Laura Wilt joined Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health earlier this year as senior vice president and chief digital officer to unify the system's digital strategy and accelerate data analytics.
Ms. Wilt previously spent a decade at Ochsner Health in Louisiana as system vice president and CIO. In her new role, she is leading digital transformation and maximizing technology to improve the patient and clinician experience.
Recently, Ms. Wilt joined the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast" to talk about digital strategy, artificial intelligence and where healthcare is headed.
Note: This interview has been slightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are the headwinds you have your eye on right now?
Laura Wilt: The rate of change in technology is speeding up so quickly. I'm really excited about some of the large language models and everybody's talking about ChatGPT. What I'm most interested in is how they can really help make work easier. What can we do with technology that can help make things easier for us as people? How can we make our work smarter, not harder? Those tools are going to help us, but with that comes challenges. It's a brand new emerging technology and there are a lot of people who have been experimenting with it.
I'm really excited to see how we can apply large language models in a way that is going to be safe and additive, and helpful for everyone. There is a big opportunity there.
Q: Many organizations are just beginning to explore what they can do with generative AI and large language models, and the things they have to look out for with artificial intelligence. Where do you see the best places AI could make an impact at Sutter?
LW: There's so many ways to apply it. One of the things I love about Sutter is we have a human-centered design team. That's what will be so important about applying any technology, and especially large language models: how can we apply them in a way that's based on humans and how people can work with them. There's endless opportunities there.
If you're doing any sort of administrative writing, there could be a way that you could teach a language model to do that writing for you. That could be one way you interact with a chat on a website, but in a richer way so it's able to answer more questions for you.
Q: I love that. From your vantage point as chief digital officer, I can imagine you touch so many different departments from clinical to administrative to financial and more. How do you add value and ensure technology is impactful for the organization?
LW: Technology should take things that are complex and confusing and make it easier. Sometimes I worry if we add too much too quickly without following it all the way through, technology can actually make things a little bit more confusing.
If you're doing something manually, for example we spend a lot of time sending insurance information back and forth to get things authorized in healthcare and it takes a long time for our patients. It's hard for our physicians who really want to see the patients. We now have staff doing network work too. So if there's anything we can do to automate that and streamline it, there is a huge opportunity for us to help add value.
Q: Where is it still important to invest resources today?
LW: Data. Any investment in data and analytics is huge. They pay dividends because the more information you can have, the better insights you can get from that data, which means you can make better decisions. Whether that's providing the right information to the physician at the right time when they need to see it, or whether it's more on the administrative side.
There's so much opportunity for how we can use data, and we have a ton of it. The investments are in the people and the process, which is equally as important as the technology to make it really work for us.
Q: How do you make sure you're providing the right person with the right information, whether it's at the point of care or operationally, so they can act on it quickly?
LW: It's a really challenging problem that we're all going to need to tackle. How do we cut through the mounds of information that we have to really get the most useful insights? Whether it's out of all the patients who are on the schedule today, can we call two to make sure they're going to come or cancel earlier so we can send someone else a text and get them in at that appointment time. Knowing which two patients are most likely to cancel requires the right amount of data analytics capabilities. It's really using predictive modeling and then it has to integrate and be easy for the person who needs to make that phone call and take action.
Q: Where do you see the best opportunities to grow in the future? What are you excited about?
LW: There are so many things I'm excited about. We have a lot of work ahead of us with an amazing opportunity to care for people. One of the things I'm really excited about is the idea of flipping from healthcare to health. Taking away the one word, which is one of my favorite things to do: how do we simplify and take something away?
Taking away the word healthcare and changing it to health opens up what your scope can be. We are thinking about how to stay healthy and promote health. It's a lot different from activities than in our traditional four walls. It's wearable devices, it's the internet of things. How do we collect data that can help people stay healthy when they're not with us, and how do we engage them differently to stay healthy and achieve their goals around health.