Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in our series on Chief AI Officers in Healthcare. Other recent CAIO profiles include Dennis Chornenky at UC Davis Health, Dr. Karandeep Singh at UC San Diego Health and Alda Mizaku at Children’s National Hospital.
When a provider organization can use artificial intelligence to help remove opioids from the outpatient surgery process, and prevent strokes in children, its benefits in the clinical space are hard to argue. But achieving those goals requires a smart and deliberate approach to AI deployment and integration.
Dr. Zafar Chaudry is chief digital officer and chief AI and information officer at Seattle Children’s. He is leading clinical and IT teams tasked with these accomplishments and more.
Healthcare IT News spoke with Chaudry for a two-part interview. Today, in part one, he discusses how he came to the role of chief AI officer, what in his background and expertise makes him a good fit for the job – and what is expected of him in that position as the technology continues to evolve.
Tomorrow, in part two, Chaudry will discuss the many different ways AI is being deployed at Seattle Children’s and the results that already are accruing from the health system’s AI investments.
Q. How did Seattle Children’s approach you to become its chief AI officer? What were they looking for?
A. For us at Children’s, it was more of an evolution. I’ve been at Seattle Children’s. This is my eighth year. I started here as a CIO, evolved to the chief digital information officer, and this is an evolution because what we’ve learned in our journey in technology is we’ve gone from doing things, just fixing things, to then being more proactive, to now being at the forefront of how we deliver technology services to our clinicians and our patients and our parents.
So, it’s an evolution. I don’t think AI is a new concept. It’s been around for a long time. I was approached to take on the new role. It was more how is my role evolving with the things that me and my team are doing. We were going from those retrospective pieces to more proactive pieces.
Q. Is this your first post where AI comes into the chief realm? And what in your background makes you a good fit to be a chief AI officer?
A. This absolutely is my first role that has the title AI in it. I think what makes me a good fit for it is I’m a recovering physician. So, I didn’t start my journey in the tech industry. I started my journey taking care of patients, understanding what healthcare looks like, and then, as I tell people, defecting to the dark side and joining the technology realm.
The source of the journey, where I see AI bringing us and adding that to a title, means that I’m more of a business-centric leader trying to solve real-world problems versus someone who is running data centers or fixing people’s laptops. Because I think what we’ve evolved from is we’ve gone from spending a lot of time and money on hardware and software to where we are now, which is, how do you actually leverage the tools to bring real front-end value to the patients you serve?
I’ve been on that journey with my team. Not only do we manage those commodity pieces, but we also manage the analytics pieces and now the AI pieces. I think looking at a chief AI officer is less about the technology. The technology you can buy from multiple vendors. It’s more around how you are using this to bring your organization to the forefront of the services that you provide. The impact you can have.
I spend my time thinking about the tools we would have. Then, what impact will that have at the front-end of the services we offer? Can we offer services faster, leaner, quicker, and, most important, with the best outcomes we can provide? Because fundamentally, you bring your child to our organization and what you expect isn’t technology. What you expect is that your child leaves the organization well, because that’s what people want.
That’s what parents and caregivers want. AI is a component that allows you to now look at things in a different way and provide potentially better outcomes.
Q. Please describe the AI technology part of your job at Seattle Children’s. In broad terms, what is expected of you? And in more specific terms, what is a typical day for you?
A. When we started the journey around AI, before we actually got to the technology piece, we had to focus on the people and process. The way we handled this is, how do we first train everyone on the up-and-coming tools we define as AI? Everybody takes an AI course now at Seattle Children’s.
How do we provide a policy that you are using the right tools and not losing data that you shouldn’t lose because we like to put data in the wrong places at times, and that could be a risk? We have a policy around AI.
And then, how do we review requests around AI so we’re building the right tools? So, my job entails first setting all that up, which we have done. But on a day-to-day basis, did we then purchase the right tools? Are the tools correctly secure? And then are we allowing our clinicians to use those tools in the ways they want to use those tools?
Our primary partnership here is with Google in the AI space. We spent a lot of time taking all of our analytics platforms and moving those initially to Google Cloud.
We just finished a big project in that space because that was setting up the baseline. Now we’re in the process of configuring Google Gemini AI to do some clinical use cases. Some are almost ready for prime time. We’re about to release Gemini for internal use to our staff members, where you can, in confidence in a secure environment, know you can use the tool to hopefully improve productivity, but also allow you to focus more of your time on doing patient care versus administrative work.
Editor’s Note: To get BONUS CONTENT not found in this story, click on the video below. Read part two of the story here.
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WATCH NOW: Seattle Children’s chief AI officer talks better outcomes through the technology