health care in a rural setting. On the flip side, issues such as housing, transportation and affordable childcare remain challenges for all rural hospitals and health systems, and affect their ability to attract and retain top talent. Stay with us to hear how the leader of the most rural academic medical center in the country has faced those issues and produced solutions that work.

00:00:36:09 - 00:01:01:06
Tom Haederle
Welcome to Advancing Health, the podcast of the American Hospital Association. I'm Tom Haederle with AHA Communications. Dr. Joanne Conroy is CEO and president of Dartmouth Health in New Hampshire, and the 2024 chair of the AHA Board of Trustees. In this podcast hosted by Shannon Wu, director of payment policy with the AHA, we learn more about Dartmouth Health's winning recipe for hiring and keeping talented health care professionals.

00:01:01:13 - 00:01:05:29
Tom Haederle
Ideas that could work just about anywhere. Now to Shannon.

00:01:06:01 - 00:01:21:26
Shannon Wu
Joanne, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. Before we get into the topic of rural health care delivery, please tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to becoming the CEO and president of Dartmouth Health and the 2024 board chair for the AHA.

00:01:21:28 - 00:01:45:09
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Thanks, Shannon, and it's great to be here. I've been at Dartmouth Health since 2017, and my path here was a little bit circuitous. I started my career in South Carolina at the Medical University of South Carolina, where I spent about 21 years. After that, I went to Atlantic Health in northern New Jersey and spent about eight years there.

00:01:45:09 - 00:02:17:09
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And that was actually a great experience, kind of contrasting academic medicine in a kind of a regional institution, to going to northern New Jersey, where you had all the influences of metro New York. After eight years at Atlantic, I went to the AAMC, the Association of American Medical Colleges, where I was their chief health care officer. And that was really great because I really got to see policy and the impact of policy on practice, and I was actually there,

00:02:17:16 - 00:02:47:29
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
I started in the fall of 2008, just as Obama was getting elected, and all the buzz around Affordable Care Act and the contributions that many organizations had to drafting, that was really, really fascinating. After six years, I took a role at the Lahey Clinic. I was the president of the Lahey Clinic, and it had just become part of a larger organization called Lahey Health.

00:02:48:01 - 00:03:15:18
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And you know, I actually love the clinic model where everybody's paycheck is written by the same person. It's a real great way to really align across the organization. But I was contacted about the role at Dartmouth, which again is a Clinic member, the Hitchcock Clinic has been in place for close to 100 years. I interviewed and they offered me the job, and I came up in 2017.

00:03:15:20 - 00:03:34:17
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
I've had the opportunity to have really a great kind of experience in almost every different type of health care system. And then when I was at the AAMC, I got to look under the hood of 185 teaching hospitals, which really gives you a perspective about the differences across the country.

00:03:34:24 - 00:03:49:18
Shannon Wu
Yeah, you're right. That is such a varied set of experiences you've had. I understand that you are one of the most rural academic health systems in the country. Please tell us a little bit more about Dartmouth Health and the rural population specifically that you serve.

00:03:49:20 - 00:04:15:17
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
You're right. We are the most rural academic medical center in the country. And people say, well, how do you know that? They actually see how many people live within 30 miles of the academic medical center. And we have only 170,000 people within 30 miles of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, which is our academic site. And the next most rural is Mayo, which has about 230,000 people.

00:04:15:19 - 00:04:54:25
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And then you have a number of organizations like University of Virginia, Carilion Clinic, that actually have small city populations. I would say, Dartmouth Hitchcock, when you kind of think about how did we get here? And really we sit on 200 acres, and you wouldn't even be able to see us from the highway. And yet, when you turn down the roads that bring you to the institution, all of a sudden you have over two million square feet of research infrastructure, clinical services, outpatient services, as well as the Hitchcock Clinic offices.

00:04:54:27 - 00:05:34:23
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And, you know, people drive two, three hours here to get their care. Rural health care in New England is probably different than rural health care in the Midwest, which is different from rural health care in the Southwest. They all have a little different flavor, but they all share many of the same challenges. When you think about the importance, however, 20% of people in the U.S. get their care from rural hospitals, and we have made a commitment to actually supporting what we call the rural safety net, which bridges New Hampshire and Vermont.

00:05:34:25 - 00:05:46:23
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
That's been the focus of not only the hospitals that we bring into our network, but also the services we invest in to allow care to be delivered locally and for people to stay in their communities.

00:05:46:25 - 00:06:11:15
Shannon Wu
Yeah, that's great. And let's dig into some of the challenges, that comes with serving patients in rural communities. We know that health care workforce has experienced many challenges, especially during this past few years. There's both a nursing and physician shortage, and it must be very tough to recruit and retain the clinical workforce that you need, in such a rural footprint.

00:06:11:17 - 00:06:15:16
Shannon Wu
What have you done at Dartmouth Health to address some of these staffing challenges?

00:06:15:18 - 00:06:38:18
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
So, yes, and no. So yes, it's a challenge, but there is a certain type of person that actually wants to live and work in a place like Dartmouth Hitchcock. So let me first talk about our attitude towards remote work. We took all of our jobs at the academic medical center and decided which ones were going to be permanently remote.

00:06:38:21 - 00:07:01:11
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
This was probably a year, a year and a half into the pandemic, and we have close to 2,500 people that are permanently remote. We employ people in 35 states, which makes some of our tax people a little bit crazy because we have to, you know, make sure that we adhere to the employment law in every single state and file all the forms.

00:07:01:14 - 00:07:24:05
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
But what it does allow us to do is actually find talent all across the country and actually leverage that talent. So our performance network is scattered across the country, but we have incredibly talented people that we could not recruit if they actually had to be within, you know, 45 minutes of Dartmouth Hitchcock in order to be on site.

00:07:24:08 - 00:07:45:24
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And another thing we found out is that often we have professional marriages, and in rural America, it's not just the person you're recruiting, it's their partner as well. And they have to find gainful employment. So a lot of this is solved by really remote work and really getting good at remote work. The second thing are nurses and physicians.

00:07:45:27 - 00:08:08:03
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And, you know, people love working up here. I mean, if you love really being in the outdoors, we are literally 15 minutes away from a ski slope, and in five minutes you could be on your bike mountain biking, and a lot of people do ride to work, and a lot of people have kayaks on the top of their car.

00:08:08:03 - 00:08:33:12
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And, you know, it's less than 10 minutes and you're flipping that into the water, so you can actually really enjoy the outdoors here and don't have to travel two or three hours to do that. You're actually living in this wonderful place. Unfortunately, our issues are the same across the country. Housing, transportation, childcare services, all the things that are less of a challenge in the city.

00:08:33:15 - 00:09:00:08
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
We actually are subsidizing housing for our clinical frontline providers. And we've been talking about building housing. It's just it's that bad. Now, we know that once we start doing it, everybody else in the community is going to say, that's not a bad idea. How can we actually use the same approach to actually developing workforce housing? I would say that we invest in transportation.

00:09:00:11 - 00:09:27:08
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
We know that not everybody wants to drive to work, so we actually support a lot of our local transportation systems from our small city hubs where most of our employees come from. And finally, childcare. You know what distresses me the most is 10% of all the women that left the workforce during the pandemic have not come back. For many of them, it's a lack of affordable and accessible childcare.

00:09:27:10 - 00:10:01:26
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
So we've invested a tremendous amount of time and effort to actually educating more early childhood educators so they can either participate in the large centers we have, and we have a number of them, and or start small businesses in their home where they can take care of kids in their home. And, you know, my hope is this way we make it easier for women to come back into the workforce because we're 85% female, and we know that having 10% of that workforce not be available is a huge issue for us.

00:10:01:28 - 00:10:07:09
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
But, you know, those are the challenges that they face in many other rural areas of the country.

00:10:07:12 - 00:10:35:00
Shannon Wu
As you alluded to, social drivers of health have also become more recognized as a major contributing factor to overall health. And as you've just mentioned, as really Dartmouth Health as the anchor institution for your community. Like many other hospitals and health systems, it is committed to promoting well-being and addressing societal factors that influence health. You had mentioned, you know, your investments in transportation and childcare services and housing.

00:10:35:03 - 00:10:46:19
Shannon Wu
How are hospitals and health systems working with community partners to address these social drivers of health in Dartmouth in particular, and other conversations you've had with other rural health leaders?

00:10:46:22 - 00:11:14:23
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Well, we have a Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity, which is really focused on operationalizing how do you improve health? Over half the people on the board are actually community health organizations, housing authority, food banks, you know, people that are living every day trying to actually improve the conditions in which people live that are critical to maintaining their health.

00:11:14:25 - 00:11:51:08
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
They actually did a really interesting study about three or four years ago, where they identified the decrease in average lifespan from Hanover to Lebanon to Grantham to Newport to Claremont, and the difference between Hanover and Claremont, which are probably only separated by 20 miles, is about 15 years. When you look at the, you know, the drivers of health, they're actually very different in those communities.

00:11:51:10 - 00:12:20:09
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
The Hanover community is populated with a lot of professionals from Dartmouth Hitchcock, and also professionals from the college. And Claremont, it's an old mill town, and a lot of people that get the work done every day, but often in blue collar jobs or jobs that don't pay as much. And we look at the correlates between income, education, access to care.

00:12:20:12 - 00:12:55:27
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
There's a huge difference. What's great is today we actually celebrated the fact that that hospital in that community is actually joining us. And our hope is that that hospital that's anchored in the community and using all of our resources in terms of expertise, our telehealth, our back office resources, so that organization can actually have a greater return on the community investment and then reinvest it in their facilities and programs, will ultimately improve the health of the community at large.

00:12:56:00 - 00:13:20:01
Shannon Wu
That's great to hear. The next question is going to be a two-part question and how we talked about some of this, but what are some of the other challenges you see that face rural hospitals and providers, in delivering care to their patients? But then, hopefully to end on a positive note, what innovations and opportunities are you seeing in this space as well?

00:13:20:03 - 00:13:46:19
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
We have actually looked at hospital at home frequently. It is hard to do it in a rural community when internet is spotty, questionable, consistent electrical and water sources. We talk about how do we deliver care in the homes differently. We do have a visiting nurse and hospice association, and I've actually gone on a lot of their intakes.

00:13:46:19 - 00:14:15:26
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And I'm so impressed how they just kind of take the patients where they are and say, how can we actually appreciate this environment so this patient can get better and will no longer need our services. So those are some of the really unusual challenges. On the flip side, we have some remarkable innovations. We have a super strong, telehealth program.

00:14:16:01 - 00:14:50:02
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
It's interesting, it’s provider to provider. So we actually provide the care to outpatient clinics, to hospitals, to physicians’ offices. And a lot of that is so people don't feel like they have to refer everybody to the academic medical center. But if they have a simple question or want some guidance in terms of how to deliver care to that patient in their rural office or in their rural hospital, that we can actually give them the answer right away, and that patient can have some resolution of what their care plan is going to be.

00:14:50:04 - 00:15:26:13
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
We also have a lot of physicians that do a lot of traveling. They get in their cars and they work in clinics. Often our emergency room physicians travel all over our rural network, and that actually allows for a great exchange of ideas between the physicians that are at those facility, interacting with physicians from the academic medical center. And, you know, it's an incredibly positive relationship that actually enhances the systemness that we have, and actually improves the ability of people to actually keep people in their community.

00:15:26:15 - 00:15:55:00
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And finally, we used ECHO, the ECHO program a lot during the pandemic, not only to educate people about COVID, but we actually have used it on all the specific disease challenges we face in the communities: substance use disorder, stroke, cardiovascular disease, liver disease. So people in the community feel like they get the resources they need to care for patients.

00:15:55:03 - 00:16:27:16
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
And, you know, after the Dobbs decision, we're offering ECHO programs through emergency rooms across the country because with the diminution of women's reproductive health services and maternity services across the state, we know that many of these patients are going to be going to emergency rooms. And those emergency room providers are ill equipped necessarily to take care of women in active labor, or a woman whose pregnancy is at risk.

00:16:27:18 - 00:16:41:20
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
So we have an OB kind of Maternity 101 for our emergency rooms. And our hope is this will help people stabilize those mothers before they needed to be transported to the academic medical center.

00:16:41:22 - 00:17:13:09
Shannon Wu
Well, thank you very much for sharing what you and Dartmouth Health are doing in providing care, for patients in your rural communities and sharing some of the innovations and opportunities you see that other providers, can take on as well. Before we wrap up, Joanne, I wanted to mention to our listeners that you and the CEOs from MaineHealth and the UVM Health Network will be presenting at the AHA Rural Health Conference in February 2025, in San Antonio, Texas.

00:17:13:11 - 00:17:32:03
Shannon Wu
We're very thrilled that you'll all be there to discuss the topic of rural health delivery. So thank you for your time, Joanne, in joining us in San Antonio. And we hope everyone who is listening will also consider heading to Texas for that event. So once again, thank you very much, Joanne, for being there. And thank you to our listeners.

00:17:32:05 - 00:17:34:26
Joanne Conroy, M.D.
Thank you, Shannon. It's great to be here.

00:17:34:28 - 00:17:43:10
Tom Haederle
Thanks for listening to Advancing Health. Please subscribe and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:00:00:14 - 00:00:37:28
Tom Haederle
It's been noted before that 1999's groundbreaking report, "To Err is Human - Building a Safer Health System" was, frankly, a punch in the gut to American health care. The Institute of Medicine's account of preventable deaths due to medical errors ignited today's sharpened focus on patient safety, now considered a core competency that drives everything we do. While patient safety has made great strides over the past 25 years, some caregivers worry it has come to a standstill.

00:00:38:01 - 00:01:03:20
Tom Haederle
Welcome to Advancing Health, a podcast from the American Hospital Association. I'm Tom Haederle with AHA communications. Every hospital and health system in America is committed to the mission of patient safety, and its measurable improvement has been encouraging. But can it be sustained? In today's podcast hosted by the AHA’s chief physician and executive, Dr. Chris DeRienzo, we explore the past and future journey of patient safety and grapple with the big questions:

00:01:03:25 - 00:01:10:18
Tom Haederle
Are we improving fast enough, and can the current reality of health care be improved? Here's Chris.

00:01:10:20 - 00:01:43:15
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
Thank you, listeners, and welcome to this episode of our podcast. I'm Dr. Chris DeRienzo, AHA’s chief physician executive, and I am incredibly excited to bring a conversation to you all today that I've been looking forward to a long time. Because our guest is Dr. Oren Guttman, and he is a practicing anesthesiologist, the enterprise leader in safety and high reliability at Jefferson Health, in addition to several other titles that might actually take the full 15 minutes of our podcast together to get through because his leadership in the field is simply unparalleled.

00:01:43:23 - 00:01:58:27
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
And we get to spend a little bit of time today talking about the journey that we've taken as a field around patient safety over the last 25 years, and where Oren and colleagues like him are leading us to go towards the future. Oren, thank you for joining us.

00:01:59:00 - 00:02:22:28
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Hey, Chris, thank you so much. Thank you for that overly charitable introduction. It's really a privilege and a pleasure to be here with you. And really just to reflect with you on patient safety. I think for most of us, you know, patient safety is really the mission driven piece. It's the core competency of really everything we do in quality and safety and health and equity access.

00:02:23:01 - 00:02:49:10
Oren Guttman, M.D.
I think we just need that moment of reflection on safety. And I'm just so excited that we get to do that today. I think it might be fair to start by saying that, many of us and I'm here giving voice to a growing chorus, kind of feel like the patient safety movement for all the good that it's done, has probably come to a little bit of a standstill.

00:02:49:13 - 00:03:19:22
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And, you know, if we if we were to say that differently, we're not improving fast enough. When we started this, we started in a world where, you know, the public really created an outcry an appropriate outcry over, over safety and the safety of our patients and our hospitals that do no harm focus. And they called our attention. And we used social systems, systems of individual accountability, like just culture systems like, you know, teamwork and team training.

00:03:19:24 - 00:04:01:14
Oren Guttman, M.D.
We looked to other safety industries like the airline industry, and we said, what are they doing to focus on their-quote unquote- mistakes? And they did a lot of resource management. They did a lot of simulation. But what we've kind of learned is that all of that, if we can wrap it up in the bubble of a culture of safety and some of those things being tactics that we use to create a culture of safety, if we're going to be honest and have some courage, we would be forced to the conclusion that they were really expensive, they were not sustainable, and the results they produced when they produced them were not uniformly produced and

00:04:01:14 - 00:04:02:28
Oren Guttman, M.D.
they didn't last.

00:04:03:01 - 00:04:26:13
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
And when I reflect on what we may call sort of the first 25 years of the patient safety movement in, in American hospitals and health systems, and that was a fairly seminal report back in 1999 that, as you've indicated, really opened our eyes to, some opportunities that previously we were sort of blind to in, in American health care.

00:04:26:15 - 00:04:49:12
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
And over the course of that 25 years, no question, we've made incredible strides across numerous axis within patient safety. And I think about in just our practice career, that when we were in medical school, that was the very first literature that was published around...you can actually reduce CLABSI and or eliminate CLABSI or central line infections.

00:04:49:15 - 00:05:18:25
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
That was not a thing that that the folks who were teaching us in medical school thought about. And now, you know, 25 years hence, we have lots of great bundles of work around that. But what I'm hearing you say is all of that really built a foundation for now where we are today, which because we have built in a number of ways to drive safety improvements, we can now think slightly differently about, what are the next steps that we get to take?

00:05:18:27 - 00:05:49:26
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Yeah. Chris, thanks for really giving voice that way to this. I think that that's absolutely true. And I would invite us to consider, is there an opportunity for us to reflect on the sustainability and whether the current reality of care delivery would still be improved by those foundational tenants? And so I would point our attention to maybe the safety moment of the century, which was the Covid 19 pandemic.

00:05:49:28 - 00:05:56:29
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Health care is a complex, irreducibly complex system. We're not complicated. We're actually complex.

00:05:57:01 - 00:06:04:21
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
Take us deeper on that, because I remember the first time you described that, I was trying to think in my head what is irreducibly complex actually mean?

00:06:04:24 - 00:06:53:12
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Complicated systems are systems where there are cause and effect relationships, where the realities of the processes are very linear. There's a good sense that things are knowable and you can break things down. It's a macroscopic view of the world. Complexity and particularly irreducibly complex systems, they're very much non-linear. The reality of how you would classify AI or the taxonomy of a irreducibly complex system has to do with the fact that pieces of the system are interacting in ways that are totally unpredictable, that risks in those systems have a probability of risk, and that they're additive in nonlinear ways, that even the barriers can actually introduce risk themselves.

00:06:53:14 - 00:07:07:13
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And, you know, in that regard, sometimes there aren't causes, there are probabilistic contributions. I'm reminded of our my time in pre-med work in quantum mechanics and thinking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

00:07:07:13 - 00:07:10:12
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
Oh, man, you're bringing me way back.

00:07:10:19 - 00:07:46:16
Oren Guttman, M.D.
You know, I thought I'd never have to remember that again. But the reality is, is that, you know, the same events that interact today and produce success can interact tomorrow and produce failure. I think part of where we've maybe gone a little bit the wrong way is that we've focused a lot on the human contribution to safety. So again, thinking that, you know, we would culture our way to safe, that if we were able to have just better functional teams with higher teamwork scores, then ultimately, you know, we would be able to really become safer as an industry

00:07:46:16 - 00:08:09:03
Oren Guttman, M.D.
and that's probably, I would say, arguably not true. The reason is, is because, remember and when the patient safety movement started, you know, we had about 10% of health systems with an EMR. Today it's ubiquitous. The complexity of technology and how it interfaces with safety. And, you know, the work that we do is socio-technical work.

00:08:09:03 - 00:08:34:26
Oren Guttman, M.D.
You cannot move left or right in health care delivery without being engaged with tools and technology, software and hardware workflows and processes. And we don't have design moments for those things. We generally kind of get those things from industry. We put them into our system. We don't do prospective risk assessments on how we incorporate them, and then we sort of work through that.

00:08:35:03 - 00:08:46:06
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And when things don't go well, we don't redesign value streams with the right lenses. And this is where I would point to maybe a further opportunity for us.

00:08:46:08 - 00:09:09:18
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
You're making me think back to in the old days of aviation, there was both a cultural problem. So they had to build a different culture within those cockpits. But there was also a cockpit problem that the system in which the people operated was not optimized. And I think in health care, we have spent a lot of time and energy

00:09:09:18 - 00:09:38:29
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
and you've written extensively on this, on trying to improve the relational culture. And I think what we're what we've come to appreciate is that is necessary and insufficient for driving the kinds of transformational patient safety outcomes that we know every hospital is striving to achieve here in the 21st century. And perhaps this is a good time to talk our listeners through, you know, we hit on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle there for a moment.

00:09:38:29 - 00:10:08:12
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
And so for those of you who weren't forced to take physics in premed, you know that that is a you can't actually measure certain particles in physics without affecting the measurement that you're taking. Even more fascinating concept to me in this construct is, the way that I've heard you talk through the difference between reliability or, again, we have spent a lot of energy building highly reliable organizations and adaptive resiliency.

00:10:08:14 - 00:10:20:29
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
But let's go there for a moment, because I think our listeners would really benefit from hearing how you've taken that concept, from frankly other fields and are now applying it in health care.

00:10:21:01 - 00:10:57:16
Oren Guttman, M.D.
I would call our listeners attention to this idea, which has been really transformational for Jefferson Health. I think that for a long time we have focused on high reliability organizing as a health care, as a framework to get to safe, right? We want to have highly reliable, we want six Sigma failure rates. And what's really interesting, actually, is when you look at the other industries from which these studies are originated from and how we are able to try and adapt those concepts in high reliability organizing into health care,

00:10:57:18 - 00:11:26:21
Oren Guttman, M.D.
there's some really interesting observations, right, about trying to make processes more reliable. The challenge is that in a lot of those other organizations - and industries, I should say - there's a lot more knowable about the inputs. There's a lot of more control over some of the foundational elements that are then being focused on, with a preoccupation for failure and a reluctance to simplify and a deference to expertise, etc..

00:11:26:23 - 00:11:56:29
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Health care is orders of magnitude more complex than a lot of those other industries. And so in that space, you know, we recognize the resilience engineering world offers us something, I think, a lot more pragmatic. And it's basically, in a nutshell, this idea that not every error is failure and that we have to almost have a predictable unpredictability, that things are actually going to have errors all the time.

00:11:57:01 - 00:12:22:09
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And rather than try and error proof a process  - work as imagined would be that we would actually error proof a process perfectly - it's a more honest view of what happens at the sharp end of care. At the sharp end of care is that errors happen all the time, but better organizations are able to detect those errors, and they're able to rescue those errors from turning into failure.

00:12:22:12 - 00:12:48:29
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Dr. Amrika Ferrie published a really nice article in New England Journal about 15 years ago or so. Don't quote me on the exact time, but it was basically, a review of the surgical administrative claims data where they had, you know, the same complication rates between hospitals, but they actually had different outcomes. And, you know, he attributed it through some abstraction work that they did to actually the ability to actually detect errors early on and rescue them from turning into failure.

00:12:49:01 - 00:13:09:10
Oren Guttman, M.D.
That concept is a resiliency engineering idea. We have to have better mechanisms in place to detect errors and actually be able to rescue them from turning into failure when failures already happened, at least contain them. We need a different model in health care. We have to have the ability at the unit level to detect errors that have not yet become failures.

00:13:09:10 - 00:13:26:15
Oren Guttman, M.D.
I'll give you just a demonstrated example. Think about CLABSIs for a minute, right? Classically, how have we thought about CLABSIs? We thought about a bundle. We thought about not putting into many lines. We've thought about ensuring that, you know, we don't put in femoral lines, for instance. And when we do it, when we put them in, we have to put them in sterile.

00:13:26:18 - 00:13:48:24
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And there are various other things that we put in bundles. A resiliency engineering approach to this looks a little different. And it looks like, you know, we don't want to put in femoral lines. But the reality is, is that people are going to come into the emergency room all the time. They're going to be emergencies. They're not going to have time to drop in sterile necklines, and they're going to put in femoral lines.

00:13:48:27 - 00:14:10:05
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And what we need to do is be able to detect those things at a unit level and get them exchanged out really, really quickly. Another good example. You know, we expect our CHG bathing to keep our lines clean to happen every day. We want reliable processes to make sure that we do that reliably. We want to have reliable ways of changing dressings.

00:14:10:07 - 00:14:30:16
Oren Guttman, M.D.
The challenges is that care at the unit level is not always perfectly reliable. And that's the work as it's actually done. On any given day, you know, there could be a call on the unit, there could be students observing that are creating distraction, you know, necessary learners. But you know, it can be a cognitive overload situation. We could have new orientees coming on, too.

00:14:30:17 - 00:14:58:27
Oren Guttman, M.D.
It could be a shift change. There could be team changes. And all of those things together create stresses in the system that may in fact create the error of the 12-hour shift went by, and we did not, for good reasons, potentially have an event called CHC math. But if we create a process at shift change where we have a detectability of that error and we can get it reassigned, we can rescue that in a reliable way.

00:14:58:29 - 00:15:11:23
Oren Guttman, M.D.
We will then prevent failure. Resiliency engineering is constantly looking to try to find errors and actually prevent them from progressing into failure.

00:15:11:25 - 00:15:32:04
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
If I am listening in from, a hospital, say not part of a larger system, hearing you describe this concept of resilience and saying, great. You know, I, I want to both be able  to continue the work that we're doing. But I also want to focus some energy now on taking the first steps towards becoming a more resilient.

00:15:32:04 - 00:15:41:04
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
And, as you described it, a more adaptively resilient organization. What is your guidance to that quality and safety leader? What is step one?

00:15:41:06 - 00:16:05:06
Oren Guttman, M.D.
I'm going to give you a top three. I'm going to break down adaptive resiliency into human resiliency, process resiliency, and training resiliency I think very pragmatically, our humans are sources of resiliency in our system. One of the most misunderstood ideas that I think we've sort of lived with in the patient safety movement is this idea of a human error.

00:16:05:09 - 00:16:29:22
Oren Guttman, M.D.
The truth of the matter is, is that we have operator errors, because we have a constant focus on thinking that human capability capacity failed. And so it was a human error. But we failed to ask the question about how the system facilitated and contributed to those errors. So here's a very pragmatic approach to increase your human resiliency: turnaround your Great Catch program.

00:16:29:24 - 00:16:52:18
Oren Guttman, M.D.
We actually took the vantage point of saying, we're going to ask the people in our system who hold themselves to really high professional standards, to tell us anytime they see a broken process, broken technology, broken tools, or those tools are not supporting the people who use them in the way they need to be supported, and actually report that when you do, we'll give you a Great Catch award.

00:16:52:20 - 00:17:14:29
Oren Guttman, M.D.
We're not going to give you a great catch award anymore for just getting in the way of harm. We actually segmented that off for extraordinary human vigilance and call that a Great Save Award. That's important. We want to honor people for that contribution. But what that doesn't do is ask the harder question of why did it take more human vigilance to actually get in the way of harm?

00:17:15:01 - 00:17:40:26
Oren Guttman, M.D.
What happened all the way upstream of these events? What processes and systems in the sociotechnical system did not facilitate the best care experience for the patient and their family? What can we do there? And so we actually completely changed around Great Catch reporting and started honoring when people gave us system failures that we then put through a process of fixing and shared back, you know, really the highlights of those of those fixes.

00:17:40:26 - 00:18:12:00
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And I'll tell you what happens. When you do that, people report more harm because you're fixing stuff that's really been difficult for them. See, the truth is, is that they've been making all these little micro adjustments all the way around. An old frame of safety called safety one, we used to call that normalization of deviance. The reality is, the safety sciences tell us is that actually those folks are making micro adaptations on a daily basis to actually not let the system catastrophically fail.

00:18:12:02 - 00:18:34:03
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And if they're elevating that to us and we can actually focus on system improvement, then we'll actually make our humans much more resilient. And they're really great sources of resiliency there. So that's an example of human resiliency. I would say for process resiliency I think your shift changes, you know, creating a focus on ensuring, you know, just old school paper and pencil, right?

00:18:34:10 - 00:19:01:06
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Making sure that a part of the handoff is any omission errors that have occurred over the shift and getting them reassigned as it relates to safety critical processes. We happen to have a dashboard that does this, but frankly, it's just as easy to just make sure that you're centralizing that information on a shift report that would be overseen, for instance, by a charge nurse, so a lot of success with that.

00:19:01:06 - 00:19:45:10
Oren Guttman, M.D.
And, you know, finally, I would just invite us to thinking about training resiliency. You know, we train task oriented things like bag mask ventilation. And we trace, you know, we train adaptive things like handoffs. What's really important in training classically is we've taught it from an error avoidance perspective. Here's how you do this correctly. What's super important is in all of our training modules, a resiliency approach would invite us to include at every step how that step could fail and include that in the actual training, because by priming people and helping them understand the errors that could lead to failure, and then also teaching them how you rescue the error from the coming failure,

00:19:45:12 - 00:20:09:16
Oren Guttman, M.D.
you make that process more resilient. And so that's called an EMT training model, error management theory training model. And you know, it's really not complicated to do. We've done this with iPhones. Just straight simple videos. We put it even in our S-bars and show examples of, you know, this is how you don't want to send test tubes down, you know, various you know, forms of misapplied labels, for instance.

00:20:09:16 - 00:20:14:17
Oren Guttman, M.D.
Right? These are that we sensitize people to errors so they can rescue them before they send them down incorrectly.

00:20:14:20 - 00:20:40:07
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
Such practical advice, and I was rounding with a team in a hospital earlier this morning. And this is exactly the conversation we're having there. Step one is trying to optimize their hand off because they knew they were some opportunities to ensure we had some structured communication and got that part right. And then step two is how do you make the handoff process itself resilient to what inevitably happens in health care, which is all of a sudden there's a code in room 12.

00:20:40:07 - 00:21:02:27
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
And so the handoff is going to get interrupted. How do we make sure that the end outcome at the transference of all the right information to the next person gets there, recognizing that it's not going to be perfect 100% of the time, or if you are leading the field in this space. This is one of the longer podcasts I've gotten to do, and I could go another three hours on this topic.

00:21:03:00 - 00:21:31:24
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
We are so grateful that you spent the time with us. And to listeners, thank you all for joining us on the podcast today. If your organization is not yet signed up with AHA's Patient Safety Initiative, I highly encourage you to join us. And by becoming a member, you not only gain access to a wealth of resources and a collaborative opportunities, but you also get access to a community of folks just like Dr. Guttman, who are lifting up their innovations.

00:21:31:24 - 00:21:48:25
Chris DeRienzo, M.D.
And this kind of innovation is one that I am confident over the next 25 years, patient safety leadership, we are only going to see become exponentially more important. We thank you all for listening and hope you continue to stay engaged. Stay tuned for more episodes and be well.

00:21:48:27 - 00:21:57:09
Tom Haederle
Thanks for listening to Advancing Health. Please subscribe and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.