Digital Transformation in Healthcare: Atif Chaughtai of Red Hat On How Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care

Have a solid change management process in place: For AI capability to be adopted successfully, organizations must introduce change at a manageable pace and work collaboratively to innovate on intelligent business processes.

As a part of our series about “Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Atif Chaughtai.

Atif Chaughtai brings 20+ years experience in information technology with a focus on Healthcare and Life Sciences. At Red Hat, Chaughtai oversees the healthcare vertical solutions, ensuring both industry business needs and emerging requirements align to the Red Hat portfolio. He is an active participant on various Healthcare and Life Sciences standards committees.

Prior to joining Red Hat, Chaughtai held positions in healthcare IT as Chief Technologist and Healthcare Ecosystem Executive, including running P&L for a global software organization. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Chaughtai served as an Enterprise Architect. His work at NIH included streamlining grants management and clinical research programs while ensuring HIPAA compliance. He was recognized multiple times for his contribution to the NIH’s mission. Chaughtai has two patents for his work in information delivery in low latency and low bandwidth environments.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Healthcare is a very personal thing — I am sure everyone has their own story they can relate to healthcare. Mine started as a 7-year-old child, when I lost my mom to cancer after five years of battling it. As a child that was close to my mom, I wanted to help with anything I could do. After her passing, the desire to help her evolved into helping others and settling the score. As a curious person looking to see how best I can fight against these terrible diseases, I came across an article from Harvard Business Review titled ‘Will Disruptive Innovation Cure Healthcare’ by Christensen, Bohmer, and Kenagy. This article plotted that advancement in technology will introduce capabilities that can enable patients to help themselves, nurses to perform more advanced medical procedures and push everyone higher on the value chain. I was very intrigued by being able to have such a vast impact and my journey in Healthcare IT started.

Can you share the most interesting or most exciting story that has happened to you since you began at your company?

The most exciting story while at Red Hat was seeing HCA Healthcare creating the Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy (SPOT) platform to collect and analyze clinical data and signal caregivers in real time to initiate early sepsis care. HCA Healthcare is now able to detect and identify sepsis up to 20 hours earlier than traditional screening methods–helping to save lives. Traditionally, diagnosis is based on manual review of patient charts during shift changes, but this approach can delay diagnosis of a condition that becomes 4–7% more deadly every hour.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Then, can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Earlier in my career at NIH, I was working with researchers who were using mice for their experiments. They would breed the mice and track the genetic makeup being passed down. We had hundreds of mice and it was empirical to be able to identify the lineage of the mice. In order to track them, we decided to tattoo the mice with a unique number almost like SSN. Once we began this project, we quickly realized that it was an extraneous process and not easily readable. After brainstorming, we decided to think outside the box literally and built capabilities to generate, print and scan barcodes for each mouse. That barcode was placed on a card that went on a cage and mice were placed in it. We had to expand the numbers of cages so we could identify them uniquely. The lesson learned from this was to think outside the immediate subject and focus on the box the subject is in.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I would say that I am still on the path to be a successful leader as I believe success is a journey not a destination. I use the following character traits as a guide while I’m on my journey:

1. Collaboration — While I’ve gained a vast amount of experience and expertise in the healthcare IT field, the importance of joining forces with other experts in this industry is key to my success. Working side by side with doctors, nurses, researchers and IT professionals has allowed me to develop a better understanding and appreciation of the healthcare system.
2. Passion — I am extremely passionate about what I do and I let that passion drive me to be the best leader and innovator that I can be. When you truly enjoy what you do, you are driven by the opportunity to develop solutions that can make an impact and add value to others.
3. Integrity — Throughout my journey, I am intentional about staying true to my moral principles. Leaders with integrity uphold their word and garner trust among their teams and colleagues, which is necessary to be successful.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

One of the exciting projects that I am working on is creating a healthcare consortium using Open Source community principals to bring together a diverse set of players in healthcare to solve some of the complex challenges. I am using Open Source community principals as a glue to bring the constituents together. We are putting customer outcomes in the center and breaking down the silos around the ecosystems to innovate.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about Digital Transformation in Healthcare. I am particularly passionate about this topic because my work focuses on how practices can streamline processes to better serve their patients. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like for a medical practice to engage in a digital transformation?

Digital transformation is how some organizations describe their efforts to bring new technologies, processes, and culture together with shared purpose. This purpose may be to improve customer experience, innovate faster, or simply survive better as digital disruption reshapes their industry. I don’t think there is any one definition of digital transformation because the challenges that lead organizations to it can be very different, though certain trends have emerged. For organizations already heavily invested in technology, for instance, digital transformation is often about bringing IT into planning discussions sooner so they can support innovation. For organizations not as invested in technology, digital transformation is more often about changing to a digital business model that positions IT as a partner versus simply a cost center.

In the healthcare industry, now more than ever, it’s critical to have access to data and unlimited scale, and to design and modify decisioning, processes, and workflows for specific situations.

What are the specific pain points that digital transformation can help address in a medical practice?

In healthcare, it’s less about digital transformation and more about value transformation. Value is simply defined by outcomes divided by cost. This means healthcare organizations have to improve the outcome or reduce the cost of providing services to increase value. This requires extending technology capabilities to the whole ecosystem involved in care, including family caregivers. However, the value diminishes as more time elapses.

Success requires a shift in the role of IT in an organization, evolving from a cost center to an innovation enabler that is driving new business models and revenue streams.

What are the obstacles that prevent a medical practice from engaging in a digital transformation?

Like many other industries, there is an overall shortage of qualified professionals in the healthcare field that can develop the skills needed to implement and maintain new technology. There is also a high dependency on legacy systems that have existed in many healthcare practices for decades. It takes considerable effort to just maintain these legacy systems. Given patient care and lives are at stake, medical practices don’t have enough staff to be involved in disruptive projects that reinvent their processes.

Managing a healthcare facility is more challenging than it has ever been. Based on your experience or research, can you please share with our readers a few examples of how digital transformation can help a medical practice to provide better care? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

As the industry rapidly evolves, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for improving patient outcomes and reducing cost. Healthcare organizations need to make full use of integrated, curated and enhanced data to gain insights required for improved decision making. Modern healthcare organizations are using data to improve patient and clinical experiences. Collecting and interpreting patient data is critical for healthcare organizations; however, getting real-time insights and capabilities at the point of care requires a flexible IT infrastructure. You must also protect that data and comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other standards.

Going back to the HCA Healthcare example that I mentioned earlier, a cross-functional team of clinicians, data scientists, and technology professionals at HCA Healthcare used Red Hat solutions to create a real-time predictive analytics product system to more accurately detect and identify sepsis up to 20 hours earlier than traditional screening methods–helping to save lives. Additionally, HCA Healthcare has used its new technology capabilities, like real-time machine learning algorithms, to establish a learning health system that decreases the risk and cost of innovation.

Can you share a few examples of how digital interactions or digital intake processes can help create a frictionless patient experience and increase access for patients?

Improving healthcare price transparency is a big impact opportunity in improving patient experience and satisfaction, but also in bending the healthcare cost curve. This will require a connected healthcare system, with data curated from both payers and providers.

A connected healthcare system can also drive strategies such as guiding patients in their care journey. It all comes down to access to real-time data and the ability to leverage it to drive decisions and recommendations.

Based on your opinion and experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Effective Medical Practice” and why.

Speaking from a healthcare technology perspective, there are a number of things that medical practices or healthcare systems can do to improve patient care and the overall experience for care providers, doctors, nurses and researchers:

• Explore the use cases for AI and data analytics for healthcare in the future: Healthcare organizations need to make full use of integrated, curated, and enhanced data to gain insights required for improved decision making. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can use this data to make decisions and execute the best actions in real-time.
• Improved data accessibility: Patients often move through several different systems as they are transferred from the emergency department to other departments or facilities during the diagnosis and treatment processes. While patients are moved across departments and facilities, it’s imperative that their relevant medical data is accessible to authorized providers, regardless of the system they are using, to deliver improved patient care and make accurate diagnoses.
• Have a solid change management process in place: For AI capability to be adopted successfully, organizations must introduce change at a manageable pace and work collaboratively to innovate on intelligent business processes.
• Consider using open source solutions: Leveraging open source technologies can allow organizations to avoid vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in comes with many different downsides, including the inability to move workloads among different clouds, the increased difficulty of extracting data from the cloud and being forced to use the underlying virtualization platform chosen by the cloud provider.
• Understand your patients’ needs: It’s important to know your patients’ needs if you want to provide the best patient care for them. This should be prioritized and used to determine what technologies you must invest in to improve your systems and processes.

Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.

One of my favorite things about working at Red Hat is having an open culture that nurtures collaboration and empowers people to bring their best ideas. At its core, open organizational culture exists when open core values and principles both represent and reinforce an organization’s culture through processes, communication, structures, and even technologies. I would love to inspire organizations and leaders across the globe to adopt an open culture that would enable more collaboration, accountability, a sense of community, and a measure of autonomy — all of which combine to create a powerful force that fosters innovation.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can keep up with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atifc/

This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!