Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare, sees a big opportunity in using artificial intelligence to improve efficiency and quality of care.
"We have a growing digital agenda in our company, and I'm very excited about what the prospects are for us around that," he said during a July 27 quarterly earnings call, as transcribed by The Motley Fool. "We are investing in a new clinical system, which we think is going to allow us to move information to the cloud more efficiently, and as a matter of fact, move standard data sets into the cloud so that we can use big data even more effectively and infuse that back into the care process."
He said the Nashville, Tenn.-based system plans to pair the digital agenda with its "care transformation innovation" process. Artificial intelligence will have a huge role in the digital agenda, he said, but HCA is still in the early stages of its care transformation.
"We are partnering with some very sophisticated companies to help us push through this in ways that I think will accelerate our agenda and inform it with more expertise than what we have internally," he said. "We're excited about what this can yield for us as we push into our next life cycle, and we'll wait to see what artificial intelligence, in fact, can do. But we view it as a positive…potential for us in a very significant way."
HCA partnered with Google Cloud in May 2021 to accelerate its digital transformation. The partnership was designed to create a secure and dynamic data analytics platform based on information from the system's 32 million annual patient encounters. At the time, HCA had deployed more than 90,000 mobile devices to run tools created by PatientKeeper and Mobile Heartbeat, as well as other developers.
The health system also aimed to improve clinical workflows through the partnership and use data insights better.