Q&A: Ardent Health Envisions a Clear Path for Digital Transformation

HEALTHTECH: As Ardent Health’s inaugural chief digital and transformation officer, what were your top three IT-related priorities as you started this role? How have those priorities changed in your first few years?

GARDENHIRE: They haven’t really changed, and they remain aligned with the organization’s strategic plan. We still want to ensure that we are preparing our infrastructure for growth, that we're doing so efficiently, and that we can do it in a very secure fashion.

We also want to ensure an excellent digital consumer experience so that we can focus on the consumers who already work with our organization and also acquire new consumers, reaching out to the communities that we serve and beyond — for anyone who might want to take advantage of our virtual services, for example.

We want to ensure that we are preparing for scale and managing a margin. We want to think about innovation that serves the people who are taking care of others, as well as the people who take care of the people caring for others. That means thinking about the clinician experience and building an experience that attracts talent to work for us. And that also includes the back-office processes such as IT, HR, finance and other areas. We’re building digital experiences to make those teams as efficient and effective as they can be so that more of that healthcare dollar can be spent on wellness and care delivery.

As we think about an update to the role, it's really about the infusion of the consumer team inside of the areas that I'm responsible for, as well as the broader enterprise project management office, and being able to measure our efforts in terms of value creation. So, the role expansion is really about the recognition and alignment of those areas and holistically bringing that together moving forward.

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HEALTHTECH: Where do artificial intelligence and machine learning fit into your organization's digital transformation strategy? How have you had to adapt new expectations around AI with your strategy?

GARDENHIRE: So many AI and machine learning solutions have been around for a while. As we focus on how to best take advantage of that, we think about compute, broader infrastructure and networking that will power those things differently.

When the industry enters the next phase of augmented intelligence and what it will mean to support humans in a different way, I think we have to be prepared for that, that our data has to be prepared to take advantage of these technologies. It’s important that we have governance. So, it's about building the infrastructure to ensure that we can take best advantage of it.

The other piece is ensuring that you have good business processes that help you best identify problems so that you can insert these tools in the right places for the maximum impact. It can solve many important things if we can place solutions in the right places and then give people the support they need to best use it.

I think about shifting skill sets in the same way that I thought about shifting skill sets when electronic health records were introduced to the environment. So, when EHRs were first introduced, I can remember thinking to myself, actually, that typing is now a nursing competency. Before EHRs, we all documented on these trifolds and wrote a lot of things by hand — people didn’t think about typing speed then. But when EHRs came along, the reality was, if you couldn't type, it really hampered the way you moved about your workflow.

I think about agentic AI in the same way, in that we're going to have to help people become better editors. We're going to have to give them the skills to work differently and to ensure that we're bringing people along as we drive this forward. I think that's one of the most important things, to ensure that we're supporting the people along this process as well.

HEALTHTECH: When it comes to deploying new technologies or adopting new processes, what's your advice on getting user buy-in? How can you improve communication and expectations between the clinical and IT sides of a project?

GARDENHIRE: Encourage your team members’ imaginations. People are always thinking of their own solutions to problems. They know how things could be better. So, first and foremost, we need to ask them how they think a process can be improved. We've been in situations where we know we're not necessarily introducing the best technical solution, or it's coming down in a way that's more regulatory driven, like Meaningful Use with EHRs. And we find value in it, but we didn't necessarily start with the value that a clinician or someone else could get from it.

I think we have an opportunity in this instance with AI, which is why I think adoption is taking off so fast. We don't have, at least just yet, regulatory or other imperatives, so it has to be all about the value that people can get out of it, whether that's workflow efficiency, decision support efficiency, or just giving people the opportunity to not do tasks that don't make the highest and best use of human creativity and interaction.

As we move this forward, we need to take the time to understand what nursing needs and what would make the process and the workflow better. And then, we also need to ask our partners, our colleagues, to not become married to a solution, because this tech is moving so fast. There are no clear winners yet. We see the Gartner maps, the KLAS surveys — they are updating rapidly because the technology is moving so fast. I think we also have to be prepared for staying with whoever is leading at the moment and getting our environment to a point where we’re almost plug and play, which is something that we've been talking about at Ardent Health. 

We want to make sure that as this technology continues to evolve, we're prepared to take advantage of what's best in the moment, and we don't get stuck or become stagnant, which can happen in healthcare.

HEALTHTECH: How are you evaluating new AI solutions that you're interested in using at your organization? What helps you sift through the buzz?

GARDENHIRE: We are doing a couple of things. We have a chief data and AI officer. He is amazing, and he continues to work with the organization to make sure that we understand the business case, the jobs to be done and the problems that we're trying to solve. We work that through a governance process, and then we try and pinpoint solutions for those problems.

There’s a risk of developing a bit of a “shiny object syndrome,” and I would tell you that I'm not fully opposed to that because I do think people sometimes bring creative solutions, and there are sometimes problems out there that we didn't know we could solve or haven't even yet recognized as a problem. With that said, I do think you still have to circle back and recognize what the problem is, ask yourself if it’s a problem that your organization wants to solve, and whether or not you want to solve it right now. Then, make sure you have a deep partnership with business leaders so that we all agree that it is a problem, and that we all agree we're going to solve it right now.

There are times when we are evaluating solutions and we really understand the problem, and it’s super clear. And there are times, when it comes to our work around innovation and impact, that we're actively working to hear what things people are trying to solve so we can understand whether or not there's a problem we haven't yet recognized.

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HEALTHTECH: What do you think will be the next big topic at conferences such as ViVE? Do you think AI will continue to dominate conversations, and if so, how?

GARDENHIRE: AI is going to continue to dominate conversations for a good long while. As I watch what's happening, I'm also trying to be honest about what is going to get us to a place where we can democratize these tools, because the reality is, we don't get to maximum impact until we can better democratize the tools.

We like to talk about what I call the app layer — the layer that fully interacts with humans, or the data layer that is providing more insights. And I think those things are really important. I hope that we get to a place where we start to maybe give infrastructure and the back end of technology a bit more visibility. We have a lot of work to do to ensure that our infrastructure can handle what's happening at the app layer. We have to make sure that we can manage compute. We need to be having more conversations about computing impact on utilities. Can we get to the right place with utilities to power all these things?

We have to have more conversations about the digital divide. We have to have more conversations about whether or not, realistically, we're preparing humans to keep up with what's changing and what's different in training and adoption and the things that are going to ensure that, again, these tools will have maximum impact.

I think this will continue to be the center of the conversation. I do think that the surrounding topics of really making it work and having impact are going to have more prominence in the conversation in order to make it real for the highest number of people.