Sara Vaezy serves as chief digital strategy officer at Providence St. Joseph Health in Renton, Washington. In a recent phone interview, she chatted about artificial intelligence, how tech can foster collaboration and this year’s HIMSS conference.
This exchange has been lightly edited.
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Why is the healthcare industry so behind when it comes to digitization?
I think healthcare is completely risk-averse, as it should be based on the notion of liability. There are patients’ lives at stake. In the early 2000s when technology really started to take off, it accelerated a pace of change that is unprecedented. But it can create a real challenge for healthcare where it’s risk-averse and opposed to change in order to preserve patient safety.
That’s where it comes from as far as the reluctance to adopt technology. We’ve made progress on those conversations as a result of it. There are ways to adopt technology without compromising the safety of patients.
There’s also a huge amount of regulation and other sorts of barriers to digital or newer technologies that don’t have a well-established place in healthcare. Regulatory and payments will catch up over time.
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How is Providence St. Joseph Health preventing digital tech from overshadowing the ultimate goal of caring for patients?
I won’t speak for all of technology. What I can comment on is more about how we think about it from a digital consumer standpoint. What we believe fundamentally is the patient should be in control of their health and their healthcare and their health maintenance.
Our digital strategy’s easy to say but difficult to execute on.
The first step is to build a better experience online as compared to offline. What that means is bringing experiences to the digital world that have been done in the offline world. If you can build that better experience online, you can change behavior.
Step two is you’ve earned the right to engage with patients on an ongoing basis through digital means. We started by building a platform called Circle. It started with expectant mothers and has now expanded to moms and kids up to 18. It serves content and services that are most relevant to [mom]. Because it’s tailored, it gets you that personalized level of relevancy in that person’s life.
How can technology or strategies like this foster collaboration between hospitals?
One of the ways we directly do that is we’re actively thinking about how we bring other health systems access to the platform we’ve deployed. We’ve met with about 70 health systems over the course of the last two years with the goal of getting them up to speed on what we’re doing and why.
The more we all work together and if there’s continuity of data, we can understand consumers better. It’s getting consumer insight in a deep way that tech companies do so they can deliver stuff to consumers that matter to them.
Health systems need to think about how there’s a lot of new entrants into healthcare. They have size and scale that we don’t. How do we as incumbents in the health system think about how we can remain relevant? There’s an opportunity for knowledge sharing.
What were the biggest tech trends you noticed at HIMSS this year?
I didn’t walk around too much to see the vendors. But here’s what I will say: In the past, companies have been much more focused on how we can solve a problem. This year, it felt like these companies are orienting themselves to say, ‘We want to work with you to understand what your problem is.’ They demonstrated a level of flexibility.
A lot more companies are thinking about the end-to-end experience as opposed to point solutions. It was swinging more toward that direction.
Which digital technologies are overhyped in healthcare?
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s overhyped. I think artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing [are] still living in the land of the theoretical. It hasn’t necessarily proven its value in healthcare. I think there’s enormous potential, and that’s why I don’t want to say it’s overhyped. There’s an interesting potential future that could be realized, but it’s just so early.
The other piece is a totally different view. It’s technologies that are pushing upstream into true health maintenance and wellness, and how individuals maintain not just their health, but a broader quality of life. I don’t think we’ve cracked the code on it. We haven’t fully realized that yet, either.
Photo: Shulz, Getty Images
