Bill Gassen, president and CEO of Sanford Health, a South Dakota-based health system with hundreds of locations across the upper Midwest, isn’t waiting for the future of artificial intelligence. His health system is bringing the tech to every corner of its operations. That could mean significant changes for health providers of all sorts — not only in their clinical work but also in how they conduct business. Gassen talked to Daniel about how the system is using AI. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How are you using AI now? First in clinical support and then for business improvement in the back office. If you look at the first one, we’ve got a team that’s developed algorithms that are helping us do a better job of predictive analytics for our patients so we can intervene earlier. On the back-office side, they’ve developed algorithms that help us do everything from nurse staffing to helping us schedule our infusion chairs. There has been some reporting about AI turning billing processes upside down — are you using it in that area? Those are opportunities for us to drive down costs that aren’t delivering a direct benefit to patients. If I’ve got a dollar, do I want to invest that in clinical advancement? Do I want to invest that in research? Do I want to invest in continuing to advance the workforce, to bring in more physicians and more nurses and more technicians? Or do I want to have to invest that in back-office support? If I can drive down some of those costs, it does free up more opportunity to invest. You’re also interested in what Congress does about pandemic-era telehealth policies, which are set to expire next year, right? Simply stated: We need those to be permanent. Everybody believes and knows that leveraging technology in a different way is a critical part of the pathway forward — I believe it’s probably our single most powerful weapon to allow us to address the issues of access and equity and to make sure that we’re doing better for all those patients. If those waivers go away, there’s not a sustainable business model around it.
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