Podcast Q&A with Edmondo Robinson, Part 2: “AI Is Going to Be Baked into Everything.”

When faced with a major crisis, leaders have two choices. The first is to concentrate all resources on survival, doing whatever it takes to stay afloat. The second is to focus on surviving, while simultaneously figuring how to apply lessons learned going forward.

Edmondo Robinson, MD, falls into the latter category. Thanks to the solid foundation that had been established at Moffitt Cancer Center, the Covid-19 pandemic served as “an impetus for change and innovation,” and led to reimagining of the strategy in many areas, including patient-centric care.

Recently, Dr. Robinson spoke with Kate Gamble, Managing Director at healthsystemCIO, about how they’re restructuring to bring three core components — IT, data, and innovation — under one umbrella to ensure digital enables, accelerates and drive the strategy forward. He also discussed the vision Moffitt has to bake AI into “everything we do in cancer care,” the mission that drew him to the organization two years ago, and why being a CDO can feel “daunting.”

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Key Takeaways



* Part of Moffitt’s vision for the (not-so-distant) future is for AI to be “baked into pretty much everything we do in cancer care,” from business operations to clinical decision support to optimizing research.

* Call it digital front door or consumer digital — the terminology doesn’t matter. What matters is enabling “convenience, access and transparency for those we serve.”

* As homecare emerges as a preferred model, “an entire ecosystem is being built out and operationalized around the consumer.”

* When patients are diagnosed with cancer, being able to quickly connect them to a provider — and plug them into the clinical operational system — is critical.

* With digital tools playing a larger role than ever in the care process, CDOs face a great deal of pressure. But for people like Robinson, “that’s where we want to be.”





Q&A with Edmondo Robinson, MD, Part 2 [Click here to view part 1]

Gamble:  You mentioned AI, which is a critical part of the strategy in terms of leveraging the data to improve decision-making. Can you talk more about that?

Robinson:  AI is going to be so big. It’s already getting there, but my vision of the future — and this future is not that far off — is that AI is going to be baked into pretty much everything we do in cancer care. And I’m talking everything from business operations to clinical decision support and direct care delivery, all the way through to optimizing research. Everything we do.

Given that vision, we’ve built out our AI operational component under our health data services, led by chief data officer, Dr. Dana Rollison. In addition to that, we also have our research component under our machine learning department, which is led by our founding chair, Dr. Issam El Naqa. We are, by the way, the first dedicated cancer center to have a machine learning department. And we have AI operationalizing these concepts; they’re working closely together as well.

Baking AI into predictive analytics

We’re really baking AI into predictive analytics around patient outcomes. We’re looking at natural language processing so we can, for one thing, improve reporting. But we’re also looking at AI for imaging because it does very well in predicting based on patterns — for example, in pathology. But we’re also using AI for business processing. In some of our automation, we’re actually working with a company that builds AI into our automation processes on the business side. It really will be pretty much ubiquitous.