Pioneering Change: The Role of Innovation (ft. Jason Hill)

Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marx.

Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thanks for listening and watching. We know that you have a lot of different choices. I consume a lot of media, and I'm sure Dr. Jason Hill does as well. And the fact that you're spending time with us is, is awesome. So thank you for doing that and we'll make it worth your while. 'Cause again, I have a great guest here, Dr. Jason Hill. Jason, welcome to Digital Voices.

Ed, thanks so much for having me.

Great to be here. This is gonna be so much fun because not only do you do great work, but you're just a good human and that's my favorite type of people and it makes for interesting friendships and conversations. So we'll jump right in and I'm just was thinking, Jason, how far far back we go. I know we've both been around the industry for a little bit and we've, we've interacted, but more formally in the past year or so, we got a chance to be on the same stage together and do different things. And it's been a lot of fun. I'm like, dang, Jason's such an interesting guy. I just have to have him on Digital Voices. So here we are. But Jason, the most important thing everyone is anxiously waiting to hear the answer to is what songs are in your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Okay. Yeah, that's great. So a thing about me you may not know is I'm a huge Christian hip-hop fan, which is somewhat of a pretty narrow genre. And I really like— 2 of my favorite bands in that space are TobyMac, who's just an amazing Christian artist that spans like a wide variety of different genres, and Capital Kings, which is a group of of hip-hop artists out of Washington, DC that do a lot of like hip-hop and electronic mix-ups for Christian. And that's actually literally what's on my playlist behind me right now. So yeah.

That's awesome. I do not know Capital Kings. I will look 'em up, but I'm a huge DC Talk fan. Oh my God.

DC Talk. I love DC Talk. I grew up, that was, that's my formative years, Ed. No lie.

Oh my gosh. I didn't know that. That, that is so funny. And yeah, TobyMac, of course, for those listeners, watchers, TobyMac is one of the 3 founders of DC Talk. Game changers back in the day, right? Because no one in Christian music was sort of the traditional gospel-y type stuff, which is good, it's great, and worship, of course. But all of a sudden you had these 3 guys who, like, yeah, came out of the DC area as well, and they were bringing in new styles, new flavor, and they were crossing generations, they were crossing genres. Yeah, it's just so many different things and great songs. And my favorite is still The Hard Way.

It's called The Hard Way. Yes, yes. I would say Jesus Freak is probably my favorite, but yes, it's a— Hard Way is amazing. I love it. Yeah.

They had so many profound— the lyrics. Yeah, it's super foundational for me as well. So we'll, we'll drop DC Talk in the links as well. For those who want to go retro.

That's really cool.

What about life message and mantra? Are there sort of words that you live by?

You know, I think it's just generally be a good person. I know it sounds very general, but I think like a lot of work in business as well as in life and healthcare, it's very easy to, you know, some might think that it's hard to lose track of mission in healthcare. I would argue that it's easy to lose track of mission in healthcare. And if you're not really focused on the The fact that you're there to care for people and to provide benefit to them in sometimes the most difficult times of their life, whether that's 5 steps removed as an informaticist or at the bedside guiding them through their last breath as a doctor. Like those things are things that we, that I, or even as a husband and father, being able to lead and guide my family, just being a good person, being Christ-centered is something that's really important to me. Not to turn this into a boss guys, but that's something I view.

We, we bring our whole person to our work when we should be the same persons and as you are clearly same person at work as we are at home and church, synagogue, wherever we might choose to worship. And so, yeah, I'm all about it. That's great. Yeah. So tell us more, like, who are you? What's your story? What, tell us, where did you grow up? Where were you born?

Yeah. So I was a Navy brat. So my dad worked on submarines. So I grew up bicoastally, San Diego. I spent a lot of time in South Carolina, a lot of time in Virginia and Norfolk, that whole area. And then when my dad, unfortunately my mom and dad didn't last in their marriage. And so when that divorce happened, we moved to Wichita, Kansas, and I lived in Wichita, Kansas for a while with my mom. And I decided to go to college in Louisiana, which is a very interesting decision that Probably takes a long time to unpack, but essentially just saying that I really wanted to find a good school for engineering. And my dad's an engineer, my wife's an engineer. I have a strong engineering background in my family and wanted to do that. So I went to Louisiana Tech University as a biomedical engineer and doing a lot of work in micromanufacturing, which is the whole reason why I went there. So they had a nanomanufacturing institution I thought was fascinating and super cool. And I couldn't get into Caltech or MIT, so that was the next step down. I went to Louisiana, drove 1,200 miles to a place I know not a single person was, and then set up school there. And then luckily, as luck would have it, I met the love of my life in Louisiana Tech. She's also an engineer, a biomedical engineer.

Cool.

And then we— I went to med school at LSU, and then third year of med school, Hurricane Katrina hit, and I had no med school. Then for the next 6 months. And so I spent the next 3 to 5 months working. My wife lost her job. I had no source of income either. We were, we lived out of a farmhouse in Jonesville, Louisiana with a friend of mine and spent those 3 months living with my wife and her entire family who are all Katrina immigrants in this farmhouse. And I spent the day working for the Red Cross in Alexandria and the nights in the line at the Walmarts where I worked for WIC. And for Medicaid because my daughter was 3 months old at that time. And so I had a 3-month-old baby and I had to figure out a way to work. So that actually instilled in me a lot of, well, being in the military and a migratory lifestyle as well as like, as well as losing all of my worldly possessions in Katrina installed me a sense of self-reliance that I don't necessarily think most people have been through those experiences.

Yeah.

I would've had that. And so I then went to probably 8 or 9 different states and medical schools to finish out my training for the next year and a half, and eventually ended up in Houston where my wife started working at NASA. And then I worked as a resident at, at UT Houston. I finished there and the family wanted to come back to New Orleans. So I, I moved back here and was lucky to get a job working as a hospitalist at Ochsner. And I worked there at one of the new hospitals they had acquired. Uh, which was quite interesting because when I worked in Houston, I was in probably one of the top academic centers, top informatics places in the, in the country, if not the world. Uh, and then I moved to this little tiny podunk hospital in Slidell, Louisiana, which had no electronic health record really. They had like people, and this is in 2010, wasn't a long time ago.

Yeah.

This is where people were running, put like labs in all the charts and, and, uh, and I would look at x-rays like the old-fashioned way. going down and getting the films. And I was like, what did I do with my career? A year later, Ochsner said, we really want to upgrade all the hospitals in our system to a new electronic health record called Epic. And my hospital that I worked at was the first one in the entire system. So I led the charge. I built a lot of the order sets for Epic, and people quickly realized that I was good at that sort of nerdy thing and willing to do it. I think probably Probably more the second one and not the first one. Maybe I wasn't amazing at it, but I liked doing it, which no one liked doing it at that time. And so then I repeated that formula with 45 other hospitals with Epic and went live with multiple— spent probably the better part of 8 to 9 years doing go-live after go-live after go-live and implementing electronic health records at a lot of hospitals. So I learned a lot about the electronic health record. And then that's when I started working, actually building, hacking, updating the health record and doing things that more— many people didn't do at that time. So got involved in machine learning and got involved very much in predictive modeling and doing that work and eventually won a HEMS Davies Award for that work in our sepsis. And, uh, and, and then out of that and sort of understanding that world of complex math and computer and design and UI in that space. And I was privileged to get the job of the clinical innovation officer. at Ochsner to work with our innovation team and kind of serve as their clinical advisor. And that has led me to where we are and having had that happen at the same time that the giant AI revolution happened. Also probably more luck than talent on my part, but luckily was able to use my talents to do a lot of really amazing things for the health system and the greater, broader world of AI and healthcare.

Yeah. Jason, you have a fascinating background, which again is one of the reasons that we're together right now on Digital Voices. But before we sort of leave the personal side, 'cause I do wanna jump into your role as the clinical chief innovation officer, is you also are an MMA fighter.

Yes.

I mean, gosh, that blows my mind. Tell us about that. I mean, that's a crazy, that's crazy.

Yeah. So, you know, I think all MMA fighters, all fighters in generally start out as bullied kids. And so I, you know, grew up in the military, which there was a lot of prowess put on physical capability and, and And I'll be being very frank and honest, I was not the most physically capable of young child. And so I got beat up a lot. And luckily the other part of the military that was really cool is that there's a lot of people who know how to fight that are also in the military.

Yeah.

So sort of goes together, right? And so at that time at work, started, you know, there was some karate dojos that were setting up and this was sort of like the mid-'80s when Karate Kid was starting to become popular and karate dojos were becoming a thing. And started working at those karate dojos and then going from base to base, dojo to dojo. I spent a lot of my free time hitting things.

Yeah.

And kicking things. And I got my first black belt in Shotokan karate when I was around 14, something like that. 13, 14. Yeah. And went into taekwondo and got a black belt in that and then went into Kuk Sool Wan, which is sort of a derivation of taekwondo with, uh, With, um, with grappling, uh, I got a, uh, blue belt in that, added Muay Thai, and then went to Krav Maga, which is an Israeli martial art that's very focused on self-defense. There's no black belts in that, by the way.

Right.

They just get certificates and ended up getting my, one of my certificates and training for that, and then moved on to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. So it's been a lifelong experience for me.

Yeah.

I've done, uh, amateur fights, which are a lot of fun. Um, and also extremely scary at the same time. But Yeah, I did a lot of those fighting both in structured karate where I'm like fighting in a karate, as a karate practitioner. And then later on as MMA became popular, I sort of fought in mixed martial arts fights where you could do things that you couldn't do in a standard karate fight, like take them to the ground. And that was a source of great joy for me. And it still remains a source of great joy for me. I was actually literally punching and kicking a bag this morning as part of my workout. But I don't do it as much competitively anymore because it's not so great on my 45-plus-year-old body. So, it's one of those things that you just sort of reminisce about as you get older.

Yeah. So, your wife, when you guys first got together, she knew this part of you already because you were already doing a lot. She didn't know. So, this happened after.

She thought I was a good Christian boy and did not realize. I think she saw some of the— she probably saw some of the belts and martial arts paraphernalia I had around. assume things. My wife also, by the way, is Vietnamese. She's Asian. So she has a martial arts background herself and her family does. And both of my kids actually, my oldest daughter has a 3rd-degree black belt and my son trains weekly in MMA. It's actually his training tomorrow. So it's not just like what I do, it's literally what the whole family does. So it was pretty widely accepted. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. So yeah, jumping back to your career. Yeah, let's talk about your role. So tell us about your role. Like, there's probably not a, like a normal day, but give us a flavor of some of the things that might happen in a normal month.

Yeah, so, you know, it's one of those roles that you kind of make up as you go along, as I'm sure you had in your long career. And I think what it became initially was a vector for how do we develop internal innovations. We had a whole center with data science team and biomedical engineers, content creators and stuff like that where we could do different innovative projects. It rapidly became how do we scale AI as an organization? So that org— so the role really went into vendor management. A lot of the, what we would consider to be traditional innovation, but for Ochsner was not traditional. We didn't do a traditionally like vendor management type, like co-development program. A lot of work had been with more like internal development of our own teams. So I had to learn to flex those muscles relatively quickly and got involved in venture capital, which is fascinating and amazing and exciting and dynamic work. And, and started thinking through like, how do you integrate startups into the culture of healthcare? And that was probably a process that took me around 2 years. I wouldn't say I've mastered it, but at least I feel like I've gotten better at it to where I'm not, you know, um, making as many mistakes as I made when I first started this. And I think that then became into like, how do we develop a coordinated AI strategy? And so the innovation team rapidly sort of morphed into, into a strategic body and execution body around artificial intelligence. And I think it's still there and still working and developing and changing today.

Yeah. What are one or two things that you all have done that you're pretty proud of, you know, through clinical innovation? You mentioned sepsis a little bit earlier. And winning the Davies Award. And what's one thing sort of in the future that you're looking at?

Yeah, so I think the sepsis thing was really something that I, I feel like was a, was a huge win for the organization. So I can tell you that we started this project in the middle of COVID which is not ideal, by the way, for any project to do. But it was just me and a data scientist, uh, Jackson, who now works at Sutter, who's, uh, who has, um, kind of got together this core of like Epic had this sepsis model and the team was like, well, the sepsis model isn't really working and we don't really know why.

Yeah.

And so we went in and figured out the reason it wasn't working is cuz like no humans were looking at it and making decisions on it. So we went and quickly got together some things in Epic. We started hacking things in Epic and doing things that no one else had done and creating checklists, creating dynamic lists in Epic that would hide or show depending on things. And then at the same time, coupled with a project manager outta the quality side that then created this whole, we called it the collaborative around sepsis, the sepsis collaborative where, yeah, we had a bunch of people Didn't have official roles, no titles, no org charts, nothing. Just humans trying to fix a problem. And some of them were literally like line-level doctors who were on the thing. Some of them were like the VP of quality. And we all in the same room and we all leveled the playing field when it came to org charts. And we're like, well, what are the things that are working and what are the things that are not working? And we literally went through day by day iterating and changing those things that are working and not working. And then. Eventually we created champions. We sort of anointed them at different campuses in our system, and we started seeing the numbers. And then we created something that was really crazy, which is a universal time zero, which is where we basically said, time zero is done 20 different ways at 20 campuses by 30 different abstractors. Let's create a set of SQL criteria that maybe it's not right all the way, but at least it's a single goal we can aim at.

Yeah.

And we did that, and it was a giant spaghetti code of SQL. If you look at it, you wanna cry, but it worked. And we're able to get sepsis time zero back the next day on 1,200 patients. And you could then drive quality. So then we used that to work backwards and created a bunch of work around it. And that was our work on sepsis. Eventually saved over 2,000 lives over the course of 3 or 4 years. Yeah, it was a, it's a project I'm very proud of to this day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's amazing. That's great. What, what about one thing in the future that you're sort of looking at?

So. Uh, gosh, if I'm gonna say the word agentic AI, I think my, my little buzzer is gonna buzz me. I would say the one thing I'm looking at, it's really important to me, is maybe it's not like a single project, but it's the primary constraint point of all of the issues that I'm seeing with AI and technology in healthcare. And it's, we're not taking into account the workflow change that has to happen.

Mm-hmm.

And I think like what I see, and this is again, part of I'm actually sort of adjusting my position at the beginning, at the end of this year to have a leg in operations because I see right now that the technology is there. It's absolutely there.

Yeah.

And the way the, the capability of it to do change is unbelievable. However, the humans don't know that and no one has taken into account the humans as to how they can change the technology. And, and how I know that is that I get so much feedback on like, oh, what's the ROI for X technology? Ambience, the best one. I'll be— the ROI is like, ask anyone who uses it and say that they would want to practice medicine without it.

Yes.

There's your ROI. Like it is, it is not quantifiable, but it is amazing. And I think like this is one of the few times that we have in history, if we could get the right kind of change management, we can actually make some amazing things happen for our providers. I think what I did through our Epic journey, Is I made a great— Epic is a great decision and AHRs are a great decision. It's the right way to go, but it really put a huge burden on the caregiver. And we now have an opportunity to actually alleviate that. And I think that to me, if we can get the right people in the same room as the people building the stuff, then I think we can actually make change happen quicker. At least that's my hypothesis.

Yeah, I, it makes a tremendous amount of sense and it Ochsner is lucky to have you. Yeah, we didn't speak much about Ochsner, but the journey you described from 2010 to what Ochsner is known for today, like super innovative, super cool, like, you know, it's because of people like you, but it's also the culture and the leadership. Can you share anything about the culture that makes Ochsner so unique and allows you to thrive?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, they always say that necessity is the mother of invention, right? And when you live in the area and the least healthy and least economically well of any part of the entire country, you sort of have to be innovative to make healthcare work, right? Healthcare at its best is sort of like middling to okay outcomes and ridiculously expensive, right? So like, how can you maintain a system that can provide good outcomes but be less expensive than the majority of other healthcare systems in the States?

Yeah.

Requires a certain level of ingenuity to accomplish. And I think that's been where Ochsner has kind of come out on top. And the other part would be the core group practice of Ochsner. So like Ochsner was founded as a group of doctors. And I think like that group practice mentality where I can walk into a meeting with another doctor, with a bunch of other doctors across our system, we immediately share the same values. We immediately realize and can see how Innovative technology happens. And we're not internally— there's always internal competition, right? But it's not like, I would say, overt. It's very much a collaborative environment. And I think that's something that comes from the top. I think that's what Robert Hart and Pete November drive, that culture, starting from the very beginning. And the third thing I will say is a dyad structure. Doctors don't know jack about business, as you will— as you know, Ed. But business people It's sort of like you combine the heart with the soul, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Or the mind with the soul, the mind with the heart. So it's like the mind can be the business person, but a lot of times the heart can be the doctor and it grounds both people towards understanding and it creates these really cool partnerships, these dyad partnerships with escalate up the leadership. And I've been a beneficiary of that leadership structure throughout my entire career and I have thought it's been amazing.

Yeah. And I've always been impressed. I've had, like I said, friends like yourself there at Ochsner and What you all have done for your communities that you serve and things in leveraging tech and for the reasons that you cited is pretty amazing. I want to switch over to leadership in our last couple of minutes, because you're a great, not only a person and clinician, those sorts of things we already spoke about, but also a great leader. What do you think are one or two key skills that enabled your growth? Because you've had this amazing career and you're still, you know, only midway through.

I'm glad that you said midway through. That makes me feel good. Yeah. So I would say one is what I call APM or actions per minute. So there's a term in video games called actions per minute. And essentially, if you look at the top video game players in the world, they can figure out what are the actions they need to do to make themselves get better at a thing and how can they do as many of them as possible within 1 minute? How do they create systems? Right. And I think the quote is like, You don't rise to your aspirations, right? You fall to your systems.

Yes.

And I think building a system around myself so that I then can increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the actions that I take and understand like, what is the directionally, like the actions that I think are going to be good at? Because like, I can do 100 actions and half of them have no value, or I could do 100 actions and 60 to 70% have no value. And trying to get myself to find the value of those actions as high as possible. has been a journey that I've had as a leader that has been, I think I've succeeded somewhat. I've gotten my APM up higher than it was probably 10 years ago. But I think that's an important thing to look at as a leader. How can you be productive? Because it's like those 3 circles that you have, right? That social circle, that spiritual circle, and that work circle. Oh, actually the 4 and physical, all there's, they're a Venn diagram, right?

Yeah.

So if you work, if you spend too much time at work, you lose your physical, you lose your social, you lose your, You're spiritual. And I think trying to maintain efficiency in each one of those things and how do you get those efficiency levels key are key to being a good leader. Because there's no lack of tasks that anyone will ask you to do. The other thing I think is understanding how not to do everything, but to find the right people that have the right skills.

Right.

And I think that's where you get to learn and build networks and relationships. And whether you have zero direct reports or whether you've got 400 direct reports, The influence of a leader is really not about his or her ability to actually do a thing. And that's something I spent a long time figuring out the hard way. It's about how do I leverage other teams of people and pull different people across my organization? Like, I keep this running inventory of people in my head across the organization that I know are good at certain things. And it's not like explicit or written down. Maybe it should be, but like, it's all in my head. So when I, when I have a project, I go, oh, I can tap this person, this person, and that people and put them together and then get them to work together well, I think is the other big aspect of leadership that regardless of what level you are, regardless of your direct reports, is understanding and maintaining that network that can be tapped in an instant is really cool.

Yeah, I love both those. Where do you go when you feel sort of drained or maybe your creativity is tapped out? What do you do to refresh?

2 things. I go to the gym. I love physical activity. I love working myself up to the limit. I love testing my VO2 max. I love testing my strength. Those kinds of things are areas that I think I realize that those circles need to be filled. And I think when I feel drained, it's because those circles haven't been filled.

Yeah.

I haven't done work on my spiritual self. I haven't done work on my creativity. The other thing is I do is video games. I love video games. I've loved video games since Atari 64, Commodore 64, and the old Atari Pong games. So I still play video games. So let's see, last night I was playing, I have a particular fondness for RPG video games. So I love Baldur's Gate 3. That's been something that's been a time sink for me, but totally worth it. And I was playing Dragon Age last night, the original Dragon Age. 10 years ago, and it's just a great game.

Jason, this has been great. We learned so much about you in a very, very short amount of time. Everything from Christian hip-hop, some of the music that you like, and just, you know, what one of the drivers, obviously the influence of your faith and also just being a good person. Talked a lot about your career and your journey and again, some newer things that most people probably didn't know, like the MMA, not just you, but your whole family really engaged in that. And then a lot of things related to your role. that you created there at Ochsner and just beginning with a great culture, but all the different things that you do on a, couldn't nail it down to a daily basis, but certainly a monthly basis because it's so varied. And we talk a lot about leadership, actions per minute was great. And then the ability to build networks so that you improve your influence, which is ultimately leadership. And then we talked a lot about different things that you do to refresh yourself. What did I miss or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

I think that the most important journey of anyone is to figure out what are the things, you know, I like to reference an ikigai framework. What are the things that you're good at? What are the things that you can get paid to do? What are the things that you enjoy doing? And I think like life is basically the process of figuring out that center of that Venn diagram. And if that, and it's asymptotic, right? Like the more you try to figure it out, the less you will get it. You have to let it come to you. So I think a lot of what I would say, and again, I know this doesn't necessarily bend with innovation and Ochsner, but I think with leadership and life in general, it's always good to realize what life is trying to teach you. And I think through some of the lessons that I've learned have been really difficult lessons where I've made a big mistake or had problems where I didn't get into medical school the first try I did, but it turned me on to understanding about how I love to be a teacher, and that's something that I've carried with me. So don't— what I would tell folks out there is that if we start to feel these lessons as they feel really uncomfortable, these times in life that feel really uncomfortable, that's actually the periods in which you're growing the most.

Yeah.

And so that would be the things I would double down on, because I feel like this podcast has gone much more into sort of like work-life territory and a little bit less like into like what my exist job is, but That's some lessons I would have for the listeners to say this, you know, having gone through a lot of that experience, it's something that you lean into it.

Yeah.

Don't run away from it. Yeah.

I think one of the reasons we're depending on the week, anywhere from number 4 to number 10 in the world is just that, Jason, it's like, we're not just work people, right? We're spiritual people that we talked about and the physical and it all comes together. And then out of it, we learn these brilliant things, uh, on leadership and, and get to know brilliant people like yourself. So, Dr. Jason Hill, thank you for being a guest on Digital Voices.

Thank you, Ed. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very appreciative. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts so you don't miss an episode.