Nashville-based Ardent Health includes 30 hospitals and more than 280 sites of care in six states, including Idaho, Kansas, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
It’s a large organization, so when it was looking for its first digital chief, it knew it needed a pro who could keep a lot of plates spinning at once. The health system appointed Anika Gardenhire, RN, to be its new chief digital and information officer in 2023, and she got straight to work transforming the health system’s digital strategy.
Enhancing the provider experience
Key to that strategy is leaning into driving improved experiences for patients and providers alike, says Gardenhire.
“We’re focused on things like ambient technologies for our providers, as well as automating the collection of vital science using a sensor that helps support our nursing and allied health professionals,” she explains. “As well as new systems, even in the telephony space for things like outbound calling. Those are some of the high-profile projects in the digital and technology space we’re driving forward.
“For ambient listening, we’ve been focused on that for the improvement of the provider experience, and we have a really great system we have been piloting,” she continued. “We’re also starting to look at how we expand that beyond the provider experience. How do we start to think about nursing and other professionals who complete documentation or do notes as well.”
Gardenhire’s perspective is ambient listening AI is a game-changer when it comes to reducing the administrative burden on clinicians, but also supporting things like better code and capture and better documentation.
Integrating technologies into operations
Gardenhire has some successful ways to integrate technologies such as AI into a hospital or health system’s day-to-day operations.
“One, it’s really helpful when you can have clarity on the use case,” she explained. “What is it you’re actually trying to do? Is it a problem? Is it an operational improvement? You really need to understand the use case and the workflow or the customer journey you’re trying to impact.
“When you have that, it’s easier to ensure you have the operational business partnership and customer buy-in you need to be successful when you’re trying to go about that integration,” she continued. “Having a focus on change management, understanding the impact of the change from your stakeholders’ perspective, is the most important thing.”
Ardent Health also has set up governance focused on use cases. It governs the use cases then introduces the toolsets that will be most impactful to those use cases.
A human-centric approach
Gardenhire believes in the importance of maintaining a human-centric approach in a tech-driven health system.
“At the end of the day, most technologists are product people,” she noted. “We make things for impact on human life. You have to have a human-centric approach because at the end of the day, when it comes to technology without the humans, at least my perspective is the product, the tech, doesn’t matter.
“My motto is, If people don’t do something different tomorrow than they did today because they made a thing, then their thing doesn’t matter. If you can’t then drive them to either use it or stop performing an activity you’ve automated for them, then the value that’s derived is lacking,” she continued. “If we don’t have a human-centric approach to that, it’s very unlikely you’re going to realize the value you’re looking for.”
Gardenhire has some advice for how a tech team and its leaders leverage new healthcare technologies to foster innovation while ensuring equitable access to care.
“This is a hard one, to tell you the truth,” she said. “The only way you do it is intentionally. We really try and ensure we are managing bias in a very intentional way, that we are approaching it from a perspective that ensures that in healthcare’s digital transformation, but specifically at Ardent, we are actively managing and doing bias checking, we’re fostering it through our technology practices, and we’re partnering with operations to ensure that’s happening as well.
“When it comes to, for example, operational initiatives that might be around the social determinants of health or some other type of mechanism, how we actually surround the patient with the digital tools means we have to have an approach that ensures accessibility for everyone,” she added.
This challenge involves everything from how one thinks about reading levels to how one thinks about preferences, such as one’s 508 compliance for their website, she noted. It’s a very intentional approach with very concrete items, she said.
Moving augmented intelligence forward
Gardenhire is working with what she calls augmented intelligence and believes this should transform clinical care.
“Augmented intelligence means human in the loop,” she explained. “At the end of the day, when I think about what most people term artificial intelligence, a lot of it is things that have been around for a really long time, but now we have the computing power to make more real time.
“Some of it is what’s actually new technology and/or algorithms when you get into agentics, but a lot of it is just not that,” she continued. “How do you place the intelligence, new knowledge and/or automation at the right place from a human interaction perspective in order to allow it to ensure that the human is in the loop and you’re actually managing the check?”
Human-computer interaction will become even more important as people think about how they’re going to use these technologies, especially in clinical care, she added.
Gardenhire offers an example that she said is quite important.
“Lots of folks have been thinking about how to use some type of augmented intelligence, whether it’s through computer vision or some type of false detection through a sensor that’s using some type of algorithm to take in some type of movement data, those types of things,” she explained. “Lots of really great folks have taken an approach to be able to do that.
“The idea being that I’d be able to use either data that shows your movement through a camera or put some type of sensor on you, and I’d be able to predict if you’re going to attempt to get out of bed or move in a way or lift in a way that means you’re likely to fall, and I can predict it in such a way that I could alert somebody to come in and intervene,” she continued. “That’s really great technology, and we want that type of prediction and augmented technology, but I need to be able to alert someone.”
Human in the loop
So getting the human in the loop is the most important thing to achieving the outcome.
“Being able to predict is not the outcome,” she explained. “Being able to intervene so you don’t fall is the outcome. That’s why I say human-computer interaction will become even more important, is because if I can’t close the loop around how I alert the human, at some point the computer or the output or the alert that’s coming out of it has to alert the human, and it has to do so in an amount of time that will allow the human to get to a place to actually intervene.
“If I can’t figure out that science, then the fact I’ve predicted becomes a lot less valuable because the intervention can’t happen,” she concluded.
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