Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare has a robust agenda for advanced digital capabilities that will support business and clinical strategy, CEO Samuel Hazen said during the company's Jan. 30 earnings call.
"As high performing as we are today, we believe there's more operational potential inside our company," Mr. Hazen said, as transcribed by The Motley Fool. "With evolving technological tools, we are investing to unlock this value. We believe this initiative, together with our care transformation and innovation program, will enhance quality, drive further efficiencies through our financial resiliency program, and improve overall operational management capabilities including integrating our revenue cycle in case management functions better."
As HCA continues to focus on financial resiliency and improving length of stay as well as the case mix, the system will also bring on more technology, structured teams and better processes and benchmarking, Mr. Hazen said. The company also announced CFO Bill Rutherford plans to retired and will be succeeded by Mike Marks, who has spent more than a decade with the system.
"We have incredible opportunities to compare more deeply into our organization, whether it's on the variable cost side with respect to what we allocate and distribute to our facilities, or fixed costs," he said. "Both of these categories are getting a lot more benchmarking under [Mike Marks'] leadership, and we're finding opportunities to rethink how we organize our cost structure, how we leverage process improvement, how we use technology and automation in those areas to improve processes and variable costs."
HCA's technology agenda is also leveraging technology for care transformation to improve outcomes in multiple aspects of the business and Mr. Hazen reports modest success in the short term. In the future, he anticipates these programs will provide additional long-term value.
The system's information technology group includes more than 6,200 employees supporting areas including business analysis, product development, infrastructure operations, IT security and customer support.
During a recent interview with the "This Week Health" podcast, Marty Paslick, HCA Healthcare senior vice president and CIO, said HCA has made a large investment in mobile phones for clinicians to support communication and improve clinician and employee experience. The system's mobility platform will be critical for incorporating generative AI, he said. HCA is working with Google Cloud to use generative AI for operational workflow improvement and clinical documentation.
"That collaboration is very intentional from a foundational perspective," Mr. Paslick said. "We need more speed and elasticity with infrastructure and wanted a partner we believe is going to be a leader in the space. We're putting the right controls and governance in place, but we also will be looking over the edge to be a leader in healthcare, when it comes to the next generation of capability."