Improving Lean Methodology and Clinical Analysis at UCSF and ZSFG – Healthcare AI Pioneers
Jesse chats with Dr. Christopher (Toff) Peabody, Associate Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, Founder and Director of the UCSF Acute Care Innovation Center, and Associate Chief Medical Officer for Performance Excellence at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital; and Dr. Lucas Zier, Interventional Cardiologist and Pulmonary Hypertension Specialist at ZSFG and UCSF Health. Together, they discuss the implementation of an LLM embedded in ZSFG’s lean performance improvement process, how combining lean methodology with an LLM works in practice, overcoming data quality challenges with the LLM, a predictive model for readmissions for heart failure, a generative AI tool that summarizes patients’ social and behavioral determinants of health, closing the gap between what a clinician intuitively knows they want from an AI tool and what they can actually articulate precisely enough for a developer to build, and much more.
Headline
NBC News investigation reveals OpenEvidence now used by approximately 65% of U.S. physicians.
Resource Link
From TechCrunch: “Medicare’s new payment model is built for AI, and most of the tech world has no idea.“
About Our Guests
Dr. Toff Peabody
Dr. Christopher (Toff) Peabody is the Founder and Director of the UCSF Acute Care Innovation Center, an initiative of the UCSF Department of Emergency Medicine. The Center operationalizes design and engineering principles to improve the acute care system in San Francisco. The Center has several active focus areas and projects, including optimizing teamwork and care coordination, implementing social medicine resources, and streamlining workflows in light of the boarding crisis. Their landmark project, E*Drive, an open-access clinical information hub, received national recognition for making local clinical guidelines accessible to emergency clinicians at the bedside.
Dr. Peabody serves as the Director of Quality and Performance Improvement at the San Francisco General Hospital Emergency Department, San Francisco’s public hospital and Level-1 Trauma Center. In this role, he leverages his formal training in quality improvement and patient safety to fulfill the SFGH mission of providing high-quality acute, unscheduled care to the citizens of San Francisco.
Outside of his leadership roles at UCSF, Dr. Peabody also serves as a senior advisor to the Emergency Medicine Innovation Collaborative (EMIC), a national nonprofit group democratizing innovations in acute care. He is a practicing emergency physician at San Francisco General Hospital and has applied his innovative approach to both medical student and resident education.
Dr. Lucas Zier
Dr. Lucas Zier is Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF and Co-Founder and Director of the PROSPECT Lab at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. He is also Director of Cardiovascular Performance and Outcomes, and serves in the Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation.
His research sits at the intersection of advanced analytics, AI, and hospital operations including the use of predictive models and decision-support tools to improve outcomes in safety-net patient populations.