Join us for a conversation with Dr. Ashley Beecy, Chief AI Officer at Sutter Health, as she shares their journey from targeted AI pilots to enterprise-wide transformation across one of California's largest integrated health systems. We'll explore Sutter's innovative diabetic retinopathy screening program, where AI-enabled cameras deployed across 28 primary care sites detect sight-threatening conditions in under a minute, and their strategic partnership with Aidoc as the premier West Coast hub for clinical AI innovation. Dr. Beecy brings unique insights from her journey as a cardiologist and former AI leader at NewYork-Presbyterian.
Ashley Beecy, MD, FACC, Chief AI Officer, Sutter Health
Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live
0:01: Intro: Welcome to Digital Health Talks. Each week we meet with healthcare leaders making an immeasurable difference in equity, access, and quality. Hear about what tech is worth investing in and what isn't as we focus on the innovations that deliver. Join Megan Antonelli, Janae Sharp, and Shahid Shah for a weekly no BS deep dive on what's really making an impact in healthcare.
0:29: Megan Antonelli: Hi everyone. Welcome to Digital Health Talks. This is Megan Antonelli, and today we're exploring one of the most comprehensive AI transformation stories in healthcare. Doctor Ashley Beecy has made a fascinating journey from practicing cardiologist to chief AI officer, leading transformation initiatives at New York Presbyterian, and now at Sutter Health, one of California's largest integrated health systems serving 3.5 million patients. Today we'll dive into how Sutter is scaling AI from targeted pilots to enterprise-wide deployment, including their groundbreaking diabetic retinopathy screening program and strategic partnerships with AI Doc. Doctor Beecy, welcome to Digital Health Talks.
1:12: Dr. Ashley Beecy: Thank you so much for having me here today. I'm so excited to, you know, I was so excited to.
1:16: Megan Antonelli: I followed your journey, being a New Yorker, being, you know, friends of New York Presbyterian and knowing a lot of folks there, you know, Peter and everybody, great team. When I saw you moving over to Sutter, I was very excited for Sutter and for you. But tell us a little bit about, you know, your journey as a cardiologist and going to chief AI officer at this, you know, sort of transformative time in healthcare.
1:43: Dr. Beecy: Yeah, absolutely. I can say my, my background isn't quite traditional, but I actually started as an engineer, so computer systems engineer back in the day and was doing custom circuit designing. So of course that involved a lot of problem solving and identifying problems, optimizing solutions and using a lot of data and design techniques for the work I was doing. And I, I loved it. I love technology. I've loved technology my whole life, but for me it's, it's not just about the technology itself, it's about applying the technology and I think the most important area that you can apply technology is human health. I mean, what better way to spend your time and try to improve the healthcare and healthcare delivery experience of. And so that really was the reason I started to, to shifted from engineering into medicine and then of course, cardiology itself actually has, you may not know this, a lot of parallels to engineering. The heart is a pump and electric circuit, and so it was a clear area of opportunity and interest for me.
2:54: Megan Antonelli: Wow, that, that is amazing because it happens so often in the other direction, right? You hear often of physicians who start in healthcare and then sort of find themselves getting more into that technology role, certainly over the last, you know, 10 to 20 years as technology has played such a large role. But as you said, I mean, in terms of cardiology and where that is and the systems that, you know, there's a lot of parallels for sure. And certainly cardiology has been, you know, one of the faster adopters around, you know, technology and that intersection of, of devices and, and, AI is, is huge as well.
3:32: Dr. Beecy: And you, and you mentioned, you know, AI being a novel field, and I think my role as a chief AI officer is actually quite new. There's a handful of health systems that are, have this as an inaugural position. I think what they really found was they need somebody to tie it together, right? Somebody that has, experience and healthcare and the clinical areas, but also that those technical areas, they can understand what are the problems, where the, where can the technology add value, and then also, you know, how does that integrate into the way we care for our patients now and thinking about the safety and efficacy along that whole course of the implementation of the technology.
4:17: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, it is, it is so, I mean, yeah, not new, but like just the adoption and the speed with which it's being adopted, has been huge. And as, as you said, we're seeing a lot of the chief AI officer role sort of proliferating throughout, as we did years ago with even the CIO and the CMIO. And, and all of those, right? So it is kind of changing that organizational structure. As you see it, I mean, you know, and as you have gone from NYP, which is, you know, such an esteemed academic medical center to Sutter, which is more of an integrated delivery system and, and how that, you know, how those differences kind of may play out in an organization's adoption for of AI and and sort of that. So journey of an AI transformation. How are you seeing the, the differences and, you know, specifically with Sutter, what are some of the, you know, kind of things that you're observing?
5:12: Dr. Beecy: You know, when I, when I came out to meet the leadership team at Sutter, I met with our president and CEO Warner Thomas, and he is just one of the most forward-thinking, innovative leaders that I've met. I've actually heard him say that healthcare is changing fast, but it's better we're not waiting for the future to arrive. We're building it and I will tell you if you ever meet him or our SVP of digital health Laura Wilt, you'll you'll find that that's not, those aren't just words, they're actions, and that's really the culture at Sutter. And that's actually what drove me there. It's just the pace that they want to move, how they want to drive change, how they want to innovate and how they actually You know, we, we bring it together as an organization aligned with our mission and vision, right? It's about how do we care for our patients first and our people always, which just runs through all of the, the transformation that we make. I actually, you know, it's interesting that you asked about the Sutter too, and, and one of the reasons why I joined, but it's, they actually, there was a Fast Company actually nominated Sutter as one of America's best places to workplaces. Oh sorry, let me say it again. America's best workplaces for innovators in 2025, so they ranked 4th. On a list of 100 top businesses, and that's because just the way that they tackle some of these big challenges in, in the digital health space. So, and that's also reflective of just what we've been able to accomplish as an organization, even before, you know, I arrived. Right.
6:48: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, I know, it really has been on the forefront for a, you know, more of a regional system that has had such a, a place in this conversation around innovation, you know, and I think, certainly we've had Chris Wall on the show before and, and, and his vision there, around kind of that, just what's important and, and that culture of innovation around design thinking and everything else that has really shaped a lot of that. And I think, you know, one of the things that has been that we've watched over the last, you know, 2 years really, or maybe 3, it's time time seems to be going so fast now, but it, you know, since that implement or the, the launch, you know, of ChatGPT and and large language models and and kind of the fast adoption, you're seeing numbers of, you know, so many pilots being done. And now we're kind of getting into that place where we're actually seeing clinical pilots, you know, that are really showing results. So I think, you know, in terms of the diabetic retinopathy program, really delivering results, tell us about that and kind of the, what's making that program so successful there etc.
7:55: Dr. Beecy: Yeah, and that's, I think it's important to note that just all of this work is a collaborative effort, right? It takes the people working on it from a technology standpoint, but also other business leaders and this one, for example, is led by Doctor Phil Eisenberg and his team in the Quality and Patient safety space as well as a Paul McFaul, a leader that's also in quality and patient safety and partnering with primary care physicians, right? So it's, it's really It takes a team to be able to identify the right opportunity to implement the technology and then do all the change management and operational workflows that are needed to support it. Because I will emphasize that just the technology itself without that appropriate integration and that uptake or adoption and usability by the physicians or whoever may be the ultimate end user of the technology, it's not gonna, it's not gonna achieve what impact you're intending. So I think that's important to to start with, and this team did it quite well. Just to provide context, you know, more than half of those patients or people with diabetes do not receive recommended eye exams each year. That's actually something that's standard sort of guidelines, and this can put them at risk for blindness, but it's completely preventable, right? And we have technology now, AI based that can detect some of these early warning signs in just less than a minute. So with these enhanced cameras that now you can have them available in primary care offices, not even just in special, you know, eye doctors or, you know, super specialists. You can really put them more broadly where people get routine care and get that screening done. And we saw hundreds of patients that we connected to downstream coordinated care with specialists. Once they were screened, and these patients had, really like vision threatening diabetic retinopathy. So if you think that the impact that you have there to be able to screen and screen at scale, I mean that's what we're ultimately trying to do, right? We want to bring this technology, we want to bring this technology to our patients, we want to bring this technology to our clinicians so that they can use it and make impact at scale. I can tell you, like, you know, some of the other work that we're doing too. There's a lot happening in the radiology space, and we know that 80, 85% of FDA approved software as a medical device is in radiology space because imaging lends itself well to computer vision models or other types of AI enhanced disease detection. And through things like AI reviews of CT lung scans, we've been able to increase our early stage lung cancer diagnosis and improve 5-year survival rates. So that's really, I would say quite impactful as, as well, right? When we think about 60% of these that our patients received an early stage diagnosis, which is better than the 27% benchmark. Nationally, and that work led by a Dr. Jason Wiesner, who's the chair of our radiology service line, just did an incredible job. Again, not just thinking about what the technology is because it can be incredibly accurate, but thinking about how do you connect that technology to closed loop care, right? Getting that patient that has that lung nodule, has that early disease detection, the right care at the right time. A lot of work also happening in the decreasing the administrative burden for our clinicians. We know that there is that statistic of pajama time, meaning providers spend hours after they leave the office looking through charts. There's so much data in an electronic health record for a patient that it can, it can really take a substantial cognitive burden to to go through and comb through that data and then to also, every time you see a patient to, to document that encounter and and record all of the findings from the visit as well as your action plan. And what we've seen is that ambient scribes can alleviate a lot of that administrative burden. So what it is is it's AI assists. When generating responses to either patient emails, so that's support of the in basket message, or it can listen during patient visits and it can take notes and generate a summary that directly flows into the patient's electronic health record. So the physician, what they end up doing is they still review all of the content in that note to make sure it accurately reflects that visit. But it can reduce the cognitive load, the mental fatigue, and it allows them actually to focus more time with the patients as well. And so, this work led by our chief medical information officer, Doctor Venna Jones has really been a win for our physicians and our patients across, you know, time in the notes and this cognitive load as well as overall job satisfaction.
13:09: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I, and I think when, you know, I remember sitting there and sort of see, you know, at the first panel about, you know, what GPT's impact on healthcare and what it would mean. And, you know, then it was, it was about pajama time. It was about radiology. You know, we kind of, we knew where it was gonna have the most impact, right? And, and, and fast impact. And, and in some cases, it was where there was the lowest risk. And the and the biggest burden, right? So, and then it was a, you know, there were a lot of things we had to figure out in terms of sort of the ethical implementation, the, how do we, you know, change management? How do we not make the same mistakes we made the last time, you know, we, we did a large digital transformation and then around governance. So talk a little bit, you know, having sat in both organizations now, etc. You know, both from a governance standpoint and from a risk standpoint, what are you guys looking at as you evaluate what pilots to do next, especially when you've seen so much success with what you had already.
14:10: Dr. Beecy: Yeah, I can talk a little bit just about prioritization first and then maybe go into governance, you know, I think it's important to note that healthcare is delivered by people for people and AI doesn't really change that. It's just really a tool that enhances the information and data that's available to us as clinicians so that we can better serve our patients and so it really starts with You know, how are we going to help our people better serve the people who've entrusted us with their care and does it make, when we look at the solution, we ask, you know, does it make the care we provide better or easier to deliver, right? So that means is it aligned with our mission and vision. And really like taking a deep dive into the problem itself, right? So what are we trying to achieve? That can be a patient experience, clinician experience, that can be, I want to improve outcomes for early diagnosis. It can be work in the administrative space too, right? How do we operate better as an organization? There's, obviously financial constraints and healthcare, and we need to make sure that we're transforming processes like they do in other industries to automate, you know, manual work where we can make things more efficient across the board. And so we have these value domains and when we look at opportunity, we make sure like, OK. Is what is the impact potential in one of these areas and what is the technical feasibility or readiness? Do we have the right tool to apply and then what, what is the risk of doing that? Is it risk and clinical decision making? Is it, is it regulatory risk and how do we incorporate that in the prioritization? You asked about governance and, and so I can kind of bridge off risk there and say that it certainly takes a collaborative approach. In our AI governance, we have representation from our general counsel, we have representation from compliance and, and regulatory as well as our clinical informatics and clinical teams and technical teams really putting our heads together to say. All right, how is this tool going to be used? What is the technology itself, what is the impact of the technology in things like the regulatory space or impact in decision making or how are considerations and risks like data privacy incorporated into this solution to make sure that we look at the probability of risk, the impact of risk. And then we take a step back and then say, well, if we deploy the solution, we talked a lot about the processes and workflows to support it, are there things that we can do to actually go ahead and mitigate that risk? And so it's really putting our head around all those different domains and really thinking about not only assessing. At risk once, but how do we monitor these solutions over time? Because there may be things that we don't see in an initial pilot or testing, and we want to really take a measured approach to ensure that over time the safety and impact meet our expectations, because there may be times Where we want to decommission tools. We may say, you know what, this is no longer working. It's not adding value or it's a safety concern, and let's stop using it. And that's an important part of this life cycle that we don't often talk about, but really needs to be considered when you're thinking about a holistic governance program.
17:50: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, absolutely. And I haven't really thought about that. And it, it was, you know, when we talked in the past about sort of legacy systems and how long it took to get, get, you know, sort of change and, and shift the culture or, or get rid of old systems. As we go into a world that is a bit more agile and a bit more, you know, with new systems being sort of implemented every day, that need to assess the impact over time and go back is so important. So I think that that's, that's really an important piece of, of all of this is that and how, of course, how they all work together is another, you know, sort of consideration, and of course, how they're impacting the people. We talked a little bit about kind of Sutter's, role as, as an innovation leader and as a national healthcare system that there's been an announcement around AI Doc's West Coast innovation hub that you guys are. What is that, you know, what does that mean and how does that, you know, kind of strategic partnership help, you know, with AI sort of deployment within the organization?
18:59: Dr. Beecy: You know, it's, I think being located in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, right, is a, is a differentiator in itself. It's, that area is the epicenter of innovation and AI revolution, if you want to call it that. And I think that gives us an opportunity as an organization to not only like tap into the ideas of our physician, nurses, and teams within our organization, but really form these. Partnerships with leading innovators that are outside our walls that are in the local area and ecosystem and bringing them in and saying let's partner and let's solve these problems together and AI Doc is just is one example of that where we decided to to partner to say, all right, let's do let's have an imaging platform that carries out that coordinated care. Right? It's a combination of the two. And so some of the solutions that we're looking and partnering on is identification of stroke, right? So not just, you know, if a, if a patient comes to our hospital, that instead of that image being sitting in a queue for a radiologist to take a look at, if there is a stroke detected on it in real time when that image is acquired, it gets put to the top of the list for the radiologist to review, right? And so it gets read faster. And not only that, but the neurology team or the stroke team gets a real-time notification on a mobile app that they have this patient coming with a stroke that they need to see immediately. And that shortens that time from when you arrive at the hospital to then when you get the downstream care. Again, not just about that the technology and the accuracy, even if it has a 100% accuracy, if you don't connect it to that downstream coordinated care, then you're not really achieving what you're trying to do, which is to reduce the time to treatment of a patient with stroke, which can have significant impact in brain function, right? Long term morbidity and mortality, and so it's, it's quite impactful.
21:07: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, that impact and that partnership is so important, you know, to do, to do all of those things. When you look at kind of, you know, as this moves quickly and how you can You know, help others in the same role in terms of health systems and leaders, moving from kind of AI pilots to platform-wide transformation. What are your big, you know, pieces of advice? What are the lessons learned, you know, throughout this journey?
21:34: Dr. Beecy: You know I I think from a, it's, it starts with. Asking the right question. So I think we've said that and kind of covered what you have to do to really get to a question that makes sense to try to answer with technology and part of that can be ensuring that you have mature processes to enhance the enhance the work flow that you're trying to improve. From a technology perspective, it can be. Build once and reuse many times, so building technology assets, whether that's data models or platform solutions or otherwise so that you can actually shorten the cost of delivering the tools from a technology perspective it's shortening the cost and shortening the time. Of delivering the tools into either a back office application or an electronic health record. I mentioned this briefly too, but measuring, right, measuring what the value and impact is across the whole solution to make sure that you're achieving value. I think another thing it's important and I think it's underemphasized is organizational readiness. And that's something I've seen that's really unique at Sutter. So there's a digital academy that does hands-on training with clinicians at point of care. There's Sutter Health University, which actually creates training materials. We have an incredibly robust communications team that actually, you know, gets the message out across such a large organization. And I have somebody on my team, so we're building a center for applied AI who's actually job is to coordinate with those different communication channels and training opportunities to quarterback and bring it all together so that we have a cohesive strategy for organizational readiness and we've been able to do things like we have a teams. Channel where people can share ideas such as different ways to prompt or do prompt engineering in tools that we provide to the organization. There's over 1000 people on that one team's channel. We've done all hands training and and strategy sessions and in person and on webinar or virtually. Learning and training for thousands of people across the organization. In just the last couple of months that I've been here, we've also put together, you know, websites and guiding principles and learning pathways where people have dedicated AI training that if they're interested, they can actually start almost as a beginner and then learn, you know, how to apply it in a progressive way. We have a lot of people. People that want to be innovators that are innovating individually and so to really provide that transformation, one of our goals is to make sure that people have the right tools to be able to innovate in individual fashion. So we do have a large language model that we, you know, has the right data privacy protections from an organization standpoint that every employee has access to. So that if they need that support in their daily work, then they have that as a productivity or efficiency tool.
24:59: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I think that the change management is so different from all the things we learned before where adoption was slow, or now adoption is so fast that you almost have to, you know, kind of take that, you know, it's like the risk that's there, you want to make sure that everyone is using it in a measured way, that the governance. Is there that the risk is mitigated because it, you know, and just to speak of the, the tools that are being built, that they're, they, they help solve problems, you know, to your first point around asking the right questions and solving the right problems. They're doing that, and it's just then how you put the guardrails and to allow people to use it effectively, right?
25:38: Dr. Beecy: Absolutely.
25:40: Megan Antonelli: Awesome. Well, I know, we are almost on time, but as we have our 5 good things that we like to talk about, we always like to amplify what's good happening in healthcare, and you've already talked about so much of that. But if you could think about, you know, sort of more broadly, what some of the good things are. It can just be one good thing or it can be a few, in terms of, you know, just the good things happening in healthcare, you know, for patients and physicians and clinicians, providing that care.
26:11: Dr. Beecy: Yeah, you know, we, we talked a lot about the solutions to make work easier for clinicians and that's. That is gonna, and that's on an accelerated path. We're seeing solutions in that space for documentation insights and you know, first drafts of documents and, and those, those use cases or applications in that space just continue to blow up, I wanna say, but just grow at an accelerated rate. But what I'm really most excited about, I'll tell you, is something that we feel strongly about at Sutter which is Proactive connected care. So how do we care for our patients outside the walls of our hospital? And one of the programs led by our chief clinical innovation Officer, Dr. Richard Milani, it's called Sutter Sync. It launched earlier this year, but basically it helps patients monitor their health from anywhere while giving clinicians the information, and insights on data that's obtained outside of the hospital so that can be a blood pressure. Monitor, they're extending to diabetes and lipids as well as some other chronic conditions. And if you, if you take that data and you, apply AI to get data-driven insights, you can really be proactive about that care. But you can also layer AI on that to be able to scale programs like this, because one of the challenges is it can be resource intensive, right? To do. Monitoring and management of patients and wearable devices and all of this data. So I think there's a real opportunity to use AI to support programs like this so that we can continue along, we're creating really like the most innovative, comprehensive, integrated, connected health systems. So I will say that that's probably one of the things I'm most excited about and I really think healthcare is gonna continue to trend in that direction.
28:09: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, I share that excitement. I think we've talked about that a lot, you know, both at our in-person health impact and interviews that we've done in terms of AI making healthcare everywhere possible. You know, we've talked about it for a long time, but that connected healthcare everywhere. You know, we, we've seen it, but it's always been siloed, but how we get to that and so your point around connected healthcare outside of the hospital is so important and, you know, and, and what people want, right? Because until you have that, it's, it's disjointed and not as effective, right? So, and, and certainly to realize the vision of kind of preventative care, it's what's needed. No doubt.
28:51: Dr. Beecy: And so think about that data, right? I talk a lot about there's so much data and and digitization of data and the electronic health record and that creates, you know, a challenge for clinicians because it's overwhelming. And we think about wearables and collecting data outside that outside. The hospital. Well, that's more data, right? So we have to be creative. We have to really be able to find the right insights that are actionable on that data to not create more of a problem, and, and or add to the administrative burden, that it already exists within our electronic health.
29:29: Megan Antonelli: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I could keep talking about this all day. You are working on so many exciting things, so I appreciate you sharing just a, a glimpse of some of that. I hope to see you soon, in person. I'm sure there's a billion conferences you'll be at in in this fall to come. But, thank you again for joining us. And thank you to our audience for, for joining us and you know, I think you've all heard that Doctor Beecy's kind of clinical background combined with that enterprise AI leadership provides valuable insights for systems. You know, leading, and navigating similar journeys. For more information, I'm sure you can reach out to Doctor Beecy on LinkedIn as well as, visit sutterhealth.org. And, for, for the rest to for sure listen and subscribe and join us at Digital Health Talks. This is Megan Antonelli, and until next time, keep innovating.
30:30: Outro: Thank you for joining us on Digital Health Talks, where we explore the intersection of healthcare and technology with leaders who are transforming patient care. This episode was brought to you by our valued program partners Automation Anywhere, revolutionizing healthcare workflows through intelligent automation. Nara, advancing contactless vital signs monitoring. Elite groups delivering strategic healthcare IT solutions. Cello, securing healthcare identity management and access governance. Your engagement helps drive the future of healthcare innovation. Subscribe to digital Health Talks on your preferred podcast platform. Share these insights with your network and follow us on LinkedIn for exclusive content and updates. Ready to connect with healthcare technology leaders in person? Join us at the next health impact event. Visit Healthimpactforum.com for date and registration. Until next time, this is digital Health Talks, where change makers come together to fix healthcare.