The Edge of Healthcare: The Silent Killer of AI Projects in Healthcare: Culture

Martin Cody: Welcome to The Edge of Healthcare, where the pulse of innovation meets the heartbeat of leadership. I’m Martin Cody, your guide through riveting conversations with the trailblazers of healthcare. Tune in to gain exclusive access to strategies, experiences, and groundbreaking solutions from influential payer and health system leaders. This isn’t just a podcast, it’s your VIP ticket to the minds shaping the future of healthcare right now. Buckle up, subscribe, and get ready to ride to The Edge of Healthcare, where lessons from leaders are ready for you to use today.

Martin Cody: Hello, again, everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Edge of Healthcare: Lessons from Leaders to Use Today. And I am thrilled to finally have on the program Dr. Lisa Schaffner, who is an expert in healthcare analytics and that ever-popular buzzword, AI, CEO and founder of A To I Advisors. So, she’s going to be addressing all of the ways that we can using data analytics, and specifically with AI, to improve healthcare and basically leverage all the power that’s at your fingertips so you can get through these complex problems faster. Lisa, welcome to the program.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Thank you so much, Martin. I am ecstatic to be here. Glad to be joining you this morning.

Martin Cody: Oh, thank you. And let’s talk about the title. Let’s talk about CEO and founder of the business, because I’ve founded a couple of businesses myself. And usually, people do that because they’re just frustrated with the way things are going. Maybe they’ve worked for big orgs before in the past. They want to hang out their own shingle. They just want to do it better, faster. Tell me the reason behind you wanting to found an A To I analytics company, or A To I Advisors to focus on analytics and data analytics and AI.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Absolutely, Martin. Everything you described was what led up to me founding my company a little less than a year ago. I spent probably the first 20 years of my career as an academic researcher in healthcare services research from Johns Hopkins. And I studied access, costs and quality. It was very slow. And I immediately, as I wrapped up a postdoctoral research fellowship, I went into business and worked for payers, healthcare providers, systems and enablement firms. Spent about 20 years there, roughly as an executive in strategy, data analytics, and AI before it was called AI. We used to call it big data at one point. That might be a buzzword. That’s our audience, yeah. Big data. Nobody still knows what that means. I think people still don’t know what I means either. But nonetheless, I came to a point in my career where I felt as though I was doing great work inside of organizations. I recently did a tally to understand how much money did I save those organizations in terms of revenue-generated in terms of expenses. And it was conservatively $2 billion. I think that’s a pretty big win over that span of time. But using data and analytics and AI and using those strategically to drive business performance, align to business strategy, that is transformation. I had a mentor, a gentleman named Inderpal Bhandari, who used to be global chief data officer at IBM once. Tell me, Lisa, when you sit in the seat of leading data, you’re the chief transformation officer. And being inside organizations and trying to do that level of transformation, making them data driven, getting them to data literacy. I have been able to be far more successful outside than I was in that regard. So, everything you described again was exactly what led to me deciding it’s time to go out on my own.

Martin Cody: I’m fascinated by that, and I want to pull on a couple of threads there. A that you did an analysis of how much money you saved or generated revenue from that standpoint, because I think that’s impressive. But B, the realization that you knew in your heart that you were going to be able to be more effective outside than in. And I’m wondering why, and we’ve talked to a lot of experts on The Edge of Healthcare around digital innovation, around change management, and leadership capacities in both of those areas. I find healthcare to be one of the slowest-moving industries with regards to leadership decision-making that exists. So, I’m curious: why is that from the lens that you see healthcare through?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Well, I see it from a few perspectives, Martin. I think the first is there isn’t necessarily the impetus to change. For many in healthcare, unfortunately, the incentives are such that changing is outweighed by continuing to do the same. I would also add that change in healthcare is something that takes lots of different inputs, whether those are people, processes, or technologies. And a lot of those inputs, along with the incentives, is also complicated and complex. And that’s the nature of our healthcare system. Not to go to policy wonk here. But in 1965, when the Social Security and Medicare Acts were passed that introduced the opportunity to earn money in healthcare. And ever since that point in time, the system has just continuously gotten increasingly complicated and complex, such that when you try to make a change in one place, if you think about it as a chain link, right? You touch one link, and every other link gets disrupted in ways that you can’t necessarily anticipate because there’s so much sitting below the surface. That’s not to say that I don’t think people in healthcare, whether they are providers, administrators, and even patients, as well as policymakers. It’s not that they don’t want to change, but the change that needs to happen is very complicated and is really painful on multiple pieces of that chain. And I think that’s ultimately why we are still in the same place, unfortunately.

Martin Cody: You’re right. It’s very comprehensive. It’s very complex. And I’m wondering if, in fact, from a policy perspective, and I’m going to get to your specialty in a second. You know, sometimes it seems like we make it more complex. And that’s not necessarily a bug. That’s a feature. And you talked about policy wonks and getting geeky, but some of the entities that are involved in healthcare, sadly, I think, don’t mind the complexity because that does slow the flow of revenue down or money movement through the system. But no one wins at that except these large organizations that are the ones enacting that. I’m not going to pick on the insurance companies by name, but I think they’re troubled. Now, you talked about the complexity, and I specifically, which might be the hottest buzzword in healthcare besides removing the provider data synchronization errors, teasing. That’s kind of what we do. AI, from a standpoint, you can’t breathe and not hear AI in healthcare. So, how are you leveraging AI because we’re still using it incorrectly in a lot of areas. But what are you doing to solve these complex data analytical problems? And tell me some examples of where you’ve been able to see some results that will probably contribute to your $2 billion of revenue generated or saved.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Yeah, I think it’s important to start with understanding. To your point, AI is thrown around constantly, and it could mean anything from I use ChatGPT all the way to I have something that is automated in my home or my car or in my workplace that is assisting me as I go about my day. So, I think it’s important to start with defining what AI is, and the way I like to define it is there are really two branches, if you will, of AI. There’s what’s called generative and analytical. I’ll start with analytical because we’ve been doing analytical AI, predictive analytics, building models. Granted, the technology to do that work has advanced and extremely quickly and far beyond where we were ten years ago, five years ago. So, the technology is advancing, but what we’re doing with data and AI to create information has been around for a very long time. I mean, go back to your basic predictive model. Your Y equals mx plus b, the slope and a line. Not to again go too nerdy, but that was an early version, we’ll call, of prediction. And we’ve been doing that for a long time. That’s actually where AI has been generating a good deal of value, both dollar value but also non-monetary value. What’s new on the scene is generative AI. And that’s where that’s your ChatGPT. That’s where there is a predictive model, very high powered, sitting below the surface that’s taking information. Think of it as being in a library, and it’s collecting all of the books that are in the library. And when you ask it a question, it’s not you having to go look through the books or starting at the card catalog if you remember one of those. It’s telling you the answer.

Martin Cody: Oh, I do.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Right? Based on everything that you know. And so, I like to start with that definition because when people throw around the word AI, the letters AI, there isn’t a differentiation between those two. And in the latter, in generative AI we actually haven’t seen the ROI from that yet. There’s a lot of promise there. We have seen it from analytical AI. So, I’ll touch a little on some of the ways that I’ve used analytical AI to help organizations move forward. First, understanding who’s likely to utilize care. And those models have been around for a while, but, and I’ve been able to advance them and make them better over the course of my career. But one of the best models that we have out there, that’s analytical AI, is predicting whether somebody is going to have a readmission to a hospital who, think about readmission.

Martin Cody: And I would imagine this is going to be first primary paramount to all of the organizations out there doing value-based care, determining whether or not they should take on additional risk and that sort of thing, knowing the likelihood that their patient population will have a readmission.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: That’s right. Readmissions, I call them the trifecta negative outcome of healthcare. They are expensive because when somebody goes in the hospital for something. After they’ve already been in the hospital, it is exacerbated. There is something worse going on than what they originally went in for. It’s a failure in the quality of care. Something happened where that care, whether it was during care previously, the transition of care, care at home, something failed as well as a bad experience for everyone involved. It’s a bad experience for the patient to have to go back to the hospital. Who wants to be in the hospital? It’s a bad experience for the providers, either feeling failure or having to redo work, if you will. So, if we think about the quadruple or quintuple aim of healthcare, that’s what it is now.

Martin Cody: Quintuple. I don’t know what six is, but it’s coming.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Oh, I’m sure it is. I’m sure it is. But if we think about the quintuple aim of care, every one of those points hits on it, right? It’s bad quality, bad outcomes. It’s costly. Bad provider experience, bad patient experience. And if we add to that social determinants of health, people with negative social determinants of health are far more likely to have that readmission. So, it’s even worse for them. And so, in building models of predicting readmissions, we’re solving for improving across all of those elements of the quintuple aim. That’s one way. Over the course of my career, I have been able to help healthcare organizations improve across the quintuple aim as well as their bottom lines because care is less costly when you have fewer people readmitted.

Martin Cody: You know, it seems commonsensical type of thing with regards. If I can keep these patients healthy and keep them out of my doors or my walls, if you will, then we are serving the community from a standpoint capacity of providing great healthcare and that sort of thing. But when you can’t do that, and you have a readmission, you, Lisa, or the group has to deliver that message that says, hey, this is on you. Ladies and gentlemen, this person received substandard. I don’t mean substandard, correct, but something happened in the care workflow that did not produce an optimal outcome. Are you able to be able to use AI from a generative perspective to say this potentially can happen again? And here’s all the data sets and modeling that we’ve done to tell you where and when.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: That’s right. You can use generative AI to do that. And we’re starting to see really great uses of generative AI in that regard. And in this case, I would also add that what I like to premise AI with is not that it’s artificial intelligence, but it’s augmented intelligence. It is not intended to take the place of a caregiver. It is intended to enable that caregiver with better information, insights that they may not have had access to or may not have considered. To your point, instead of that provider having to go and spend the time to dig in that particular patient’s history to understand where was the failure of care and what could they have done differently. They have those insights in front of them. When AI is generative and really well done. And when I say really well done, something that is absolutely critical for organizations to be able to do AI, whether it’s generative or analytical, is high-quality data. Today, very few organizations invest in making their data high quality or even understanding what the current quality of it is. Data is an asset, and that is also often lost on organizations. And I say organizations broadly. It’s not unique to healthcare, but healthcare has infinite volumes of data it can access and the investment needs to be made in ensuring that data is complete, it’s accurate, it’s of high quality. And I would add that not every piece of data is of equal value. Oftentimes organizations are just collecting and storing volumes of data. And there’s a cost associated with that that doesn’t have the return in terms of what that data or what the value of those data are to the organization and to its customers. So, there is a need strongly to go upstream. I think, in the ways that you all are doing with provider data, specifically, to aggregate it, to test it, and to improve it, just like you would any other asset, you buy a house, you’re going to stay in that house for some period of time. At some point, you’re going to have to replace the roof. At some point, you’re going to want to improve the decor, right? Everything is on a continuum.

Martin Cody: Some of us are not allowed in the House making decisions just from that standpoint?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Yes, yes.

Martin Cody: And so, we’re not on that committee. Well, and I love the fact of what you just said with regards to data. It’s all data. And it’s across all industries. And it’s that age-old thing that we all learned in grade school or high school. We attended our first computer programming class, you know, garbage in, garbage out. Unfortunately, there is so much garbage, and specifically in the world that we play at on the provider data side, it’s disheartening yet encouraging to hear payers talk about their directory being less than 50% accurate. To hear health systems going through hundreds of millions and sometimes billion dollar implementations of large-scale health record systems, and they’re importing data that is less than 50, 60, 70% accurate, that they’re then going to flood all of these other peripheral systems with. And I got to believe, from your perspective, that’s a starting point to a degree to use different things. But then, where do you take that? And then tell me about A To I. From what it actually means. But how do you tackle this one bite at a time? Giant problem. You know, it’s a journey of a thousand miles type of thing with one step. Where does Lisa jump in?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Yeah. Lisa jumps in with A To I Advisors, which stands for Assets to Insights. My consultancy helps healthcare organizations take their data assets, optimize them, and get rapid as well as sustained returns via insights that drive business performance. Where I always start and where great data and analytics strategy always begins is alignment to the company’s business priorities. What does the organization absolutely, positively have to achieve? What are those wild, important goals? Wildly important goals? Excuse me. If you’ve ever read four D’s of execution, right? What are the must haves? And prioritize starting with the data that are aligned to those must haves. It’s the equivalent of walking in, and I love to use imagery, so you’ll have to bear with me. It’s the equivalent of walking into an episode of Hoarders. Where do you start? A house packed to the rafters with some bits of gold and a lot of things that you can’t even begin to describe. You don’t know what they are or what you might use them, right? So start with the business strategy. What is important? What is the most important thing in terms of performance? And find those data and get those data cleaned up. I’ll give an example from one organization I was a part of. I learned very quickly upon entering that there were metrics that had to be calculated on a monthly basis to provide the providers in accountable care organizations with a monthly incentive payment. And those metrics, in terms of their definitions, there were some challenges, but the calculation of them, as well as the data underlying them, were very challenged and so payments were at high risk of being inaccurate. So, thinking about all of the data that we were sitting in front of me, what do I start with? Well, we need to pay providers accurately. Let’s start there. That’s really important to our financial well-being, but more importantly to theirs. That’s why they’re signing on with us. So, six metrics is where I started with what are the definitions of those metrics? Because even if you have bad data and you run it on bad definitions, that’s a recipe for disaster. So, start with defining what you need to measure. And you’re going how you’re going to measure it. Then understand do you have the data to measure it? If you do, great. Let’s dig in and figure out what’s the quality of that data. If you don’t, you need to acquire it, or you need to adjust how you’re going to measure. But once you have the right data and the data are right, and you know what you’re going to measure and how you’re going to measure it. This is the measure twice cut once approach, as some like to call it in home improvement projects. That’s right. Then you’re ready to go. And you can build off of that one effort to bring forward what I’ll call broadly data governance. Nobody likes to hear the words data governance. Everyone thinks like massive project. Lots of money, lots of time wasted. Not if you align your efforts to identify it and Clarify your data. Invest in your data aligned to your business priorities, strategy, and performance.

Martin Cody: All right. I’m going to put myself in a CFO role of a health plan or a hospital.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: I worked with a few of those, Martin. I know what you’re talking about. I’ve had to sit in front of them. Yep.

Martin Cody: And so I’m sitting here looking at this problem, and to me, it’s gargantuan. And it’s so large and so complex. And I’ve got teams allegedly working on this that are all underneath me, that report up to me. How do I know where to begin? How do I know what to address? And then ideologically, there’s companies out there that do this allegedly, right? And I’ll name some of the big boys. So, you’ve got Capgemini, you’ve got a Deloitte, you’ve got a McKinsey, you’ve got a BCG, you’ve got an IBM, someone that you’re probably familiar with from that standpoint of exactly. You know, when I hear a A To I, and the CFO says, I don’t know you, these other ones have these gigantic portfolios of alleged success stories and things like that, why would I want to choose A To I? And what’s the value prop? And how do you get me from decision to outcomes that are tangible to me as the CFO that I can report to my board and show them where we’re moving in the right direction?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Excellent question. I’ll start with where do you begin? Will you begin with what do you need immediately? So what I do in my business A To I, I have a program I call Jumpstart that I offer to organizations, where I have it in three phases. The first phase is to walk in and understand really quickly what I just described. What is your business strategy? What are your performance priorities? Where are you not getting the information you need? Because often, if not every time, that I’m brought into an organization, things are on fire. And the things that are on fire, we don’t have the reports, the analysis, the data, as it’s called globally to make decisions in our organization. We don’t have it, and we haven’t had it. And we need to get it now because our performance depends on it. So, my first step is to walk in that first part of my engagement and find very quickly, what do you need to do? What do you have the data to do with it, and how do we start producing that information ASAP in an iterative fashion? So we get in your hands insights. Is it going to be 100% at that point? Absolutely not. In fact, you probably need 80% of what you think you need to make a decision. So, we get going on that. As I get that off the ground, I start to assess the organization systematically across four dimensions people, processes, technology, and most importantly, data literacy. Let me talk about the first three quickly. People, do you have the right people in your data and analytics teams, and are they aligned to the right activities as well as, do they have the right skill sets? Are they people who are anticipating versus reacting as one dimension of that? Are they bringing to the table? Do they understand the business? Oftentimes, analysts and data engineers, for example, are hired because they have great technical acumen, but they have no domain expertise. So, really start to understand what the team looks like, because they’re getting hit left and right with all kinds of needs, demands, requests.

Martin Cody: Right.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Do we have the right people in the org processes? How are we doing the work? How are we prioritizing the work oftentimes, and I did this in my corporate career. One of the most important things to stand up is an intake and prioritization system. And I’m not talking about setting up tickets. I’m saying here, what are the most important priorities that the organization has to solve for? And let’s align the resources to those, and the rest is noise. Pay attention to the signal. Technology. Every organization has bought a ton of stuff, and that stuff oftentimes is not being used, or it’s being underutilized. This is especially a problem in startup and even startup growth-stage organizations, where I had a dear friend describe it as a credit card is a very powerful thing. Lots of things get bought. Are we using them? Do we have the right things? Oftentimes we do have the tools, but we also have a lot of noise there. Let’s clear that noise. Moving to data literacy. Nine times out of ten, if not ten times out of ten, the organizations that bring me in will tell me the analytics team is terrible. The analytics team isn’t producing now. I used to be an individual contributor on an analytics team, and I had heard that oftentimes, and I knew that wasn’t the case. Yes. Can it do better? Of course, we all have opportunities to improve. We may even have some of the wrong resources in the wrong places at the wrong times. But the final mile in using data and analytics and AI, especially to create value is not the technical. It’s the ability and the desire of business customers to adopt it, to use it. Now, there could be challenges with what’s been produced, but the ability to produce great insights in an organization does not come from sending a request to an analytics team. It comes from partnership. And partnership requires translation. Business customers speak one language, data and analytics people speak another. Business customers have business problems to solve. Data and analytics people should be able to understand what some of those problems are, but they’re thinking from a technical perspective. How do I operationalize what I have to solve? We need translators. That happens to be a role that I’ve been told that I am very good at. One dear friend, a colleague, described it as, I’m the person at the UN that gets everybody to take their headphones out and listen to translate versus what was going into their ears. So, second phase is to get really clear on how ready, willing, and able is the organization to be able to produce and consume the insights. Last but not least, the third phase of the engagements that I do is to help them build that strategic roadmap. And my goal always is to start with what they have and to keep it as budget-neutral as possible. Oftentimes, there isn’t another expense needed. It’s repurposing.

Martin Cody: Right.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: It’s moving things around. So, that’s the value proposition I bring to CFOs and certainly others in organizations. And in that three-phase engagement, which I run, typically in 45 business days, we go from zero to a full-fledged plan for whatever the time horizon is that’s appropriate to the organization. That is, do they need a 12-month roadmap? Is it more 15 because they’re rapidly changing? I guarantee up front my fees for that first engagement, the first 15 business days that I will find them at least that much in terms of dollar value, whether it’s revenue expense or risk mitigation.

Martin Cody: Interesting. And it’s funny because you answered my next question was how long does this take from a standpoint of those three phases? So that’s terrific. The other thing, given your consulting hat, well, I’ll back it up on the 45 days. 45 days is lightning fast, right? Because from a path to revenue standpoint or a path to impact standpoint, every health system has 45 days, I promise you that. So, what I find two things of challenge, because I’ve already seen a differentiation between you and some of the consulting groups that I’ve mentioned. I’ve seen historically that, you know, not all of them. And I don’t want to paint too broad of a stroke here, is that they seem to be more interested in five, seven-year engagements than immediate resolution of the problem. I think that’s bad because if you can solve someone’s problem faster, chances are whoever’s problem you solve, they’re going to tell ten people. And you can use that as a force multiplier and the flywheel of referrals and stuff like that. So, just solve the problems and get out. We don’t need to leather binders and stuff and 100-page reports that sit on a credenza somewhere. Get in. Solve the problem. Get out. And I think your business will be successful. It sounds like you’re on that path based upon your tenure and what you’ve seen in the marketplace. Fair assessment?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Absolutely. And I’ll add, those consulting houses, large consulting houses are now being put to the test. There was an article this week just in the Wall Street Journal alone, talking about how the federal government, under the current administration, is requiring them to demonstrate what they are going to produce and how quickly and to reduce their engagement time, because to your point, they’re coming in with the perspective of this is the very first engagement, but we see 5 to 7 years, 5 to 10 years of revenue generation from walking in the door. And that’s not solving the problem, right? That’s not even asking the client or customer what is your problem? And it also demonstrates something that I’ve observed where. And I’ll talk a little about this in a moment where I’m aligned, A To I Advisors, to a few organizations that are doing consulting and advisory services, and even providing leadership services in very different ways than what those large consulting houses are doing. So, what I have observed is oftentimes, those houses will bring in very junior, with maybe a little bit of tenure expertise to come in and learn on the fly. I think what’s different about somebody like me and the types of organizations that I work with is we all have 10, 20, 30-plus years of experience being inside healthcare organizations and being successful.

Martin Cody: You may not sing your own song as glowingly as I will. You are disrupting the traditional model of consulting.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: That’s exactly it. That’s very well said. And so, one organization that I’ve aligned with that’s doing just that specifically in healthcare is called Pronexus Advisors. We are a bunch of over 400 people like me who have 20, 30 plus years of experience as being an executive, whether it’s from a clinical, operational, administrative, technical perspective. And what we’re able to bring organizations, which is why I aligned with Pronexus, is a team-based approach, like what you would see from a large consulting house, but with deep expertise, deep experience, the ability to rapidly turn around and generate value for an organization in ways that the larger houses can’t because of their operating models. Another organization that I’m a part of where I’m building a couple of practices as well, namely in healthcare, and is chief data officers, is an organization called TAG CXO. TAG CXO places fractional and interim executives in as CIOs, CTOs, and now we will have CDAIOs. I feel like old MacDonald had a farm whenever I say that. You’re such a variation on it, but these are organizations that are truly disrupting how healthcare organizations. But even more broadly, sometimes how different industries are approaching solving their problems, whether it’s needing a leader or needing an advisor or executing on the plans that I’ve talked about that I build for organizations, strategic roadmaps for data and analytics, and AI; I offer that service. If I’ve given you a roadmap and you don’t have the ability internally to execute it, I am glad to come on and support you in that regard. And that’s really also different than what the larger houses traditionally provided.

Martin Cody: I love it, and it’s funny because you just hit upon a word, leadership, that I was going to ask the final question before the speed round, because this is lessons for leaders to use today. When you present your three-phase plan, is there a point in time where you’re 20 days in, 30 days in, and you recognize that the CEO or whomever is this, wherever the buck is going to stop, is not the person to drive this forward?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Yes, 100% of the time, there is somebody who is not there to drive it forward. When it comes to data and analytics, it really has to come from the top. It has to come from the bottom as well. It’s top-down, bottom-up. But if the top, namely the CEO but also members of that executive leadership team are invested only in producing the information and not consuming it, and not requiring making accountable the organization to make data-driven decisions, it will all fall apart. You can have the cleanest, high-quality data ever. You can have the best analytical tools and people. You can produce the best information, the most robust models. You can have that all. But if nobody uses it. And that’s often a problem in these organizations. If nobody uses it and they continue to make decisions that are not data-informed, all of that will be for naught.

Martin Cody:  That’s what I see too often, is that lack of leadership. And I’ve had numbers of leaders and CEOs on the program to discuss that as like, why does that happen? Where do we find I don’t want to say better leaders, but where do we find leaders that aren’t afraid to make decisions? Push the envelope and act. You have the findings. You have black-and-white validated data. This will be the net impact to your organization. And yet, they still don’t embrace the change and execute on it. I don’t understand how that’s allowed.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: I’m with you. There are times when I have been absolutely lost as to why an organization could realize 20, 30, 50, $100 million dollars.

Martin Cody: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Yeah. And if we think about realizing opportunities, my brain thinks in terms of matrices oftentimes, is it a high or low lift? Is it a high or low-value of opportunity? Many times, these are low lift high dollar, and they’re not being adopted. And I think to your point, it’s a matter of being a brave leader to say, no, we are going to do this. This is the right thing to do, not just for our organization but for our customers. If we start to put on the hat and think about the voice of the customer, that’s where I’ve seen leaders who are very brave and who are very empowered empower their organizations to do just that.

Martin Cody: I love it. And it’s interesting because you mentioned the word brave twice, and it’s a great word because I always like to use the word courage. And having character and integrity is another good one. Integrity. Yes. We could talk about this for hours, but I’m going to ask you four questions. I love the answer so far in the dialogue and for all of the podcast listeners and viewers. Thank you so much for putting up with the fact that I am at Logan Airport, and Lisa is kind enough to plow through the background noise and disturbances. I wanted to get this interview in so we can get it out to people, because I think what you’re doing is extremely valuable. The speed round. Now you’re familiar with this, I’m going to give you concepts, phrases, true-false questions, and one handwritten essay. There’s no essay questions. Okay. So, the first true or false question is healthcare systems today have zero idea on how to leverage AI for their organization. True or false?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: True.

Martin Cody: Okay, good. We’re in agreement there. Lisa, from a policy you talked about, you didn’t want to give them the policy wonk phase, but we’re going to go there a little bit now. From a policy creation perspective, whether it’s HHS, CMS, what have you, and a regulatory body. What policy is needed most today to free up decision-making and improvement of healthcare from an efficiency standpoint?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Well, that’s a big one. When I think about how much of healthcare today is paid for by government, whether it’s federal or state, combine it all together. It doesn’t matter. We need to simplify prior authorization and utilization management that expends a great deal of resources, time, and effort. We have whole administrative burdens around it, and oftentimes, those are not generating value. We’re seeing state legislatures pick up policies in this space to make it easier for consumers, make it easier for providers, and to reduce the total cost of care by eliminating some of those functions through things like what we call gold carding. For example. If providers are doing a great job, why put them through the paces? I think that’s one of the most important policy changes we need to be able to see to make healthcare simpler.

Martin Cody: I like it. True or false? There isn’t a healthcare organization that you can’t help.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: True.

Martin Cody: See, this gets back down to leadership. There should be no reason why someone a healthcare leader, a board member, a CEO or CFO doesn’t listen to this podcast and go, I’m going to call Lisa. I have 45 days. I want to figure out how to move the needle. All right. Last question. Living or deceased, who is one person you would like to sit down with in healthcare and have a meaningful, compelling conversation? What is the topic? Who is the person, and what are you drinking?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Oh, oh, I like that last question, especially on a Friday. In healthcare for me, goodness, it would be the founders. It’s going to be four. The founders of the Cleveland. I have to because I can’t separate them because they’re unique. The founders of the Cleveland Clinic! They came up with an incredibly forward-thinking approach to care, and I actually spent three years of my career in Cleveland and really got to know some folks over there very well and see their system and their model, and it’s wonderful. I would want to hear from them about how they chose to get there at the time that they did, and share with them what healthcare has become, because that was a really different time. It predated when healthcare became a business to make money in. It was about generating care, and it was also at a time when being in the hospital was a big risk for you. It still is. There’s still risks of being hospitalized, but it was a very different time in healthcare, and what I would want to share with them is how we are now moving to from fee-for-service to value. And how would they change what they are doing or what they conceived at that time if they were operating today?

Martin Cody: Cool. And what are you all drinking?

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Oh, okay. We’re drinking fruity boat drinks because those are my favorite. We’re having passion fruit lime margaritas. I had one of those the first time in Curacao almost a year ago. It was so delicious. I took a picture of it. That’s what we’re having, because that’s going to make everything lively and festive.

Martin Cody: It does change the alchemy of the group, I promise you that. Especially a boat drink. Mr. Buffett was right on. Lisa, thank you so much for the interview today. I’m looking forward to seeing the reach that this propels A To I. I love what you’re doing. It’s much needed. And obviously, as disruptors ourselves at market, we always embrace and want to support and elevate fellow disruptors. So, congratulations to hanging out your own shingle. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, we all know it’s not easy to do that, but you’re doing great things. And if you’re a health system CEO, CFO, board member working within the healthcare industry, call A To I Advisors.

Dr. Lisa Schaffner: Thank you so much, Martin, for the opportunity. I have absolutely enjoyed this conversation. I could not think of a better way to spend my Friday morning.

Martin Cody: Oh you’re awesome and thanks so much for putting up with all the background noise at Logan. And thank you, Edge of Healthcare supporters can’t do this without you, and looking forward to seeing you on the next podcast. Take care everyone.

Martin Cody: Thanks for diving into The Edge of Healthcare with us today. I hope these insights will fuel your journey in healthcare leadership. For more details, show notes, and ways to stay plugged in to the conversation, head over to MadaketHealth.com. Until next time, stay ahead of the curve with The Edge of Healthcare, where lessons from leaders are always within reach. Take care of yourselves and keep pushing the boundaries of healthcare innovation.