Stephanie Baum
It can be a long and challenging undertaking for a technology company to persuade a hospital or health system to adopt their product. But when they succeed, another complex challenge emerges: how to implement that technology. This topic is the heart of a panel discussion at the INVEST Digital Health conference in Dallas on September 18, held in collaboration with the Health Wildcatters accelerator. Cyril Philip, vice president of digital health ventures with Bon Secours Mercy Health and digital ventures lead for Accrete Health Partners, is one of the panelists engaging in this discussion. In response to emailed questions, he provided an overview of his role and what goes into implementing new tech at the health system.
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Note: This article has been lightly edited.
Please describe your role at Bon Secours Mercy Health.
I hold a dual role at Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH). I am the health system’s vice president of digital ventures and I also lead digital ventures for Accrete Health Partners. Accrete is a holding company that serves as the digital transformation engine for BSMH. We invest and build partnerships that deliver innovative health care solutions to health systems including BSMH. We focus on emerging technologies such as AI, digital ways to optimize care for our patients, and driving operational efficiencies within an ecosystem of digital health care expertise and solutions.
What are some of the things that can go wrong when hospitals implement new technology?
Health systems sometimes struggle with adopting new technology for a variety of reasons. One major reason is budgetary limitations, for many operators they must choose between doing innovation and ensuring there is minimal impact to their operations. This choice sometimes causes innovation and new technology to take a back seat. Another struggle is around evaluation of new technology, for many systems understanding the workings and requirements of new technology such as AI can serve as a challenge that’s difficult to overcome. At times it is easier to go with the less sophisticated option than the high-potential technology.
What are some of the ways hospitals and health systems can plan in advance to avoid some of these pitfalls?
One way to overcome these inherent challenges is to adopt an innovation mindset that focuses on empowering the clinicians and operators. This involves less of a top-down approach of innovation for innovation sake, but an approach focused on helping to solve existing problems faced by the health system. This will involve a commitment to fund innovative new technology without sacrificing operational efficiency and ensuring a pathway for evaluation of technology without the hurdles present for existing technology.
What kinds of technology are the most challenging to implement?
We see the most difficulty in adopting technology solutions which don’t have a predecessor. While it’s not necessarily easy to adopt a new vendor to replace an existing vendor, when there is an established pathway of evaluation and an existing background analysis- there is a good starting point. This is not always the case when evaluating and adopting new technology, such as those that leverage generative AI. These technologies have to rely on legacy evaluation pathways and implementation methods that are not necessarily designed for how they function.
Are there any anecdotes you recall from your experience that illustrate how a hospital and tech vendor worked together to execute a tech implementation that went particularly well? Or an anecdote that taught the people involved in a tech implementation a valuable lesson?
One solution that was a combined effort by our operational teams and an external partner is our health system’s implementation of conversational AI technology by leveraging our partner Brado. Led by the amazing work of our marketing leadership and Brado, we were able to launch a pilot to test the effectiveness of using conversational AI to engage patients outside of our health system around their health needs. The particular use case was to engage the caregivers of dementia patients in one of our markets. By leveraging Brado’s technical and marketing experience, we were able to create a new way to interact with prospective patients.
Is it getting easier or more challenging to implement new technologies in hospitals?
I believe it’s getting easier to implement new technologies in hospitals, and it’s driven by the engagement by leadership at health systems. I’ve been in nonprofit health care for the last 10 years, and when I started, “digital health” was misunderstood as limited to telehealth and similar technology—it has since evolved to leverage technology to improve care and how it is experienced by our patients and clinicians. Health system leadership has recognized that new technology implementation is a requirement to do business and thrive. This mind set shift has opened the landscape for startups and larger companies alike to bring new technology to health systems.