Lisa Stump, executive vice president, chief digital information officer and vice dean of information technology at Mount Sinai Health System and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, participated in the search and hiring process for Girish Nadkarni, MD, Mount Sinai’s first chair of artificial intelligence and human health to create a formal department at the Icahn School of Medicine dedicated to AI. She now partners with him and the system’s chief clinical officer – calling themselves the “digital and technology partners” group – to structure a center of excellence around AI and digital health, focusing on the patient and consumer experience.
DTG is also examining the employee, researcher and student experience to make sure it’s as frictionless as possible.
“Those are the biggest areas of growth,” said Ms. Stump during an interview for an upcoming episode of the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “How do we become a much more agile, rapidly learning health system to adopt and create new tools in the space of AI?”
There are a multitude of possible AI technologies and projects for the system to focus on; Ms. Stump helps focus priorities by bringing the conversation back to the problem they’re trying to solve. She makes sure the problem is clearly defined and the right problem to focus on. She’s also keeping a close watch on the pace of change and development of AI models.
“They’re coming at us fast and furious, and we can’t give every one of them our attention,” she said. “So ensuring we’re solving very real problems for our patients, for our clinicians and for our organization really helps us set the key priorities on how we frame and focus our energy.”
The rapid pace of change is one of the most significant challenges for the digital team at Mount Sinai.
“Even good change is hard,” said Ms. Stump. “Change is hard for all of us. Our organization as a whole is undergoing transformative change deliberately. We are looking at transforming our basic operating models. We’ve tended to function in a fairly distributed model across the enterprise and we have new leaders, myself included – but I’m not alone at that level; there are other new leaders in the organization, or leaders who have been here a long time but are now functioning in new roles, and that’s a big change.”
The organizational change coupled with the rapid pace of introducing new technologies and systems requires the team to pay close attention to change management and the cognitive burden placed on everyone involved. Ms. Stump is taking a pragmatic approach with her team to ensure success.
“I always like to break change down into science. It can overwhelm people. You have to present that clear vision so that people get excited and buy into the change, but not overwhelm people with so much detail right up front,” she said. “Then break it down into those digestible bites and celebrate the wins along the way. When those first two or three milestones have been accomplished that we laid out, celebrate those to set up the move to steps four, five and six, so people can always see the end game. Understand what’s necessary, what they need to commit in the near term, and then remind them of the progress that we’re making.”
