We Want to Position AI to Help Us Work Smarter and Care Better for Patients

Welcome to the Big Unlock Podcast. We are carrying on The Big Unlock podcast, which was started by Paddy Padmanabhan. This is 146th episode and we are very excited to have you as the guest and looking forward to our interaction. 

Shakeeb: Thanks, and appreciate you having me on. Glad to be the 146th. My name is Shakeeb Akhter. I’m the Chief Digital and Information Officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where I oversee digital and technology services, our overall enterprise digital transformation strategy, and all things ranging from infrastructure, applications, cybersecurity, AI, data and analytics. I’ve been in that role for almost three years now, and it’s been wonderful. I’m looking forward to speaking with you about the work we’re doing.  

Q. Shakeeb, what motivated you to start off in your healthcare journey? 

Shakeeb: That’s a great question. It takes me back about two years. My background is in finance and economics. I’ve had two career stories: about a decade in finance, starting with big four consulting in financial services, then moving into banking, specifically in derivatives quantitative modeling during the 2008 financial crisis. That’s when I really began to understand the intersection of technology, banking, and quantitative modeling. 

It was an interesting time, using data, analytics, and technology to drive things forward. During that period, I realized I wanted to do something more meaningful long-term—something aligned with my values. I looked around and found healthcare to be a great place to build a legacy, contribute to humanity, and drive improvement. So, I made a conscious and hard pivot from finance to healthcare technology. 

It’s been a rewarding journey, full of change and opportunities to give back. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m really happy with that decision.

Q. That’s great to know, Shakeeb. Would you like to tell us more about what drives you at job from delivering the services that you do and touch on your digital literacy and culture initiatives?

Shakeeb: Sure. Just to give a quick overview of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), we have a very special mission: to solve the most complex problems and give every child hope for a healthy future. CHOP was actually the first paediatric hospital in the U.S. 

Yeah, many people don’t. We focus on three major areas: providing excellent patient care, driving innovative research, and offering quality education to advance the field. That’s what drives us.  

In terms of scale, we have three hospital locations, one of which is dedicated exclusively to behavioral health. While we’re based in Philadelphia, we have over 50 care network sites, including urgent care, primary care, and specialty care. We see around 1.5 million outpatient visits and 30,000 to 35,000 admissions annually. Although we’re located in Philadelphia, we have a global footprint, serving children from all 50 states and over 65 countries. 

We have about 28,000 employees, including 2,000 credentialed physicians and dentists, and around 700 beds. We also have a large research institute focused to drive research based breakthroughs in pediatric care. Our clinical operations, research, and foundation work together to drive transformation in pediatric care. 

Q. That’s awesome. I understand you’ve focused on some special initiatives around digital literacy, especially with all the changes we’re seeing, like AI and Gen AI. But things are changing and care needs to be more accessible. You have some good initiatives around training and teaching people about all things digital and also building a digital culture in the organizations. Could you please talk with us about that? 

Shakeeb: Sure. To answer that, I’d like to take a step back. When I became CIO almost three years ago, we embarked on a journey to develop a digital transformation strategy. Before that, we had an information services and technology strategy, but we took the time as a team across CHOP to define what digital transformation truly means to us. 

What does it actually mean beyond just being a buzzword? For us, it’s a systematic and intentional redesign of everything we do through technology. The key to our digital transformation strategy is that it was developed in partnership with our chief strategy officer, chief medical officer, and one of our chief operations officers, with input from around 200 people across the organization. We asked ourselves: What does digital transformation mean to CHOP? Where should we focus, and how can we create a digital culture here? That’s how the work began a few years ago. 

It was really valuable to gather ideas on where to focus and what matters most to CHOP—what leverages our strengths and helps us transform ourselves and the industry. We landed on three focus areas. 

First is AI and automation. No meeting is complete without mentioning AI, right? So, what does AI and automation mean for us? How can we use it to make our work easier, give time back to clinicians, improve efficiency, and drive innovation in both care and research? 

Second is the total experience—improving patient, provider, employee, and partner experiences. This includes our digital door strategy, where we’re focused on improving access, creating a seamless experience for patients to access care at CHOP, and reducing time to care. For providers, we’re tackling burnout, especially with documentation and EMR. How can we use technology to ease that burden, reduce workload, and improve satisfaction? 

The third piece is digitally enabled care models. How can we design care models that use digital tools to help us meet patients where they are? We’ve launched several remote patient management programs to discharge children earlier and provide care at home without sacrificing quality. 

These are just some of our initiatives. Our strategy’s success is rooted in integrating digital into everything we already stand for—high quality, the best patient outcomes, excellent patient experiences, and driving research and innovation. That’s our philosophy: digital is woven into our business strategy. It’s not something separate; it’s about being digital, not just doing digital. That’s how we frame it.

Q. That’s a really interesting positioning, Shakeeb. I’m sure that your background in data and analytics has helped really propel it forward. 

Shakeeb: I’m a big proponent of data analytics—it’s been in my DNA for a long time. I believe it’s the cornerstone of driving digital transformation. It’s the foundation for understanding our current performance, figuring out how we can improve, and measuring progress moving forward. We use data analytics as much as possible to guide our digital transformation efforts and to measure the outcomes. It’s really important to us.

Q. Can you share some insights from your journey, especially on managing data from disparate systems? How do you prepare it for a 360-degree view of the patient, or any 360-degree view, in a large system like yours with millions of patients and thousands of physicians?

Shakeeb: Yeah, absolutely. From my perspective, our data analytics strategy, which we built five years ago, has six pillars. The first is creating an enterprise data hub—getting all of our data into a single data warehouse or lakehouse. We have over 100 source systems feeding into this, with both structured and unstructured data, allowing us to ingest everything into one repository. 

The second step is modeling the data appropriately. We integrate, standardize, normalize, deduplicate, and trust the data. Data integration is crucial to our strategy. The next step is ensuring data trust. Without trusted data, it can’t be used for decision-making. We’ve created a data trust office focused on governance, quality, and stewardship, applying these standards at the warehouse level to build a trusted data layer. Our enterprise-grade analytics solutions are based on this layer, eliminating most of the usual questions about data origin and meaning. 

About a year ago, we launched our enterprise data catalog—a single front door to all data assets at CHOP. This includes metric definitions, cohorts, and dashboards, making data more accessible. 

Next, with trusted and integrated data, we can create a data-literate workforce. We’ve invested heavily in data literacy through our Data Analytics University, which has trained thousands at CHOP. We teach people how to use data, tell stories with it, assess its quality, and make data-driven decisions. 

The final two pillars involve deploying self-service analytics solutions. Thanks to our work on literacy, trust, and integration, we’ve seen widespread adoption. Now, we’re focusing on predictive data science and advanced analytics—how to predict outcomes before they happen. That’s the advanced analytics component of our strategy.

Q. All this seems to play into Gen AI as well, right? It’s democratizing access—anyone can use it in plain English. Can you share your thoughts or initiatives around Gen AI?

Shakeeb: Sure. I think Gen AI along with every other type of AI is highly reliant on large data sets that are of high quality. When my team and I talk about it, we said that the real limiting step to deploying AI at scale is data quality. So, we’re highly focused on measuring, monitoring, and improving our data quality. 

We’re implementing tools to do that, in addition to the data trust work I talked about. That’s the key. In terms of AI, I remind folks Gen AI is the newest form of AI. We’ve had deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision for decades—studied, tried, and true applications of AI—and they all rely on high-quality data. We’re focused on being inclusive of those other branches of AI and seeing how we’ll apply them. 

Gen AI has a ton of potential; it’s the newest and brightest in terms of attention. We’re testing what we’re calling CHOP GPT, our own instance of CHOP GPT. Our vision for AI is AI as an ally to our workforce. We want to position AI to help us work smarter and care better for our patients. That’s our focus for AI. 

For Gen AI, we’re developing CHOP GPT and working on other AI uses. For example, we’re training a large language model on our policies and procedures, making them searchable and accessible to staff. On a broader AI scale, we’re using predictive AI to predict claims denials before they spread and to predict other clinical events. 

With Gen AI, we’ve partnered with Epic. We’re the first organization to scale augmented response technology (ART) with Epic for all clinicians. This uses LLMs to draft responses to patient messages. Our clinicians get millions of messages a year, and this saves time. We’re also working on use cases with Epic, like note summarization, to reduce the burden for clinicians.

Q. Very cool. So, Shakeeb, moving on to another topic of interest. In large systems, one would imagine it’s difficult to innovate. What’s your approach at CHOP around innovation? And along with that, how do you work with startups? They’re innovating all the time, coming out with new solutions. If you could touch on these two areas, that would be great.

Shakeeb: Sure. From an innovation perspective, innovation is in CHOP’s DNA. It’s been a hallmark of the organization from a clinical and research standpoint for a very long time. We’re trying to bring that same thinking into the technology landscape. 

We do this in a couple of ways. One is partnering with our research institute to identify research scientists working on AI, machine learning, and other techniques in healthcare in novel ways. We figure out how to support them in their work. 

Second, our starting point for digital innovation is always defining a problem or challenge that’s impactful to CHOP, then working backward to determine the technology solution. We don’t look for technology in search of a problem. We focus on problem statements, outcome metrics, and prioritizing where to spend our time and effort. Our Chief Medical Officer has also launched an Innovation Catalyst Program to identify large, challenging problems. Our Digital Technology Services (DTS) team is embedded in those conversations to determine if there’s a technology solution that can drive innovation in that space. 

Regarding partnering with startups, our strategy is to constantly scan the market for new solutions that add value and help solve our pain points. We have a platform play strategy, where we first turn to our large, strategic partners to see if they have an existing solution that meets our needs. If not, we’re open to partnering with others. 

Long term, I believe we’ll move in the direction where, when we see a unique solution, we’ll approach startups with key problems we’re trying to solve at CHOP and open that up to other startups in the market. If they’re working in this space and meet our requirements, we’d love to hear from them. As we work on the Center for Digital Innovation, this is part of our vision for the future. We’d love to co-develop products with others and potentially share in their success. That’s what we’re thinking about for how we’ll partner with the startup ecosystem.

Q. So, Shakeeb, I would like to wrap up the session with your thoughts or insights on what’s coming next. The professor at Wharton I used to work with, Professor Jerry, would say, “the next big thing.” What do you think is the next big thing or the next big innovation?

Shakeeb: I think the next big thing is really bringing all the disparate data sets in healthcare together to analyze and predict preventatively which patients are at risk for specific diseases. This concept of precision medicine is on the cusp of becoming a reality, thanks to advancements in technology, the availability of data sets, and interoperability standards led by the industry. 

I believe this is the moment when precision medicine will be a reality for us in the next few years, allowing us to offer more tailored care to our patients. This brings together many elements we discussed: data, analytics, and AI, along with clinical decision support and informatics. These will be essential to integrate these ideas into workflows and identify patients at risk for particular diseases. 

We’ll use genomic data and other forms of data that patients may not even be aware of, helping them improve their outcomes through this process. So, I think that’s the next big thing in healthcare, and we’re at the right time for this tipping point. 

We hope you enjoyed this podcast. Subscribe to our podcast series at www.thebigunlock.com and write to us at info@thebigunlock.com  

Disclaimer: This Q&A has been derived from the podcast transcript and has been edited for readability and clarity.