The Next Big Thing in AI? Building Your Own Tools

Advocate Health's Andy Crowder says it won't be long before large health systems and hospitals develop their own products, and create a hub-and-spoke platform to help smaller and rural providers.

As large health systems and hospitals become comfortable with AI, they're going to want to move beyond vendors and develop their own tools.

Andy Crowder, CHCIO, CDH-E, SVP and Chief Digital Officer at Advocate Health, says they'll be moving in that direction soon.

"When I want to do an AI solution that's looking at cohort management and clinical trials and disease management and population health, that's going to need to take external data sources, internal EHR and render interventions," he says. "The next step is to develop that ourselves. And so I've got to go create an agile development model that can deliver much faster than the traditional back and forth process with a vendor."

Crowder, whose health system just announced a large AI deployment with AIdoc, says they won't target products that companies like Epic, Aidoc and other platform vendors develop. However, there are use cases that health systems will want to support with their own custom-developed solutions, and there will come a time very soon when healthcare leaders want their own technology that can easily access and use their own data, rather than setting up the necessary BAAs and data-sharing guidelines with a vendor.

"I don't want to take nine months to a year in contracting and data integration to feed black box models," he says. "I want to bring their model to my data, do the validation and determine if there's a ‘there' there, and I want to build at that pace, and that's a different operating environment."

"We're developing synthetic data environments and some other things that we're standing up to speed up the pace," he adds, noting that AI innovation at Advocate Health is being routed through The Pearl, the health system's innovation hub launched earlier this year. "It's almost acting like a startup inside of a very conventional healthcare system, and that's where the tension is going to be. But that's what we're going to go after."

Creating an AI Network

Crowder says some large health systems have the resources to develop their own AI tools, while smaller and rural providers may not have those capabilities and may need help. This presents an opportunity for Advocate Health to develop a hub-and-spoke strategy, similar to telemedicine platforms, that can create AI pipelines for those providers.

"I think that this type of capability is going to bring in more organizations that want to partner with us, because they can't do it at scale like we can," he says.

This could enable health systems like Advocate Health to develop their own revenue streams and help smaller and rural providers access services they need to stay afloat and help their patients.

"If I can democratize care at scale on a platform, that means you don't have to go to Mayo to get the best research," he notes. "You don't have to go to Cleveland Clinic. I can do it at every point of care that I have, because I've built a platform architecture for it, which is a different model."

Crowder says Advocate Health has to work fast on this strategy, because AI is developing faster than anything else in healthcare.

"My belief is that this technology is going to have the most profound impact on humanity – and healthcare because of its link to humanity – and people more profoundly than any technology that's come along," he says. "When we look at the places where we've hit the sweet spot between clinical workflow, consumer engagement and provider, we watched the adoption go from miniscule to immense in weeks, which would normally take us years."

A Standard of Care

That's why he expects that within two years, AI, with human oversight, will be a standard of care.

"Everybody who does patient care should have ambient listening, chart summarization, and documentation, and computer vision should be everywhere," he says. "We think we can take 65% to 75% of all of the administrative burden off our clinical teams. We think we can take productivity from where it's at today and let it be a force multiplier of three and a half to five."

And as AI gradually becomes integrated into healthcare, Crowder wants to be in front of the pack.

Advocate Health will become a "destination employer because of the investments we've made," he says. "The lives of caregivers within our four walls and virtually will be better off than many others because we've made these investments. That's how profound we expect it to be."