UTMB Faculty Senate Minutes
Monday, August 12, 2024
Teams Virtual Meeting
4:30 PM-6:00 PM 

Open Senate Meeting:

Call to Order – Shannan Rossi, PhD, MBA, Faculty Senate Chair

Attendance “Roll Call” & Establishing Quorum

  • GSBS – Dr. Maureen Laroche
  • JSSOM – Dr. Kelly Carmichael
  • SHP – Dr. Crystal Douglas
  • SPPH – Dr. Sharon Croisant
  • SON – Dr. Shinu Joy

Agenda Adoption: Consent Agenda Adoption – Approved

Review & Approval of Minutes– July minutes are approved and uploaded to Faculty Senate website.

Guest Speakers

Peter McCaffrey, MD, MS, FCAP & Salim Hayek, MD        
Topic: AI as a Catalyst: Elevating UTMB to New Heights by Leading in AI Mastery and Innovation.

  • Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare:
    • Enable the highest standards of specialty care
    • Understand and manage personalized care
    • Simplify scheduling, prescription refills, telemedicine and more
    • Automate and eliminate paperwork
  • Brief Historical Review:
    • Perceptron in 1958, backpropagation in 1980’s, Convolutional Nets (LeNET) 1990’s
    • Convergence of compute, data access, and software tooling blew up AI in 2010’s
    • Advent of Transformers in 2017
    • Modern Generative AI in 2020’s
  • Generative AI:
    • Long-range interactions with modifiable context makes models adaptable
    • Paradigm shift toward zero- or few-shot use cases
    • Language, Image, Video, Audio and multi-modal
    • Robust tooling for prompt development and testing, for agent deployment, for dialogue, and for data retrieval
  • Strategy and Initiatives: 7 Pillars of UTMB’s AI Strategy
    • Drive Volume to Care Pathways
    • Embed UTMB in Important Consortia and Coalitions
      • TRAIN, CHAI (assurance lab)
    • Alleviate Administrative Burden
      • Power CoPilot(Mark Schultze), scheduling in Find-a-Doctor (Mark Schultzwe), Billing/Documentation (Salin/Leah), IHOP Search/Chat (Salim/Shane)
    • Develop AI Expertise/Engagement by Opening Co-Pilots Across the Enterprise.
      • Qualified Health, Proptathons, Prompt Focus Groups, AI Rounds, Innovation Team
    • Make Enterprise Data Accessible to AI
      • FHIR connection (George), Engineering Lab (Vineet), Fax Document Stream (Mark Schultze)
    • Bring UTMB Near to Commercialization Activity
      • Accelerator partnerships (Vineet), Qualified, and Innovation Team
    • Protect UTMB against AI Misuse and Liability
      • Utmb.edu/ai with prompt training, policies
  • AI Addresses the Common Bottlenecks
    • AI is a tool to augment physicians and we desperately need augmentation
    • Our goal is to maximize patient health and to focus clinician time directly toward patient care
  • Complete vs Marginal Automation
    • We often think of AI’s bar as completely performing a human workflow or task: complete automation
    • In reality, it can be disruptive even if automating only part of a task or workflow: marginal automation. Most automation is marginal.
  • Macro Effects and Valuation of Work
    • AI increases case efficiency for Pathologists.
    • This will likely impact the RVU model.
    • Compensation may regress downwards or shift.
    • Either we can find new demand, find new valuation, or we face potential contraction.
  • Primary Initiative: Improve ROI
    • AI-Enhanced documentation to reduce denials and improve payment
    • AI-Guided medical billing, mismatch repair, and provider queries
    • AI-driven opportunistic screening and improved Find-a-Doctor for physician search
  • UTMB Innovation: AI-Enhanced Notes
    • UTMB uses Generative AI to enhance clinical notes
    • UTMB is building AI tools focused on billing requirements and clinical guidelines
    • Target Outcomes:
      • Increase payment rate
      • Reduce AR days
      • Reduce FTE time in appeals
      • Improve Case Mix Index
  • Other Initiatives
    • Save FTE Time
      • Improve IHOP Policy Search
      • Perform AI-driven policy analysis (e.g. contradiction)
      • Clinical Trial Matching and Abstraction with AI
    • Enhance AI Tools and Partnerships
      • Launch Secure GPT for pilot users (Qualified Health)
      • Launch utmb.edu/ai with governance and safety policies
      • Join CHAI (with UT assurance lab) and Microsoft TRAIN
    • Strategic Course for AI
      • Implementation
        • Build, publish and translate
        • Partner to accelerate development
        • Commercialize early products
        • Early site for Epic AIR
        • Early site for Microsoft AI
      • Thought Leadership
        • CHAI and AI assurance labs
          • CHAI: 1,500-member coalition across medicine, industry, and regulators.
            • Establishes the standards for validating and monitoring AI.
            • The “what” for responsible AI.
          • Collaborative Case studies
          • Core member of MSFT Train
            • Microsoft TRAIN: Leading consortium for tools for data sharing and AI monitoring.
              • Access to pre-release tools and input on MSFT roadmap.
              • The “how” for responsible AI.
          • Leaders in UT System AI
          • Define and share best practices
      • UTMB is Leading in Responsible AI
        • UTMB and UT Southwestern are the only UT institutions who are part of Microsoft’s Trustworthy and Responsible AI Network
        • UTMB Co-Chairs the UT System AI Collaborative, representing all UT Health Institutions and setting policy for responsible use of AI statewide.

Updates

Reminder:
September 9th - Faculty Senate Annual Meeting
Location: Levin Hall Dining Room
Time: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm

Unfinished Business & General Orders

  • None

New Business

  • Dr. Claudia Hilton motions to move into executive session. Motion seconded: by Dr. Maureen Laroche

 

    Announcements: None at this time.

    Adjournment at 6:00 p.m.