Drs. Hoberman and Nguyen on preparing for health care AI

Many questions surround the advancements of artificial intelligence in medicine, including data integration tools and their impact on health care operations. Industry leaders gathered recently at Becker’s Healthcare 9th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference to take up those questions.

Two Permanente physician leaders participated on expert panels at the event: Brian Hoberman, MD, chief information officer, executive vice president, and national IT leader of The Permanente Federation; and Khang Nguyen, MD, assistant executive medical director for Care Transformation at Southern California Permanente Medical Group.

Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT Podcast interviewed both leaders about how Kaiser Permanente is exploring and implementing new technology to enhance patient care and support clinicians.

For Dr. Hoberman, one pressing goal of health care innovation is to ensure that all AI tools are accessible and relevant to health care leaders who aim to increase care quality and satisfaction levels among patients and care teams.

“The approach I am interested in is the democratization of access to clinical intelligence and insights, and essentially making them much easier to use and putting them in the hands of folks who are the business owners and leaders,” said Dr. Hoberman.

Both physician leaders emphasized the need to clearly define problems so that technology and administrative leaders can match new clinical technology with business needs, like using AI to augment clinicians’ care delivery and reduce their workloads.

“If there’s a clear understanding of the problems that are worth solving, then the solution becomes a collaborative process because the business owners will always understand the business far better than technology,” said Dr. Hoberman. “And the technology folks can really understand what the opportunities are, in many cases, better than the business owners can in any given moment in time.”

Dr. Nguyen raised the example of Kaiser Permanente successfully deploying ambient listening technology to more than 24,000 physicians to help automate notetaking.

“The moment they started using it, the adoption goes through the roof,” said Dr. Nguyen. “I literally have not met a single person yet who hasn’t said that they couldn’t use ambient listening in some capacity.”

Dr. Nguyen noted that Kaiser Permanente is exploring the use of AI to assist with mammography screening and cardiovascular disease imaging. A key step to pave the way for emerging health care tools, Dr. Nguyen added, is to prepare existing data sets to be more consumable for AI algorithms, making applications more useful.

Related health care AI story: Dr. Maclean on using AI to improve breast cancer detection

When asked for advice to health care leaders watching the rapidly changing technology landscape, Dr. Nguyen said to keep an open mind to the potential of AI but always have backup plans that can mitigate the risks of adoption.

Dr. Hoberman shared that health care leaders should remember to understand the human side of business and know their customers when thinking about new technology.

“We support humans from pre-birth to end of life and every dimension of every kind of clinical condition — health, wellness, and disease, and patients in infinite variety of settings of care,” said Dr. Hoberman. “Knowing your customer is challenging, but that’s really the heart of it.”

Listen to the Dr. Hoberman episode and Dr. Nguyen episode on Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT Podcast.