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On this episode of "The Digital Patient" podcast, hosts Alan Sardana & Dr. Joshua Liu speak with Dr. Maulik Purohit, Chief Health Information Officer at Lehigh Valley Health Network, about "Building Guardrails to Prevent Complacency, Healthy AI Skepticism, The Power of Daily 1% Improvement, and more..." Click the play button to listen or read the show notes below.
Guest(s):
Episode 113 - Show Notes:
[00:01:13] Why Dr. Purohit was drawn to being a physician since he was a child for the idea of caring for others;
[00:01:51] How being a caregiver for his grandparents with their healthcare appointments deepened his connection with them, and fortified his desire to be a physician as he saw firsthand the limitations of the healthcare system;
[00:04:10] Why Dr. Purohit had a desire to improve the healthcare system at large by making it easier for patients to access care and how an opportunity arose for him to establish the inaugural concussion program at Mass General;
[00:06:00] How Dr. Purohit ended up doing a lot of the front-line work for the concussion program, including clinic planning, determining patient flow logistics, hiring, and creating templates, and how this experience helped him understand the business side of medicine, consumer engagement, patient experience, and quality;
[00:10:00] How there is immense pressure today to learn everything in medicine while balancing personal life, and why Dr. Purohit is grateful for his family and wife, who played a major role in his success;
[00:11:50] How Dr. Purohit was recruited to the Department of Defense to expand their brain injury and PTSD program and why he wanted to collect better data and build a platform with analytics across longitudinal patient data to better understand brain injury as large epidemiological studies were lacking in brain injury research at the time;
[00:15:00] How Dr. Purohit gained insight into various technologies and infrastructure during his time with the DoD;
[00:16:00] Why Dr. Purohit got into Informatics as he recognized it had more reach than his research in integrated medicine, how he became CMIO;
00:18:00] How chasing the CMIO / CHIO role was never the goal for Dr. Purohit, but rather the platform to make an impact on the healthcare system, and why he chose to join Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) because of their collective desire to push the envelope and improving healthcare;
[00:19:00] How Dr. Purohit first focused on reducing waste; implementing technology to provide real-time cost data and decision support for clinicians, helping them make more cost-effective decisions;
[00:22:00] Why Dr. Purohit believes AI and automation can greatly improve non-clinical tasks in healthcare, freeing up human resources for higher-level work, and why he is skeptical about fully automating clinical care, as he has not seen a tool that can outperform a human in every situation;
[00:23:00] Why Dr. Purohit remains skeptical of AI, noting how the quality of the data is paramount for AI to function well in healthcare, and until the data is clean and accurate, AI will have limitations and potential fallouts;
[00:24:00] Why Dr. Purohit believes data capture in healthcare also needs improvement, as user interface and human-centered design are not yet at the level of consumer products like Google or Amazon;
[00:29:49] Why Dr. Purohit thinks about complacency as a natural human tendency and how he prevents complacency at critical junctures through specific guardrails and structures to ensure safety;
[00:34:00] How patient messages can vary in complexity, and how complex questions require not just ingestion of knowledge that an LLM can refer to, but also analysis of the patient's chart and profile, and the dangers of relying solely on AI;
[00:39:10] How Dr. Purohit is inspired by the book, Atomic Habits, and a concept discussed within of making 1 percent improvement every day to achieve exponential improvements over time;
Fast 5 Lightning Round: