Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Vaz with Becker's Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. It's great to have you. Today, we're talking about how healthcare organizations can unlock the full value of AI by rethinking infrastructure as a strategic asset from power and facilities to engineering and design integration. And I'm so excited to be joined by two wonderful guests. Brahim Santos is the US segment sales and market leader at Healthcare for Schneider Electric, and Zach Hilliard, he's the Principal Innovation and Technology Design at SSR. Brahim and Zach, thanks so much for being here today. It's great to have you both. Welcome. Yeah, thanks for having us. Great to have you. I want to kick us off with sort of asking a fundamental question a little bit. And Brahim, I want to start off with you, right? When we think about healthcare, AI and AI in healthcare, a lot of folks think clinical. That's the way it goes generally. I want you to talk a little bit about sort of the, what we call the hidden frontier of this. What do you want executives to see and why does the built environment determine whether AI delivers real value in this context? Yeah, no, for sure. And I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this because it's something that's kind of hiding right in front of everyone's face, really, if you think about it, you know, look, when it comes to patient care, we always think of these clinical applications and the things that directly touch the patient. But often we overlook the back of house or the behind the scenes systems that actually play a major part in helping to ensure that this physical environment is what it needs to be for patient care. And that being said, I think it's often viewed or viewed as pure cost, right, without any return, if you will, the necessary evil to keep those four walls in place for the patient care. But I do believe if executives take a second to figure out, hey, how can we do things like leverage AI into or work with partners such as ourselves to, you know, leverage an AI in these back of house systems and applications, they can actually leverage in for more of those clinically facing systems. systems, right? So if you take a time, if you take some time to really think about like, hey, if I maybe can add some efficiencies and, you know, do some other things to what normally is just writing a check for, maybe I can actually write that check and that check can actually turn into something bigger by way of savings. Zach, is there an example of how infrastructure readiness shows up in the real world before it touches patient care? Is there something that sticks out for you? Yeah, well, one of the terms that's very familiar in the design space is like a facility conditions assessment. So that traditionally has been what's the age of your infrastructure? How am I going to diagnose your infrastructure from an engineering lens? And I think that this is such an exciting opportunity now where that is really getting recalibrated to look at adding sensors adding intelligence intentionally in that infrastructure assessment so that you can do this pairing and inference just like what AI is is just looking at patterns you know and then giving you an outcome. So how do we take that data intentionally early on and get the wins that Brahim was talking about so that you can fund some of these larger capital initiatives? And Zach, I want to talk a little bit about that change that you've just mentioned, right? Again, we talk about the return of investment to return on asset, which you just described essentially from a design and engineering lens, what changes when hospitals start doing exactly what you just described, which is treating infrastructure as a strategic yielding asset instead of just something that's a utility to keep things running? Well, I like that you use the word utility. Thank you. It is exactly that. It's a utility. So the dynamic value is probably the thing. And it's the dynamic, meaning it's hard to go in and say there's going to be this one outcome for you doing this investment. Return on investment is did I get that yield, right? Did I make more money on the thing? ROA, which is this new framework or technology around attention, access, automation, and assets, is really a multiplicative, like duplicative kind of value that we're looking at things differently. So by making those connections of the infrastructure, smart spaces, like thinking about using a sensor, video, audio, other componentry like that intentionally gives you dynamic outcomes. It's not one thing that Lucas benefits from. It's one thing that every department will now benefit from. That gives you the attention that you, you know, that you never had before. It gives you cognitive offsets so that you can have your care teams focus on things they need to focus on and not have that doom and gloom of like, you know, pajama time that you hear about. Right. So we care about that. Even as engineers in the back of house, we care about those things because we're trying to make sure that we have that satisfaction for the customer. Brahim really quickly, just as a follow up to this, do you feel like organizations are not understanding this more and they're getting a feeling for for this? I don't know how much of it is they don't understand or they just allow it to sit in the back of their minds, if you will. Right. And allow other things to stay in the forefront. And maybe some of it is a little bit of not understanding or having a conversation with some individuals to understand what the opportunities are in front of them. So I think it's why we're here today, right? To help kind of spark some interest and to, you know, start to cultivate these conversations and learn, you know, what their environments are like. And if we can leverage in some more technologies to add in some efficiencies for sure. Yeah I want to talk a little bit about the bridge that you two both build And Zach I start off with you Again we talk about sort of these coordinated layers that this is required for And Schneider sort of builds the foundation of physical assets and resilient power And then you are bringing engineering and integration and AI governance certainly as sort of the canopy in all of this to bring this together From the design side what does it take to then again bridge that to build that bridge to have those layers so that hospitals can move again from that idea to application from where they are vulnerability and empathy. Yeah. Probably come to mind first, uh, having those different points of view or perspectives, uh, on the other side, but the partnership is the key word, like, and looking at not only just either of our organizations, like, obviously we want to be your partner, but understanding and empathizing with the facility, you've got strong operational commitments with big partners, big, like very impactful partners. They're doing the scopes of work that's been defined. Now there's this utility of AI. Have you really done a second pass and understood what might already be there as building that bridge? So when we kind of create this like hamburger stackers, you know, that we were talking about earlier today with Microsoft is having this discussion. It was more to understand what each one of us can bring from our own expertise, but then empathize and find those integration and crosswalks together. Yeah. Brahim, when you're having these conversations with health systems, right, what's the first design decision or sort of the no regrets move that sort of makes everything easier to scale and to actually get to this point? It's a tough one, like kind of like put some low hanging fruit, if you will. Yes. You know, dipping your toe in the water. I think there's a couple ways to to approach and look at it there's i think there's always great opportunity in new builds for sure right it's always easy to make sure that you select new equipment with the proper fundamentals if you will right to uh be connected right making sure that you uh if given the option they're often very low dollar uh additional options to select along with your equipment to make them connectable right to make them smart so i think that's always the first step right so when you have that opportunity to procure new pieces of equipment for your for your facility make sure that you buy it so that it can be connected and smart next i'd say from a brownfield uh standpoint you can you can also often have a five figure investment in some of your applications that can yield six seven figure return so there are opportunities out there of layering technology into your existing. It could be in HVAC systems, lighting. It can be in a lot of different things that are right there in front of you that you can really find those savings. Zach, when we close our conversation here today and you're looking ahead to maybe, you know, 12, 24 months, what's that quick win that you prioritize right now for health systems? Finding an I guess an unrecognized or undefined use case So expanding upon just the versatility of what an AI strategy is going to give you There's a lot of rigor that comes with that because governance is still a very hot topic at this conference, I'm sure, around how do you kind of control and manage AI? Because it is risky, you know. But if you can do those things properly, have the guardrails in place, I think you'll be just blown away by the outcomes just as a consumer, everyone that's listening to this right now. has probably GPT, co-pilot, Claude, et cetera, on their phone. And you can't tell me that you know what that outcome is going to be, but somehow magically delivers, right? It's the same thing with your facility. It's like, we want those magical moments to happen almost as a benefit we talked about in our session here around the value that we got out of behavior recognition, starting to learn those patterns and learn like the predictability of what a facility manager is looking for and not having them to have to prompt and ask it, but having them just to receive and say, yes, please. Like that's a real big benefit 12 to 24 months away. That's tangible. Yeah. Brahim really quickly too, you mentioned the ROI of this in terms of obviously it's going to have financial benefits if this is done right, but what are those outcomes, those other outcomes that systems can expect if they're doing this right in the next 12 to 24 months? Just even in addition to monetary benefits, if you will. Yes. Right. So one of the things that Zach and I and we had talked about in our session, we had two images up in front of us. So, you know, one was out of a mechanical system, most historically in the basement, if you will, and then very dark, very, very dark basement. And then in OR, and then we were just kind of really painting the picture of these two worlds really aren't that far apart, right? I think often we think about the actual space that the patient is in. We just really highly focus on that, right but again we're talking about the back of house aspects so you'd be shocked right that when you work on those back of house basement type applications hvac systems whatever the case may be you're actually improving patient outcomes right you are sustaining the environment you are increasing uptime all of the above so in addition to just some of the monetary benefits you can yield from, you know, increased efficiencies, you can often maybe just increase the environment as a whole, which can often produce a better outcome from patient care. I think we're creating confidence. Like, yeah, I mean, confidence is like, I guess, maybe a bow tie on the whole thing is you're going to have more confidence in your facility for everyone that's serving, which is kind of a neat, neat thing to think about. Yeah. You don't have to cross your fingers anymore. You can do guessing game, no guessing game. There you go. Yes. It's so great to have you both here in at Becker's Annual Meeting. Thanks so much for taking some time and being here. Thank you. Thank you so much. And we also want to thank Schneider Electric for sponsoring today's podcast. You can tune in for more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.
