February 18, 2025

The Health

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Medical & tech leader predicts health care’s potential

Medical & tech leader predicts health care’s potential

Episode Transcript

Alan Helgeson (announcer):

“Reimagining Rural Health,” a podcast series brought to you by Sanford Health. In this series, we explore the challenges facing health care systems across the country from improving access to equitable care, building a sustainable workforce, and discovering innovative ways to deliver high-quality, low-cost services in rural and underserved populations. Each episode examines how Sanford Health and other health systems are advancing care for the unique communities they serve.

In this episode, host Courtney Collen with Sanford Health News talks with Dr. Nworah Ayogu, head of Healthcare Impact at Thrive Capital. Dr. Ayogu is a speaker at the 2024 Summit on the Future of Rural Health Care.

Courtney Collen (host):

We’re so happy to have Dr. Ayogu in Sioux Falls. Welcome.

Dr. Nworah Ayogu (guest):

Thanks for having me. My first time in Sioux Falls and I’m loving it. I’ll be back.

Courtney Collen:

Love to hear it. So glad to have you. You’ll be speaking on a panel about expectation to experience, really rethinking health care to serve today’s consumer. What is one message or a couple of messages, golden nuggets as I like to call them, that you want to drive home with our audience here today?

Watch the Sanford Health News vodcast of this episode

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

So, I spend a lot of time thinking about innovation. You know, I spent a bunch of time in startups, spent time in big tech at Amazon, and now I’m at Thrive. So we hear pitched startups all the time thinking about innovative ways to solve problems.

And to me, I think one of my biggest pieces and one of my biggest takeaways is going to be we used to say a lot, necessity is the mother of innovation. And when I think of where’s innovation going to take hold and where do I think innovation is going to come from for this next sector of health care innovation, I think we’re going to see it in densely urban areas and very rural areas.

So people think a lot about, you know, Silicon Valley and, you know, the Upper East side of New York. And there are two kinds of innovation people talk about. There’s sustaining innovation and there’s disruptive innovation.

Sustaining innovation is doing the same things we’ve always done. Doing it, you know, faster, doing it cheaper. Disruptive innovation is really thinking outside the box to say, how do we do things in a completely different way? And we need a more disruptive innovation in health care. But the way that we’re going to get that is through the communities that truly have needs, the communities where the current health care system is not serving them appropriately. And to me, that’s part of why I’m so excited about this summit because one of the big things I’m pushing, one of the big things I’m anchored on is that that’s where real disruptive innovation comes from, are people who understand the needs and necessity is the mother of innovation.

So it’s going to be our rural communities, and it’s going to be our densely populated urban communities that are going to drive that innovation because that’s where the need is. And honestly, there’s so much talent in these communities to drive that innovation as well.

Courtney Collen:

Is there anything that has surprised you, something that you’re taking away personally from the events so far today?

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

So, honestly, one of my favorite parts has been talking with the Sanford Health leaders throughout. I think there are probably three pieces:

One is that they’re really leaning into virtual care as a modality, but also as a way to redesign how they connect and support patients. And not because, you know, it’s fun, not because it’s a shiny tool, because they’re saying, look, we know we have communities where the nearest doctor is literally miles away, tens, hundreds (of miles) away, depending on specialists. And they’re saying, this is what we need to actually serve the customer and serve the patient that we have. So the way that they’re embracing virtual care is one that’s been really amazing.

I think there’s a deep cultural aspect, and we talk a lot about reimbursement mechanisms in health care. We talk a lot about the technology. But culture is actually what ties together whether or not an organization can be successful.

And there’s a deep focus within Sanford and the leadership, the clinicians on the culture and the community. They care about the people around them because that’s their family, those are their pastors, those are their teachers. And that culture is actually very key for making sure that you’re innovating but also you’re innovating compassionately and with the patient in mind. And I’m, I really love that.

Courtney Collen:

I’m glad that you’re part of this and you’re part of the dialogue as well. Dr. Ayogu, what do you think is the biggest misperception about rural America right now?

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

To me, it comes back to the fact that people who haven’t spent a lot of time in rural America can think that it’s stagnant and people don’t want to innovate and people don’t want to adopt new technology. And that’s, I’ve not seen that to be the case at all.

So I think the biggest misconception to dispel is that this is a community and these are areas that want to innovate, but they want to innovate on things that are truly going to solve their problems. So if you’re willing to engage the community and work back from their problems, you will find that these are communities and health systems that are eager and excited to really not just innovate, but actually to drive the innovation.

Courtney Collen:

And I’d love to know what innovation or action in your mind will it take to move the needle forward say in the next one to two years?

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

I’m a big fan of AI. I spend a lot of time leaning in to understand and see sort of what that tooling is. And I think of three categories of AI.

There’s what we call Fortune 500 use cases, so things that are as useful to a Sanford Health system as they are to a Walmart. So that’s things like, making sure that your data and your engineers can move more rapidly, making sure that your call center when you call in, we can actually have that be automated such that you can get to your problem quickly without having actually having to talk to a person. You can solve your problems yourself. Whether that’s Sanford to use that the same way that American Airlines can use that.

Then we have clinical health care specific administrative use cases. So that’s things like scheduling and revenue cycle management and sort of prior auth and then we have clinical use cases. And it’s been interesting. I think there are less of those that people are deploying.

But one of the things I do is, every week, there are case studies in the New England Journal of Medicine. These are kind of the “House MD” level cases, the super sort of complex medical mysteries. And I put them in every single week and you know, chat GPT’s newest model just to see how does it perform. And we’re going on six weeks straight of me doing this.

And you know, me and my colleagues, the cases that we often can’t get, it does a thorough differential diagnosis. That with super complex esoteric, it gives us the treatment guidelines to the same level that the New England Journal of Medicine’s experts are giving. So it just shows that this technology is here and the clinical applications can really do a lot to improve access, but also make sure that no matter what your zip code, you’re getting that kind of same level of expert care.

Courtney Collen:

Isn’t it fascinating?

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

It’s amazing.

Courtney Collen:

Yeah. Incredible. How do we strengthen trust in health care during a time of rapid disruption?

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

So in my mind, trust comes down to two things. Say what you’re going to do and then do what you say. And that’s it. If we continue to do that, we will earn people’s trust.

But it’s remembering that trust is a thing that is earned. And if you go in with that mentality and you do those two things, you tell people what you’re going to do to set those expectations, and then you do it to earn the trust. And then you do that repeatedly over time, you’ll earn trust.

Courtney Collen:

Fantastic. OK, and lastly here, what book are you reading right now? And if not right now, what book potentially has been really key or influential in your career thus far?

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

I’ll answer both. So the book I’m reading right now and is called – well actually, let me start with the one that’s been influential. So it’s called “Pathologies of Power.” It’s by Paul Farmer, who was a doctor and mentor of mine, did a lot of amazing global health work. But it’s really, it’s very much a values driven book. And one of the things he talks about is he was a great person and I think mentor of mine who I learned about a lot from, and one of the principles in it is the preferential option for the poor. It comes from a Catholic teaching, but it’s all about you should focus your time on the areas and people who need you most, about how do you triage? What do you focus on?

There’s some people will say, focus on the lowest hanging fruit. His was always focused on the most need and that’s how you order and prioritize your time. He did that in his global health work. He did that honestly in his personal time as well. And I, the more and more I think about it now is you’ll learn a lot of knowledge as you go through your career. You’ll learn to work with new tools, but you know, we’ll have AI that’ll make it easier for us to do all of our jobs.

But the one thing it won’t do is set our values. And I think to me, I think more and more that the things I learned early on, the people who taught me those values and the books that help me think about what are the values I want to exist in those, this world, I find that to be more and more important. I think it’s only going to get more and more important that we’re not afraid to talk about our values and live our values and make sure that our organizations and the systems we’re a part of our values aligned.

Courtney Collen:

What do you love most about what you do?

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

I think it’s being able to work with amazing, talented people who are following their passion. So every day we hear from entrepreneurs, and we get to work with entrepreneurs who are spending all of their time focused on a problem that is near and dear to their heart and soul. That is kind of their passion, their meaning, their reason for being. And when you’re around that passion, it’s infectious.

And the fact that every day we get to, in some way, shape or form, assist them in that journey, that’s awesome. I think that’s my one wish is that everyone gets the chance to fully pursue their passion and hopefully has, you know, sherpas around them to support them.

Courtney Collen:

I love that. Well, we are so grateful to have you here in Sioux Falls for the third Rural Health Summit and for this podcast as a guest. Thank you for being here and for all that you do.

Dr. Nworah Ayogu:

Thank you for having me, and I will definitely be back.

Courtney Collen:

Looking forward to it.

Alan Helgeson:

You’ve been listening to “Reimagining Rural Health,” a podcast series brought to you by Sanford Health. Hear more episodes in this series or other Sanford Health series on Apple, Spotify, and news.sanfordhealth.org.

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Posted In
Leadership in Health Care, News, Rural Health, Virtual Care


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