Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai expects “robust returns” from informatics projects over the coming years, executives told Becker’s.
The health system recently bolstered its informatics leadership by promoting Shaun Miller, MD, to chief health informatics officer and appointing Yaron Elad, MD, as chief medical informatics officer and Lisa Stephenson, MSN, RN, as chief nursing informatics officer. The moves reflect an increased focus on AI and innovation — and the role informatics plays in both — at Cedars-Sinai.
“Hopefully efficiency is gained, where our investment in these platforms leads to really robust returns and improved patient outcomes and clinician efficiency,” Dr. Miller told Becker’s. “Because I think point solution over point solution is going to be hard to scale across healthcare.”
Cedars-Sinai is already proud of its approach to interoperability, which has connected the health system to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and garnered level 10 Most Wired status from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. Cedars-Sinai also has a robust startup accelerator that has helped develop companies including Artera for patient texting and Health Note for previsit questionnaires.
“We really have been good at pushing the limits of Epic and being innovative with our electronic health record, making sure clinicians are at the table for a lot of the optimization and design,” Dr. Miller said.
That has led to a high adoption rate of physician order entry and documentation in the EHR, he said.
“These are all great, exciting, new toys, but the important thing here is: What does it do for our patients? What does it do to make our colleagues practice more effectively?” Dr. Elad said. “That’s my goal in my role.”
His responsibilities also include preparing healthcare workers to handle AI properly. “We have to remind our clinicians that they’re still responsible for the patient. They’re still responsible for whatever they choose to do based on what the AI may or may not be telling them to do,” he said. “They still have to view AI with the critical eye as well, and not necessarily always accept everything that the platform is telling them.”
As he put it: “It’s important for us to stay human as we utilize these tools.”
Cedars-Sinai has been piloting AI scribes as it decides on an enterprisewide solution and evaluating Epic’s AI chart summarization tool. The health system has an AI governance council that oversees the use of the technology.
Cedars-Sinai has long been the “cutting edge” of translation, Dr. Elad said: “Whether it’s translating between the test tube in the lab or translating between the data that we acquired from some new language model, in both cases, we’re going to be using data to help take better care of patients.”
The health system has amassed a “tremendous amount of data” so improving “signal-to-noise” will be critical, Dr. Miller said, including using that information for clinical decision support.
He said a big part of the leaders’ new roles is improving the “comfort level” among clinicians for technology, as well as teaching them how to keep data safe and secure.
“I was just in a meeting the other day, as we’re growing our virtual nursing program, where we did demos with nurses of some AI features that we want to pilot,” Ms. Stephenson said, “so they would really understand how they work, be able to ask questions and really maintain their engagement and guidance as far as what makes sense.”
