It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by technology, especially when change and innovation seem to come so rapidly. Tom Koulopoulos, founder and chairman of the Delphi Group and author of Reimagining Health Care, joins Health Calls for the premiere of Season Five, “Technology and Humanity.” Koulopoulos discusses how he began to research health care as a futurist and why he thinks providers have an immense opportunity to utilize technological innovation to their advantage. He also names potential pitfalls of technological dependence while giving an optimistic outlook on the future of health care technology.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by technology, especially when change and innovation seem to come so rapidly.
Tom Koulopoulos, founder and chairman of the Delphi Group and author of Reimagining Health Care, joins Health Calls for the premiere of Season Five, "Technology and Humanity." Koulopoulos discusses how he began to research health care as a futurist and why he thinks providers have an immense opportunity to utilize technological innovation to their advantage. He also names potential pitfalls of technological dependence while giving an optimistic outlook on the future of health care technology.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Health Calls on any of your favorite podcast streaming services or on our website, www.chausa.org/podcast. Give us a five-star rating while you're at it… we'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about what conversations we should have next!
Resources
Visit Tom Koulopoulos's website to purchase Reimagining Health Care or his latest book Gigatrends
Brian Reardon (00:07):
This is Health Calls, the podcast of the Catholic Health Association. I'm your host, Brian Reardon, and this is season five of our show. And this season we're covering the topic of technology and humanity. Today I'm joined by Josh Matejka, our executive producer. And in just a moment, I'm going to introduce Tom Koulopoulos. He's founder and chairman of a Delphi Group and an author. Josh, to start with you, season five. We've got a theme for this season, for the episodes that we have coming. What prompted this theme? Well, I
Josh Matejka (00:38):
I think based on just feedback we were getting about the show, and I will say it's weird to be on this side of the booth this time, but based on feedback we were getting about the show and really based on feedback we got at Assembly, we knew that something that our members really cared about was what's happening with technology right now? What does the future look like? Artificial intelligence is obviously a major, major thing that everybody's looking at wanting to be on the front end of and not being reactive. So we felt like this would be a good thing to cover and make sure that we're having these provocative conversations that are being on the leading edge of technological innovation so that we're giving the best possible stuff for our members.
Brian Reardon (01:18):
And you mentioned Tom's presentation assembly, which was very well received by those who attended, and that was of course back in June of this year. You heard his presentation. Did you have a takeaway or two from that that you want to share?
Josh Matejka (01:30):
Well, I think, I don't want to speak for Tom, obviously he's the expert and we'll get to hear a lot from him. But I just think the thing that really stood out to me was that it's possible to maintain our humanity and it's something we should strive for. It's great to be innovative and it's great to look forward and try to be on the cutting edge, like I said. But a lot of what our ministry comes back to is humanity and that kind of person to person contact that our founders and our founders were so big on and meeting the needs of people that we're all around them. And it's great to want to innovate. It's great to want to be first and best, but at the same time, if we're losing that humanity, if we're losing that human connection, we're losing something that is integral to our ministry. So hearing Tom talk about the fact that that's not only possible but very doable and something we should strive for was really powerful and I'm excited to hear him talk about it again. Yeah,
Brian Reardon (02:26):
And I think the other thing about the theme for the season, it really fits nicely with our vision statement. We will embrace bold change to elevate human flourishing. It's really that bold change just is constantly happening. But again, it gets back to what you were saying that humanity and human flourishing is really what Catholic healthcare is all about. So with that, let's dive into our episode one, which is the topic for this episode is maintaining human connections amid technological innovation. And again, joining us, our guest is Tom Koulopoulos, again, founder and chairman of the Delphi Group. Tom, thanks for being with us.
Tom Koulopoulos (02:58):
Brian. It is such a pleasure to be here to speak with you. Thank you.
Brian Reardon (03:02):
Again, we mentioned your presentation at assembly. I think what my takeaway from it, I asked Josh what his was, but really the fact that we are in this sort of just flurry of technological innovation, it just seems like every day there's something new coming at us. And of course AI has been getting a lot of attention, but I actually was talking to a colleague the other day that my wife and I went back and watched The Matrix a couple of weekends ago. She'd never seen it. And of course that movie I think came out in the nineties and in the first five minutes they're talking about AI and I'm thinking, well, this is not a new concept, obviously. And even before a movie like that, I think in science fiction it's been talked about for decades, but we've noticed obviously in the media there's a ton of attention, but really technological innovation, it's more than just when we think of AI, we think of chatGPT. So I guess my first question to you is, is that recognizing that we're just again, amidst this tremendous and what seems like overwhelming rapid technological change from your perspective, where do we kind of stand? Can you kind of level set for us where we are at this moment, I guess in history?
Tom Koulopoulos (04:03):
Yeah, I think a level set in terms of where we are in this moment in history is a great way to position how we start this conversation. Brian, look, let me start by saying that I've been in this industry for 40 years now, and I've seen a lot of changes. Some of them monumental like the internet, others and most of 'em fairly incremental. But what I've noticed, to your point about being overwhelmed over the course of the last 60 years since really the advent of computing, what we've done is laid more and more technology at the doorstep of the knowledge worker. So whether you're a primary care physician or whether you are an analyst on Wall Street, I don't care what your job is. If you're working with knowledge and information, you have more and more technology that you also have to manage. And that technological burden presents a cognitive and an emotional burden on people.
(04:53):
We have to be our own support system when it comes to technology. Anyone who has an elderly parent and has tried to coach them through using an iPhone or using apps knows what that cognitive burden is like. But it weighs heavily on all of us. And I think what we have to keep in mind is that we've been consistently more and more overwhelmed by technology. Certainly it's made our lives better, it has added value to our lives, made us more secure in some ways, perhaps healthier, but it's also created an enormous burden. I think we're finally at the point right now, and I bring this up because we feel overwhelmed, but I think we're on the precipice of a breakthrough that will take away much of that burden. And part of the promise for me when I look at AI is how AI can alleviate that burden, can take on the role of being my technology associate collaborator, and allow me as a human to do what humans do well, to be creative, to problem solve, to form relationships, to be empathetic.
(05:53):
That's the humanity of our work, and all of us want to do more of and less of the technology. So I think that we're at the end of a 60 year track record of increasingly burdening the worker ourselves. The way we live, work, and play has been burdened by technology, and we're finally at a point where we may actually see that burden begin to alleviate. And that to me is an incredibly hopeful point in time and one that I always emphasize because people see this as yet one more way that technology will create more complexity, more difficulty, more tedium in my life. And I think it's just the opposite.
Brian Reardon (06:30):
And want to dig a little deeper into that because I think a lot of us are concerned with our own behavior, with our kids' behavior about how much screen time we spend. And that I think is associated with looking at technology, whether it's social media, whether it's our work emails, whether it's just whatever. And now it's in the palm of our hand. It used to be sitting maybe in a living room or on a kitchen counter being a tv. So you're saying we're on this cusp, but perhaps giving a little bit of a break from that, can you talk a little bit more about how that might look?
Tom Koulopoulos (07:01):
So you bring up some interesting points here, Brian. One of them is this notion of screen time. I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon. I think we've become very much a voyeur society. We love to watch ourselves and to watch the world and to watch all of the craziness that surrounds us in social media. And there's danger in that. Obviously there's danger in that from the standpoint of children getting rather twisted and incorrect view of what the world really does look like. There is of course the specter now of deep fakes and will we know what's real and what's not real? How much of what we see will we be able to trust? I think there's going to be a period during which we will have to struggle with this notion of screen time and how do we pry ourselves away from our screens?
(07:52):
But let me give you a glimpse of what that might look like because you asked the question. I want to answer it directly. Part of what AI promises, and I do believe this will be one of the more significant benefits of ai, is that it will become our navigator. Well, today I have to spend my day most of my day looking at a screen spreadsheets, word documents, emails, all these things and digest all this information, make sense of it. What if AI could do all that for me? What if I was allowed to sit back and express my creativity in whatever way makes sense in what I do if I'm a primary care physician? What if that meant not having to deal with a medical record? What if that meant not having to stare at the screen and at Epic or Cerner or whatever I'm using rather than being able to look the patient in the eyes?
(08:38):
See, I think that's the promise that I see, is that AI can alleviate the burden by taking us away from the screen and focusing us more on those aspects of our job that truly allow us to express the value of being human, which in the case of healthcare is very often the relationship. And I don't think you'll find any doc who would, or clinician for that matter, who would say, I'd rather look at a screen than look at a patient. And if they respond in the affirmative of that, and they're probably in the wrong profession. So that's part of the way that I see it playing out. It becomes our navigator. It becomes our assistant imagining having a very smart protege that can sift through all of what you do today on your screen for you, and then come back and say, here's the summary. Here's the important stuff that you should know in order to be able to take action and to make decisions. That's where I see AI being able to eventually to pry us away from that screen time. But look, it's going to take a while. It's not going to happen quickly. And we are definitely in the, I think a very tumultuous period where we will have to struggle a great deal with that transition from where we are today to where I just described. But I do believe we'll get there and relatively soon, certainly within the decade.
Brian Reardon (09:48):
Well, and what you just described. So I was imagining being in a physician's office talking to my doctor and AI listening into our conversation and being able to take that conversation, feed it into the medical record. And so again, that physician and I are having a conversation, he's now turning around to look at a laptop. Is that I think a fair way to describe what that might look like in the real world?
Tom Koulopoulos (10:08):
Precisely. I think you hit the nail, right, and that's exactly what would happen. We call it bedside manner. We have all kinds of euphemisms that we use when we talk about the patient clinician relationship. At the end of the day, it's making it more intimate, it's making it more meaningful. And look, who in healthcare hasn't heard of the placebo effect? When patients are given hope, when they're given the benefit of that sort of trust in their provider, their outcomes improve. So it's no small thing to emphasize build and amplify that relationship. So yes, it's exactly what you just described in simple terms, but that's very profound implications I think.
Brian Reardon (10:48):
And at Assembly, you talked a lot about re-Imagining Healthcare. That was the topic. You've also released a book with that title. What drew you to healthcare as a topic, Tom? It
Tom Koulopoulos (10:57):
Wasn't so much being drawn to it as it was being dragged into it, to be quite honest with you. I had two, I've written a book back in 2008. The book was called Smart Sourcing. It was a book I wrote on a lark because I had been involved in the outsourcing movement. I had worked with, for those of you that might recall who are in my demographic, Ross Perot and some of the work he had done in outsourcing. So I wrote a book about outsourcing and I focused a bit on healthcare because I thought in healthcare, we really should focus on our core competence, which is caring for the patient, not all the administrative burden that could be outsourced to someone else or some other entity. And a few folks got ahold of that book, Cal Knight, the former CEO at John Muir Healthcare in Northern California was one of them.
(11:38):
United Healthcare folks were others. And they sort of ganged up on me and said, you know what? We love the book, but you need to write this specifically on the topic of healthcare. And at first I pushed back and at some point, I can't remember if it was Cal or someone else at United Healthcare, they said, me, look, the reason that you should write this book is because you are what we will all be. You are an outsider and a patient. And ultimately the really big problems, and I'm not claiming that I can solve the problems. I'm just chipping away at this the way we all are. But ultimately, some of the biggest problems can only be solved from the outside in, not from the inside out. Because when you're inside, you're subject to all of the constraints, the box thinking that says this is unsolvable.
(12:23):
You see the problem day in, day out, it's difficult to step away from it and to gain any true objectivity when you're on the outside, you have that gift. And so I took a stab. It was a challenging stab to understand this system. At times, I felt like the medical school student who comes down with every malady they can possibly imagine, when I looked at healthcare and pulled back the covers, I realized there were a lot of pieces of it that needed attention. But at the end, I came out very hopeful because there were role models. I think we can find those role models in all of our experiences in healthcare, those docs, those clinicians, those providers who really do exceptionally well at caring for us as people. And I walked away from that project, from writing that book with a real sense that we can solve a lot of healthcare without getting wrapped around the political diatribes. Eventually, yes, legislation was necessary. There's so much that we can do today with technology to help move things in the right direction. And we've been talking about ai. AI is certainly part of that, but just one part of it. There's so much more that I think we can be doing to focus more of healthcare on the patient and not on the administration and the clerical aspects of healthcare.
Brian Reardon (13:29):
And as the population ages, we're going to have more patients to take care of and fewer workers. Can you talk a little bit about how technology can support those of us in healthcare as we continue on in this transition that is coming where there's going to be few of us younger people caring for our parents, our grandparents?
Tom Koulopoulos (13:50):
There's so much in what you just said, Brian. First of all, burnout is real in the healthcare profession. It's very real. It's very sad. I see. I have friends who are clinicians, who are nurses, who are docs, and I see it day in, day out. I have a son-in-Law who just finished residency and I see the pressures on him. My daughter is in healthcare. I see how desperately she wants to make a difference and how important that difference will be. She focuses specifically on pediatrics and autistic youth, and I worry for all of those folks because they are being drawn into a quagmire that is so burdened with administration and technology and not enough of their time is spent being able to focus on their patients. So to your question, I think the way it will change the tenor of healthcare is by us to do what we got into healthcare in the first place to do, which is to care for people, to focus our energies, our efforts, our talents on that piece of the equation, and allow technology to do much of the rest of it. Not unlike what you just described with the PCP visit in the doctor's office where AI is the observer and taking the notes and doing everything that today has to be done on a keyboard by the docs simultaneously while they listen to the patient. So I do believe that AI more specifically will give us the opportunity to refocus on what is most important in healthcare, which is that relationship with the patient, the continuity of that relationship, and the understanding and the hope that comes from that relationship.
Brian Reardon (15:38):
And I love the fact how optimistic you are about the potential of technology in bringing humanity to the fore in caregiving. What are some of the dangers though, of the sort of rapid expansion and involvement of all things big data in the work we do in healthcare,
Tom Koulopoulos (15:58):
There are many risks there. Some that we've already seen is the inherent bias of some data sets. If you feed data that has bias to an ai, the AI will reflect those biases, and those can be quite dangerous. Whether they be racial biases, whether they be gender biases, whatever they might happen to be, if they're baked into the data, they will end up being part of the way AI perceives the world and provides advice and analysis on that data. So that's one big risk, and we have to make sure we put in place guardrails and are careful to clean that data to make sure that data is representative and lacks to whatever degree as possible those biases. The other piece of it is that no technology is inherently positive or negative. Every technology cuts both ways. We split the atom and we created nuclear bonds, but we also created nuclear medicine.
(16:51):
We've saved countless lives. I would project many more lives than were taken through the horror of nuclear weapons. No, no. Technology is without both sides of that equation. Our responsibility is to make sure that on net the technology has benefit and allows us as a society to use that technology with net benefit, not a net liability that's on us as humans to do. Anyone who's worked with customer support and has dealt with an interactive voice response system knows the other risk of technology, which is that we dehumanize the process. We take the human out of the equation and look, today we're at a point where AI can't do it for us. It's just not smart enough. It will be soon, but we still need the humans. And in healthcare, it is a cornerstone of healthcare. As I said earlier, the greatest thing you can provide a patient with is hope.
(17:46):
And that comes from the relationship, not from the ai. So we are humans dealing with humans, and that is the most essential ingredient of healthcare. I believe at the end of the day, and to whatever degree we can use that as our North star, that whatever application of technology, whether it be AI or anything else that we use in healthcare better to amplify the humanity of healthcare, we are then following I think the right direction. We are taking the right path, but that has to be our north star. Without that, the risks are that we dehumanize, we make healthcare much less of a relationship driven experience and purely a data-driven experience. Both are necessary, but at the end of the day, that human relationship I think is the single most important contributor to positive outcomes and hopefulness of patients.
Brian Reardon (18:37):
No, that's great. And it gives me hope, just listening to it. So my final question, not only did you present to our assembly, but you actually took some time after the presentation to talk with some of the leaders from Catholic Healthcare. I guess my final question, was there anything from that conversation that was either asked or shared among the group that stood out to you that could be some advice for those listening in Catholic healthcare to this episode? I think
Tom Koulopoulos (18:58):
One of my biggest takeaways from the event, and it was a very important takeaway for me personally, and I've seen this over and over again, and I would emphasize it because I think it ends up becoming the most important ingredient, long-term in the success of any organization, but more specifically a healthcare organization is being mission-driven and believing that mission is more than just words on paper. It's more than just what you say and what you repeat in the hallways. It is what you believe, and you are driven by that mission and that mission ultimately, that mission of humanity is at the center of everything that you do, and it guides your choices. It guides your decisions. I think that was my takeaway, and from all the conversations I had, that was the most important and most consistent message that I got, is that being Mission-driven and believing in that mission can have enormous benefits in making the right choices about technology and all the other things that we have to make choices about in a very complex industry like healthcare.
Brian Reardon (19:57):
Thank you for that affirmation. I think that's really important statement and way to conclude this conversation. So Tom Koulopoulos, again, he's founder and chairman of the Delphi Group. He's also an author, and Tom, you want to share a book or two and maybe if you've got a website for our listeners in case they want to read more and gain more of your insights.
Tom Koulopoulos (20:16):
I'd love to. Thank you. So my latest book is Gigatrends. You can find out more about that gigatrends.io. It talks about a lot of things that we just mentioned, and my personal website is tkspeaks.com, tkspeaks.com. You can find out a lot more about my speaking and a lot of the research that I'm doing of late.
Brian Reardon (20:35):
Thanks again to Tom Koulopoulos. This has been Health Calls, the podcast of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. I'm your host, Brian Reardon. Our show's executive producer is Josh Matejka with additional production support from Yvonne Stroder. This episode was engineered by Brian Hartmann at Clayton Studios in St. Louis, Missouri. You can find health calls on all of your favorite podcast apps and services, as well as our website, chha usa.org/podcasts. And if you've enjoyed the show, go ahead and give us a five-star rating. We'd love to hear from you. As always, thanks for listening.