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Sanjeev Agrawal says hospitals can no longer view efficiency as a luxury item.

Hospitals are going to need to become more efficient and excel at operations in order to stay afloat, said Agrawal, the president and chief operating officer of 

“I believe hospitals are facing in 2023, the 1999 moment that airlines faced, where you've got to become operationally excellent, or you either will get acquired or worse, you might not survive,” he says. “I understand why hospitals are so far behind because they're so under invested in what is the key driver of competitiveness in every other industry.”

In the latest episode of the Data Book podcast, Agrawal talks about the need for hospitals and health systems to turn to technology. LeanTaaS provides software solutions for hospitals to expand their capacity to schedule more surgeries and serve more patients. LeanTaaS works with more than 175 health systems and 625 hospitals, and about 5,000 operating rooms.

“Think about LeanTaaS as a company that helps hospitals optimize the use of constrained capacity.”

, a company that provides automation solutions for health systems. And he discusses why hospitals need to embrace technology, and how they serve more patients and reduce stress on their staff.

In our latest episode, the president of the healthcare technology company talks about the need to embrace technology so hospitals can survive.

Sanjeev Agrawal of LeanTaaS says efficiency is a 'requirement' for hospitals | Data Book podcast

On this week's episode of Data Book, Chief Healthcare Executive spoke with Dedi Gilad, CEO and co-founder of TytoCare, an at-home, handheld exam kit and app. We discussed the evolving technology of a virtual visit, the current state of remote patient monitoring and more.

On this week's episode of Data Book, Dedi Gilad, CEO and co-founder of TytoCare, discusses the evolving technology of a virtual visit, the current state of remote patient monitoring and more.

TytoCare Is Putting the Power of the Medical Exam in a Patient’s Hands

On this week's episode of Data Book, Chief Healthcare Executive spoke with Charlotte Lee, MBChB, of Big Health, a digital therapeutics company. We discussed how the country of Scotland is taking steps to make a digital therapeutic solution for anxiety and insomnia available nationally to all residents, the importance of improved access to mental health care, reducing perceived stigma for mental health care and more.

On this week's episode of Data Book, Charlotte Lee, MBChB, of Big Health, a digital therapeutics company, discusses digital therapeutic options for anxiety and insomnia, the importance of improved access to mental health care, reducing perceived stigma for mental health care and more.

Big Health Is De-Stigmatizing Mental Health and Providing Broad Access With Digital Therapeutics

On this week's episode of Data Book, Chief Healthcare Executive spoke with Ira Tauber, president of Triose, which works with health systems and hospitals on supply chain solutions. We discussed the supply chain issues that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic and how they were addressed, as well as potential upcoming supply chain issues at hospitals and health systems with an aging U.S. population.

Ira Tauber, president of Triose, discussed the supply chain issues that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic, as well as potential upcoming supply chain issues as hospitals and health systems care for an aging U.S. population.

Podcast: Setting Up a Supply Chain Strategy for Success

On this episode of Healthy Bottom Line, Chief Executive Healthcare spoke with Erica Coletti, CEO of the Alliance for Better Health. We discussed some of the current problems associated with programs addressing social determinants of health (SDOH) and how the Alliance’s social Independent Practice Association (IPA) model can help tackle these issues. We’re also talked about the financial benefits hospitals and health systems can see when implementing policy changes that seek to improve SDOH programs.

Several problems exist with current programs that address social determinants of health (SDOH); however, a new social model aims to combat these issues and improve the programs’ effectiveness.

Healthy Bottom Line: The Trouble With SDOH Programs and the Secret to Improving Them 

On this week's episode of Data Book, Clay Ritchey, CEO of Verato, a next-generation patient-matching solution for healthcare, speaks with Chief Healthcare Executive. He discusses how patient-matching technology can alleviate stress for providers and improve patient care. He also talks about the financial benefits this technology can have for hospitals and health systems, as well as potential data privacy concerns.

Clay Ritchey, CEO of Verato, highlights the administrative and financial benefits that patient-matching technology can provide hospitals and health systems, as well as how it can improve the patient experience.

Podcast: Match Made in Hospitals — Patient-Matching Technology Can Improve Healthcare

On this week's episode of Data Book, Chief Healthcare Executive spoke with Terri Casterton, Director of Healthcare Product and Strategy at Bottle Rocket, a consultancy that provides business strategy, product, design and technology services. We discussed the latest Apple Watch features, the use of patient supplied data in healthcare and the use of technological innovations in healthcare.

Terri Casterton, director of Healthcare Product and Strategy at Bottle Rocket, discussed the latest Apple Watch features, the use of patient supplied data in healthcare and the use of technological innovations in healthcare.

Podcast: Getting Health Systems and Hospitals to Utilize Data From Wearables

On this week's episode of Data Book, Chief Healthcare Executive™ spoke with Punit Soni, CEO and founder of Suki, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that streamlines administrative work for providers as a means to reduce burnout. We discussed how this tool helps reduce burnout among healthcare professionals and how this technology can be used in a post-pandemic world. We also talked about some of the misconceptions about how AI can be used in healthcare and the role that it should serve.

Punit Soni, CEO and founder of Suki, delves into how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to address burnout among healthcare professionals, as well as misconceptions about the purpose that this technology should serve in healthcare.

Podcast: Addressing Provider Burnout and Work Overload: What is the True Purpose of AI in Healthcare?

Leslie Trigg, CEO of Outset, the creator of Tablo, a home-based dialysis machine that incorporates cloud-computing technology. We discussed how these machines work, why they would be attractive to patients, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the demand for these machines. We also talked about the potential for home dialysis machines to be eligible for reimbursement and what the future looks like for this technology.

Leslie Trigg, CEO of Outset, discusses how imbedded cloud-computing technology in home dialysis machines can improve quality of care for patients, and how the pandemic has boosted demand for these machines.

Podcast: Home Dialysis Machines and Cloud-Computing with Leslie Trigg

 spoke with Tara Vail, chief growth officer of HST Pathways, a company that produces a technology solution for ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs). We discussed how ASCs are taking an increased role in the healthcare setting, why EHRs weren’t mandated for ASCs, challenges to adopting the technology, and interoperability.

Tara Vail, chief growth officer of HST Pathways, discusses the lack of EHRs at ambulatory surgery centers and the challenges to adoption.

Podcast: ASCs and EHRs with Tara Vail

The tech giant touts the potential to reduce administrative burdens on doctors. 

Oracle says it’s bringing AI to make electronic health records easier to use

The company is working with the hospital system to help physicians have an easier time with documenting patient encounters. The firm’s CEO sees potential beyond documentation. 

Augmedix works with HCA Healthcare on using AI for medical notes

Interventions such as movement, mindfulness, and social connection are associated with improvements in physical and cognitive functioning.

Rethinking ‘impossible’: Innovative approach to dementia engages patients and reduces healthcare costs | Viewpoint

The digital health company is offering more customized experiences on its platform, including options designed to help health systems engage and retain workers.

Gozio aims to help hospitals connect with patients and staff

The UMass Chan Medical School is examining a test developed by Linus Health. Researchers say they hope the test could lead to earlier interventions for Alzheimer’s disease.

Using a digital test to find early signs of cognitive decline

Craig Newman, the chief strategy officer at HealthChannels for ScribeAmerica, discusses how technology can be used to help reduce the amount of time and energy providers spend doing administrative tasks.

How can technology help reduce the administrative workload for doctors so that they can provide better care to patients?

Great question. I think everything is all about how do you make it easier for physicians to focus in on patient care? The last thing we want to do is actually create new sequential processes or new workflows that take the provider away from the patient.

And so, when I think about the model itself, and this is going to be different, again, based on the care environment that the providers working in — I'll just use an ambulatory clinic — I think about segmenting that work pre-visit, during the visit, and post-visit and looking at how we can offset some of that work with technology. For some, the technology is still not up to snuff to offload everything for that provider.

So, let me give you a prime example. So, let's talk about documentation of the physician itself and doing a clinical documentation. There's a whole notion of how do we leverage artificial intelligence (artificial intelligence) to actually drive value at the point of care to help with physician documentation. AI is incredibly effective when we talk about like radiology, or coding, or billing practices because there's tremendous data and very little variability.

Think about your primary care office. You've got different voices, different templates, different processes, different people coming in and out, maybe different caregivers, a ton of variability that exists for providers today. Technology alone — AI and machine learning models — can't solve the problem. And so, I think what we're seeing happen in the market, and what we've done with our product line Speke, is actually blend front-end technology that creates a seamless workflow for the provider. Imagine being able to walk into a room, hit a single button, and it could capture the entire conversation between a patient provider. No periods, no stop phrases, no clicking around in the EMR (electronic medical record), no nothing. And then, you leave the room, you hit stop, you can verbalize something after the fact, move on to your next patient, and never be tethered to the computer. And then, within moments to 24 hours, that note is structured in the EMR.

How did that happen? Well, we take that smart technology optimization process — sort of audio preprocessing, and speaker segmentation and machine learning — we route it to back-end labor to do QA (quality assurance) and CDI (computer design and integration) and then offload the clerical task from the doctor, doing that work behind the scenes a little bit asynchronously. Just by doing that little step, you can free up time. And getting back to that what we talked about previously around time driven activity-based cost, you've got to create time for the physician and offload those clerical tests.

We're seeing the same thing to providers, pre- and post-visit who were using technologies like chatbots or robotic process automation technologies, that can help make sure that we automate as many processes as possible. But then, we still need to make sure that there's human glue involved, who can help them with support strategies like doing comprehensive chart prep, helping tee up where there are care gaps to close, helping them with their specificity, acuity, documentation, or even making sure their charts are completed, efficient, and on time so the bills get out, so they don't have outstanding charts and their DSOs [daily sales outstanding] don't get screwed up throughout the course of the week or month.

So, I think it's a balance of technology and labor working in concert together. It's not an and/or [situation]; it's a both.

Craig Newman: How Technology Can Reduce Administrative Burden for Physicians

Craig Newman, the chief strategy officer at HealthChannels for ScribeAmerica, discusses the amount of time that physicians, nurses, and scribes spend on administrative work and how the pandemic has exacerbated the need for things to change.

How much of a physician’s day is spent doing administrative work and how does this time allocation impact the quality of care that patients receive?

As you know, there's about a million active physicians throughout the country working across the care continuum. And that may range depending on which care environment they're in—emergency medicine, the inpatient setting, urgent care, or the clinic-based environment. Or sometimes we think about home care. On average, most physicians are spending, just to give you a sense of the average clinic day—I'm just going to talk about the outpatient clinic—so if you're in clinical practice, you're spending between 9 minutes a clinic hour and 20 minutes of clinic hour, clicking, typing, or moving things around in the EMR [electronic medical records], navigating and working below license.

If you're in the inpatient setting, that may net out to about 3 hours of working below license. So, in a 12-hour shift, imagine 25% of the time we're paying our highest-cost FTEs (full time employees) to do remedial duties. And there's actually a study that came out in 2014, called time driven activity-based cost. And the idea behind this was how do we shift towards value and reduce costs models and think about, not just cost in terms of clinical cost, but also how we think about total costs from a labor spend perspective. And this gets to your point of how much time physicians spend below license.

Imagine they came up with an equation around capacity of a resource cost. And so, essentially, let's say if you make a quarter million dollars a year to $2 a minute. A nurse practitioner, if it's $100,000 a year, it's $1, a minute. A scribe or virtual scribe is the lowest cost, you'd see is like 35 cents a minute. So, on a minute-by-minute basis, you can begin to see and they've tested this up at Boston Children's Hospital, how much cost is going and time is being spent by a physician working below license, and how we can offset that information to a lower-cost resource, whether that's labor or technology, or a bit of both to drive value and improve care delivery models.

It was actually early on how we started thinking about the quadruple aim and really moving towards care-based models that drive high value, clinical care, reduce the cost of care and improve patient satisfaction all at the same time and getting doctors done by dinner. So, that was a long-winded way to say they are spending way too much time on clerical duties, and much less time than they should be on engaging with their patients, whether that's during the encounter or following up with them after the fact.

Again, I think they're it's a multiprong issue. There are challenges, obviously with flow, but physicians get behind because they have to spend so much time with clerical responsibilities that could be offset to a resource like a scribe or a virtual support model or digital assistant. That could be much more effective and if they were able to offload that work, they could actually not just run a much more efficient practice or have an efficient flow but, alternatively, they could potentially see more patients, which would improve the amount of time it would take a patient to get in the door. That's a huge problem we have in healthcare today is the wait times it takes for new patients to get in to see physicians, especially specific specialists where there may be shortages, and that problem is only getting worse for so many organizations across the country. So, those clerical components, we really need to take a hard and fast look at. That's why our company, we serve 3500 hospitals and health systems and over 2000 medical groups, this is exactly the focus. How do we reduce clerical burden from physicians and their care team to improve flow, reduce cost models, and drive value to patients?

How has the pandemic impacted administrative workload for physicians?

I'd say it's only increased. Again, this is a this is a big topic, right? So, hard to cover in a short interview today. But I'd tell you that, physicians, first of all, they're people just like everybody else. And you got to remember they've got family members, they've got other folks. So, they need to protect their time as well and have a work/life balance. The problem is, there's more work being put on them. When we moved forward in the pandemic, obviously, we had a hybrid delivery system. And what I mean by that is we moved from just having in person care to telehealth visits as well.

Well, that's not just a change for them. That's a change for their office staff, as well as for the patients, which means there's more steps that went into the process to make sure that we connected that provider with that patient. That's added burden right off the top. So, I'd say that's problem number one, because if a patient doesn't show up, or maybe a patient's 10 minutes late for that telehealth visit. Well, that backs up everything else throughout the course of the day and there's cascading problems.

But then there's another challenge that we have, which is labor shortages. I've worked with a number of health systems who ranged from having a 10% shortage of medical assistants, to a 30 to 40% shortage of medical assistants. Medical assistants, there weren't enough to go around pre-pandemic. Now, we're competing with, let's say even if we're paying a pretty good salary, they can go down the street to Dunkin Donuts, make $5 an hour more and get a signing bonus, it's a huge challenge. Or maybe they have they're providing home care or childcare for their kids. And so, we're seeing that shift. So, if there aren't medical assistants who can actually help support the provider with flow, or even do some of those additional ancillary duties, it's a huge challenge that backs up the clinician or adds to their day, which means they're spending more time at night on the weekends trying to play catch up with some of those remedial duties like documentation. 

That's actually one of the reasons we have an arm of our company, ScribeAmerica, where we've actually leveraged the scribe as a care team assistant, whether in person or virtually, to actually help with some of those ancillary tests. So, it doesn't bog down the clinician, the care team. So, chart preps, documentation, pending orders, helping organize their time after the event like a personal assistant can really help drive and improve care delivery models and make life a little bit easier for the physician because at the end of the day, again, they're human. They're they're impacted by COVID-19 as well and so are their families and you want them done by dinner feeling refreshed because the last thing we need is to accelerate the burnout curve when we're already facing physician shortages.

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