Brittany Cyriacks, Clinical Informatics Program Director, UCHealth

This episode recorded live at the 10th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting features Brittany Cyriacks, Clinical Informatics Program Director, UCHealth. Brittany shares how UCHealth is leveraging AI and virtual nursing to improve patient outcomes, reduce mortality, and standardize care across hospitals, while offering advice on governance, change management, and avoiding technology fatigue.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Philips is a health tech leader focused on
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(00:21):
for every patient. Better care for more people.
Philips.
This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and we are recording live at the
twenty twenty five Health IT Digital Health and
RCM conference.
I'm currently joined by Britney Cyriax, who is
the clinical informatics program director at UCHealth. So,

(00:42):
Britney, thanks for being here. Would love to
have us start off by sharing a little
bit more about your background and your work
in health care. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
I am a nurse. I've been a nurse
for seventeen years working for UCHealth. I started
as a clinical nurse,
worked as a charge nurse, got into professional
development where I did a lot of the
onboarding of our new staff, and then transitioned

(01:05):
into clinical informatics and have my master's in
clinical informatics.
Currently, for UCHealth, we have a very large
virtual health center, and I am the informatics
program director over all of those programs and
work closely with our informatics team to kind
of redesign
the way that we're delivering care with a
virtual nursing model.
Wonderful. Well, thanks for being here. And I'd

(01:26):
love to start our conversation off with AI.
So nearly half of medical practices reported using
AI in some capacity last year, and it
remains a key topic for health IT leaders.
So from your perspective, what are the use
cases that are making the most difference right
now and how are you leveraging them in
your organization?
Yeah. So from my perspective,

(01:47):
AI is not new for the nursing world.
We've been using sepsis predictive model and deterioration
predictive model through our EHR.
And so we have found that having models
that can really detect that something
is happening with the patient early so that
we can intervene early has been very successful.
And what we've kinda done with those tools

(02:07):
is that instead of giving them to the
very busy bedside nurse, we have virtual ICU
nurses
that get that signal instead, and we'll do
a chart review,
put in a few orders for the patient,
and really drive care around those deterioration events.
And so we've seen some really great outcomes
and decrease in our mortality
by really standardizing

(02:28):
that model. And it's also been a model
that's been significantly
scalable.
So every time we bring on a new
hospital into our system
and they come on our EHR, we can,
you know, flip a switch, so to speak,
and give them that same workflow
and see the same outcomes for that organization
as well.
Awesome.
And as virtual care expands from an

(02:50):
AI enabled tools and remote monitoring to broader
digital health platforms, introducing new technology brings challenges.
So what advice do you have for leaders
navigating everything from governance to patient engagement? And
can you share an example of how your
organization has balanced innovation with operational constraints?
Yeah. I mean, my advice that I will
give to health organizations

(03:10):
and their leaders is that you really need
to bring in an informatics
team. If you don't have one already,
these are gonna be the folks that really
help with that change management
and really connecting with the end users and
being that voice between the technical solutions and
the work flow and really advocating
for the right solution,
something that is of ease of use for

(03:31):
the clinicians and something that the patients find
useful.
We're not going to
find a problem for a solution. We need
a solution for the problems that we're already
having.
And so I would, just encourage kind of
that informatics
involvement early on and then bringing in those
end users, really understanding
their friction points

(03:52):
so that we are together finding a solution.
And how are you seeing recent legislation, both
in state and federal areas affect healthcare organizations
and healthcare IT specifically? And have you adjusted
any strategies in response?
One example I can give you is just
around remote patient monitoring billing codes. I think
during COVID, we obviously were given a little

(04:14):
bit more leeway
in compliance and kind of the way that
we ran those programs. And so we've found
as they've gotten a little more stringent
that we've had to kind of redesign our
workflow to make sure that we're getting
everything that we need to be doing from
a checklist perspective to be doing the billing
for that. Another thing that we've seen is
that they are covering that cost for Medicaid

(04:35):
patients. So that's been a huge win to
be able to provide
these services to patients that we previously were
not able to.
And as we wrap our conversation up, what
is your top piece of advice for health
care leaders as they prepare for further advancements
in technology and rising demands for care?
Yeah. I think we run the risk of
having some AI fatigue, technology fatigue.

(04:58):
The space outside of the hospital walls is
moving so quickly, and oftentimes within our organizations,
we move very
slowly. I think we're gonna have to find
a really good balance so that we can
stay current in what we're doing in our
work. We're also gonna have to make sure
that we have some governance around this. So,
again, that we're not getting the new fancy,
shiny tool, but that we really are

(05:19):
making sure that our solutions are fitting what
our organization is trying to tackle.
Well, thank you so much for joining me
today on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast and sharing
these insights. Again, we are live at the
twenty twenty five Health IT, Digital Health, and
RCM conference.
Thank you.