Michelle Stansbury serves as Vice President of IT Innovation at Houston Methodist.
On April 6th, Michelle will give a presentation on "Building a Center for Innovation / Changing to a Culture of Innovation" at Becker's Hospital Review 11th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place on April 6-9, 2020 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Michelle's session, click here.
Question: What, from your perspective, is the biggest challenge about the future of work for hospitals, and what can they do about it? (i.e. automation, desire for more flexibility, clinician shortages, etc.)
Michelle Stansbury: There are several challenges that Houston Methodist faces that we are actively pursuing:
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) – how to get clinicians back in front of the patient by using this technology. EMR’s have done well to help with caring for our patients but it has gotten the clinicians tied to the computer instead of talking directly with the patient. We hope to utilize this technology to help our physicians and nurses better engage our patients.
- Telemedicine - to be used by patients and physicians. Patients want convenience and what better way than to offer services through telemedicine for non-emergent services. We are also offering specialty consults, follow-up visits as well as virtual ICU.
- Intelligent automation – this is an exciting technology that healthcare has not traditionally been using. We implemented Intelligent Automation that past year for mundane tasks normally handled by FTE’s. We have seen significant savings from this technology in the revenue cycle and will be further implemented on other areas in 2020.
- Creating convenience – consumers are demanding the same conveniences from healthcare as they receive from other industries (travel, banking, airlines) and we are working with several vendors such as Amazon to create those conveniences at Houston Methodist.
- Privacy – working with new technologies will always require that the privacy of patient data be top of mind.
Turning data and insights into action – artificial intelligence is now becoming a reality and has seen many opportunities that we are exploring in 2020.
Q: Where do you go for inspiration and fresh ideas?
MS: Two years ago we starting looking at how digital health technology could help disrupt our institution. At the time as a small group of individuals were meeting. We called ourselves the DIOP group (Digital Innovation Obsessed People). This group eventually was turned into the Houston Methodist Center for Innovation. This group is the R&D for our Digital Health Innovation. We get our ideas from patients, clinicians, staff, vendors, and conferences as well as other industries to help us determine where we should pilot new technology. That technology is then brought into our Technology Hub that allows us to showcase this technology before using it in our clinics or hospitals.
Q: What do you see as the most exciting opportunity in healthcare right now?
MS: Creating personalized healthcare by knowing the patient and their preferences. This is harder than it might seem, but everyone has different preferences and we want to create a personalized experience based on preferences. This also applies to our staff and future employees at Houston Methodist. Another area is cost transparency. Healthcare has become very expensive and consumers are shopping just like they do everything else. They want to know what their out of pocket expense will be prior to receiving the services. Lastly, I believe Telemedicine will continue to grow in 2020.
Q: Healthcare has had calls for disruption, innovation and transformation for years now. Do you feel we are seeing that change? Why or why not?
MS: I clearly see where digital innovation is truly disrupting the way healthcare organizations have been functioning. If you know the Gartner Hype Cycle, I feel we are on the upward swing now. We haven’t yet been able to provide the same experiences as Marriott, Amazon or USAA, but we are working to get there. We have had several successes in 2019 with technology vendors and will continue to explore how to get better. Also, legislation has got to change to support digital innovations which are changing quickly and legislation needs to change at the same pace