026, HR Healthcare_Keynote Panel_Building the Next Generation Healthcare

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: At the next panel, that it will be speaking about building the next generation healthcare system with AI and Digital innovation. So please welcome to the stage Lance Bradshaw, Director of Workforce Transformation at Intermountain Health System, Ashley Ridgeway Washington, former Chief Human Resource Officer at JPS Health Network, and Ryan Stoneman, Manager of Talent Acquisition and Human Resources at AI Integration at UCHealth. Welcome, friends. Come in and have a seat

All of my notes were in order yesterday. Now they're in reverse order

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: For social distancing. You want us to consolidate?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: You want us to come in closer?

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Whatever makes y'all comfortable.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: It just felt-

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: I just wasn't sure where I was supposed to sit at this point. Okay. Hi. It's nice to have you all in person together.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: Absolutely.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Yeah. All right. So we have to start with us, right? We- I think we always have to start with us. So  what-

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: I'm gonna scoot over. They said it looks a little awkward. We're, like we're not friends.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Okay.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: Is that a little better?

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Okay. I like it much better. Thank you. I'm getting thumbs up. It was giving me bad feelings of going back to 2020 or something. All right. All right, let's start with us. So what skills do HR pr- professionals need to be successful using AI?

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: I'll start because I'll set the bar here, and then these guys will raise the bar.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: No.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: 'Cause we got... had a chance to meet a couple weeks ago, and I was just so impressed- with the caliber of the panel that I'm sharing the stage with. So anyway for those that don't know much about Intermountain Health, we're based in Salt Lake City, Utah. We have 34 hospitals, 400 clinics, and just about 70,000 employees, and we've grown pretty significantly over the last, our, our entire life cycle we've continued to grow. But particularly over the last few years, as we've merged with large health systems, acquired new clinics. We're building a new children's hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada. And th- that question right there is the focus of what workforce- Yeah

transformation is all about. How do we build not only the skills to meet the needs of today, but we really have to be proactive in thinking about w- what is the impact that AI not only has on us as a workforce, but our patients are demanding and expecting us to be able to leverage this technology.

And w- we continue to go through upskilling and reskilling exercises across our entire footprint, and that, that really is at the focus. So I'll share a little bit more about that as, as we go on, but that's kinda how we're thinking about it initially.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Thank you for getting us started.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: Yeah.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Okay. Ashley, why don't you go?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: So the long and short for me are three things. Curiosity, context, and healthy skepticism are the things that HR practitioners really need to be better at AI. The reality is that the technology is moving really fast. You gotta stay curious. You gotta play around.

You got to explore, and you need context because that sucker hallucinates all the time. And quite frankly, if you don't have context, you could really get yourself into trouble. And then healthy skepticism. We shouldn't be asking what AI can do. We really should be asking what it should do. And so that's part of kind of that journey to be able to use AI in a way that really improves your life and exits productivity.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Thank you.

Ryan Toedtman, Manager, Talent Acquisition & Human Resources AI Integrated, UCHealth: At UCHealth, we have top-down leadership support, I think, for the technology implementation, and a unique role of- someone in HR managing AI integration, which I think has been a really positive for us. There is so much happening so quickly. I think it's really important to be grounded in not a technology transformation, but really a workforce transformation in that we really need to break down old processes and where our barriers are to use intelligent automation as a force multiplier for our human impact and how our humans give back to our patients and ul- ultimately are improving lives.

So we've put a, a lot of focus on upskilling our teams. We've done internal education sessions, lunch and learns with both within HR as well and with leadership. We've put together an internal podcast that we do on a quarterly basis called "The Human Algorithm," that we bring people together to talk about these things and share examples of what they're doing in their space.

So we've taken it to the level that we've done the education as the groundwork as part of our crawl phase. We're walking now where we're using some of the technology and moving into the run. I think we will start to figure out where that intelligent automation really does evolve the way that we do our work.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Awesome. Thank you all. Yeah, we just, we have to start with us, right? Because we support everybody else. So one of you said, and I don't remember who said it on our phone call, I apologize. So one of you said, "We are asking people at the bedside that have spent their career at the bedside to embrace and even champion AI."

So w- that really hit me as a nurse because you're right, it's a whole different world. How do we ensure that the users and the leaders at the bedside feel comfortable? So what have y'all done that have helped your leaders and your clinicians feel comfortable with incorporating AI? Yeah.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: It's interesting because I as my title says, formerly at JPS Health Network, I actually left healthcare for a moment to figure this out and stood up a AI firm that really helped to dig into that.

And now I've been sucked back into healthcare and I'm now at another healthcare company 'cause I love healthcare and it loves me. But at the end of the day, the, the short answer is we don't. We don't. You all think about what in healthcare are we ever comfortable with? Healthcare workers are not fragile like a flower.

They're frag- fragile like a bomb. What we actually need to do is think about how we help them to understand the upside of AI, right? Because when you think about how you actually get adoption with AI, what you actually find is that when you're honest with people about what it can and can't do, when you appeal to self-interest and help them to understand how it can help them to do their jobs easier, better, or s- more safe, it will be something that they adopt naturally.

We have to give people the tools that they need. We have to give people the training that, that they need. But to assume that we need to make people comfortable in a space that is changing so fast is a farce. And to suggest in healthcare that we can is really where distrust is seeded because the truth of the matter is you have to be honest about what it is and what it isn't and what it can do and what it can't.

And so what I would say is that we need to help clinicians to understand how it allows them, it helps them to make their jobs w- have less friction to provide better care for patients, and ultimately to be able to do the thing they love to do without the barriers that they currently have.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Thank you.

Ryan Toedtman, Manager, Talent Acquisition & Human Resources AI Integrated, UCHealth: Yeah, Ashley, I think those are such good points. Something that we're doing at UCHealth that I think is along with that is, it's the education, but it's, and it's also the practicality. So we're building an AI academy within the organization right now, like college where you have a 101 for those folks that are just learning governance, learning ethics, learning how to prompt engineer, all the way up to a 401 and a capstone.

That also includes a leadership preparedness for managing digital teams, managing a digital workforce that, that is inevitably coming. The cool thing about it is it's built and structured as an education program, but it, the, it ends, the 401 ends with a capstone where we've involved IT already.

We've involved process improvement. We've broken down the process, and you're coming out of the education program with practical work that you're bringing, and intelligent automation that you're bringing back to your units or back to your business unit or things that are actually going to use the people that are learning with us, but also helping us evolve the workforce as well at the same time. So I think the education into prac- practicality of an output is going to be really cool to see evolve.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: Yeah, the only other thing I would add is I actually I love the, the comment you made about we're not- the goal isn't to get them fully comfortable, right? Because the change is so rapid. But I think h- how we're looking at it from a, a human readiness perspective is that we can help them be confident, right?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: Absolutely.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: They need to be uncomfortable because the, the change is happening rapidly. But if we focus so much on just the one tool and getting you fully comfortable with using that, it's gonna change tomorrow, and then they're gonna be thrown right back in that, right? So if we focus on that confidence then they're building that muscle that allows them to take advantage.

Because, if try to study the tools all day long, that's all you would be able to do, right? These things are changing so rapidly, you wouldn't actually be able to implement and get the work done. So that's what we're focusing on. I love the, the AI academy approach. We've done something similar at Intermountain.

But it's no longer this long range long term, let's pull everyone out of work and study this for six months, right? Some of our old approaches. It's embedding these microlearnings and these nano learnings at every touch point we can to help build that muscle that I talked about. So I love that description. Can

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: I say one more thing? Sure. Pull clinicians into the use case- ... and technology implementation process. Nobody gets a clinician on board or a caregiver on board like another caregiver, and often from a back office perspective, we think we know the process, but they have so much more knowledge.

And so pull them into the fray, 'cause I think that's another really important change adoption strategy that has to happen for many of these technologies to get sticky and take hold.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Oof. Absolutely, ashley. Excellent. 'Cause that, that takes care of that whole, "You've never done what I've done before.

How do you know that this is gonna work for me?" I also love the fact that y'all frame this in terms of what's in it for me is what I really want is a better relationship with the patients, being able to provide better care. So thank you for that. As a nurse and an older nurse, all this stuff is scary for me.

That snake definitely is on my head, and you make me feel safe as you talk about all this. So what stories can you share with our audience about how you've used AI to build resiliency and drive efficiency in your organizations? Maybe even failures that you've learned from that they can learn from. I feel like I'm my back to half of the room

Ryan Toedtman, Manager, Talent Acquisition & Human Resources AI Integrated, UCHealth: I can start. I don't have a particular failure 'cause there's lots. And I think one- I think when we started this work in meeting with our chief technology and our chief HR officer, our idea was, "Let's fail, but let's fail fast. Let's move with the technology that's evolved," 'cause, we're never gonna learn, we're never gonna continue to evolve what's working, what's not working, and how we can mold our w- workforce f- for the future if we don't fail fast.

So I don't have a particular failure instance, but I think the mindset of failing fast, learning from your mistakes and continuing to be a steward of learning and education in the AI space as fast it's, as it's evolving has been really important. We've had a number of agents that we've built.

We've met and partnered with vendors that we've discontinued or continued working with. So I think that would be my message is and that's my message to the folks that I'm trying to bring on board is it's okay to fail. Fail fast, enjoy, learn it, and evolve from it.

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: Yeah, I'm Ryan. L-lots of failure points, but I, again, I think that's the friction is where you learn, right? If these if the technology's too smooth, you're not actually digging in and learning what you need to as an organization. One one failure that just comes to mind early on when we were starting to build agents within the Microsoft Copilot Studio environment we had an interesting use case that we called...

we love to name our agents, right? That way we can distinguish them from each other. But we had this it was a corrective action buddy, so we called it CABI. And this was initially an idea that came out of our employee relations team. They wanted some agentic support to ensure that we were meeting policy on all of our corrective action documentation.

Thought it was a great idea, s- a safe kind of use case to kinda test it out. And as we started looking at deploying this one got to the point where they wanted to have a conversation with the employee about the behavior that was being documented. And as we partnered with them to review that, the leader said that, that never happened."

And so that was the hallucination that, the, the agent was introducing into it, trying to fill in the gaps, trying to be helpful. But that just enforced, reinforced the idea of not only human in the loop, but human at the helm, right? We are leading these- ... these, this technology, and it's so important that we reviewed that.

Luckily, we caught it before it advanced to, a termination or anything beyond that. But that I think was a great reminder for us. We want the governance in place. We wanna run quickly, right? Because the technology if we are too slow, that gap just continues to grow. But we wanna be thoughtful about it.

So I love the, the crawl, walk, run- Yeah ... walk, run mentality because I think that's important that we're sustaining that forward momentum but we're not running, getting out over our skis 'cause that's where I think we can get in trouble sometimes.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: So I've had the benefit of both- looking at this from the perspective of a consultive perspective with clients, and then actually doing this work every day inside organization. And what I would say is, you're right. There are too many failures to actually pick out one that I think is- ... juicy enough and didn't, isn't covered in an NDA.

But I say- I say that to say I think when I think of one thing that I think is a cautionary tale that we should really talk a little bit about is feeling like because you don't have it all together, you can't get started. And I had a client who was, I would say a medium-sized business, and was very hesitant, but had hired a lot of I'd say Gen Z consultants.

And so he was like, "We're not ready. We can't get started yet. We haven't picked a tool," and all of these things that we were discussing. And I said can you do me a favor and just get a sampling of your group and ask them to take this five-question survey?" It was just a basic assessment. And what we found is what I suspected, that he was having these deep strategy sessions with his leadership team about what they should do and what the governance should look like and what ecosystem.

Meanwhile, his consultants were dumping proprietary information in Claude, ChatGPT, and whatever other AI tool- ... that they were using to get their work done. And so what I s- what I think the cautionary tale for that is that you can't assume because your strategy is not together that people are not leveraging this technology in some way, and in the absence of really clear guidance about how to use it, you should assume that people are using it in a way that is probably not the way you want it used.

There is a benefit and a burden, and AI is a force multiplier of whatever you have. If you've got chaos, it's gonna force multiply that. If you've got clear decision rights and guards- guardrails, it's gonna force multiply that. And so what I would say about failures is that failure to act is probably the biggest failure.

And then secondly, I would say that the failure to understand that this is a human-first initiative, that really quite frankly, sustainability and scalability with any AI solution is predicated on trust, adoption, and usability. And if you've not gotten your data together, if you've not gotten your processes together, and you've not done the work to get people ready to embrace it, you have built beautiful technology that will sit on the shelf.

Yep. And those are the things that I would say are the biggest aha moments from navigating clients and navigating the myth internal to organization that results from tr- trial and error.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Yeah.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: Yeah.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Excellent. Excellent. All right. What questions do y'all have for this panel? Oh, got one really fast here. Wait one second. Here comes your mic. We'll wait a second. I didn't give notice to my mic runners.

Audience Member: Two questions. First one, Ashley, you just touched on it. So nine out of 10 health systems in the US are Microsoft shops. So are you allowing employees to work outside of Copilot on Claude or Gemini or Perplexity or name it?

Second question is for Ryan. If the AI Academy 101 is prompt engineering, what the heck is 401?

Ryan Toedtman, Manager, Talent Acquisition & Human Resources AI Integrated, UCHealth: Yeah. Do you wanna go first?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: So the long and short is that the organiz- I've just started a new job y'all, so I'm seven days in, right? ... We only allow our employees to use Copilot. For somebody like me, I'm a certified AI consultant, that's a big bummer, but I understand why.

I think we have just really delved into governance and readiness, and so they wanted to close the parameters and then blow them back out. What I hope is that over the next year, we will really do a deep dive in determining what products really do the best job of helping people X productivity. I'm gonna flat out say, and I hope there's not a Microsoft person in the room, I-- Copilot is-

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: The worst one ...

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: a easy button, but it is an inferior product, and so it really does constrain folks' ability to do what AI should be helping them do because it is just clunky and not where it needs to be.

And it's expensive. That's the other thing. I I'm babbling on, but one of the things that I will tell all the HR people in the room to start looking at is the understanding of token utilization because AI is moving toward utilizing tokens for all of their even enterprise solutions, and understanding how to be a good steward of tokens is going to have the same value as cost leadership in another three years.

It will be the difference between profitability and loss for those who are doubling down on AI investment. So if you don't know what that is, Google it, send me an email. I'll send you some stuff. But there is going to be... Your job is gonna-- part of that is gonna be token stewardship- ... in the next three years.

Ryan Toedtman, Manager, Talent Acquisition & Human Resources AI Integrated, UCHealth: So the question about AI Academy it's meant to address kind of a learner at any level. So our 101 and 201 is really more micro-learning, asynchronous learning with governance, ethics, prompt engineering, what tools to use when, how to use it, how it can partner with you. When you evolve more into the 401 level, it is more for probably leadership and people that are doing more process breakdown, process management, process change, with the end result being they're identifying an issue in their area of work developing the process automation that can address that issue, and coming out of that learning A, with knowledge how to manage a digital workforce, and B, implementing change for their units.

So the asynchronous is where it starts building that foundation, and the 401 is really taking that education into practicality and bringing it back to your workspace.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Very good. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. What other questions are out there? I have one right up here.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Audience Member: Scarlet Clark: Hi, Scarlett Clark with Hebrew Senior Life. I'm enjoying this conversation very much. But Ashley, you mentioned something around parameters and what we wanna... I think you all have. And what we wanna make sure our employees understand what can and they can't use. And in the interest of not getting too granular, when you think about an AI policy, what do we wanna make sure is written on there?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: At the most granular level, what we will allow AI to decide and what we will never allow AI to decide. People should be able to access on the internet a list of approved applications and not approved app- or approved applications, not approved is... You should assume that if it's not on the list, it's not approved.

Just like you sign off on your IT, and I actually have encouraged my organization to build it into the IT annual training so that people h- know exactly, can we use smart glasses or not? In healthcare, the answer probably is not for many organizations, right? What applications can we use and what can we not use?

And so there is probably a more technical governance policy and use case policy and, who gets provisioned, Copilot, the free version ver- versus the licensed version. But all of that is the kind of back operational stuff. Foundationally, you should have an easy-to-understand policy that makes a frontline associate understand what they can use, what they can't use, what they can put in, what they can't put in, and gives them real baseline clarity.

No PHI, no, employee information, nothing proprietary, and here are the tools that we will let you use. And have them prominently placed on the internet as a part of that education. And I love your idea of this academy. In a digital mindset kind of organization, a 101 is a part of your annual CBLs, so everybody gets a baseline understanding of how the organization rolls.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Thank you What, what other questions? What else?

Sure, I don't forget that side of the room. No? No questions? All right, we have a few minutes, so I'm gonna ask you one more then if I can, and that is how did you successfully address people's fear around AI? See, that's me and fear again here, but those snakes, how did you ad- address the fear that people had around AI use?

Lance Bradshaw, Director, Workforce, Transformation, Intermountain Health System: And maybe I'll chime in- Perfect ... because I don't know that we've fully eliminated it across the board, right? Yeah. And so what I mentioned a little bit earlier around the readiness and the confidence, I think for us has helped reduce that. But you have to acknowledge it. I think that's important that if you gloss over it, if we...

we do a great job on training. HR is we're the rock stars when it comes to developing training, and modules, and courses. And so everything, if we... That, that is the elephant in the room, and if we don't address that head-on, I think people are gonna see that, and that's just gonna...

that fear is gonna continue to grow. So I think that people need to hear, be heard, and understand what we're doing to address that. So we in our our caregiver experience surveys, we ask them how they're feeling about it. Do they feel like they have the proper tools?

They know that there's limits on the number of tools they can use, right? We set firewalls in place, kinda to the earlier point so that there is responsible use. But within that, then we let them have the flexibility, and then as they become more familiar with it, tho- those fears start to start to get reduced.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Thank you. Anybody else wanna add in or?

Ryan Toedtman, Manager, Talent Acquisition & Human Resources AI Integrated, UCHealth: I think, There's new fears on a daily basis, right? Right now, the one I'm hearing about is what is UCHealth doing about the environmental impact? ... And what is, our AI governance and new laws and decision-making, and the fear that probably everyone's thinking and always continues to think is w- what's the losses of jobs look like?

Yeah. I think those are all things that we don't hide from and embrace head-on. Again we're really focused on using the technology to be a force multiplier for our humans the giving people human work back and being, giving them the ability to be strategic consultants or human consultants or caregivers that are making an impact on people's lives on a day-to-day basis.

So I think education's really important. I think change management is really important with anything that you're doing. Don't use AI to use AI. Break down the process, understand the problem that you're trying to solve before you kind of approach. So that's a little bit of what we've done is break down does technology even make sense for this instance? Or is this something that we can solve with process change or other interventions?

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: Thank you. What I just heard in that answer, and this is last time I'll say it, I promise. But I just heard in that answer was keep me informed, keep me safe, keep me comfortable. Did you hear that? Remember the things that the, my research had shown. So thank you. Yeah. That was great answer.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP, CHRO, formerly JPS Health Network: The short answer is AI is scary. And if it's not scary to you, you need to delve into it and be more curious. And so I think we need to first acknowledge that we are in uncharted territory, but this is not the first time, right?

And part of what we do is we are... Many of us are scientists. We are discovering, we are delving, we are remaining curious. And I think back to when I first got in healthcare I started shadowing this nurse. She had a very unconventional approach on our unit, and I said, "How is it that you keep...

Y'all do really hard, scary, complex work on this unit. How do you keep people motivated?" 'Cause their engagement was high, and she wasn't a particularly warm and fuzzy woman. And she said, "On this unit, we keep it funky." That's what she said. She said, "On this unit, we keep it funky." And what that meant for me and what that...

how would I translate that into is that she was honest and transparent and vulnerable with her team about what it was and what it wasn't, and she never shied from that. And I think that's the opportunity we have, right? This is an unprecedented change. We are all navigating it together. We will navigate it together.

Speaking of navigating it together, leaders go first. And so your CEO should be talking about this. If you are a CHRO and you're not coaching your CEO on this, you should be. Your C-suite should be talking about what this means. And here's the reality. People may lose jobs, but there will be other opportunities, and we should be preparing and upskilling and getting our folks ready for those other opportunities.

I tell my staff all the time "AI may not take your job, but someone who leverages AI to be more productive will likely take your job." Yep. And so I think how we, manage fear is to keep being curious and to keep being honest and to realize that there are things AI should be used for and that it should never be used for.

Moderator: Mindy Spigel: All three of you, great answers. Thank you so much. So with... Yes. Thank, thank you so much for joining me up here, and those were... That was a great session talking about AI. Once again, let's recognize my panel.

Thank you. Y'all did a fabulous job. Thank you.