Health system AI initiatives tend to follow a familiar arc: leadership identifies a promising tool, a committee evaluates it, and the organization deploys it to the people who will use it. Tampa General Hospital is running a different sequence.
“We are inviting our team members in to bring some of this technology. We have, through our innovation and other avenues, ways for our team members to bring up what is a challenge to them and many times they’re involved in the solutioning,” said Qualenta Kivett, executive vice president and chief people and talent officer at Tampa General. “When we involve the experts at our bedside or computer screen, whatever their expertise is, that is going to bring us closer to resolutions and solutions that are going to be beneficial to them.”
Rather than asking front-line staff to adopt technology chosen above them, Tampa General asks them to surface the problems worth solving and then keeps them in the room while the solutions get built. The people doing the work understand it better than anyone evaluating it from a distance. The development teams quickly assess whether the project is plausible and how to get it done, bringing ideas to action quickly.
“We are leaning on the team member or the person that brought it up to figure out — is this the solution that would be helpful for them?” Ms. Kivett said. “That’s how we’re getting our team members ready [for AI] and we’re celebrating. I know that may sound a little soft, but in celebrating those that are coming up with different ways of doing things–it doesn’t always have to be technology– but it’s the celebration of doing things differently that we have to embrace. The world is changing around us and healthcare has to change too. We are reminding people that it’s ok to disrupt and celebrate those disruptions.”
The approach matters as much for adoption as it does for design. Technology that a front-line worker helped shape is technology they understand, believe in, and are more likely to use correctly.
But this isn’t an open invitation for all ideas. Ms. Kivett said co-design operates inside a governance structure outlining clear standards and necessary foundation to safely pursue new ideas. Dr. Nish Patel, who leads the system’s AI function, and Scott Arnold, chief information and technology officer, have built a robust governance framework focused specifically on the efficacy and ethics of every tool under consideration.
“There has to be confidence in the approach we’re using,” she said.
That sequencing — governance first, then co-design — is deliberate. It gives front-line innovators a safe channel to bring problems forward without the organization taking on unvetted risk. The governance layer sets the criteria; the co-design layer finds the right solutions.
Co-design only works if the organization genuinely celebrates the act of doing something differently — not just when it succeeds, but as a value in itself. That means tolerating failure as part of the process.
“These are things that we’re willing to try and fail fast,” she said. “I’ll also pivot. We’re looking at how we can support team members in their development and growth. AI continues to be an area that has a lot of interest in our team members and we want to help them continue to develop not only in patient care but in current technologies.”
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