Pioneering Change: The Role of Innovation (ft. Jason Hill)

- Welcome to Digital Voices.

“We're healthcare and life science leaders”

explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now you're host, Ed Marks. - Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices.

Thanks for listening and watching. We know that you have a lot of different choices. I consume a lot of media and it's your Dr. Jason Hill. It does as well. And the fact that you're spending time with us

is awesome, so thank you for doing that. And we'll make it worth your while, 'cause again, I have a great guest here, Dr. Jason Hill, Jason, welcome to Digital Voices. Ed, thanks so much for having me.

Great to be here. It's gonna be so us fun because not only do you do great work, but you're just a good human, and that's my favorite type of people. And it makes for interesting friendships and conversations.

So we'll jump right in and I'm just was thinking, Jason, how far back we go. I know we've both been around in industry for a little bit, and we've interacted, but more formally in the past year or so,

we got a chance to be on the same stage together and do different things, and it's been a lot of fun. I'm like, dang, Jason's such an interesting guy. I just have to have him on Digital Voices. So here we are.

But Jason, the most important thing,

everyone is anxiously waiting to hear the answer to, is what songs are in your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to? - Okay, yeah, that's great. So a thing about me, you may not know,

is I'm a huge Christian hip-hop fan, which is somewhat of a pretty narrow genre. And I really like to my favorite bands in that space, or Toby Mac, which is just amazing Christian artists that spans like a wide variety of different

of genres and in capital kings, which is a group of hip-hop artists out of Washington DC, they do a lot of hip-hop electronic mix-ups for Christian, and that's actually literally what's on my playlist behind me, right now. So yeah.

And that's awesome. I do not know capital kings, I will look them up, but I'm a huge DC talk fan. - Oh my God, DC talk, I love DC talk. - I grew up, that's my formative years at no life.

- Oh my gosh, I didn't know that. That is so funny. And yeah, Toby Mac, of course, for those listeners, watchers, Toby Mac is one of the three founders of DC talk. Game changers, back in the day, right?

Because no one in Christian music is sort of the traditional gospel-y type of stuff, which is good, it's great, and worship, of course. But also, you had these three guys who like, yeah, came out of the DC area as well,

and they were bringing in new styles, new flavor, and they were crossing generations, they were crossing genres. - Sean, you know. - Yeah, it's just so many different things,

and great songs in my favor to steal the hard way. - Oh, yeah. - Yes, I would say Jesus Freak is probably my favorite,

but yes, it's a hard way of the amazing, I love it.

- Yeah. - Yeah, it's so many profound, the lyrics. Yeah, it's super foundational for me as well. So we'll drop DC talk in the links, as well, for those who want to go retro.

And that's really cool. What about life, message, and mantra? Are there sort of words that you live by?

“- You know, I think it's just generally,”

be a good person. - That sounds very general, but I think like a lot of a work, when business as well as a life and health care, it's very easy to, you know, some might think that it's,

it's hard to lose track of mission and health care. I would argue that it's easy to lose track of mission and health care, and if you're not really focused on the fact that you're there to care for people and to provide benefit to them

and sometimes the most difficult times of their life, whether that's five steps removed as an informatysis or at the bedside guiding them through their last breath, as a doctor, like those things are things that we, I, or even as a, as a husband and father,

being able to lead in God and my family, just being a good person in Christ's center is something that's really important to me. That's to turn this into a response, guys, but that's some of you.

- We bring our whole person to our work and we should be the same person's and as you are, clearly, same person at work as we are at home and church, synagogue, wherever we might choose the worship. And so, yeah, I'm all about it, that's great.

- Yeah, so tell us more, like who are you? What's your story?

“- Well, tell us where did you grow up, where were you born?”

- Yeah, so I was in Navy Brats, and my dad worked on submarines, so I grew up by coastily, San Diego. I spent a lot of time in South Carolina, a lot of time in Virginia and Norfolk that whole area.

And then when my dad, unfortunately, my mom and dad did it last in their marriage and so when that divorce happened, we moved to Wichita, Kansas and I lived in Wichita, Kansas for a while with my mom

and I decided to go to college in Louisiana, which is a very interesting decision that probably takes a long time to unpack, but essentially, just stay, I really wanted to find a good school for engineering

and my dad's an engineer, my wife's an engineer. I have a strong engineering background on my family

So I went to Louisiana Tech University

“as a biomedical engineer doing a lot of work”

in micro manufacturing, which is the whole reason why I went there. So they had a nano manufacturing institution. That was fascinating and super cool. And I couldn't get into Caltech or MIT, so that was a good step down.

So I went to Louisiana drove 1200 miles to a place I know not a single person was and then set up school there and then luckily as a as luck would have it, I met the love of my life in Louisiana Tech. She's also an engineer, biomedical engineer.

And then we, I went to med school at LSU

and then third year of med school,

a hurricane Katrina hit. And I had no med school, then for the next six months. And so I spent the next three to five months working my wife lost her job. I had no source of income either.

We lived out of a farmhouse and to Joesville, Louisiana with a friend of mine and spent those three months living with my wife and her entire family who were all Katrina immigrants. In this farmhouse and I spent the day

working for the Red Cross in Alexandria and the nights in the line at the Walmart's where I worked for WIC and for Medicaid because my daughter was three months old at that time. And so I had a three month old baby

and I had to figure out a way to work. So that actually instilled in me a lot of, well, being in the military and a migratory lifestyle as well as like losing all of my worldly possessions in Katrina installed me a sense of self,

of self-reliance that I don't necessarily think most people had been to this experience. Yeah, I would have had that. And so I then went to probably eight or nine different states and medical schools to finish out my training

for the next year and a half and eventually ended up in Houston where my wife started working in NASA and then I worked as a resident at UT Houston. I finished there and the family wanted to come back

to New Orleans. So I moved back here and was lucky to get a job of working as a hospitalist at Oxnir and I worked there at one of the new hospitals they had acquired. Which was quite interesting because when I worked in Houston,

I was probably led to the top academic centers, top, you know, informatics places in the country. It's not the world and then I moved to this little tiny post-on hospital in Slido, Louisiana which had no electronic health record really.

They had like peep and this isn't 2010. What was the long time ago? - This is where people were running, put like labs in all the charts and I would look at X-rays like the old fashioned way going down and getting the films

and I was like, what did I do with my career? (laughing) The year later, Oxnir said we really want to, we really want to upgrade all the hospitals in our system to a new electronic health record called Epic

and my hospital that I worked at and it was the first one in the entire system. So I led the charge, I built a lot of the order sets for Epic and people quickly realize that I was good at that sort of nerdy thing and willing to do it.

“I think probably more second one and not the first one,”

maybe I wasn't amazing at it but I liked doing it

which no one liked doing it at that time. And so then I repeated that formula with 45 other hospitals with Epic and went live with multiple, I spent probably the better part of eight to nine years doing go live after go live after go live

and implementing electronic health records and a lot of hospitals. So I learned a lot about the electronic health record and then that's when I started working actually building, hacking, updating the health record

and doing things that more many people didn't do at that time. So got involved in machine learning and got involved very much in predictive modeling and doing that work and eventually won him's Davies Award for that work and our subsists.

And then out of that and sort of understanding that world of complex math and computer and design and UI and that space and I was privileged to get the job of the clinical innovation officer at auctioner to work with our innovation team

and of service, their clinical advisor. And that has led me to where we are and having had that happen at the same time that the giant AI revolution happened. Also probably more luck than talent on my part

but luckily was able to use my talents

to do a lot of really amazing things

for the health system and the greater broader world of AI and health care. - Yeah, Jason, you have a fascinating background which again is one of the reasons that we're together right now on digital voices.

But before we sort of leave the personal side because I do wanna jump into your role as the clinical chief innovation officer is you also are an MMA fighter. - Yes.

- I mean, gosh, the applause of my talents about that. I mean, that's a great, that's crazy.

“- So, you know, I think all MMA fighters,”

all fighters and generally start out as bully kids.

which there was a lot of prowess put on physical capability and I was being very frank and honest. I was not the most physically capable of young child. And so I got beat up a lot. And luckily the other part of the military

that was really cool is that there's a lot of people who know how to fight that are also in the military. (laughs) So it goes together, right? And so at that time, I'd work,

started, you know, there was some karate dodges that we're setting up and this was sort of like the mid-80s when karate kid was starting to become popular and karate dodges were becoming a thing. And started working at those karate dodges

and then going from base to base to dojo to dojo. I spent a lot of my free time hitting things. (laughs)

And kicking things and got my first black belt

and showed up on karate when I was around 14, something like that, 13, 14. And went into Taikwondo and got a black belt in that. And then went into Cooksville 1, which is sort of a derivation of Taikwondo

with grappling, I got a blue belt in that. Added really Thai and then went to Krav Maga, which is in Israeli martial art. That's very focused on self defense. There's no black belts in that, by the way.

The just gets certificates and I'm getting one of my certificates and training for that. And then moved on to Brazilian Dugitsu. So it's been a lifelong experience for me. I've done immature fights, which are a lot of fun.

And also extremely scary to save time. But yeah, I did a lot of those fighting, both in structured karate where I'm like fighting in a karate practitioner. And then later on, as in it maybe came popular,

I sort of fought in mixed martial arts fights where you could do things that you couldn't do in the standard karate fight. Take the ground. And that was the source of great joy for me.

And it still remains a source of great joy for me. I was actually literally punching and kicking a bag. This morning, I was part of my workout. But I don't do it as much competitively anymore because it's not so great on the 45 plus year old body.

So it's one of those things that you just sort of reminisce about as you get older. Yeah.

So your white, when you guys first got together,

she'd do this part of you already, because you were already doing a lot. She didn't know. So this happened after. She thought I was a good Christian boy.

“And I didn't realize, I think she saw some of the,”

she probably saw some of the belts and like martial arts paraphernalia had around. And yeah, the soon things. My I've also, by the way, is Vietnamese to Asian. So she has a martial arts background for self

and her family does. And both of my kids actually, my oldest daughter has a third degree black belt. And my son trains weekly in MMA is actually his training tomorrow.

So it's not just like what I do. It's literally what our whole family does. So it was a, we widely accepted. Yeah. Yeah, I love that.

So yeah, jumping back to your career. Yeah, let's talk about your role. So tell us about your role. Like there's probably not like our normal day, but give us a flavor of some of the things

that might happen in a normal month. Yeah, so, you know, it's one of those roles that you kind of make up as you go along as I'm sure you had in your, your long career.

“And I think what it became initially was a vector”

for how do we develop internal innovations. We had a whole center, data science team, biomedical engineers, content creators, and stuff like that, where we could do different innovative projects.

It rapidly became how do we scale AI as an organization. So that working, so the role really went into vendor management, a lot of what we would consider to be traditional innovation, but for auctioner was not traditional.

We didn't do traditionally like vendor management type, like code development, a program. A lot of our work had been with more internal development of our own teams. So I had to learn to flex those muscles relatively quickly

and got involved in venture capital,

which is fascinating and amazing and exciting

and dynamic work and started thinking through, like, how do you integrate startups into the culture of healthcare? And that was probably a process that took me around two years. I wouldn't say I mastered it,

but at least I feel like I've gotten better at it to where I'm not, you know, making as many mistakes as I made when I first started this. And I think that then became into, like, how do we develop a coordinated AI strategy?

And so the innovation team rapidly sort of morphed into a strategic body and execution body around artificial intelligence. And I think it's still there and still working in developing and changing today.

You know, what are one or two things that you all have done that you're pretty proud of, you know, through clinical innovation? You mentioned Sepsis a little bit earlier and winning a David's Award.

And what's one thing sort of in the future that you're looking at?

“Yeah, so I think that the Sepsis thing was really something”

that I feel like was a huge win for the organization. So I can tell you that we started this project in the middle of COVID, it's not ideal, by the way.

But it was just me and a data scientist, Jackson, who now works at Sutter, who has kind of got together this core of like, Epic had this Sepsis model. And the team was like, well, the Sepsis model isn't really working, we don't really know why.

Yeah. And so we went in and figured out the reason it wasn't working is because like no humans were looking at it and making decisions on it. So we went and quickly got together some things in Epic.

We started hacking things in Epic and doing things that no one else had done, creating checklists, creating dynamic lists in Epic that would hide or show depending on things. And then at the same time, coupled with a project manager

at the quality side that then created this whole, we called it the collaborative around Sepsis, Sepsis collaborative where we had a much of people didn't have official, no titles, no or charts, nothing. Just humans trying to fix a problem.

And some of them were literally like line-level doctors who were on the thing. Some of them were like the VP of quality. And we all on the same room, and we all leveled the playing field when it came to or charts and were like,

well, what are the things that are working? And one of the things that are not working. And we literally went through day by day iterating and changing those things are working and not working. And then eventually we created champions.

We sort of anointed them the different campuses in our system, and we started seeing the numbers. And then we created something that was really crazy, which is a universal time zero, which is where we basically said, time zero has done 20 different ways of 20 campuses

by 30 different abstractors. Let's create a set of SQL criteria that maybe it's not right all the way. But at least it's a single goal we can aim that. And we did that.

And it was a giant spaghetti code of SQL. If you look at it, you want to cry. But it worked. We're able to get Sepsis times zero back the next day on 1200 patients.

And you could then drive quality. So then we used that to work backwards and created a bunch of work around it. And that was our work on Sepsis, eventually saved over 2,000 lives over the course of three or four years.

Yeah, it's a project I'm very proud of to this day.

Yeah, that's amazing, that's great.

Well, what about one thing in the future that you're sort of looking at? So gosh, if I'm going to say the word egentic AI,

“I think my little buzzer is going to buzz me.”

I would say the one thing I'm looking at, it's really important to me. It's maybe it's not like a single project. But it's the primary constraint point of all of the issues that I'm seeing with AI

and technology and healthcare. And it's we're not taking into account the workflow change that has to happen. And I think like what I see in this is, again, part of actually sort of adjusting my position

at the end of this year to have a leg and operations. Because I see right now that the technology is there, it's absolutely there. And the way the capability of it to do change is unbelievable.

However, the humans don't know that and no one is taken into account the humans as to how they can change the technology. And how I know that is it. I hate it so much feedback and like,

oh, what's the ROI for X technology ambience the best one to say? I mean, the ROI is like ask anyone who uses it and say that they would want to practice medicine without it.

Yes. Here's your ROI.

Like it is not quantifiable, but it is amazing.

“And I think like this is one of the two times”

that we have in history, if we could get the right kind of change management, we could actually make some amazing things happen for our providers. I think what I did through our epic journey

is I made a great, epic is a great decision and HR is a great decision and it's the right way to go. But it really put a huge burden on the caregiver and we all have an opportunity to actually alleviate that.

And I think that's it. We can get the right people in their same room as the people building the stuff. And then I can actually make change happen quicker, at least that's my hypothesis.

Yeah, it makes a tremendous amount of sense. And Austin is lucky to have you. We didn't speak much about Austin, but the journey you described for 2010 to what Austin is no one up for today,

like super innovative, super cool, it's because of people like you, but it's also the culture and the leadership. Can you share anything about the culture

“that makes Austin so unique and allows you to thrive?”

Yeah, I think it's, you know,

they always say that necessities

in the mother of invention, right, and when you live in the area and the least healthy and least economically well of any part of the entire country, you sort of have to be innovative to make healthcare work, right?

Healthcare at its best is sort of like middleing to okay outcomes and ridiculously expensive, right? So like how can you maintain a system that can provide good outcome, but be less expensive than the majority

of other healthcare systems in the States? Requires a certain level of ingenuity to accomplish. And I think that's been where Oksher has kind of come out on top.

So like, Oksher was founded as a group of doctors. And I think like that group practice mentality where I can walk into a meeting with another doctor with a bunch of other doctors across our system, we immediately share the same values,

we immediately realize and can see how innovative technology happens and we're not internally,

there's always internal competition, right?

But it's not like I would say overt, it's very much a collaborative environment. And I think that's something that comes from the top.

“I think that's what Robert Hart and Pete November”

drive that culture starting from the very beginning. And the third thing I will say is a diet structure. Doctors don't know Jack about business as you will, as you know, but business people is sort of like you combine the heart with the soul, right?

Yeah, or the mind with the soul, the mind with the heart. So it's like the mind can be the business person. But a lot of times the heart can be the doctor and it grounds both people towards understanding and it creates these really cool partnerships.

These diet partnerships with escalate up the leadership. And I've been a beneficiary of that leadership structure throughout my entire career. And I have thought it's been amazing.

Yeah, and I've always been impressed.

And like I said, friends like yourself there at Oksher and what you all have done for your communities that you serve and things and leverage a tech and for the reasons that you cited is pretty amazing. I want to switch over to leadership in our last couple minutes

because you're a great, not only a person and clinician, those sort of things we write to talk about, but also a great leader. What do you think are one or two key skills that enable your growth?

Because you've had this amazing career and you're still only midway through. [LAUGHTER] I'm glad that you said midway through. That makes me feel good.

But so I would say one is what I call APM or actions per minute. So there's a term in video games called Actions per minute. And essentially, if you look at the top

of video game players in the world,

they can figure out what are the actions they need to do to make themselves get better at a thing. And how can they do as many of them as possible within one minute? How do they create systems, right? And I think the quote is like, you don't rise

to your aspirations, right? You fall to your systems. And I think building a system around myself so that I then can increase the signal to noise ratio of the actions that I take.

And understand what is the directionally like the actions that I think are going to be good at. Because I can do a hundred actions and half of them have no value. Or I can do a hundred actions in 60 to 70% have no value.

And trying to get myself to find the value of those actions as high as possible has been a journey that I've had as a leader that has been. I think I succeeded somewhat. I've gotten my APM up higher than it was about 10 years ago,

“but I think that's an important thing to look at as a leader.”

How can you be productive? Because it's like those three circles that you have, right, that social circle, that spiritual circle, and that work circle, or actually the four and physical. All there's there have been diagram, right?

So if you spend too much time at work, you lose your physical, you lose your social, you lose your spiritual and I think trying to maintain efficiency in each one of those things, and how do you get those efficiency levels key are key to being a good leader?

Because there's no lack of tasks that anyone will ask you to do. The other thing I think is understanding how not to do everything, but to find the right people that have the right skills. And I think that's where you get to learn and build networks and relationships.

And whether you have zero direct reports, or whether you've got 400 direct reports, the influence of a leader is really not about his or her ability to actually do it thing. And that's something I spent a long time figuring out the hard way.

It's about how do I leverage other teams of people and pull different people across my work? And it's like, I keep this running inventory of people in my head across the organization that I know are good at certain things.

And it's not like explicit or written down, maybe it should be. But like it's all in my head. So when I have a project, I go, oh, I can tap this person, this person, and that people, and put them together, and then get them to work together well.

“I think it's the other big aspect of leadership,”

the regardless of what level you are, regardless of your direct reports, as understanding and maintaining that network that can be tapped in an instant, is really cool. - Yeah, I love both of those.

Where do you go when you feel sort of drained, or maybe your creativity is tapped out? What do you do to refresh? - I do do things, I go to the gym, I love physical activity, I love working myself up to the limit,

I love testing my BO2 Max, I love testing my strength, those kind of things are areas that I think I realize that those circles need to be filled. And I think when I get feel drained, it's because those circles haven't been filled.

I haven't done work on my spiritual cell, I haven't done work on my creativity. The other thing is I do is video games. I love video games.

Commodore 64, and the old Atari Pong games.

So I still play video games. So let's see, last night I was playing,

“I have a particular fondness for our peachy video game.”

So I love Baldur's Gate 3, that's been something that's been a time sink for me, but totally worth it. And I was playing Dragon Age last night, the original Dragon Age 10 years ago,

and it's a great game. - Thanks for this big, great. We learned so much about you, and I'm very short about it time. Everything from Christian hip-hop,

some of the music that you like, and just what one of the drivers, obviously the influence of your faith, and also just being a good person, talked a lot about your career and your journey.

And again, some newer things that most people probably didn't know, like the MMA,

“not just you, but your whole family really engaged in that.”

And then a lot of things related to your role that you created there at Oster, and just beginning with a great culture, but all the different things that you do wanna could nail it down to daily bases,

but certainly a monthly basis, 'cause it's so varied. And we talked a lot about leadership, actions for minute was great, and then the ability to build networks so that you improve your influence,

which is ultimately leadership. And then we talked a lot about different things that you do to refresh yourself. What did I miss? Or is there anything you wanna double down on?

I'll give you the last word.

- I think that the most important journey

of anyone is to figure out what are the things I like to reference in. Can you guys framework, what are the things that you're good at? One of the things that you can get paid to do, what are the things that you enjoy doing?

“And I think life is basically the process of figuring out”

that center of that venn diagram. And if that, and it's asymptotic, right? Like the more you try to figure it out, the less you will get it, you have to let it come to you. So I think a lot of where I would say,

and again, I know this doesn't necessarily been with the innovation in Oxford, but I think with leadership and life in general,

is always good to realize what life is trying to teach you.

And I think through some of the lessons that I've learned have been really difficult lessons, where I've made a big mistake or had problems where I didn't, you know, I didn't get in the medical school the first try I did, but it turned me on

to understanding about how I love to be a teacher. And that's something that I've carried with me. So don't, what I would tell folks out there is that if we start to feel these lessons, as they feel really uncomfortable,

these times of life that feel really uncomfortable, that's actually the periods in which you're growing the most. And so that would be the things I would double down on. 'Cause I feel like this podcast has gone much more into a sort of like work, life territory,

and a little bit like into like, what my exist job is, but that's some lessons I would have for the listeners to say this, you know, having gone through a lot of that experience is something that you'd lean into it. - Yeah.

- Don't run away from it. - Yeah, I think one of the reasons we're depending on the week, anywhere from number four to number 10 in the world is just that Jason's like, we're not just work people, right?

We're a spiritual people, we talked about and the physical and the physical, and it all comes together. And then out of it, we learn these brilliant things on leadership and get to know brilliant people like yourself. So Dr. Jason Hill, thank you for being a guest

on digital voices. - Thank you Ed, thank you so much for having me, a very appreciative. - Thank you for listening to digital voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection,

and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify podcast. So you don't miss an episode.