Engineering Healthcare’s Future: Bree Bush on AI-Powered Command Centers || EP. 185

[00:00:00] Hey listeners, Laurie McGraw here. I wanted to talk about this next episode with Bree Bush. She is the General Manager of the Command Center and Pharma Solutions at GE Healthcare. And she's talking about a great new solution launch that she did at GE, where she was bringing together this amazing command center with their first customer, Duke University, an amazing academic medical center.

[00:00:26] And she's talking about doing something very, very complex and making it simple. All of the technology, all of the operations in terms of what's going on in a complex hospital system, the surgery theater, all of those things and bringing this new command center, making it simple, easy to use with all of the noise and complexity that comes from being in a hospital.

[00:00:55] What I love about talking to Bree is she's been at GE Healthcare for going on 19 years. That's a long time to be at one organization. And what she talks about is how much she loved moving from the next thing to the next leadership opportunity.

[00:01:13] And what she's working on is how much she's working on. And what she's working on now, hard, complex engineering problems and making it simple to then put it into, again, complex healthcare organizations and improve quality, improve the experience for patients, make it easier for the organization and also for their bottom line. You're going to hear a lot of enthusiasm from Brie.

[00:01:38] You're going to hear just the early learnings of someone who is moving up the leadership ladder. And I am confident we are going to hear a lot more from Brie Bush as she continues to advance in her leadership career. And now let's go to Brie. Ask for the next opportunity and never get comfortable because I think it's when we're uncomfortable that we grow the most and we surprise ourselves on what we can do.

[00:02:08] And I think that is what I would tell every woman out there. Be uncomfortable, get comfortable being uncomfortable and always ask for that next thing because what's the worst thing I was going to say? No. Yeah. Who cares? This is Inspiring Women. And this morning I am talking with Brie Bush and she is the general manager of the command center at GE Healthcare.

[00:02:32] She's a longtime executive at GE Healthcare and we're here at the health conference talking about a lot of things, AI, innovation, all the things. And Brie has some exciting announcements from GE. But Brie, thank you for being on Inspiring Women. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. It's awesome. So just as we get into it, Brie, first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. You've been at GE a long time.

[00:02:58] I think I'm aging myself, but yeah, I think I just hit 18 years. I was actually an intern at GE going into my senior year of college. Oh my gosh. Literally forever and started as an engineer, a mechanical engineer trying to figure out how I was going to change healthcare. I was very passionate about healthcare from the very beginning, mostly because of family because healthcare is personal. And really just started in engineering and pretty quickly realized I can't impact healthcare like I want to being an engineer.

[00:03:27] Unfortunately, like I felt like the cycles were too long. And so I went into consulting and really hit the road and I said, I want to be with the providers. I want to try the most difficult problems and how do we solve them and be at the elbow with them. And so then I got on the road four days a week for about 14 years doing consulting. Oh my gosh. All across hospitals. Oh my gosh. Okay. So like, let's just like wind that back a little bit. So you went to Bucknell. Okay. So a little town in Pennsylvania. You said that you were living in Singapore at the time you were going to college.

[00:03:55] So a short commute back home to see, to see family. But then like why GE? What attracted you from the get go to go to GE? Usually internships are great sort of like grounds to then go do something else. But you stayed right in a fairly large company. Yes. I think the culture of GE for sure. I think their morals, the ethics behind the team. It's a great company who really supports building you as a leader.

[00:04:21] And I felt that as I left my internship, I joined a leadership program, an engineering leadership program. And the promise was around, you know, we're going to develop the whole person. So your technical skills, your leadership skills, we're going to challenge you. And I think that's the other big thing is every time I got bored, I said, gee, I need something more. And they opened a door. And I think for me, a company who will do that for you and continue to help be with you as you evolve and push you to do new things. You know, I think that's why I stayed there so long.

[00:04:50] Well, investing in you and then building your skills, but also sounds like you've taken on much more responsibility in your not new role, but in your current role. So as general manager of the command centers. So what does that mean? What do you do? So we have an amazing product, the command center business that was built 10 years ago with Johns Hopkins. And so I oversee kind of the commercial aspects, the product, the delivery of that, the engineering side, really kind of as the overall P&L leader.

[00:05:19] And we're on a really cool trajectory within GU Healthcare because we've had some great changes and initial outcomes around our command center business. But we got to modernize, right? We got to now embrace AI and really think about how are we taking these challenges that the customers still have around access to care, capacity management to the next level and really streamline it. And so right now we are investing a lot in our future solutions and embedding AI into our technology.

[00:05:47] And I couldn't be more excited about it, honestly, because the problems are so real. And we have 10 years of expertise on all the nuances on how do you actually make impact for the hospitals. So, Bri, you know, we're here at the health conference and everything is about consumerism and digital health and everything. You're talking about like, you know, in the hospital, you're talking about busy hospital

[00:06:13] floors where there are patients who need critical care, where there are endless beeps and noise and, you know, confusion and nurses and staffing issues and all those things. You're talking about command center as it relates to inside the four walls of a hospital, right? Yes, correct. And I agree. I mean, I think everyone who's had a family member in a hospital knows, right? One person comes in and tells you one thing and then another provider comes in and then you're waiting for the imaging study.

[00:06:43] And so what we're trying to do is kind of create the seamless patient experience in the end. And that happens, you know, if you look at how many people touch a patient in a hospital, it might be 40 different individuals in the hospital, right? And there's a million points of failure across that, right? Someone's short staffed, some workflow didn't get completed. And so what we're really doing is monitoring all of that and giving insights to the care team, where are patients falling off the tracks? Where are we missing some of the quality things that we need to be doing?

[00:07:10] And that's hard to do when you have a thousand patients in a hospital. And then you think about a health system, right? And a lot of these command centers are managing entire health systems, 10, 20. We have a place in Canada who's managed 41 hospitals. So really big, complex systems and tons of interdependencies. It's a great engineering problem, actually. Well, it sounds like the engineering problem is really helpful. So I mean, I think everyone can relate to what it looks like to be in a hospital. Nobody wants to be there. It's confusing.

[00:07:39] And I always think of high stress, you know, whether you're there certainly as a patient, of course. But even for all of those workers who are there needing to support. So can you just like talk about what some of those interdependencies are? And in particular, I think that people want to believe that when you go to a hospital, it is a safe place. It is a high quality place to get care. But there's many reasons that things fall through the cracks.

[00:08:07] So I'd love to understand sort of like, you know, with this command center that you've developed, you know, I didn't know that it came from Johns Hopkins. That's amazing. But like, how does it work? What are you thinking about? And then also, you've got some pretty big new announcements in terms of what you're doing with it. Yeah. So I would say there's what we're looking at is there's a bunch of different departments who have shared services, right? So you think about imaging, you want to get an MRI and what individual care teams are

[00:08:35] doing is they're advocating for their individual patients. But these are shared services, right? So how do you know which patient needs the next MRI? It's really hard to tell. And what happens today is people call frustrated and start yelling and then somehow the MRI gets done, right? Who makes those decisions? In the end, the lead, the department will make the decision. But I think if you honestly ask people who gets the next bed or who gets the next imaging, it's whoever's yelling the loudest in the moment. Uh-huh. So yell louder. Yeah.

[00:09:04] And it's hard, right? Yeah. So what we have to do is it's a shared service. It's a shared resource. And so what we're doing is really telling them and helping teams understand how do you best serve one patient and all patients? It's a balancing act, right? And you have to do that across many departments and many different specialties, physical therapy, occupational therapy, right? Like case management. And so what our command center does is, one, help pinpoint where those issues are going to come.

[00:09:34] So not only right now, but if we look out 48 hours, up to two weeks, what's going to be the demand for your services? Great. We know that. What's your staffing look like? Do we have enough people to cover that? There's such a staffing shortage right now, right? So you're kind of moving people. There's not a lot of wiggle room there in how you staff. And then telling you now, where are the bottlenecks and how do you best utilize the fixed resources that you have? It's unfortunate. There's not much margins in healthcare, right? That you don't have as many resources you want to serve as patient. Well, not in a hospital.

[00:10:03] Not in a hospital environment. I mean, between equipment, staffing rules, quality rules, all the compliance that is needed, you're right. Yeah. So what our system is doing is helping them manage their operations better. We have EMRs out there who manage the patients. We manage the operations. And that means helping people prioritize which patients should get access, where, what's the site of service for these patients.

[00:10:30] A lot of our access challenges aren't the fact that there aren't beds or there aren't clinics. It's you can't see them and we don't know how to navigate patients to them. So there's a lot of ways just in addressing that piece of it. And then there's the throughput side of how do you reduce length of stay and how long patients stay in the hospital. And that's really multidisciplinary. So you need to understand, everyone needs to understand their interdependencies. And so what our software does is help them know, okay, I'm next up. Like, I'm next up and here's what I have to do. And we're all people. Things fall through the cracks.

[00:10:59] We'll surveillance that, show you exactly where that might be so that you can take that action in real time. I'll tell you, so, you know, I just spent quite a bit of time in a hospital setting. I have a new granddaughter. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. And she spent time in the NICU and she's doing quite well and received excellent care. But I tell you what, the number of things that were required to just, when that baby was ready

[00:11:25] to leave the hospital, I mean, of course, all we could do, we were just desperate to get her out of there and just so excited. But the number of dependencies and checklists and just getting a wheelchair or, you know, to get to have my daughter come out, it was an enormous amount of time. And you could just see the logistics that were not sort of like working well together. Does the command center help with things like that? 100%. It aligns, I guess, kind of gets everyone singing from the same sheet of music, basically.

[00:11:55] And I think it's also a very complex problem that my brain cannot solve that, right? That's why AI is needed. Well, you're an engineering brain. I think your brain can solve that. I'm not sure. There's too many interdependencies. And just to give an example, if there's all these patients coming into a hospital, some come through surgery, some come through the emergency room, some come directly from the hospital, some are labor and delivery, right? And now you're trying to figure out, okay, I have one bed. Who should get that? Well, it depends. Am I going to put my ORs, my surgery rooms on hold?

[00:12:23] Is the ED going to be in crisis and people are going to start leaving because we can't give them care? Like there's all these interdependencies. And so what we're doing and what our AI is doing is looking at all those interdependencies in real time and then giving recommendations. Here's how you can best accommodate all patients. And that's why I think AI is needed in this space. And is it learning? Sort of like learning? Because I would imagine that some of the flows of how things work in a hospital environment is dependent on people, dependent on physician decisions, nurse decisions, things like that.

[00:12:52] Is the AI learning sort of the habits of a particular hospital? Yes, exactly. It has to be nuanced to them. I think we always joke, if you've seen one hospital, you've seen one hospital. While the problems are similar, their workflows are drastically different. And so, yes, it learns the nuances of the hospital. It aggregates data that comes from the EMRs. We deeply understand what's happening with the patient. But then also aggregates all the staffing data, what's happening with your devices, what's happening with your assets, all that into one picture.

[00:13:21] Which really, if you want to care for patients, you have to have the right people, the right staff, the right equipment, the right capacity beds, whatever it might be at the right time. And so that's the optimization we're doing. And then, Bree, in terms of your big announcements, so I understand you're working with Duke. Is that right? So what are you doing with Duke? Yeah, so we've had a long-time collaboration with Duke Health and have built their command center with them to really help, again, with access and throughput.

[00:13:48] And we've had some amazing outcomes around reducing the time patients stay in the ED, in the emergency room, or in VOR. But then we also recently had a need to kind of take it up a level and say, hey, as a hospital operator, I can now see, I need to be able to see where are my pain points going to be ahead of time. And is today a bad day? And I need to kind of pull, you know, wave the white flag and say, help, drastic measures needed, or is it just every other day?

[00:14:16] And so we just announced with them the hospital pulse tile, which is another tile on top of our command center software, which looks at both what is the need for beds, what is the throughput needed, where are your bottlenecks going to be across all these different departments, so they can get really fast to action. They're not searching for data anymore. And I asked them, I said, hey, how come you can't do this in your EMR? And like, we literally cannot see this. You know, you think you can see it, but you can't see it. And because I can't see it, I spend time on phone calls, calling around.

[00:14:46] And by the way, the moment I get the information, it's out of date because a new admission comes in or something changes. And I need it in real time because I need to make faster decisions. I don't have time. Patients don't have time to wait, and we need to make faster decisions. So in the end, it's a tool that helps improve decision making and make it a lot faster for those operators. Yeah, well, I like the optimization aspect of it. You certainly sound excited about it, Brie. I do think your engineering brain could solve it, but maybe you are an AI person. So I want to come back to you, Brie.

[00:15:13] So 18 years at GE, and we talked about that a little bit in the beginning. You're a millennial, and so it is quite unusual for that level of tenure. Most millennials just study show it's less than three years if they stay at any one position. So as you've had opportunity, you've invested in yourself, the company's invested in you for leadership development. What keeps you there? I would say first it's probably my passion for healthcare at the core of this.

[00:15:41] I think to me there's just so much opportunity, and I guess I just have a dream of impacting that in a real way. I think what GE Healthcare doing is super inspiring. I think what we're doing in the command center space, it's just the stories you hear, you would keep going. You would keep going because you're like, oh my gosh, we did that. That's amazing. We helped this one patient. That's amazing. And those are the stories that I think really keep you going. I mentioned the culture,

[00:16:09] and I think the strive for excellence is really important in GE Healthcare. And I think that there's room to fail, of course, and I think that's important. But there's also this desire to be the best of the best. And I did a lot of sports growing up. I'm very competitive, and I prefer to be the best of the best. So I think some of that drives me as well. It's just like that strive, and it's inherent in culture. Yep. So over the years that you've been there,

[00:16:37] you've had many promotions along the way. Give me an example of one of the, I mean, this is inspiring women. And so I'd like to know just, you know, one of those stepping stones where you took maybe a risk, a leap that you might feel like you were not ready for, but you obviously were ready for it. Like any of those sort of examples that were big learning experiences for you? So GE Healthcare is a huge company, right? And so there's not many like little startups. And I have this little entrepreneurial side of me, and Command Center was that.

[00:17:06] So I helped build Command Center from day one. I was the onsite project lead at Johns Hopkins for five years. And so that was really fun. 14 years of being on the road sounds exhausting. I'm tired just listening to it. I went on some nice vacations though. Let me tell you, lots of points that I went on for that. But so to me, there was a moment though, like, you know, I would say Command Center was my baby. I was actually on the team beforehand, but I realized as a leader, you know, I was always looking at how do I round out my leadership skills? And I didn't have any P&L experience.

[00:17:34] Like I didn't know what it looked like to actually have to manage a budget. I didn't have to report on my budget to anyone. And so there was an opportunity where we were trying to work with pharmaceutical companies in a different way. And so there was an opportunity for me to step into that role. And it was heartbreaking for me in all honesty, because I felt like I was abandoning my baby. The team and even the team that you'll see here at Health, we've been together for 10 years. And there's, we're family, right? And I really felt like, and I was the right hand at that moment

[00:18:04] when I decided to leave. And it was so emotional for me. I felt like I was letting people out, betrayal, you know, and is this the right decision? But that was the first moment that gave me a chance to say, okay, well, like there's no one above you now. So you make the decision. What is the strategy? You can't hide behind someone else's strategy. And that's a whole different skillset that you're trying to develop. What is your communication style with leadership? You know, what is your team style? What culture are you going to promote, right?

[00:18:31] And, you know, being a part of a culture is different than leading the culture and setting the standard. And so that was a big moment for me to experience that. It was with a small little team that we had so much fun doing it. But it was definitely uncomfortable. And that imposter syndrome that people talk about, oh my gosh, it's real. Every day you wake up. But you shake it off. And it sounds like you really have done a great job with it. And I love the focus on, you know, taking responsibility for a P&L.

[00:19:01] And I, you know, so many different leaders in their journeys to like their next levels, like the opportunity to do that is so critically important for exactly the reasons that you're stating. Give me an example of like something that surprised you about that you were great at, that you didn't actually think you might be as great as you obviously are. You got something, Brie. I know you do. I know, I know. Let me... I think that that experience,

[00:19:30] I think I'm a really good problem solver in the end. And maybe that is my engineering brain. And I'm relentless around solving a problem and doing it in a different way always, frankly. I firmly believe there's no end to better. I think I probably drive my family crazy because I don't drive the same way to school every day because there might be a faster way out there, you know? And, but I feel like that pursuit and that customer focus around problem solving, I think is really my strength.

[00:19:57] And I think if you say focus on the real problems, that's how you make a great product, right? It's when you get distracted by internal, you know, workings or other things, you follow the competition too much, that's where we get off track. But if we stay obsessed with the customer and solving their problems, I don't think you can lose. Yep. Yep. I think those are great guiding principles. So, Brie, as we close out here, if you just like think ahead, you know, with this great product launch that you're doing, where do you expect it to be in the next couple of years?

[00:20:27] Oh, man. I feel like we're building the rocket to the moon, to quote Tahoe, who my boss, who was on stage the other day. But I think we're at this key point where AI is going to really transform healthcare. And I think operations is going to be the first place it happens because the clinical stuff is a little bit more risky, right? The operational stuff, I think, is ripe to be addressed. I can see our, you know, all of our organizations really pushing to be on the four walls of the hospital, of course,

[00:20:55] and really looking at integrated care. And so, which just makes it more complex. I just talked about how many people touch a patient when they're in a hospital. Now you're talking about all the outpatient and all the ambulatory stuff. Like, that system is just getting more complex. But I'm really bullish just around how we can help make meaningful impact and outcomes. And it's going to take AI because it's too complicated to figure out. There's too many variations out there, even on the individual patient to what they need. But I can imagine a day where, you know,

[00:21:24] scheduling a patient is, you know, done via text message and we can actually get to the right scanner, the right patient, the right tech. All of that's kind of seamlessly integrated. Today, there's a lot of manual processes around that, right? You imagine a day, my dream has always been, where a patient shows up in the hospital and they know at 8 a.m. the doctor's coming in, at 10 a.m. imaging will be done, at 12 p.m. PT, and by the time, make sure your family's here at 3 p.m. the doctor's coming back.

[00:21:51] To do that is extremely complicated because you have to get everyone's schedules right to actually provide a schedule to a patient. But imagine you came into the hospital and you knew what was going to happen with you. Like, I think the stress that that would take off of the patient, off of the family, would be enormous. And I can imagine that also the value of how much cost that would take out of the system would be extremely high as well. And it also sounds like it would reduce an enormous amount of stress and really do a lot for improving quality.

[00:22:19] Bree, as we absolutely close out this conversation, your last best advice to other aspiring, inspiring women, what would you say? I would say ask for the next opportunity and never get comfortable because I think it's when we're uncomfortable that we grow the most and we surprise ourselves on what we can do. And I think that is what I would tell every woman out there. Be uncomfortable, get comfortable being uncomfortable and always ask for that next thing

[00:22:49] because what's the worst thing that one's going to say? No? Yeah. Who cares? Ask the next for one. So move on. Exactly. Exactly. All right. That has been excellent. So I've been speaking with Bree Bush on Inspiring Women and Bree, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This has been an episode of Inspiring Women with Lori McGraw. Please subscribe, rate, and review. We are produced at Executive Podcast Solutions. More episodes can be found on inspiringwomen.show.

[00:23:17] I am Lori McGraw and thank you for listening.