Health systems across the U.S. face a range of financial and operational pressures, as well as an uncertain regulatory environment. While New Orleans-based Ochsner Health is not immune to these headwinds and considers them, it remains more focused on its core strategy: providing the best care possible in the most efficient, cost-effective way.
“Your No. 1 thing you can do is become more efficient, and that works for any scenario,” Executive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer Jim Molloy told Becker’s. “And the only thing you do, if there’s something that becomes massive, is go into a different emergency mode where you’re doing things that are more short term than long term. We’re trying to do everything we can to be efficient with an eye on the long term. But we have contingencies that you think about in the event something so extreme happens that we’re forced to get more short term as a reaction.”
This approach carries into the digital transformation space and artificial intelligence.
“AI has the potential to achieve what we all are hoping it achieves,” CEO Pete November told Becker’s. “But it’s way more about change management and how you implement AI than it is about the technology.”
Mr. November noted that Ochsner also does not want to get caught up in the newest, shiny AI tool; the system instead wants to focus on specific areas to target.
“For us, there is a big emphasis on anything we can do to use AI to improve, to make it easier for our clinicians to care for patients, to give patients greater access — these are things that are important. Certainly, these balance with how we can use AI to create efficiency,” he said.
Mr. Molloy expressed similar sentiments while highlighting the technology that is already available.
“Companies have spent great time and done a great job developing the technology,” he said. “But it takes a lot to plug that technology into your system effectively, especially when you look at all the regulations, compliance and everything else. That’s the menu of things you have to look at. You’ve got to pick how you spend your time — which ones are ready to be plugged in, who spent the time to make it ready to be plugged in — versus where you’re the experiment. Balancing that is important because time is our most precious commodity.”
With this approach in mind, Ochsner is focused on various projects in the next 12 months, including its new $300 million children’s hospital building on the campus of Ochsner Medical Center-New Orleans. The health system broke ground April 29 on the 343,000-square-foot pediatric- and family-centered facility.
Other endeavors on which Ochsner is focused include the new Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine and a new neuroscience institute being built near Ochsner Medical Center-New Orleans.
