Sitemap
Authority Magazine

In-depth Interviews with Authorities in Business, Pop Culture, Wellness, Social Impact, and Tech. We use interviews to draw out stories that are both empowering and actionable.

Digital Transformation In Healthcare: Dr. Renae Beaumont On How Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care

12 min readJun 28, 2024

--

Invest in Technology to Make Data-Driven Decisions and to Streamline Administrative Processes. Use reliable, valid digital diagnostic and monitoring tools to make informed clinical decisions and provide efficient, effective clinical care that is sensitive to patients’ changing needs and preferences. Tech tools can also be used to streamline patient scheduling, billing, record-keeping, and report-writing to enhance work satisfaction and reduce burn-out.

As part of our series about “How Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Renae Beaumont.

Dr Renae Beaumont is an award-winning clinical psychologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and founder of the evidence-based Secret Agent Society (SAS) social-emotional learning program, which features online games and activities. Dr Beaumont is passionate about using technologically innovative approaches to improve the mental health and wellbeing of youth and families. As part of her research and clinical care, she has examined the feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of AI-driven diagnostic and monitoring tools, wearables, virtual reality and therapeutic apps and platforms.

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?

As a former flute teacher, I’ve always loved working with children. I was searching for a career path where I could help children who were suffering. Initially I was thinking of becoming a pediatrician, but I also wanted to be able to incorporate creative approaches into my clinical care to connect with patients and to help them to reach their potential. Clinical psychology is a wonderful career fit for me, because I get to use a personalized, strengths-based framework to work with patients over a number of sessions to help them achieve their goals and to face life’s challenges.

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

In my clinical work, I’m often working with children to help them develop meaningful friendships with others. One of the most thrilling things for me is experiencing the excitement in a child’s eyes and voice when they’re telling me about being invited to do an activity with a new friend — sometimes for the first time in their life — like being invited to a sleep-over or a birthday party. Helping children feel ‘seen’ and valued by their peers is an incredible feeling that really stays with you.

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?

I remember that when I first started facilitating therapy with children, I was so stressed about not doing it ‘right’. I used to take in a printed session outline that basically scripted everything I was going to say over an hour-long session! I quickly realized that children and parents aren’t robots — I had to use evidence-based practices in a flexible way that captured their interests and motivation, and met them where they were at. What I learnt from those early experiences is that effective therapy is a balance of science and art — taking the science of therapies that work and delivering them in a personalized, engaging way.

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?

  1. Persistence. When I first moved to New York City from Australia, my Australian credentials as a psychologist weren’t recognized here in the US. So, I went back to graduate school at Columbia University and took classes that I had taught at the University of Queensland in Australia! I sat my psychology licensing exam during a snowstorm in New York City, and my family traveled from Australia to come and celebrate when I passed. From this experience, I learnt that sometimes we have to take small steps backward in order to take giant leaps forward. Being based at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City has enabled me to build an incredible professional network that has helped to enhance the impact of my work. I’m not sure that would have been possible at the same scale if I had stayed in Australia.
  2. Having a Strong Sense of Purpose. When you are trying to do transformative things in healthcare, there are many setbacks and disappointments. Continually reflecting on why you and your team are doing what you are doing helps you to have the strength to keep trying, even during really tough times. As a translational scientist and clinician who is still going through the process of becoming a US citizen, I have really struggled to find funding to support the type of program development and applied research that I am passionate about. I’ve persisted in finding creative ways to do this work despite the funding obstacles, because I believe one of my purposes on this planet is to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people.
  3. Courage. Every year, I commit to pursuing new challenges in both my personal and professional life to ‘build my bravery muscle’. This year, I’m learning ballroom dancing with my husband. We are making LITERAL missteps and having to course-correct and find a way to keep moving forward!

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

So one of the most transformative clinical innovations that I’ve started using recently is an FDA-authorized digital tool to diagnose autism developed by Cognoa — It’s called Canvas Dx. At the moment, there are so many families throughout the US who are stuck on waitlists of 12 months or longer to get a formal Autism Diagnostic assessment for their child. We simply don’t have enough specialists to be conducting these assessments, and most of the standard diagnostic protocols are time-consuming and expensive. Research shows that early is everything when it comes to autism therapies and supports being optimally effective. A delay in diagnosis significantly impacts on a child’s ability to access these services and supports that they and their family desperately need — it’s truly heartbreaking. Canvas Dx is a super easy-to-use digital solution that captures and synthesizes data from a caregiver, healthcare provider, and two short videos of a child in their home environment. It uses responsible AI to indicate whether a child is likely to have Autism, and also provides the clinician with valuable insights into the child’s functioning across domains like communication and sensory needs to guide recommendations about appropriate therapies and supports. Training pediatricians and other health care workers to use quick and accurate diagnostic tools like this to diagnose autism could really help to address the waitlist crisis that families across the US are facing.

Another exciting project that I’m working on at the moment is using facial expression- and voice- recognition software to look at improvements in children’s emotion regulation after they participate in the Secret Agent Society online therapy program relative to an alternative program. Children play a frustrating video game before and after each program, and we examine changes in their anger, anxiety, calmness, and joy using AI-driven software. You know, one of the big criticisms of psychological science is that it relies on subjective self-report or other-report measures to evaluate therapy outcomes — we all have inherent biases in how we see things. Objective measures like this software may really help us to get a better sense of how effective therapies and treatments really are in addressing areas of clinical concern.

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?

For me, digital transformation means integrating digital solutions into healthcare to improve patient access and outcomes and to make processes more efficient. It’s about delivering value at multiple levels — to the patient, the provider, the organization, and the payer. Digital healthcare innovations also have the potential to meaningfully address health equity disparities if they’re developed and evaluated in partnership with diverse and representative populations.

These were all considerations for me personally when I started using the Canvas Dx autism diagnostic tool that I mentioned earlier. As a clinician, the digital tool allows me to conduct accurate autism diagnostic assessments in a fraction of the time that it usually takes, it’s really easy to use, and it provides a meaningful diagnostic summary report that was validated on a US-representative sample in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic background. I can flexibly use it for both in-person and telehealth consultations to improve the reach of my clinical services, and I like that any diagnostic conclusions that are made aren’t just based on my professional opinion, but also on an objective analysis of data that was collected from caregivers and video footage of the child.

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

I think that some of the pain points that the digital transformation can address are long wait lists, limited accessibility to evidence-based, personalized care, doctor shortages, clinician burnout due to the burden of paperwork, and challenges capturing data to indicate patient progress between doctor visits.

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

I would argue that one of the greatest barriers is cost. We need widespread policy reform to offer reimbursement for using evidence-based digital solutions that fit with clinicians’ and billers’ workflows. We need payors to offer reimbursement for these tools at a rate that recognizes their value in improving patient outcomes, reducing the length and cost of diagnostic assessments and therapies, and reducing or eliminating many associated downstream healthcare costs by providing timely clinical care.

Changing clinical practice often feels uncomfortable for clinicians. They may have fears about whether new innovations are as effective as companies claim they are, and whether they’ll be held professionally liable if ‘something goes wrong’, like a data privacy or security breach. Clinicians may also be concerned about the additional IT support demands that may be created by adopting new technologies, and the internal administrative burden of the IT review and approval process in large healthcare organizations. The time it takes to become trained in new technologies and having access to on-demand customer support are also important considerations for clinicians and administrative decision-makers. It’s important for the developers of new tech innovations to reduce the friction of adopting and utilizing them as much as possible for clinicians, patients, and organizations as a whole.

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 I mentioned before, using a digital diagnostic tool (Canvas Dx) as part of my autism diagnostic assessment process has reduced the time needed to conduct a reliable, valid autism diagnostic assessment by about 70%. It’s also reduced my report-writing time by roughly the same amount. That means I’m able to see more patients and for fewer, shorter visits, dramatically reducing the cost of my diagnostic services. I also have increased confidence in my clinical decision-making, as the output from the diagnostic tool includes an objective analysis of video clips of a child in their natural environment, as well as caregiver and clinician questionnaire responses. I received one-on-one training on how to use the platform at a time that worked with my schedule, and it took less than one hour.

Another example of how I’ve used digital innovation to improve patient care includes using a pediatric wearable device, by Kiddo Health, to better understand how a therapeutic program and environmental accommodations and supports are impacting a child’s stress levels on a day-to-day basis by collecting and reporting biometric data, like heart rate and skin temperature. Identifying patterns in data like this over time can help healthcare providers make adjustments to a patient’s treatment plan or recommend other changes to their daily routine or environment.

A third example that I’m looking to pilot on the Adolescent Partial Hospitalization Program at Weill Cornell Medicine is using a casual online game called StarStarter Rx to treat social anxiety in teenagers. The game uses a process known as Attention Bias Modification to help teens tune in to neutral or positive things around them rather than possible threat cues. We’re planning to examine whether playing the game for 12 minutes a day, four days a week over four weeks seems to contribute to improvements in their anxiety and mood. Games like this offer fun, effective, and scalable ways to address the youth mental health crisis that is sweeping our country.

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?

For starters, telehealth intake assessments and services help to address geographical barriers to care. Patients are able to access services and support resources from the comfort of their own home, often at a time that is convenient to them. Secondly, online screening and diagnostic tools and platforms that patients complete at their own convenience, that automatically score their responses and that collate and report relevant data in a way that is efficient and clinically meaningful to the provider, are game-changers to clinical care. Patients don’t feel that they’re wasting time sitting in a waiting room filling out forms, and clinicians or assistants aren’t spending time manually scoring forms or writing lengthy intake summaries or reports.

Based on your opinion and experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Effective Medical Practice” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1 . Build strong patient relationships that are based on empathic, personalized approaches to care. I work with many children who have diagnoses of Autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Anxiety Disorders -they’re all unique. I try to take a personalized approach to their care that connects with their interests and strengths and treats the whole person.

2. Commit to Ongoing Skill Development. Stay up to date with latest advances in clinical care — including tech innovations! I regularly attend conferences and professional training events to learn about new innovations in mental health.

3. Connect with your Community. Engage with local organizations and connect with other professionals at local events, workshops, and conferences to develop collaborative care networks to support patients.

4. Invest in Technology to Make Data-Driven Decisions and to Streamline Administrative Processes. Use reliable, valid digital diagnostic and monitoring tools to make informed clinical decisions and provide efficient, effective clinical care that is sensitive to patients’ changing needs and preferences. Tech tools can also be used to streamline patient scheduling, billing, record-keeping, and report-writing to enhance work satisfaction and reduce burn-out.

5. Cultivate a Practice Culture that attracts and retains employees who align with business values and priorities. For example, my employer (Weill Cornell Medicine) values honesty and integrity in its employees. So, the organization creates a supportive environment where employees are encouraged to proactively reach out to their supervisors to discuss mistakes that they make, and to develop plans for what they could do to prevent and manage them differently next time.

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.

My movement would focus on US healthcare reform to create streamlined pathways to adequately reimburse validated digital diagnostics and therapeutics at a federal level. This would help to address disparities in access to quality health care, reduce the cost of care, and improve clinical outcomes for all… Did I mention that two of my other character traits are ‘optimism’ and ‘idealism”?!

How can our readers further follow your work online? If readers would like to find out more about my work, they can go to:

Renae Beaumont, Ph.D. | Patient Care (weillcornell.org)

To find out more about the Secret Agent Society Program, they can go to Secret Agent Society

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

--

--

Authority Magazine
Authority Magazine

Published in Authority Magazine

In-depth Interviews with Authorities in Business, Pop Culture, Wellness, Social Impact, and Tech. We use interviews to draw out stories that are both empowering and actionable.

Responses (1)