Dennis Chornenky, chief artificial intelligence advisor at UC Davis Health, knows what it takes to become a healthcare AI executive – and he’s been there twice.
That’s why we sat down with him for this two-part interview – to share the lessons he’s learned in this recent role as a healthcare executive.
Today, Chornenky, who has two decades of IT leadership experience and is also the CEO of Domelabs AI, discusses where and how UC Davis Health uses artificial intelligence most frequently.
He describes some of the many AI projects he is working on in the California health care system and provides guidance other executives who may want to become the chief AI officer of a hospital or health system.
Q: Please talk at a high level about where and how UC Davis Health is using artificial intelligence?
AND. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work with UC Davis Health and the great leadership there. I think we have a great vision, very pioneering, amazing clinicians and staff, just a great team all around.
We track over 80 applications of AI across the healthcare system, and it’s quite a diverse range. A lot of it also comes from individual research grants from NIH and others that some of our researchers and clinicians have been involved with, and some of it is really intriguing.
It has a variety of applications in care delivery, patient engagement, patient management, operations and administration. We’ve also been looking at this site a lot more often lately. From the administrative side. We recently hosted a University of California-wide conference at the University of California focusing on how we can think about greater operate of artificial intelligence on the administrative side of all the different University of California campuses and academic medical centers throughout the University of California.
I don’t want to name specific vendors, but it’s been great to see the adoption of AI quite quickly. I think we still have a long way to go.
There are many possibilities. As I mentioned in the first part of our interview, artificial intelligence is evolving really quickly. A substantial part of our role right now is thinking about how to take a stand on the things that are going to be really essential and powerful in the next year or two.
Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, recently said that it thinks we could have something similar to or resembling AGI [artificial general intelligence] in a thousand days. So I think to the extent that something can mimic those capabilities, whether we want to think of it as AGI or not, that will be very powerful. [Editor’s note: AGI is software with intelligence similar to that of a human being and the ability to self-teach.]
Cognitive functions that are orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have, even in the most advanced models released to date. So how organizations think about positioning is a really essential dimension, both on the management side and on the adoption side.
Q. More specifically, describe and discuss just one specific AI project that you are proud of that is working well for UC Davis Health and some results that you are seeing. How did you oversee this project?
AND. I do not supervise AI projects individually. I’m a few steps further and really focusing more on the strategic levels of management, security assurance and broader directionality of innovation and adoption. But certainly, as I mentioned, we follow different projects, encourage them and facilitate support them with different resources in different ways.
One thing I can mention that is really good is the operate of technology that we operate to facilitate us identify stroke patients and prioritize strokes. This was really helpful. The vendor we work with also helps share some of this information with other academic medical centers and health systems, increasing efficiency and facilitating the journey for patients who may also have a presence in other organizations.
And it really improved patient outcomes in space. The ability to identify a stroke more quickly has a huge impact on patient outcomes. This is a project we are very proud of.
Q. What advice would you give to other CIOs who want to become CIO of a hospital or health system?
AND. This is a really intriguing question and one I hear often from colleagues and people who have watched my journey and are interested in doing something similar. Many people have really great experience, so they are wondering how to potentially advance in this field. I’ll repeat again, broadly speaking, what I mentioned in part one: I think you really need to think about the different dimensions of the skill sets that will be required to be successful in this position in the future.
So understanding policy, business strategy, technology, what it can and can’t do, and also having expertise in whatever field you go into. If you feel like you have some of these, but maybe you’re a little lacking in some other areas, I definitely encourage people to delve into other areas and broaden their options overall.
Because, again, AI is a multi-dimensional technology, and multi-dimensional capabilities require, I think, multi-dimensional leadership. It’s evolving very quickly and management is evolving even though it is management lags far behind artificial intelligence. It’s very convoluted.
And this is what I call the AI management gap – where technologies are evolving much faster than management can catch up.
You have very narrow inside knowledge, especially in regulated sectors such as healthcare and government. It becomes a real challenge to quickly adopt AI as it emerges, especially if they don’t have a guardrail in place. So over the last year, we’ve seen a lot of notes from academic medical centers and other organizations saying that ChatGPT shouldn’t be used until there are clear policies in place for where it can be used.
Some people operate it anyway. This is not something that organizations can always control. It’s certainly better to prepare these policies in advance to understand what types of applications and activities, potential risk impacts, or threat vectors you’re likely to see.
I think cybersecurity is another issue I should mention for those interested in this role. Cybersecurity is becoming really essential, especially in healthcare. Many threat actors view healthcare as a tender target containing highly valuable data that can be exploited in a wide variety of applications, ranging from ransomware to exploiting insider threat opportunities with additional data.
So I think it’s also very essential to understand the intersection of AI and cybersecurity.
I recommend it to people who are just gaining knowledge about these different dimensions, try to develop as much skills as possible, as much understanding as possible in these areas, read the news and try to keep up with good people and cooperate with them.
It is arduous for anyone to be a profound expert in any of these areas. So it’s really good to collaborate and have good communities where there’s partnerships between executives, so if you actually become an AI leader in your organization, you’ll have the skill set and the breadth of perspective necessary to facilitate your organization bridge the gap in AI management.