UMass Memorial Health CEO Is Addressing 'Psychology of Change' with AI to Solve the Workforce Problem

Dr. Eric Dickson shares with HealthLeaders the importance of getting clinicians on board with AI for alleviating hospital capacity constraints.

As an aging population continues to grow and require more care over time, hospitals have no choice but to become more efficient to survive and serve their communities effectively.

To do that, healthcare must find answers for two mega trends that the industry can't ignore, according to UMass Memorial Health (UMMH) president and CEO Dr. Eric Dickson: the widening ratio of patients to healthcare workers and how technology like AI can aid in uncluttering hospitals.

"If I could fix one thing right now today for our healthcare system, it would be getting patients out of the hospital that don't need to be there," Dickson told HealthLeaders. "That would fix all the other problems that are really symptoms of the root cause."

At Worcester, Massachusetts-based UMMH, the academic medical center is running at about 110% capacity as long length-of-stay times are being compounded by the lack of labor, resulting in significant lost revenue, Dickson noted.

Hospital occupancy rates are expected to only go up in the coming years, placing further financial and operational stress on organizations, as well as increasing the risk of burnout for workers.

Unless something changes, the national average hospital occupancy rate could reach 85% as soon as 2032, constituting a bed shortage, a recent study published in JAMA Network Open revealed. The increasing occupancy rates are less about the rise in hospitalizations and more about the decline in number of staffed beds, highlighting the importance of a strong workforce.

For Dickson, the providers that learn how to utilize AI to create more efficiency among their staff will be the ones that solve their workforce challenges. The key to that, however, is getting the buy-in from physicians and other clinicians.

"AI is math and for years we've known solutions to problems mathematically but could never implement them because of the psychology of change," Dickson said.

Pictured: Dr. Eric Dickson, president and CEO, UMass Memorial Health.

Dickson's clinical background helps him communicate to his doctors how AI can benefit them, but he's doing more to deepen his understanding of the technology to make it as palatable as possible for his staff. That includes enrolling in the Stanford healthcare AI certificate program and setting up an AI governance structure at UMMH.

"I'm spending much more time thinking about the psychology of getting people to use AI and the data platform and how the data gets entered and making sure we have our data platform right, more so than which AI do we want to use and how do you roll it out. Because I think if you don't have those two building blocks correct, you're going to fail," Dickson said.

Aside from calibrating AI to address the needs of the staff using it, it's also on organizations to have the right data platform, Dickson emphasized. Unless you input good data, you're not going to come out with the AI result that you want. Where systems are likely to falter, the leader of UMMH pointed out, is in the inaccuracy of data that goes into their system.

Stepping into the relatively unknown landscape of AI isn't for the faint of heart, but it will be necessary for organizations that want to thrive in the future.

"There are going to be big winners and big losers in healthcare over the next decade, and it's primarily the losers that are going to be the ones that didn't get AI right and the winners are going to be the ones that did. The winners are going to have a tool that's going to make them 20% to 30% more efficient," Dickson said.

"We, at UMass Memorial, are doing everything we can to make sure we're on the winning side of that equation."