Meet the Innovators: Emergency medicine physician leverages innovative technology and AI to make life better for patients and providers

Welcome to “Meet the Innovators,” a series of stories profiling the leaders and frontline change agents working in and with HCA Healthcare’s Department of Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I). Learn how they got to where they are, and how they are helping to build the future of patient-centered care. 

Meet Dr. Alex Stinard

Standing in a “supercomputer room” of the 1980s, five-year-old Alex marveled at the technology before him and its potential for changing the world. Little did he know he was in the presence of an innovator, his father, the first person at his university to write his PhD dissertation on a computer using punch cards.  His father’s expertise in analytics, coupled with being surrounded by a skilled family of physicians, would go on to shape Alex’s career pathway and impact the future of patient-centered care at HCA Healthcare.

Throughout his formative years, Alex always knew life as a physician was his destiny. Yet, computers captured his imagination. When the first IBM hit the market, his family was first on the block to own a personal computer. Playing computer games and writing programs – all on a one-color DOS screen – became his favorite pastime.

Alex applied to medical school at the age of 18 and was accepted into the University of Missouri when he was just 19 years old. It was during Alex’s college days when the high-pitched whirrs, chirps and beeps of a then ‘state-of-the-art’ dial-up modem delivered his first email on the PC. Always an innovator, he dreamed of blending technology with medicine, making life just a little better for patients and providers.

Before his medical school journey began, neuroscience research became his focus. Working with cutting-edge technologies such as fMRI, electroencephalograms and event-related optical signals, his research focused on mapping the human brain’s function by examining its temporal and spatial relationships. Once medical school entered the picture, his focus shifted to his life’s calling: treating patients and forming meaningful clinical relationships. All the while, the lure of technology and its infinite ‘what ifs’ continued tapping on his shoulder.

Championing technology in the ED

Today, Dr. Alex Stinard serves HCA Healthcare patients as the emergency department medical director at UCF Lake Nona Hospital in Orlando, Florida. His hospital is dedicated to the future of healthcare, investing in the education of future providers and groundbreaking research as well as innovative technology and treatments that support our commitment to ensuring access to superior quality care and patient safety. Dr. Stinard is in his element.

With over a decade of clinical practice, he merged his research background and appreciation of technology with his clinical expertise by partnering with HCA Healthcare’s Department of Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I). It is no surprise that this innovator, physician leader and life-long early adopter of new technology is entrenched at UCF Lake Nona Hospital, CT&I’s first Innovation Hub, a living environment for the formulation, testing and production of innovative solutions that improve care delivery and experience for patients and providers.

Upon its formation a few years ago, the CT&I team asked HCA Healthcare clinicians to identify the most significant barrier to providing the best patient care in healthcare today. The overwhelming response was the volume of documentation, which is a vital but time-consuming process across the industry. This finding was commensurate with industry-wide documentation challenges validated in a 2022 study in JAMA Internal Medicine finding that 58% of physicians said time spent on documentation limits the amount of time they can spend with patients.

In collaboration with Google Cloud and Augmedix, a healthcare technology company, CT&I went to work to develop a solution designed to address the burden of clinical documentation. Input from HCA Healthcare clinicians like Dr. Stinard was crucial to pilot a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology that captures conversations between providers and patients and extracts key medical information.

How does it work? Dr. Stinard uses an Augmedix app on a hands-free device to create accurate and timely medical notes from conversations with his patients. Augmedix’s proprietary platform then leverages natural language processing (NLP), along with Google Cloud’s generative AI technology and multi-party medical speech-to-text processing, to instantly convert the data into medical notes, which physicians review and finalize before they are transferred in real time to the hospital’s electronic health record (EHR).

Related article: HCA Healthcare collaborates with Google Cloud to bring generative AI to hospitals

Dr. Stinard, along with 75 other emergency room physicians across four HCA Healthcare hospitals, works to identify opportunities to improve and enhance the solution, which is shared with CT&I and Augmedix teams. HCA Healthcare plans to expand the technology’s reach, potentially to its nationwide health system.

While we are in the process of collecting measurement data, physicians in the pilot program are highly engaged in helping shape this future innovation. It is no coincidence that this technology’s early benefits mirror Dr. Stinard’s passion for “making life just a little better for patients and physicians”.

“When I first started at HCA Healthcare 15 years ago, we wrote our orders on pieces of paper,” explained Dr. Stinard. “I remember being the change champion for our hospital when we transitioned from paper to computer orders. We’ve really come a long way as we’re developing a computer system that goes beyond helping organize orders and information.”

Prioritizing innovation

HCA Healthcare has long been purposeful about innovating to care for and improve human life, from sharing best practices across one of the nation’s first hospital systems, to building a clinical data warehouse that leveraged data to support care in the early days of electronic health records (EHRs), to using that data to help the nation navigate a global pandemic. And, with more than 37 million patient encounters annually, we see opportunities to innovate at scale that are not as visible or possible at other healthcare organizations.

HCA Healthcare’s legacy of innovation continues with CT&I’s strong collaboration with nurses and forward-thinking physicians like Dr. Stinard.

Dr. John Doulis, vice president of data services and innovation for CT&I, says Dr. Stinard was ideally suited to serve as physician champion of this bold and innovative solution. “Dr. Stinard is a great partner and key thought leader in the clinical documentation space,” said Dr. Doulis. “What he’s accomplished in terms of standardizing documentation, even prior to the clinical documentation solution using Augmedix in the Lake Nona ED, has been nothing short of just very impressive.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Stinard decided to expand his horizons in computer science by returning to school to expand his knowledge of AI. When CT&I selected Augmedix, an AI-driven platform, it was “hand in glove” for Dr. Stinard as he truly understood how to leverage the technology solution.

Dr. Stinard shares that we’re just starting to see the explosion of interest in AI across the country with a keen eye on change and improvements in healthcare. “Those improvements begin with large language models, which will help communication be clearer not just between the patient and provider, but the provider and the care team.”

Change and adaptation

Dr. Stinard likens the clinical documentation solution to everyday programs using AI, which many of us are interacting with at any given moment. “Think of the little changes in email, Spellcheck and now AutoCorrect. Once our clinician-driven testing is complete and data tell us this is a viable solution, our vision is to build a business case for scaling the technology across other HCA Healthcare hospitals and, potentially, the entire organization.”

For providers, how has the clinical documentation solution impacted their ability to make those meaningful connections with patients? “This is the first year in the last 15 years of my practice that I spent less time on the computer, allowing me to have more quality time listening and connecting with my patients,” Dr. Stinard explained. Considering the potential of this clinician-driven solution, change may be one of its biggest hurdles for providers. Like anything new, Dr. Stinard believes physicians can learn how to use it and adapt it to the new situation.

“It’s like using cruise control for the first time: you’re going to be deciding where the roads are going to be appropriate, when to use it and how to activate it and turn it off. You adapt your practice to the technology by saying things out loud that you’re thinking inside, which not only benefits the scribe and the machine learning algorithm, but also the patient who knows what you’re thinking. More information delivered to the patient also helps with documentation.”

Related article: (Forbes) HCA, One Of The Largest Healthcare Organizations In The World, Is Deploying Generative AI

Advice from the innovator

CT&I’s purpose is to create the future of patient-centered care by solving longstanding industry issues in healthcare delivery through clinically-led integration of technology into care. That means clinical input – the clinician’s voice – comes first. HCA Healthcare’s clinical documentation solution in the emergency department is a prime example of the organization’s continued commitment to innovation and elevating the clinician’s voice.

With AI driving this innovation, there are those who may be cautious of the adoption of AI in medicine. Yet, Dr. Stinard is passionate about clearing the air: AI will never replace a provider. The goal is to use AI technology to improve workflows on time-consuming tasks so that clinicians can focus more on patient care.