Author: Dhawal Tank | Page 4

A Practical Guide to AI Strategy in Healthcare

Most healthcare organizations want to use AI for operational efficiencies. This is missing the mark to think about deploying it strategically. No wonder senior management and other staff are often skeptical.

I want to put forward a practical outline on how to think about healthcare innovation (including AI) strategically. Not just as “tech” to throw at a problem. Not as a shiny buzzword that means nothing.

The MIT Technology Review & GE Healthcare published “The AI Effect” to talk about the changes taking place in healthcare as they use more artificial intelligence. It is a survey of 900 healthcare professionals.

Let’s understand what the report says, and try to dig deeper and find more constructive ways to resolve some big challenges.

The primary case they put forward is that AI is “is making health care more human.” The report states that AI is all out to disrupt healthcare. It talks about all the progress it has made already and will continue to make. It talks about all the ways it will continue to bring massive changes to the healthcare industry as a whole.

Despite this, the real data and stories don’t always paint a rosy picture. The most public of this is of course IBM Watson’s implementation. The stories on it show repeatedly that the return on such a solution was underwhelming. (See here, here, and here)

I believe there is a structured way of approaching this problem to get the greatest benefits from AI in a healthcare setting.

I also believe that one-size-fits-all is not the right approach as you think about AI in your specific situation.

Let’s go back to the report. Some key survey results taken from the report are as follows.

79% will increase budget of AI Applications.
72% of respondents to this survey show interest¹ in implementing AI.
74% of health-care institutions are developing or planning² to develop AI application algorithms.
93% agree that AI has improved the speed and accuracy with which patient data is analyzed and shared.³

These numbers need greater context. Let’s try to understand the deeper meaning of these numbers.

¹ Interest is one of those nebulous words that mean nothing. As a publication that focuses on technological innovation, of course “interest” suggests “72 percent of leaders ARE implementing AI”. But anyone who has ever sat in an office to actually get a sale understands that “interesting” can often be double-speak for “we’ll let others do AI in healthcare first because we’ve got more important things to do right now.”

² Planning is another word that means little. Organizations “plan to” become the leader in their field. Very few manage to do so. This is similar to me “planning to” become like Bruce Wayne.

³ By how much? What are the quantifiable benefits here? This kind of abstract language is what makes deciphering a lot of these reports so frustrating.

This tension plays out nicely in the next section which talks about the challenges.

Less than half (~45%) of respondents believe that AI has helped increase consultation time and time to perform surgery and other procedures.
In contrast, more than 1/2 of respondents planning to deploy AI raise concerns about medical professional adoption, support from top management, and technical support.
Integrating AI applications into existing systems is challenging for 57% of respondents.

The one silver lining here is that 79% indicate that AI has helped avert health-care worker burnout. While the above numbers are promising, there is a distinct lack of strategic thinking about the benefits of AI in a healthcare setting.

The report briefly summarizes all the challenges in a short section as follows:

“Among those was skepticism about the provable benefit and overall cost of AI as top factors hindering its adoption. Hospital administration is generally more skeptical than medical staff. Another hurdle is the disruptive impact that AI has on existing processes; a third is the difficulty of integrating AI applications into existing systems.”

The Juice is in the Details

The juice is in the details. What do you invest in? How does it deploy? What is the process used to deploy it? And how do you think about it in a structured yet holistic manner? Is AI even appropriate or are there lower hanging fruits available?

I want to propose a 5 Step Process for medical professionals to think about Artificial Intelligence within their healthcare organization. This is about elevating the case for AI in healthcare as a matter of sound business strategy.

The Five-Step Process to Build Strategic Healthcare AI & Innovation Cases

First, Start with Organizational Challenges & Values

Ask yourself, what are the key challenges facing the organization right now? Is it doctor burnout and turnover? Is it frivolous lawsuits? Is it long patient wait times? Is it increasing costs? If so, where?

In short, which issues are having a strategic impact on the organization itself?

Compare and contrast this with the organization’s principles, values, and priorities. Perhaps long wait times are not important after all to its stakeholders if you compete on being a low cost provider. Perhaps perfect diagnosis is not as important as giving people care that is “good enough” (no, not every case is a life & death situation and sometimes good enough is well…good enough to let the patient’s body heal itself).

A deliberate approach to healthcare innovation in your organization starts with asking: what do people we serve need? As leaders & decision-makers, this means understanding the needs of patients, as well as needs of providers themselves.

This is not about “healthcare innovation” it is about “healthcare innovation for you and your organization.”

Second, Understand Root Causes

It is surprising how few organizations in healthcare settings properly map out the root causes of a problem or situation. Solving the top-layer problem can leave a deeper issue to fester and metastasize. Getting to the root of an issue is key.

I talk about a root causes analysis in my Principles of Organizational Breakthroughs: A Practical Guide for Leaders which you can download by signing up for the Clarity Weekly newsletter.

In brief, get to the root causes of the organization issues and priorities. Understand both the quantitative and qualitative manifestations of these root causes.

For example, Dushyant Sahani from the University of Washington Medical Center makes the case of using AI for smarter scheduling so that more patients can be seen every day by doctors.

But perhaps the issue isn’t scheduling of doctors’ time. But perhaps the issue is under-staffing of doctors in the first place. In which case, “smart scheduling” is likely to cause greater burnout.

For such an issue, you can collect real data on what it costs to hire a doctor, and what it costs the organization when they burnout. Using this as a comparison to the benefits of AI will create a better case and lead to a better outcome.

Third, Create Options to Solve Root Causes

Is AI the right solution to solve these underlying root causes? If so, proceed further with understanding how to do it. If not, you have to use good old-fashioned Human Intelligence before deferring to anything Artificial.

Perhaps software is the right solution. Perhaps it isn’t.

To extend the example further, if the root cause is doctor burnout, a smart scheduling piece of AI won’t help. What would be the most effective ways of dealing with doctor burnout? Reducing patient workload? Would it be reducing the paperwork? Would it be a better match of a patient with the doctor’s interests and qualifications? Or would it be something else entirely such as allowing for greater doctor involvement in management?

Each of these questions points to a different solution. Some powered by Artificial Intelligence and some powered by Human Intelligence.

Fourth, Understand Second-Order Consequences

This is where people have been failing. As it mentions above, “integrating AI applications into existing systems is challenging for 57% of respondents.”

As a medical professional leader, it is your responsibility to think through the ripple effects of implementing such a change throughout the organization and understand the soft costs and cultural challenges ahead of time.

You need to create action plans and contingency plans as these second-order consequences play out in your organization. What will you do with them?

In the case of doctor burnout, say you choose to introduce AI tools to reduce paperwork. If so, how will non-medical professionals interpret this change? What would be the training time required to onboard everyone on this new platform? Does it impact other staff in the organization who have to interpret this data? How so? What is its accuracy?

This is the time to involve all stakeholders in the discussion and foresee issues.

This is sometimes overlooked.

Dr. Rachael Callcut says that “It’s challenging working to move the field forward in a transformative way with artificial intelligence. There has to be alignment in vision, commitment to exploration, and mutual excitement. Everyone involved needs to be willing to push forward into a sometimes unproven space. If we are afraid to fail on a project and thus, don’t take it on, the opportunity to change the future will pass us by.”

The very reason this happens is because leaders in one silo don’t involve everyone. It is hard to have mutual excitement about anything where you feel something is being pushed down your throat with a change. Involving stakeholders early in the process goes a long way.

An aside: I often notice a negative or adversarial force at play between medical professionals (who are used to giving advice for living) and staff, administrators etc who have to run the organization. I believe for any successful decision and subsequent implementation, medical professionals need to let go of “doctor-knows-best” and administrators at the same time need to engage with doctors earlier in the process. They also need to assist medical professionals in thinking through these 2nd order consequences more thoroughly.

Finally, Decide & Execute

Only after going through this exercise can you make an informed decision about AI in your healthcare organization. This also makes selling internally a lot easier if you have involved different stakeholders in finding root causes of the organization’s major concerns and mapping out the second order consequences of the options you have on the table.

What do you think?

There are major innovations possible in healthcare in the coming decade. But we need a systematic and strategic way of thinking about it.

What nuances, caveats, or other points would you bring to make the discussion of healthcare more strategic, systematic, and practical?

Don’t fight the beast

When doing work that matters, in risking something of yourself, a voice stirs inside of you. Some call it the Lizard Brain, some call it the resistance, and there are many other things you can call it.

You can call it the enemy. It comes at you with teeth flashing, ready to attack you. What do you at times like that? You feel that you must resist it. You feel like you must fight it in order to address it, in order to make it go away.

But this is its plan all along.

Start a venture, the beast comes to attack you. “This cannot be done. You will fail and lose everything.”

Express your interest in someone you like. “This person will reject you. You will never get her/him/the role you want.” Also the beast.

Publish something, create something, and put it out there. “No one will want this. You’re wasting your time. Stop dreaming.”

The beast will come and attack you, and want to fight you. It will make you believe that the only way to counter its voice, is to fight it.

Not so. Fighting it is what it wants. When you even touch this beast, its teeth bite into you and makes you rabid. You believe you’re fighting this beast, but actually you’re letting it control you.

Instead, stop fighting the beast. You will at first believe that if you stop fighting it, it will win. It will own you. But that is already happening right now.

Stop fighting it. You will notice that it will have nothing to attack then. It will pass right through you. You will see that you are much bigger than it. You will see that the beast was toothless all along. You will then be able to move on.

A Resolution in Thinking

Instead of making a career, health, or any other external resolution in 2019, consider making a resolution in changing how you think.

Over the last few months, I’ve taken on more projects, work, and just stuff to do. On top of that there’s taking time for relationships, and staying healthy (both mentally and physically). I’ve searched for ways to organize my life my effectively.

Enter The Bullet Journal.

This is an paper based way of organizing my life that has made a huge difference in just how much more effective I am. It’s also made me a lot more deliberate in spending time on things that matter.

Check it out for yourself:

On top of this, I’ve been deeply affected by the work of Brian Tracy, who recommends writing out your big goals every day. For weeks, I’ve been repeatedly writing out the same goals. This too has had a big difference in the kind of progress I’ve made in my life.

While this external growth has been great, there’s still a gnawing at the back of my mind and gut about what to do for 2019. There’s still a feel of inadequacy, a feeling of incompleteness, incompetence, unworthiness.

I’d been searching for ways to tackle this. And after much reading, I wanted to share a powerful Resolution of Thinking I’ve taken on.

This is not about “positive thinking” which is just putting layers of fakehood on our real vulnerabilities.

Instead, this is about entering your mind and visualizing yourself as someone who competently and confidently lives the way your best self would. This is mental rehearsal of being the kind of person you want to be.

This is not necessarily about external goals. It is deliberately internal.

How would your best self wake up? How would they be in social situations? How would they work? How would they handle a crisis? How would they work? How would they eat? Move? What kinds of habits would they have?

There is a lot of research that shows that this kind of mental practice does amazing things in increasing our self-esteem, self-efficacy. It changes our self-image for the better so we feel worthy and capable of handling the big audacious goals we have (or even the simpler things). This is based on the work by Dr. Maxwell Maltz who wrote the book on how to change your self-image. See more here.

Our mind is not able to tell the difference between what’s happening in reality and what we picture in our minds. That is why this is the kind of progressive exercise that can help us change ourselves from the inside out.

Change your thinking, change your life. In this new year, resolve to change how you think about yourself. Visualize your ideal self in detail daily. See yourself slowly becoming this person.

How to Lead: Be Interested, not Interesting

Last week, we learned that great leaders are those that can create psychological safety within their teams. These teams outperform others where psychological safety is lacking no matter how talented, creative, educated, etc the individual team members are. We learned that it is important to create trust & respect in team members, and this in turn creates a feeling of safety. You can read more about this here.

This week, we will go into what it takes to actually create this psychological safety. My proposal is contrary to much of what pop culture portrays as leadership. There are images of high powered corporate CEOs and world leaders. YouTube videos and articles on the Internet talk about how to be charismatic, how to persuade people, how to convince others, etc.

Learning these skills have been akin to getting superpowers. The quality of relationships has gone up substantially for me, and I hope you can get something similar out of them.

Continue reading “How to Lead: Be Interested, not Interesting”

The Future of Work

During this past week, I had the privilege of being one of the 100 people invited to the St. Gallen Symposium in Switzerland to discuss the Future of Work. The event is an intimate gathering of roughly 600 people: leaders of tomorrow and leaders of today including billionaire entrepreneurs, world leaders, and cutting edge researchers, and brilliant thinkers.

To qualify for this all expenses trip, more than 1,300 people wrote an essay. I was one of the 100 whose essay and ideas were picked. I wanted to share this essay that discusses what the future of work will be.

I was trying to answer how I plan on being economically relevant in the future as computers increasingly take over the work of so many humans. Here’s my essay below.

Continue reading “The Future of Work”

Why a tribe is the solution to so many of our problems today

Tribe was on my to-read list for a while, and it only took me 2 days to finish it. It’s a very short, sparse 130 pages. Here are some of the most interesting quotes from the book with a few thoughts near the end.

“I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I’ve done it so many times. First, there’s a kind of shock at the comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about, depending on their views: the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign born, the President, or the entire US government. It is a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime except that now it is applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.”

…

“If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,”

…

“As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.”

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“It may be worth considering whether middle-class American life—for all its material good fortune—has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.”

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“What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss.”

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“How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?”

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“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It’s time for that to end.”

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“Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money and status.”

…

This book with full of insights on why we have evolved to essentially to live in tribes, and what we’ve lost from abandoning that model. Contempt and superiority of one side compared to another has really overtaken any sense of coming together. Parents will find it interesting to learn we isolate our babies right from the first few months of birth, which is so contrary to our design. Whereas in tribal societies, we were held 90%> of the time, in today’s age of separate rooms and trying to imbue a false sense of independence (instead of interdependence) in babies, no wonder we are creating a generation of anxious, stressed out, depressed young people.

What we need today is a greater sense of unity and tribal community (Ubuntu) than ever before. Not only does it restore us to our more natural evolutionary past, but also restores happiness and security into our lives. This is not about a false sense of tribe that social media provides us,

The world needs it in large doses. The book also does a great job exploring why so many of us feel so distant with our neighbours, our friends, and ourselves.

Media Fast – 30 Days of Distraction Free Living

It’s high time we all consider a media fast. Mental illness is at an all time high (although one can argue it is just reported for the first time). So is a feeling of helplessness and lack of control over one’s life.

Perhaps you end your day having spent hours surfing reddit, random blogs, social media, or news websites, and you wonder what you even got done that day. Maybe you feel very pessimistic about life given current events. These moments train our mind that we are pretty much helpless in controlling the destiny of our lives.

I’ve already written a lot about quitting social media here. The purpose of this series is to go one step further. I am going to write about my experience quitting ALL media for the next 30 days. This includes TV shows, movies and documentaries, YouTube series, magazines, newspapers, and blogs.

Just to be clear, this does not mean I will stop watching videos or reading information on the Internet or in print. Rather, I mean to consume information consciously: I must have a purpose before I open another tab, and start watching that video, reading that post, or listening to that podcast.

This is in contrast to the mindless nature of browsing the net to keep myself occupied, distracted, entertained, or informed. My method will be to consume media that serves my goals. That’s it.

10 Reasons We Need A Media Fast

Reclaim your mental sanity.
We spend so much time prescribing therapy and drugs to people with mental health issues: be it depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and a whole lot more, but don’t bother to focus on a major contributing factor for all this: the media. TV shows, movies, internet articles about tech billionaires, and the constant barrage of click-bait celebrity gossip does tremendous harm. It creates the expectations reinforced daily of our inadequacies, our failures for not being fit/healthy/sexy/rich/successful/young enough.
Have more time.
If you feel constantly stressed, overworked, and wonder at how achievers get stuff done, this is how! Quit all this mindless consumption and get on a media fast and you will discover a tremendous amount of time you didn’t even know you had. Your mind will fight to binge on this kind of stuff again. Resist it. Breath. Meditate. It will go away. After the first few days, you will discover time that you did not know you had.
Feel more in control.
A lot of us feel out of control in our lives. I credit much of this to the constant attack of negativity from the news and social media. I am not claiming that ignorance or sticking your head in the sand is a good strategy to live life. Rather, it’s the idea about getting very selective about what we consume.
In The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli, the author asks, “Out of the 10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life?” You can find a quick summary of the affect of news and our out-of-control feelings from this article: News is bad for you–and giving up reading it will make you happier.
Live Purposefully.
When the mind clears up from all the noise, noise, noise of TV shows, Internet, magazines, etc, you will get space to create life a lot more purposefully. Our consumption of media becomes directed in the service of the life we want, not away from the life we’re living (and we’re not happy with). When we subtract out the unnecessary, what’s life is the necessary that makes a big difference.
Feel freedom.
Additionally, we actually feel the freedom that comes from having a lot more time. We feel the freedom to live purposefully. This is a crucial distinction from points 2 & 4. While we may physically have more time to live a better life, this reality is useless unless we actually believe that is the case. The barrage of what we consume is so endless that we feel the opposite: that there isn’t enough time and space for our lives. Ironically, this is just not true.

When we drink water from a fire hose, no wonder we feel overwhelmed.

When we do a media fast, we actually end up feeling that we do. This new belief will be one of the key factors is helping us take control and live purposefully.
Build discipline.
It feels wonderful to set goals and accomplish them! And this goal is tremendously powerful because it is an internal goal: something where we fight our minds and work to overcome our own mental scripts. I wrote about the potent power of such goals in my previous post about goal setting. If you’re struggling to figure out what sort of goal to set that will challenge your mind, this 30 day media fast is a great one to get started. It will build discipline that will permeate into all other parts of your life.
Mindful growth.
Our growth is often driven by necessity. We don’t have money in the bank, so we work on getting a job and earning a buck. But when we get rid of distractions, we are free to pursue goals that matter deeply to us. Additionally, when we choose to consume media mindfully, we have to force ourselves to pick the things that we want to be informed about/consume. This type of mindful growth will be a lot more powerful.
Be happier.
Next, we become a whole lot happier when we don’t surround ourselves with negativity. For example, you might think watching How I Met Your Mother or the latest Superhero movie doesn’t affect you in any way. Now this is just not true! Product placements remind us that we can be a lot more sexier/stronger/heroic if we owned the same products. The body shapes we see give us an immense sense of dissatisfaction with our own bodies. I’ve talked about this in the past that this won’t help us get into exercising, so this negativity isn’t helpful. And finally, the dramatic story lines and character lives just do not exist in real life.
We are deeply dissatisfied with our lives because we think life is supposed to be like these fictional stories. We may not know it, but it is affecting us in a very deep and primal way. But what makes a good story doesn’t make a good model for our life. For more, read this.
Make a positive difference in the world.
Ironically, when we give up reading the news and feeling helpless, we actually have the freedom to actually go out in the world and make a difference. Volunteer, help someone in the community, get informed about the few things you care deeply about, and take action! You will feel powerful and in control of your life and the lives of others. This happens when you don’t let the 24/7 media channel run your mind 24/7.
Just to see if you can!
Last, just do this to see if you can! Make it into a fun challenge with your mind. Explore this theme and see what difference it can make. Treat is as a 30 day experiment.

So that’s it for this post! I would be curious to hear about your experiences with the negativity of the media. Please also let me know if you’d like to join me in taking on a media fast together!

Leave a comment below or message me privately to let me know!