Sara is an Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at Providence, a non-profit health system with 51 hospitals and nearly 1000 clinics that serve approximately 5 million patients annually in the western region of the country. Sara’s prior work spans across advisory work, health policy, research, and consulting. Sara received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and received her MPH and MHA from the University of Washington.

Sara Vaezy, Chief Transformation Officer at Providence

The Pulse: Can you share the journey that led to your current role, and outline your main priorities and focus areas as Chief Transformation Officer?

Sara Vaezy: I’ve been at Providence just about nine years, and it’s gone by very quickly. Before Providence, I worked in management consulting and health policy. Before that, I was a scientist at a medical device company and in academia. I’ve always been interested in science and the discovery process. I realized I didn’t want to work in lab environments, and thought I might want to be a physician. I did a large exploration process of shadowing physicians to see if it was the path I wanted to take, but was given the advice to pursue an MD only if you can’t imagine doing anything else.

During this exploration process I saw the increasing levels of provider burnout firsthand, and this led me to want to understand why the system functions the way it does, which led me back to school where I studied health policy combined with systems thinking.

In my current role as Chief Transformation Officer I’m responsible for sustainable growth which means driving new customer acquisition, technology enabled care transformation, creating better access, more reach, and a better clinician experience. In terms of teams, I lead brand, marketing, digital, virtual care, responsible artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, and digital innovation which builds new products that may spin out into full standalone companies.

The Pulse: How do you strike a balance between addressing immediate needs and advancing the long-term vision for health care transformation? Are there often instances where these priorities conflict, and how do you navigate those trade-offs?

SV: It’s a good question, but I might reword the question from a technology lens: if you have a platform for today, how do you build on it for tomorrow? If you come at the problem in a creative way, you should be able to do both at the same time.

Our planning process enables us to achieve this. We don’t do waterfall planning where you complete large phases of projects before moving onto another large phase. We do smaller, short-term planning and testing with the long-term goal still in place. This allows us to adjust our product so that it is addressing short-term immediate needs and still building towards our long-term vision.

We are also able to address this trade-off by using a portfolio approach to innovation – we will take on shorter-term and longer-term projects at the same time. One example is a two-year infrastructure project we did on Marketing team. We want to know our patients well enough that we are aware of what services they are in the market for. Part of the trade-off we took in addressing immediate needs, while leaving resources for the long-term part of the project, is that we focused on what we call “next best” data point. We don’t want to spend the time and resources trying to get everything – it would take too many resources, and it keeps things friendlier and not overbearing for patients. We just want what’s most relevant and useful. Keeping this focus allows us to move quicker in the short-term and allow flexibility long-term.

The largest hurdle with long-term planning is typically the financial component. We need to be able to show that although a project is more future oriented, here is the return-on-investment we’ll already see today. For us, more transformation and innovation type work pay for itself through operational savings.

The Pulse: How do you assess the long-term potential of new innovations and technology, and differentiate buzzy from transformational?

SV: Signal to noise is very hard, and with the creation of applications becoming so much easier, there’s been a proliferation of technology. The simple way to describe how we try to do this is through deep market, technical, and build/buy/partner analyses. Some of it is more of an art than a science. It’s not just features and functionality. Our EMR (Electronic Medical Record) could theoretically do everything, but we look at workflow, customer experience, user journey, and get deep on the technical side of things for each part of our product. We don’t have an appetite for black box solutions. We also have extremely high standards for monitoring and data access.

One of the most important things is to be unwed to specific solutions and stay objective. In addition to the categories above, one important element for us is looking at the leadership teams of the technology. Are they private equity versus venture capital backed? What is the track record for the company? How many pivots do they have in their history?

With brand new technologies, especially ones that touch the actual care of patients, we want to wait and see how academic medical centers and other research institutions react to it first. For example, with imaging and clinical trial technologies that are coming up, we often wait and see what the results are for academic early adopters.

My team and I also built a list of problem statements through both industry and internal interviews. We got feedback from the ground from caregivers, which is the term we use internally for employees. Some of the feedback we got was macro-level things, or issues we think will become larger in the future. We constantly refer back to this as a reminder of the most important problems we are trying to solve. This helps us to remove some of the noise.

The Pulse: Can you share examples of innovations of technologies Providence has implemented in recent years that are proving to be effective and enduring?

SV: We’ve invested in technologies to improve the end to end in-basket. The in-basket is the inbox where physicians receive messages. There are many different sources that messages come from: patient generated, payer generated, provider or peer generated. The number of messages a physician receives is proliferating rapidly. Currently, our physicians and care teams receive 15 million messages per year.

We are solving this issue in a few ways. The first is helping the patient to tackle the problem directly without having to send a message, or in other words, message avoidance. This involves intent recognition, or understanding what the patient needs to get done, and simplification of the patient experience and workflows by connecting them to the right fulfillment partner. The second is using technology to help our physicians respond to messages by triaging the messages they receive, summarizing cases, and bringing up relevant information from the patient’s charts. The average time to respond used to be 48 hours for our physicians, but with this technology we were able to bring it down 50% to 24 hours.

The Pulse: What advice would you give to individuals aspiring to both secure and succeed in strategic roles within health systems, particularly those looking to make a meaningful impact?

SV: Right now is a particularly challenging time in the world, especially in health care. We can’t afford cynicism. Creativity, interest, and enthusiasm for problem solving is more necessary than ever. Continue to think of all the interesting problems and people that could be helped. Don’t get cynical. Get in there and bring people in that also have this same energy. I found myself at Providence very serendipitously. The opportunity just emerged, I took a risk, and I did it. Now, nine years later, I’m still having fun with it in trying to solve problems.

I was worried when many of these new technologies, particularly AI solutions, were coming out. I’m more of a business person, and I understand health care, but my science background was in a completely different arena. I wondered what I can do and what I will be able to add, but the last two years have been the most interesting learning journey. There’s room for everybody. We still need translators that can bridge the gap between tech, business, and operations. There’s still a lot of room for what humans can do and add to these technologies, particularly with integrative thinking.

Interviewed by Lindsey Mattila, December 20, 2024.