Join Dr. Stephanie Lahr, Chief Experience Officer at Artisight and recognized healthcare innovator, as she shares insights on transforming healthcare through AI-powered smart hospital solutions. From her journey as a health system CIO to technology innovator, Dr. Lahr discusses how Artisight's platform is addressing critical challenges in healthcare delivery while enhancing both provider and patient experience.
Stephanie Lahr, Chief Experience Officer, Artisight
Megan Antonelli, CEO, HealthIMPACT Live
Welcome 0:01 Welcome to Digital Health talks. Each week we meet with healthcare leaders making an immeasurable difference in equity, access and quality. Hear about what tech is worth investing in and what isn't. As we focus on the innovations that deliver. Join Megan Antonelli, Janae sharp and Shahid Shah for a weekly no BS, deep dive on what's really making an impact in healthcare.
Megan Antonelli 0:29 Hi everyone. Welcome to Health Impact live digital health talks, where we explore groundbreaking technologies reshaping healthcare today. We are joined by Dr Stephanie lar, Chief Experience Officer at artisite and good friend and advisor to health impact. So we are excited to talk about their innovative AI powered smart hospital platform that is transforming care delivery. We've heard a lot about it, and we know that Stephanie's extensive background as both a clinician and healthcare technology leader, she brings unique insights into how AI can enhance provider experience and patient care quality. Hi Stephanie, how are you? Hi Megan. So great to see you. I'm great. It's Happy Valentine's Day. Love the red. Happy Valentine's Day. I love your red. It's exciting to be here. It's a Friday. Are we gonna have a date night? Yes, we should, although I think we all need to sleep right now so that we can be ready for what's about to happen in the next week at vive we are it's going to be a very busy week, all of us in our taking off our red and going in our cowgirl outfits. I assume I'm all packed up and ready to go. I bet. Well, I know a little bit about your journey, because you've been such a great speaker and help to health impact. But tell our audience a little bit about where you were, what you did before articite, and, of course, what brought you to that.
Stephanie Lahr 1:54 Yeah, so the journey has definitely been a bit of a winding road. I'm an internal medicine physician. Practiced as a hospitalist for many years, and during that time that I was practicing as a hospitalist, I got involved just sort of serendipitously with our IT teams. I had gone through an epic implementation when I was in residency and really identified that EMR was going to be a permanent part of where things were going. And I thought, well, probably you should have some clinicians hanging around while we make some of these decisions. So I got involved with that, and then realized there was education I could get. So I did some certifications, then got board certified, and then kind of, you know, evolved my career for moving further away from the clinical side and more into this intersection of healthcare delivery leveraging technology. Was the CM IO then at Monument. So in 2016 was recruited to come to monument health for an implementation, again, of epic at that point, and led that implementation. And then toward the end of that project, the CIO was retiring, and the CEO of our health system said, you know, as important as this synergy is between technology and our care delivery models, maybe it makes sense to have a physician, you know, at the helm of those teams and really guiding our strategy. Would you want to do that? And I, well, yes, why not, right? So I jumped in and again, started surrounding myself with smart people and getting engaged with with colleagues and a good network, some of how I came to meet the team with the health impact. And so anyway, you know, really had a great journey doing that and taking the CIO role expanded for me, my lens on all of the things technology, where things were evolving. I mean, obviously there were conversations about cloud and artificial intelligence and things that were happening that were broader than just kind of what was happening at the informatics level, and I was really excited about what I saw was the potential, you know, I've told a lot of people that, especially when I was a cm, io, I felt like my mantra was, I can make it suck less, which, I mean, not really billboard worthy, but at least was honest, and People still appreciated it. It was just like, you know, we'll get there. And over the last few years, I think what we're seeing today is the evolution and speed of evolution of technology has really gained so much momentum that we're at a place where we're about to be able to make it not suck, and it's going to take some work, and it's not going to be immediate, but that really was, you know, a creative moment for me in the journey to be able to say innovation and partnership between vendors and health systems is what's going to be necessary in order to do all this. And then up popped, you know, the articite into my. World. And I met Andrew, our CEO, who's a physician as well, and he had this vision around how we could reduce the friction for our clinicians at the bedside and leveraging artificial intelligence and sensors and using things like computer vision. And I thought, Wow, this this is so amazing. This is where we have to go. And one of the things I loved was it wasn't, you know, oh well, we're going to do this in the clinic, or we're going to do this in, you know, the just in the patient rooms in the hospital was we can use these tools anywhere and everywhere. We have humans that have work that we could remove, you know, from from the lift of what they're trying to do. And it was such a cool way of looking at it that I was super excited. And he said, Gosh, you're so excited, maybe you should come work with us. And so here we are a little over two years later, and it's been quite a journey and a great time.
Megan Antonelli 5:52 Yeah, yeah, no, I you know, of course, we always love to have CIOs who are also physicians, right? I mean, it's always that that voice and that experience has always been something that I think just lends itself to, you know, sort of moving the needle in the right way. And, you know, yes, sucking less is pretty much, I would put it on a billboard, I would, and Andrea's work, obviously, we've, we've followed that closely and been, you know, really big fans of artists, I and the work that you guys are doing, and it's moved so quickly, right? I mean, there was, there was this point where it was like, Oh, wow. But then, of course, as you looked at the, you know, when we had the pandemic and sort of clinician burnout, there's always been the clinician frustration with the EHR and the technology. But then we had such a sort of, that perfect storm of sort of burnout and challenges there. And I think that is really what kind of put a spotlight on AI and certainly what artists it's doing. So tell me a little bit about, like, what you've seen in terms of how it's really working to help alleviate the burnout, the frustration, and as I've heard you say, bring the joy back?
Stephanie Lahr 7:01 Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, I think it's multi fold. First of all, I think a lot of what we're seeing and what we're going to see with AI, particularly in the clinical realm, where we're talking about, you know, assisting clinicians is, it's going to be very synergistic. It's the human plus the technology, right? It's not about the replacement. It's about, how do we bring the two together to allow the an exponential improvement in experience, or whatever is necessary in order to move the needle forward? And so, you know, the we start with just the idea that a camera and a speaker and a microphone and a TV that can be used to create a two way video experience. That's the future every hospital room in the country, I think, will have that in the next handful of years, we might actually see and I saw somebody posted recently in another channel that you know they could see the days coming soon where we move computers, a physical computer, laptop, etc, out of patient rooms. Yes, what are we going to replace it with ambient technology? It's not that we're not going to need computers, quote, unquote, in the room. We need that computational ability to fade into the background, and that's, you know, that's a journey. That's not something that you go in and turn on in a big bang kind of way and and you have all the tools. And so, you know, what we're seeing is we're seeing first health systems go through this adoption phase of leveraging cameras, Speaker microphones, creating a high quality, two way audio, video interaction that can be leveraged in the patient room for a variety of different opportunities, whether that's virtual nursing, virtual pharmacists, virtual therapy, anybody who might need to come into the room, specialists, etc, being able to leverage that technology, and that is a bigger, you know, challenge potentially than you might think, because the idea that we're putting cameras into the private and personal space of patient rooms is a piece that we have to really walk through and make sure we are understanding the privacy elements of that and how we maintain dignity and all of those kinds of things in A situation like that, and then when you have that foundational technology in place, and people are sort of used to it, and even the patients are thinking, This is so great because I have access to all these members of my care team in additional ways, then we can start layering on the artificial intelligence. And one of the things that I find so exciting about the work that we're doing is, once that infrastructure essentially is put in place, the sky is the limit as to how we can leverage it all. And so many great ideas come from the customers, right? And so we're using things like computer vision to be able to see what's happening in the room. So an easy one is we watch the patients with computer vision to monitor them for falls or even the activity, how, how active are they in the room? And, you know, things like that, that can then guide the clinical person, the that is watching that to see. So, right? It's that combination of the person and the technology, we're not eliminating the person. We want them still watching, but we want them to be cued and hone in on a situation when that's needed. So we're identifying all kinds of scenarios where we can do that. And I think one of the other elements that's so important in this, as we think about this being effectively adopted in in healthcare environments is these are complex environments and understanding what it looks like to have a patient prevent, you know, identifying a potential fall or identifying that a patient's been turned appropriately to prevent pressure ulcers. Those aren't things that computer vision inherently knows how to do. It doesn't know how to do that, so we have to train it. And that happens because of the synergy between the clinicians and our teams that are on site. And we build those for the first time in real healthcare environments, and then we can go and reproduce them over and over and over again. So you know whether it's in the operating room, where we can do things like identify that the patient has come into the room, see that the drape is going up, that the drape is going down, and then do something with that data, right? So we can put it into the EMR, we can leverage it for communication. But it's really about how do we reduce the friction, to bring the joy back to healthcare. That's, you know, in essence, the whole goal,
Megan Antonelli 11:45 right? That's amazing. And it, you know, I think, as you look at, I mean, as you said, there's so many places that this can be applied, right, everywhere, every room, every department, over the last two years, you know, where is the sort of best point of entry, if you will. You know, where are you seeing that? You know, this is where we like to start. Or, yeah,
Stephanie Lahr 12:05 yeah. I mean, these are conversations that are we do have uniquely with every health system as with every other technology. You always want to start with a problem that you have, right and ensure that you're not starting with a solution but starting with the problem. But I think we know that most organizations are challenged with even if they're not made. We have some organizations that tell us, gosh, we don't really have a lot of burnout. We have really we have, you know, nurses that we don't have shortages. They're very content to be here, which is amazing, but still, they probably have throughput challenges. Those nurses would probably still be excited to have their work life, you know, improved by not having to do additional documentation or not having to capture additional information. And so, you know, we spend that time with with them identifying, but oftentimes what we see is there's a clear ROI on being able to support the throughput in a hospital. Because, obviously, we hear stories often about emergency rooms that are holding patients. That's rarely a result of challenges in the ER, it's usually more a result of an inability to get those patients to get throughput through the hospital. So if we can identify things that are happening, if we can create efficiencies, create notifications around things, to improve that efficiency and throughput, we we can help alleviate those challenges. And so, you know, we that's often a place that we start. Certainly fall prevention is still, it's incredible that, you know, we are where we are, and yet many, in fact, not, I would say most organizations still are not where they want to be in preventing falls, especially falls with injury within a hospital. And so leveraging these tools to be able to do that is really impactful. So that often means a virtual nursing or virtual sitting program with the additive elements of artificial intelligence monitoring algorithms that can, you know, be additive to that is often where we start.
Megan Antonelli 14:22 Great. I when it comes to where you're seeing, you know, kind of the most impact and and also around that, you know, kind of provider burnout, operational efficiency, you know, when, when your customers come back and say, Oh, my God, it's amazing. What are, what are? You know, where is that happening the most, and where do you see that?
Stephanie Lahr 14:40 Yeah. I mean, I think we hear it in the sentiment, right? We hear stories from nurses that are saying, Please don't ever take this away. This has really changed the, you know, my ability to care for patients and the quality of what I can provide, but metrics is where everybody. You know, where we're all trying to go. So we do see metrics that are, you know, reduced turnover, improved throughput, decreased overtime, decreased falls, the number of hours that are saved by a combination of a virtual nurse plus any of the AI algorithms. So it's not, it's not, and I want to be clear about that. It's not just about the AI. This really is care transformation, model change, and leveraging the combination of virtual care augmented with artificial intelligence algorithms, and the combination of those things together is producing these, you know, 1000s of hours saved that for for nursing at the bedside, to then be able to return to doing other kinds of work, including things, you know, like seeing quality, you know, improvements in in other areas, because they have more time to Go and focus on on those elements, or occasionally because we're queuing them in some way that there's something that they might need to be paying attention to. So a lot of really, really exciting metrics, in addition to just that sentiment side of people saying, Gosh, this is a tool that really has changed how we can look at things. And we also see, on the patient side, organizations coming to us and saying, our patient experience scores are going up because they feel that this technology, and then the synergies of how that technology is interacting with the Care Transformation Model is improving their experience and their care in the hospital.
Megan Antonelli 16:37 Oh, that's great. What about in terms of type of health system. Are there particular health systems that you know sort of this works really well in, and you know that that are more responsive,
Stephanie Lahr 16:49 you know? I think this is, like I said earlier, I think we're going to see a camera, a speaker, a microphone, two way, audio, video, virtual care, augmented with AI in every health system, in every hospital in the country in the next handful of years, when you think about small hospitals, critical access hospitals. So, you know, rural healthcare very near and dear to me, as I have really always practiced and lived in in rural environments, it gets a little trickier. You know, a critical access hospital might have eight hospital rooms, but might have an average daily census of two people. So I think there's some unique opportunities. There's also some unique challenges in that, right? Do you really want to outfit eight rooms with technology when the reality is, on any given day, only two patients will be in any of those rooms? So then, you know, maybe we think about mobile carts and, you know, maybe, maybe the infrastructure is a little bit different. We also think about, you know, if you're trying to leverage a centralized, you know, nursing model of virtual care, augmenting, augmented with AI to then support that. Well, in a hospital that just has two patients, having another nurse sit in a virtual station and help the nurses that are at the bedside probably is not going to be the best utilization of resources, but we're starting to see organizations that are looking at ways of sharing that right? So a lot of critical access hospitals are part of a bigger health system, so then that's great. They can deliver from their central hub out into the into the more rural areas. And I think that's again, an amazing opportunity as we think about allowing those that live in rural settings to be able to be accessing the same kinds of care that they would be able to receive in an urban or tertiary center. We can do that with even more effectively, with virtual plus AI and then, and then those you know, that centers back to this idea that, you know, there's, there's, we just have to architect it for them individually, and for those that are standalone, then maybe they arrange something with an organization that is able to provide some of those resources into them. So, you know, there's that. That's probably the biggest area where I would say there's some uniqueness. But whether you're an academic medical center or a community hospital, I think that this is really where the future is going. And it may not look exactly the same in every place, but these are the kinds of tools that we're going to need to continue to do high quality care delivery,
Megan Antonelli 19:20 right? So, yeah, I mean, it's like, it depends on how you're going to scale it, and, you know, sort of the applications, but it's certainly valuable in all of them. What about, I mean, you mentioned, kind of, what outfitting a room? What does that look like?
Stephanie Lahr 19:33 Yeah. So it's typically speaking, you know, and historically, one of the things I loved about artistsite Was this idea, you know, if a camera and a speaker, microphone, TV, they're going to be in the rooms. The reality is, we're going to use those for more and more things, right? And an artist, say, is trying to stay on top of what all those things are and provide as many of those opportunities. But there might be something else that the. Health System wants to use that camera for. So we've always had an agnostic approach to either using off the shelf kinds of hardware or hardware that maybe health systems have already deployed, and then being able to not require them to buy new hardware if it can meet the needs, because those kinds of costs add up and are can be a barrier to actually being able to do this work if those infrastructure costs get too much. But then more recently, you know, due to conversations that we were having with our customers, many organizations are getting into this space of putting that kind of equipment into rooms for the very first time. And they said, Can you just do that for us? Can you create something? And so we are doing that, and now have an ability for one device that can go into the room, that has the cameras, that can do the computer vision, that has the speaker, the microphone, has the compute, has all the elements that are needed to connect to the TV, so that we can simplify the deployment for the health system. We can simplify the cost of that and allow the health system to leverage that tool, if that's what they what they want to do. And so you know, again, honestly, when we talk to health systems about barriers, this is one of the number one things that comes up, not only because of cost, but also a lot of hospitals are older buildings. They're the networking and other elements that support getting this technology to work well and be able to be deployed is complicated and may not have been architected 40 years ago when the hospital was built, in order to support these kinds of things. So we're trying to really slim that down and respond to health system needs, so that we can make that lift as easy as possible,
Megan Antonelli 21:52 right? Yeah, it's interesting, especially as we see hospitals kind of moving to the home and virtual and all the technology that's necessary in that. And then even a lot of new builds, you know, I'm always struck by, oh, I'm not. We're talking about getting people out of the hospital, but then the hospitals are building, so then that's, you know, a great opportunity. But in terms of other barriers, I mean, are you seeing resistance? You mentioned a little bit in terms of the patients that they'll you know, there's a sensitivity to cameras in the room. What about clinicians? You know, I think a ama study came out, a survey where they were saying, you know, physicians are more, you know, welcoming to AI at the moment. Are you seeing that? Have you seen that change over the last couple of years?
Stephanie Lahr 22:32 Yeah. I mean, I think some of our traditional ways of thinking about bringing technology in, whether it's AI or something else, because, I mean, at the end of the day, AI is just a tool, right? And that tool is it's challenging, because it may be a little more complicated on the back end to understand, and so we have that education to do. But what we know for sure is when we aren't inclusive, when we don't start with a problem that needs to be solved, when we don't engage the frontline users and stakeholders in how we're going to use these technologies, they don't like it, right? And so the same thing is going to happen with AI. And so I think what we're really hearing from clinicians is, please include us. Please share with us what problem and how you're thinking about solving it with this kind of technology, and then give us as much transparency into how the technology actually works, so that we can feel confident and comfortable that it's going to solve the problems that we think we're trying to solve. And I think that, you know, gradual step wise opportunities in this space again, if we start with things that are about reducing the friction. And you know, if I were to say to a physician, what if you never had to document this specific thing again, because the computer vision is going to see it, and now you don't have to do it? Oh, yeah, that could be pretty great. You know that, and that's lower states than trying to think about as we move in the progression of things that will even be considered medical devices, like clinical decision support, where the out, or an algorithm of some kind is going to tell you what they think needs to happen with the patient. Those are going to be more complicated and convert deeper conversations. But I think what we're seeing is a comfort amongst clinicians that, yes, we think the world is going here, please include us. Let's start simple and and then we'll build this together.
Megan Antonelli 24:36 Do you have advice for your customers or hospitals that are looking to to do this on how to get their physicians involved.
Stephanie Lahr 24:46 You know, I think actually, so. I remember when I interviewed for my hospitalist job in a year that I don't really want to mention at this moment, but a while ago, and I said, Hey, do you. Have an EMR, and could I be a part of this conversation about what you're doing here? And the CEO said to me, sorry, but you're a physician who wants to use an EMR and wants to be a part of this like no one's ever said that to me before. Again, that was a while ago. Like I that's not the world we live in today. I actually think most physicians that are practicing today, that are leveraging all kinds of technology in their home environments and things like that, I think they do want to be a part of the conversation. Probably the biggest thing that can be a challenge is time, right? They they are trying to take care of patients, and we want them, and need them to do that work, and yet, we want them at the table for these conversations. And so, you know, one is being flexible. Don't schedule things at a time that you know their most, you know, highly effective patient hours. Work around their schedule. Figure out what you need to do to do that and and if there is some way depending on the organizational structure and the the, you know, employment models and things like that, if you can even cut out time, you know, carve out time in order for them to participate. But honestly, you know, in my experiences, you know, at Monument as a CIO and CMIO, there were tons of physicians actually, who had great ideas and things that they wanted to bring forward, and were willing to put the commitment into that they just wanted to feel heard and have and know what avenues to do that. So I think it's make the avenues clear in case they have an idea. Make it easy to work around their schedule, or as easy as possible if you need their engagement, and then if you can, in some way even carve out time for that. I think that's, you know, really valuable,
Megan Antonelli 26:43 right? Yeah, I think the time, that time challenge, is a big one, but, but also the communication. Well, we have a few minutes left, and we always like to ask our guests about, you know, kind of what is there? What are they most excited about? What's the one good thing we do our segment, five good things. So when you look at healthcare today and technology. What's the, you know, the good thing that you're excited about?
Stephanie Lahr 27:07 Well, I'm going to make two comments on this. So one of the things that I think is going to be game changing in the next couple of years, and I don't mean this just because of where I sit today, computer vision. The capabilities of computer vision, I think are really, really incredible. And you know what we've seen through large language models and the use of voice and ambient you know, there's still opportunity to dig further into that, and I think that that is really going to be helpful in healthcare, additionally and more potential. But computer vision, we've barely begun to scratch the surface of what that can look like. And I just think that there's going to be a huge amount we can do, if for no other reason than you know, we want more data in healthcare, and data collection is one of our biggest challenges. We're not good at it. We ask humans to do it, who are inherently not ideally suited for data collection. If we can start to leverage computer vision, maybe in combination with ambient listening technologies, to actually be able to be eyes and ears in the room to capture information, it can be like having a process improvement engineer in every room in a hospital, 24 hours a day, without having to have the human resources to do that. So I'm really excited for where that can go, that can then help so many other things. But if I say one good thing, what I would really say is that I'm so excited right now about the creativity that we see in this space, that people are everyone wants to be innovation innovative. It's innovation is no longer about like a title and a person and an office. Innovation is everybody coming together with this excitement and belief that we can really be creative and leverage technology to move us forward. And that's something that I think we've not that's not been the perspective that we've had before. And so that the creativity, the number of entrepreneurs that I see that are nurses and physicians and clinicians who are saying, I've got a great idea and I can bring it forward. And because the technology stack has become so much more simplified for an ability for people to be able to do development with relatively, you know, minimal lift and background in computational models and things like that, with some assistance. It's just a really very exciting time, and I'm so excited to continue to watch and see the very unique things that come out of the creativity that we're seeing from people today.
Megan Antonelli 29:42 Yeah, I mean, and if you like, just both you and Andrew, in terms of that, you know, putting those tools to be creative and to be innovative in the in the hands of clinicians and physicians and their ability to innovate is, is awesome. So that is exciting, and the computer vision is mind blowing, but also super, super exciting to tell our audience where they can learn more about artists. I get in touch with you. I know you're going to be at five next week, but also hymns, but in general, if they're not going there, what's the best way?
Stephanie Lahr 30:15 Yeah, well, I'm definitely on LinkedIn with regularity. So by all means, reach out to me there and send messages. Also our website, www.articite.com would love to have you visit us there, reach out to us on LinkedIn as well, on our articite page. So really excited to continue these conversations and connect with people. Would also just love your ideas and feedback about what it is we're doing and where we're going next, because our best ideas come from the folks that are out in the world doing the work every day.
Megan Antonelli 30:48 I love that. Well, thank you, Stephanie, it was so great to see you. Thank you to our guests. Thank you to our audience, and thank you for joining us on digital health talks. I hope you enjoyed Dr layers insights into AI powered healthcare transformation and highlighting the tremendous potential for technology to enhance both provider and patient experience. As she said, don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn. I know she's there and quite active, and to learn more about her work, visit her at 525, and for more innovative perspectives on health technology. Subscribe and visit us at Digital Health talks. That's Megan Antonelli signing off.
Thank You 31:27 Thank you for joining us on digital health talks, where we explore the intersection of healthcare and technology with leaders who are transforming patient care. This episode was brought to you by our valued program partners, automation, anywhere, revolutionizing healthcare workflows through Intelligent Automation, netera, advancing contactless vital signs, monitoring elite groups, delivering strategic healthcare, IT solutions, Sell point, securing healthcare, identity management and access governance. Your engagement helps drive the future of healthcare innovation. Subscribe to digital health talks on your preferred podcast platform. Share these insights with your network and follow us on LinkedIn for exclusive content and updates. Ready to connect with healthcare technology leaders in person join us at the next health impact event. Visit Health Impact forum.com for dates and registration. Until next time this is digital health talks, where change makers come together to fix health care. You.