Health-E Law Podcast Ep. 7
Health Vibes at ViVE with Sara Shanti and Carolyn Metnick
Thank you for downloading this transcript.
Listen to the podcast released March 21, 2024 here: https://www.sheppard.com/multimedia-553
Welcome to Health-e Law, Sheppard Mullin's podcast exploring the fascinating health-tech topics and trends of the day. Our digital health legal team, alongside brilliant experts and thought leaders, share how innovations can solve some of healthcare’s (and maybe the world’s) biggest problems if properly navigated.
In this special episode, partners Sara Shanti and Caroline Metnick join Phil Kim to discuss Sheppard Mullin’s recent attendance at ViVE 2024, the premier conference for digital health innovators primarily focusing on optimizing patient care and improving the patient user experience.
About Carolyn Metnick
Carolyn Metnick is a partner in Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate Practice Group in the firm's Chicago office and a member of the Healthcare and Privacy & Cybersecurity Teams.
Carolyn represents a range of healthcare industry clients, including hospitals and health systems, physician organizations and digital health companies. She advises on healthcare regulatory and transactional matters, focusing on health information privacy and security.
Carolyn advises clients on a range of privacy and security laws, including HIPAA and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). She also counsels businesses in data breach investigations and compliance with federal and state breach notification laws. Carolyn is a Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States (CIPP/US) and a Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E).
Carolyn also represents healthcare industry clients in transactional matters, guiding clients through joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and advising on healthcare regulatory issues. Her background as a former litigator helps inform her transactional work.
About Sara Shanti
A partner in the Corporate Practice Group in the Sheppard Mullin's Chicago office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Sara Shanti’s practice sits at the forefront of healthcare technology by providing practical counsel on novel innovation and complex data privacy matters. Using her medical research background and HHS experience, Sara advises providers, payors, start-ups, technology companies, and their investors and stakeholders on digital healthcare and regulatory compliance matters, including artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), gamification, implantable and wearable devices, and telehealth.
At the cutting edge of advising on "data as an asset" programming, Sara's practice supports investment in innovation and access to care initiatives, including mergers and acquisitions involving crucial, high-stakes and sensitive data, medical and wellness devices, and web-based applications and care.
About Phil Kim
A partner in the Corporate and Securities Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin's Dallas office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Phil Kim has a number of clients in digital health. He has assisted multinational technology companies entering the digital health space with various service and collaboration agreements for their wearable technology, along with global digital health companies bolstering their platform in the behavioral health space. He also assists public medical device, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the investment banks that serve as underwriters in public securities offerings for those companies.
Phil also assists various healthcare companies on transactional and regulatory matters. He counsels healthcare systems, hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, physician groups, home health providers, and other healthcare companies on the buy- and sell-side of mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and operational matters, which include regulatory, licensure, contractual, and administrative issues. Phil regularly advises clients on matters related to healthcare compliance, including liability exposure, the Stark law, anti-kickback statutes, and HIPAA/HITECH privacy issues. He also provides counsel on state and federal laws, business structuring formation, employment issues, and involving government agencies, including state and federal agencies.
Transcript:
Phil Kim:
Welcome, everyone, to a special edition of Health-e Law where in today's podcast, we'll be discussing Sheppard Mullin's recent visit to ViVE. ViVE is a tech-oriented healthcare innovation conference, an event that showcases and primarily focuses on optimizing patient care workflow and improving patient user experience. Today, I'm joined by my partners, Sara Shanti and Carolyn Metnick. Both of whom are healthcare partners with me here at Sheppard Mullin. And Sara, I'll start with you. What were some notable takeaways from the conference this year?
Sara Shanti:
Thanks, Phil. This conference was a really remarkable event. We always get excited to go to ViVE and its sister conference, HLTH, which is generally in Vegas because it is just a massive event with innovators and technological solution to make healthcare and the delivery of healthcare more efficient and better outcome. So we were thrilled to see another showroom floor that was just packed with innovators and great ideas to improve healthcare, but the one topic that was just completely inescapable was artificial intelligence. It really permeated, I think, the whole showroom floor and nearly every single panel that we attended.
Phil Kim:
That's great. Carolyn, was there anything that stuck out for you at ViVE in 2024?
Carolyn Metnick:
As Sara mentioned, AI was a very important significant theme. You couldn't sit on one conference or one panel without a discussion about AI which, of course, is very exciting, and I think most of the folks were optimistic about it. I would say that provider burnout was another important theme which we're all familiar with it and aware of it, and certainly, COVID put stress on clinicians, and we know that a number of clinicians left the market, and there's a labor shortage, but some of the statistics were really shocking. Apparently, it costs $4.6 billion a year, and I sat in on a great panel that was about how virtual care delivery models can really help reduce burnout, and it just makes it easier on providers to have maybe a couple days a week where they are able to work from home.
Certainly, there was an acknowledgement that virtual care is not perfect for every patient and every scenario, but it really is powerful. I also think, listening to this panel, there are opportunities to reduce healthcare disparities by some of these virtual care delivery models that not only reduce provider burnout, but also make it easier for folks in certain communities to access really great care that they might not otherwise would. Again, these aren't new concepts, but it was interesting to hear more about it and hear some of the statistics and what people are seeing. That panel also really addressed AI potential as well.
Sara Shanti:
I think the AI piece, that's a great example of where AI came in to address a much bigger topic of burnout. I know things as simple as solutions to help providers get through their email and their communication with patients all the way through tools that they can rely on for diagnostic testing. So I heard that too, Carolyn. The burnout of our remarkable professionals is so crucial in how AI can maybe support some of that.
Carolyn Metnick:
Yeah, and that's exactly right. I mean, there was a point about provider getting, I don't know, 300 emails a day and how having technology or AI to help prioritize some of those emails may be useful. Then, that conversation went into a different direction about the importance of AI governance. Again, if you're not looking to use AI or really thinking hard about this space, then you're not a player. I think that was another takeaway that became very quickly obvious. That was just a permeating theme.
Phil Kim:
Sounds like there were a lot of AI solutions that were discussed at ViVE this year that were focused on streamlining patient care workflow processes, thereby enabling a higher volume of patient visits per day, but I think that's probably a nice juxtaposition to what we see with overall provider burnout.
Sara Shanti:
It wasn't just the technology companies speaking to it or the providers. We also heard it from government which I think, Carolyn, maybe you disagree, but I found it really fascinating to hear how CMS and VA were talking about incorporating AI with some real innovation into their models too, and because we all know that there's not a lot of really clear regulation in AI right now which I think everyone was waiting to see if there's going to be any big announcements at ViVE. But really, we just heard from everyone all the way from tech and large providers all the way to government agencies that having a framework and being really thoughtful about how you're implementing AI, how you're evaluating how it's working, and its use, and its protections is really crucial for the industry, especially as we're aware that this Congress will very likely will not be bringing down any real regulation on AI, and so it's up to the industry to ensure they're operating within a framework that can adjust to future regulations.
Carolyn Metnick:
Yeah. I would agree, Sara. I mean, that just goes to the importance of AI governance which I think stakeholders, and providers, and anyone, really, any company that's going to be using AI really needs to have and develop. One other theme that I want to mention which also ties into all this is data bias. I feel like disparities and biases in actual data were common themes too throughout a number of the panels. There was a focus on just the bias in healthcare in general and really, some interesting statistics. Again, it also ties in with the concern about AI. As the use starts to expand, there's the concern about it automating a bias and scaling the bias that already may exist. So that's something that I think AI governance may be able to protect against or mitigate, but there doesn't seem to be much of a solution for that at this stage.
Sara Shanti:
I think that's a great point that we talked a lot about. The conference talked a lot about bias and some other pieces with data integrity with AI. But otherwise, we had some of the brightest minds in AI in that room at some point during the conference, and I think everyone really struggled with talking about the perils of AI, right? We're so optimistic. Everyone is so excited about the solutions that AI can bring that the room really, really struggled with talking about some of the risks and some of the real threats of AI not only to healthcare, but as healthcare moves forward with some of these exciting solutions, how that could potentially be misused in society as a whole. So we found that fascinating, that as excited as everyone was, it was really difficult to come back to Earth and focus on some of the real risk to some of this technology that hasn't been fully identified even.
Carolyn Metnick:
I heard a great saying. This was the panel that was about addressing bias through the lens of hidden figures, and one of the speakers said, essentially, the takeaway was if you're using AI, you need to think about three things: toolset, mindset, skillset. He broke it down as toolset is, "What are you buying? What's the technology?" I mean, that could be the AI. Mindset, data stewardship, and skillset is training. He said, “That the easy part, really, is the data stewardship and the training, but the concern, again, was also automating a bias.”
Another interesting point that he made is that the responsibility to collect data within a provider system, think of a health system or hospital, it exists at all levels, so the person who does the intake or registers a patient to the physician. Everybody needs to be thinking about what kind of data you're collecting, why you're collecting it, and how you're going to protect it, and what the downstream implications are. We don't always think about these things, and we all take in so much data every day. So I think this goes to a theme that you were mentioning earlier. We haven't discussed yet about data as an asset. Was that a theme that you saw much throughout, Sara?
Sara Shanti:
Yeah. I think there were a couple of panels that specifically were meant to address data being really precious, an asset to the provider or even to the payer or other health company. As Carolyn knows, Phil knows, we do a lot of work in that space of maximizing all of your assets, including data assets, but to do it ethically and legally. But on the flip side, and I know we only have a couple minutes left here, so I'll just make the point that there's also a concern that data was really being fragmented, and if we could unfragment that data, think about how much more information the industry will have to use for the benefit of its members and its patients.
Phil Kim:
Yeah. It sounds like this year at ViVE, it's really a combination of themes that, Sara, Carolyn, we've all been talking about for quite some time which is that with AI governance being critical and the fact that we still have yet to see a comprehensive federal framework to regulate AI, it's up to stakeholders and big players in this industry and everyone, really, to take responsibility to make sure that we're handling data properly, that we're handling all of our social responsibilities as we need to. So, yeah. With that, we will wrap up this special edition of Health-e Law, and we'll continue to report back as we attend other conventions that might be relevant to you all. Thanks for joining us. That is it for us here today. We will see you next time, unless you need us in the meantime.
Contact Info:
Phil Kim
* * *
Thank you for listening! Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to the show to receive new episodes delivered straight to your podcast player every month.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help us get the word out about this podcast. Rate and Review this show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or Spotify. It helps other listeners find this show.
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as legal advice specific to your circumstances. If you need help with any legal matter, be sure to consult with an attorney regarding your specific needs.