On October 11th, Adam will serve on the panel “AI and Automation – Key Thoughts and the Relationship to the Healthcare Industry” at Becker’s Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker’s is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place October 9-12, 2019 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Adam’s session, click here.
Question: What is the No. 1 principle you uphold and practice to effectively lead a team?
Adam Sullivan: A nimble adaptable team that is comfortable with change. As a Senior Director of our Artificial Intelligence team at Change Healthcare, I lead our data scientists in developing the many solutions that Change Healthcare offers to the market for payers, providers, and consumers. We are practitioners of data science and AI and understand that means we will wear many hats to find innovative healthcare solutions. AI development requires many skills including coding, modeling, deep learning, visualization, among others and a team needs to be experienced to work the many areas. With that, the biggest challenge that organizational transformation and innovation requires is change management. It’s simply not enough to have 2-3 people on the team focusing on change management – it requires everyone to be on board and I work to instill practical ideology for organizational change. This often means that the team is tasked with stepping outside of their comfort zone! We don’t consider any task to be outside of our pay grade, we instill in our team that effective change management requires both finesse and accountability and that everyone on the team must be an agent of change.
Q: As a leader, how do you stay connected to the actual work that is being done – and not just by watching others execute, but by executing yourself? If so, how do you balance between leading and executing personally?
AS: Our team has grown quite rapidly from 8 to over 50 in a little over a year. This has led to a personal change of “hands on” to my current role as director of the data scientists. As such, I’ve found that my time is less effective building models and writing code to support AI-based applications within RCM . We have practiced change management in this area and I have moved to hiring really great folks who are much more talented than myself at this point. I now spend my time in a critical role of partnering with internal and external customers who need AI and participating in targeted outreach about our AI-based solutions that we develop: how our AI solutions work, the value they add. My view is that AI is so new to the market and many of our customers, as well as our talented and experienced revenue cycle SME’s, want to be a part of the AI journey as they transform their organizations and need help with understanding the intricacies of AI so they are comfortable and ready to make the change to AI. We have grown our team to make this shift in our organization by adding an additional layer of customer management. The time I spend filling that role further helps fine-tune to mission and vision of what our AI team is doing at Change Healthcare.
Q: What is one topic or issue you’ve been investing time in to better understand as of late?
AS: From a revenue cycle perspective and application of AI, one of the biggest puzzle pieces that is front-of-mind is to solve is the effort that goes into authorizations. There is so much that can be done that can help providers more effectively identify which scenarios require an authorization, the use of AI to help complete the process, and the use of AI in the prior authorization process to reduce overall denials. From an Artificial Intelligence perspective, I’ve been investing a lot of time understanding the applications of reinforcement learning in healthcare. Traditional supervised approaches require lots of trustworthy and accurate data for AI to “learn” different behaviors. However, we all know how quickly healthcare evolves. A single regulatory update can have many downstream workflow effects, notwithstanding efforts to train AI-based models. Reinforcement learning can solve many of these challenges, but it remains to be seen whether current workflows can support a decisioning process that gets better over time.
What contributes to better conversations between a health system’s financial and clinical leaders?
At Becker's 4th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, taking place November 2–5 in Chicago, more than 1,500 hospital and health system executives tackle decisions that determine whether organizations thrive or merely survive: protecting margins under cost pressure, choosing where to grow, renegotiating payer relationships, stabilizing the workforce and proving real ROI on technology. This is where leaders work through them together, face-to-face. Apply for complimentary registration now.
