Today, we have the privilege of interviewing Amanda DeMano, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at AVIA. With over 25 years of experience in healthcare, Amanda has spearheaded numerous initiatives to accelerate digital transformation in healthcare. At AVIA, she works with a network of 60 health systems that are committed to their own digital transformation journeys.
Amanda’s extensive background in healthcare IT has equipped her with valuable insights on the strategic challenges health systems face and where/how digital is making an impact despite the industry’s complex conditions.
Prior to joining AVIA, Amanda held various leadership positions, including Executive Director of IT Strategic Programs at UChicago Medicine and a leadership role in Deloitte’s Strategy and Operations consulting practice.
Amanda holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Health Information Management from Saint Louis University and has completed master’s level Management Information Systems coursework. She is highly regarded by her colleagues and has received endorsements for her exceptional leadership, change management, program management, and EHR expertise.
Outside of her professional endeavors, Amanda resides in the Chicagoland area and is a mom to three children, ages 11, 11, and 8. On the weekends, she is shuffling her crew to soccer, basketball, dance and gymnastics – but also finds time for her new sports interest, Pickleball.
In this interview, we will delve into Amanda’s insights on the intersection of healthcare and technology, her experiences in driving strategic partnerships, and her vision for the future of healthcare innovation. Stay tuned for an enlightening conversation with Amanda DeMano, a trailblazer in the healthcare industry.
Thank you for taking time to share your knowledge and experience with our audience. Can you start by telling the audience about yourself?
Since as long as I can remember, I have always been attracted to the healthcare industry. It started with a love for medical science, progressed into a period where I was pretty deep in IT implementation management, and now shifted to an elevated, more strategic focus where I get to wake up everyday learning and thinking about how technology is, can, and will improve healthcare delivery. But across my professional journey, there has always been a persistent theme – I like working on big, gnarly, complicated, political, and complex problems. What drives me is finding that one idea – that one thread in the tangled ball of yarn that I can pull – and follow through for an outcome.
Can you tell our audience about AVIA? What problem is AVIA solving & how?
Before I tell you about AVIA, it’s important for me to ground us in a few industry facts.
First, I’m going to say that digital is required to achieve the strategic goals of healthcare systems. But let me define digital. Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to fundamentally change and improve aspects of an organization’s operations, business models, and customer experiences. It involves the integration of data, automation, and virtualization of workflow into all areas of a business, with the aim of enhancing efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness.
While you can still build more buildings, acquire more providers, and negotiate for better supply pricing, these traditional moves to acquire market share and improve margin are less efficient than digital levers, like creating virtual care teams and services, empowering consumers in their interactions with the health system, and using data and automation to improve the supply chain.
Second, technology is moving way faster than any single health system’s ability to adopt. While the pace was pretty staggering pre-pandemic, COVID-19, Generative AI, and AI more generally have put us on a trajectory for change that NO health system is prepared to manage for.
No one organization –or leader within –can know enough, fast enough, to keep up with the pace of technology and prevent costly missteps. You just don’t have what you need.
Today, health system leaders navigating digital decisions have two choices – you can go to Google, call peers in your network, and go to conferences to learn enough about what you need to know to make educated choices. It’s slow, not a disciplined approach, and limited to the knowledge you can glean working these questions on the side of your desk. Alternatively, you can hire a 3rd party professional services firm to come in and help you with the people, process, and technology decisions on defined problems and priority projects. This is great, but your budget will only stretch to a few projects per year. And the firms love you and leave you – often with you holding the bag on a great tool or program that is never fully optimized.
AVIA was created to disrupt the professional services market for health systems and provides a third option. AVIA was created to be a persistent and-long term partner to health systems through a membership model, a unique combination of access to industry and solution experts, a robust peer network, advisory services, and performance analytics support nearly 60 health systems are members of the AVIA network and benefit from continuous, on demand decision and project support on over 180 digital capabilities across Consumerism, Care Transformation, and Operational Transformation. We learn from these members, and the broader industry, and then bring our insights, strategies and tools back to be an extension of your team. We also curate connections for you with experts, peers, and solution providers so that you can make accelerated and confident decisions on your path forward.
AVIA’s new Generative AI Collaborative is a great example of how we use the power of our network to accelerate insights and bring scaled, efficient support to health systems. This July, we announced the launch of our national collaborative that is leveraging industry experts and the experiences of our participants to tackle practical needs of health system leaders. What use cases are being used today? How should I think about my data/IP rights? How exactly do I perform due diligence on a “black box”? What changes to our health system policies might be needed? How do I talk to our patients about how we use these tools? Where are regulatory agencies most likely to take action?
The national AVIA Generative AI Collaborative seeks to provide answers and tools to help health system leaders tackle these questions and more for their own systems.
How is generative AI being used in healthcare today?
It won’t be a surprise that we are in very early days. AVIA is cataloging the use cases, and we’ve found that most generative AI tools that are in production today are focused on administrative and communication tasks. Translating complex medical language into a 6th-grade reading level or facilitating call center communications are two examples.
We’re also seeing solutions that are addressing provider burdens. One such tool is making sense of all historical health record data for complex patients and generating clinical summaries to help providers prepare for, and document, their encounters.
Another example is a tool that uses AI to predict adverse outcomes for inpatients and then generates the quality documentation that must be completed as the clinician reviews and determines next steps to improve outcomes. Both of these examples keep humans in the loop, but show huge efficiency gains for providers now and leave me excited about the future. Large language models will develop more context awareness and reduce hallucinations. With that will be much more impact to come for provider wellbeing.
What are the main challenges and limitations of using generative AI in healthcare?
I think our primary challenge as an industry is our data. Healthcare data is particularly sensitive – and while it technically belongs to all of us as patients, it is notoriously difficult to collect, normalize, and synthesize. Data has surpassed oil as the most valuable asset on earth. Unfortunately, our healthcare data is trapped in silos, so the time-to-value for healthcare might be a longer journey than we will see in other industries with more ready access to the very information needed to train generative AI tools.
Imagine you build a generative AI tool on a data set from an academic medical center in New York focused on complex specialty care. Can you take that tool and apply it to a community hospital in rural New Mexico and expect the same outcomes? No.
This is not to say that we won’t be able to make progress, but our adoption curve will have to account for a longer journey. The stakes are really high. We will have to move forward with rigorous validation, transparency, and demand domain expertise at each step.
How can generative AI contribute to personalized medicine?
Of all the hype and promise of AI and Generative AI tools, I think I am most excited about the impacts they will have on advancing personalized medicine. Just like technology is moving too fast for any individual health system leader to know enough – medical science moves too fast for any one individual provider to know enough, too.
It’s estimated that we spend $1,000 – $3,000 per patient annually on “non-optimized medicine”. These are medications, treatments, and procedures that are not indicated to have impact on the patients for whom they are ordered. Imagine a world in which we could better predict medications and treatment plans based on an individual. This is care I want to receive.
Precision medicine has seen some advances in areas like oncology care – sometimes even doubling life expectancy and dramatically reducing costs when a patient’s genetic profile is considered in treatment planning. Genetic information is complex; -omics data is even more complex. This will not be the work of humans alone. AI and generative AI tools positioned against this space will literally change our lives … someday.
What are the potential ethical concerns surrounding the use of generative AI in healthcare?
The use of generative AI in healthcare poses several ethical concerns that need to be addressed to ensure responsible and beneficial use of the technology. There are clear risks on the potential for bias. Training data that is used to develop generative models must be evaluated so it can be trusted.
We also have to leverage the best technology and data privacy tools imaginable. Generative models require access to large amounts of data for training purposes. We can’t make any compromises in our duty to protect health information and maintain trust.
Lastly, and I mentioned it before, we must ensure tools are trained in the hands of qualified domain experts. It will be important for the industry to adopt standards to ensure the quality of those that are building, validating, and supporting these advanced tools.
What impact can generative AI have on healthcare cost and accessibility?
The implications for cost and access are existential to achieve. Today’s care delivery model is workforce heavy. In the next 10 years, the number of people in the eligible workforce will shrink while the number of total people requiring healthcare services will increase. These numbers don’t work without some transformation of our care models to augment humans and more efficiently serve the needs of healthcare consumers.
One example might be chronic disease management. As generative AI tools become more developed, they can be applied to remote monitoring programs that will be able to predict and provide care with automation and convenience. This leads to better, more continuous chronic disease management that requires less human workforce monitoring and intervention over time as technology matures.
I can also imagine a more optimistic future in which automated tools are effective at making us more healthy. Think about a generative tool that knows you, applies empathy, and provides you context aware nudges and interventions to promote healthier living. Can we become more empowered at managing our own chronic disease – or prevention? I think so.
Contact Details
- Business website: www.avia.health
- Business address: 515 N State St, Suite 300, Chicago, IL
- Business phone and email: ademano@avia.health
- Amanda’s Linkedin
