Becker's Hospital Review

57 57 PRACTICE MANAGEMENT THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Pennsylvania Hospital CMO Dr. Daniel Feinberg's advice for aspiring physician leaders By Laura Dyrda D aniel Feinberg, MD, chief medical officer of Philadelphia-based Penn- sylvania Hospital, sees the CMO role becoming more operational in the next few years. He joined the Becker's Healthcare Podcast to share his thoughts on physician leaders and career advice for clinicians who aim to hold an executive role. Question: How is your role as chief medical officer evolving? Dr. Daniel Feinberg: e role of the CMO has shied from the quality, safety, regulato- ry person to more operational. As an exam- ple, I'm very involved in clinical informatics. Years ago, I was the lead physician for four hospitals for [Dallas-based] Tenet at the time it went live with Epic's EHR. I now oversee about 100 advanced practice providers, and I supervise and oversee our case management and social work program. Physician executives have more operational responsibilities than they did in the past, and I see the COO and CFO as much more in- tegral partners, much like I would have seen the CNO in the past. Q: What are your three pieces of ad- vice for future leaders? DF: The most important thing for emerg- ing leaders is to be collaborative and to always be looking for opportunities to col- laborate with people who are not natural partners. For physician leaders particular- ly, it might be someone in finance or the accounting department who may not be a natural partner for physician leaders but who is critical for identifying opportunities that require investments from the hospital or health system. No. 2, I would say is to be really open to feed- back. It's helped me a great deal in my career, and it's helped me manage my own depart- ment in a very different way in the past two years as compared to a decade ago. I try to maintain really open lines of communication and use feedback as a tool to help us all im- prove and not as a tool for criticism. I like giv- ing positive feedback and receiving positive feedback, like most of us do, but I also talk about opportunities for improvement and re- ally with the goal and full intent of making us all better. No. 3, is always say yes when asked to think about something that isn't directly in your line of work or span of control. Maybe it's a stretch assignment, maybe it's something a little outside of your comfort zone. I've always found that saying yes to those opportunities proved to be very valuable in my career. I'll use the Epic EHR example as a prime exam- ple. Someone said to me, "Are you interested in getting involved in some of the informatics work that we're doing?" I thought it linked so clearly with some of the quality and safe- ty work that I was doing as the patient safe- ty officer that I expressed interest, became knowledgeable, got certification and then my impact really was much greater as a result. I took advantage of being connected to people in the IT world, and that helped us advance the EHR rollout and decision support that was used to improve quality. We all have opportunities and are asked to think about getting involved in something that seems like a lot of extra work or some- thing we don't need to do, but I found having an open mind to those things and exploring them with a lot of inquisitive behavior has helped me develop as a leader. n AI in healthcare in 2021: What should CIOs expect? By Laura Dyrda J oel Klein, MD, senior vice president and chief informa- tion officer of Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical System, joined the Becker's Healthcare Pod- cast to share his key priorities in the coming year and dis- cuss the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare. Below is an excerpt from the podcast, lightly edited for length and clarity. Question: What do you expect from AI over the next five years? Dr. Joel Klein: That is a really exciting area, and not just in the obvious ways to predict who is going to be readmitted, or who will get sepsis, or who is going to incur the most healthcare dollar costs. We actually have implemented us- ing our own team and tools on all of those fronts. But there are other areas, like responding to insurance denials, or help desk, where AI is beneficial. We have a bot now that handles almost all of our password resets which gets peo- ple turned around and productive again without having to wait a few minutes on the phone for a human being to re- set their password. We think there is a ton of opportunity just in plain old boring business activity where AI can really help us. I think for me the most important thing is to remember that for areas like automatically reading the chest X-ray or the path slide, the most important thing is to have good pro- cesses around it. If I predict the five patients who are on a medsurg floor who have sepsis that nobody has identified yet, it won't do anybody any good if there isn't someone whose job it is to act on that. We can have all the fancy AI in the world, but we have to have humans who are seeing it and making sense of it, and doing something meaningful with the recommendations or directions that the algorithm or process recommends. It can't just be put this thing in, ad- mire it and pat ourselves on the back for being fancy. It has to be ingrained back into the workflow. That is the thing we are going to focus on the most in the next year. n

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