MGMA Insights: Crystal Washington on Generative AI for Healthcare Leaders
Download MP3Well, hi, everyone. I'm Daniel Williams, senior editor at MGMA and host of the MGMA Podcast Network. Today, we are continuing our coverage of the upcoming MGMA Leaders Conference. It's September 28, through October 1 in Orlando. And today, we are so blessed to have one of our keynote speakers, Crystal Washington, who is join joining us today.
Daniel Williams:Crystal, I've been reading about. Crystal is a a futurist, an author, a hall of fame speaker. That's kinda cool. And, she's gonna be talking to us about generative AI and other issues like that. Crystal, it's so good to get to connect with you today.
Crystal Washington:I am so honored to get to spend some time with you and, the audience as well. Thank you for having me.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. So I have to ask you before we get rolling. Are you an Orlando person, a Disney kind of person? Do you like things like that? Or
Crystal Washington:I have a Disney addiction. If I could move in, I would. In fact, I'm one of the few adults I know who have gone to Disneyland and a couple parks in Disney World even by myself. So I don't have to have a chill child. I don't have to have another person.
Crystal Washington:I will go by myself and even get on the kiddie rides with little kids. So I'm there with, like, four year olds. It's a small world. Yay.
Daniel Williams:That is so cool. Well, I don't know if you've carved out any time. I know you have a busy schedule. If you plan to hit Disney or anything else while you're there. Anything?
Daniel Williams:Are you just flying in, flying out? What are you gonna do?
Crystal Washington:We kinda have to wait until we get closer. I I get in trouble if I start making fun grandiose plans before I get close. My team gets on me, so sometimes other things are planned. But I hope I hope, Daniel, that I get a chance to, and, hopefully, some of the attendees will be right there with me. We'll be small rolling it together.
Daniel Williams:Okay. Well, that is so cool. And you can ride the rides for me. I have a now 20 year old who got me to do a few rides about a decade ago, and I got off of one of those things that had me moving sideways and upside down. And I went, that's it.
Daniel Williams:That's the last one. So I I know my limits, and I will leave that to you, Crystal, and my daughter, and other people who like really fast, rides that disorient. So Let's talk about you a little bit. I gave some background of you being an author, a hall of fame speaker, a futurist. How did you get involved in being a future how does someone become a futurist?
Daniel Williams:Someone who looks in to, like, what's going on with technology, trends, things of that nature.
Crystal Washington:It's interesting because I was a futurist before I knew I was a futurist. It actually took one of the more founding futurists in The United States from, like, the seventies to see me and was like, you do know you're a futurist. I'm like, what? And I went through training. Basically, it it falls into how I think.
Crystal Washington:Just
Daniel Williams:Okay.
Crystal Washington:I've always been I was a baby that did puzzles, and I have a way of just looking a few steps ahead. But, basically, I guess the part of the story that might be interesting and it led to this is that my degree is in hospitality because they offer me a free ride. And so when I was in that industry, I started to see what was going to happen ahead of time. And I was very young. I was in my early twenties over department of people old enough to be my parents and grandparents.
Crystal Washington:And I remember telling my boss, I have a feeling, and this is in the two thousands, this social media thing's gonna be big. I said, I just feel like it's a matter of time before companies get on here. Now, of course, now we're like, duh. But it hadn't happened yet. And I said, think about it.
Crystal Washington:If Pepsi gets on there and they have a profile, Pepsi can talk to people who love Pepsi, and they'll love Pepsi more. And my boss, who's a few generations past me, said, look, kid. You're cute and you make us a bleep load of money. He didn't say bleep. Stick to what you know.
Crystal Washington:And I was like, oh, burns. And so I did what any self respecting millennial would do. I quit my job and I started a company. And so it was all around leveraging social media to grow small business. I started with mom and pops in the Houston area.
Crystal Washington:And then within about a year, year and a half, I had Google, Microsoft, and British Airways hire me as a consultant. So I've always had a way of seeing what was coming ahead of time, especially with technology. And when your future is you actually go through training for this, degrees. So there's there's more to it. Right?
Crystal Washington:It's going back to school and everything. But it's a way of seeing the world where you see alternative futures that are likely to happen by collecting data points, recognizing not just trends, but something called signals, Daniel. Those are things that we've all seen before. We know how we see those little things, and we're like, this keeps popping up. I don't know what it means, but it means something.
Crystal Washington:Yeah. Knowing how to analyze that and turn that into data, that's really what futurists do. And we help individuals or organizations prepare for those very likely alternative futures and even get ahead of them to try to bring about the future they want. There's things that we can do that oftentimes in normal strategic planning doesn't happen.
Daniel Williams:Okay.
Crystal Washington:So that was my course to being a futurist. It started off with my business and then the speaking and a futurist being like, wait a minute. And she pulled me aside and told me to go through all this extra training. So now I just have models that really match how I naturally think. I'm always thinking several steps ahead.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. And it's really interesting you explaining that you really started out in hospitality. I don't know how many futurists combine those two elements of life. I think that is so cool. Were you not not like you saw the future, but, you know, the pandemic obviously really rocked us on a global level, and just so much is changing so fast.
Daniel Williams:So we have the pandemic, then we have AI has been around for decades. But to consumers like me and many of our listeners, AI, quite possibly the way we interact with AI right now with ChatGPT and other, you know, platforms out there, that has just exploded in these last several years. So what would you say about what's going on just from that everyday use of AI? And then we'll get into the health care side of it.
Crystal Washington:Well, I I think it's important to ground ourselves in the fact that the term artificial intelligence was invented in the nineteen fifties. Okay. We have been using artificial intelligence for anyone that's alive right now, they've actually been using it for almost their entire life unless they're over a 100 years old. Right. And so any type of technology that performs a reasoning function that used to require the human brain so even a regular calculator from the seventies is technically artificial intelligence.
Daniel Williams:Wow.
Crystal Washington:So we have to understand that it's not this new scary thing. Now it did, increase dramatically starting to get into the February, especially in the medical field or when it came to actuaries for insurance, analyzing data, scanning. We know that it's oftentimes more reliable than humans when it comes to recognizing irregularities in medical scans. But the reason why everyone's talking about it now, and it seems overwhelming, cause even then when that was happening in the medical field, and it was growing tremendously even in 2020, I actually did a nine month IBM data science certificate to better understand it, especially from a medical perspective. Now I have no interest in being a data scientist.
Crystal Washington:I just I see what's coming, and I like to study it ahead of time. Right. It was really the invention of or the not invention. It was the introduction of generative AI to the public in November 2022, which really blew the cap off. Right.
Crystal Washington:Because this was a form of of AI that generated human like responses. Mhmm. That seemed like it could analyze things. It seemed like it could draw and make videos and do summaries. We hadn't seen that before.
Crystal Washington:And, And, of course, when you understand what it is, you know that it's not an oracle. It's actually just advanced math and pattern recognition. But the speed with which it's increasing is dramatic, but it's not as dramatic as people think. What's happening is we're listening to the people who are creating it, who are saying it's gonna be able to do this, this, this, this, and we're looking at them as experts when they're really salespeople. Does that make sense?
Crystal Washington:Yeah. And so what happens is you buy into the hype of a thing. I'm not saying that it's not important, but what it does is it creates this anxiety in people. And if you look at some of the Elon Musks of the world or you look at, you know, our folks over at Meta, right, Oftentimes, the things that they say do not come to pass in a timeline they say at all, period. What Meta was supposed to be capable of is not what it's doing right now.
Crystal Washington:Anybody remember the metaverse? People were spending Yeah. Hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy real estate in an in in an invisible world. Right? So I say that because I think we should take it seriously, Daniel.
Crystal Washington:But I also think that we have to understand it's not moving as fast as they say it is. It is not as accurate as some are portraying it is to be. It is not human level intelligence. And we have to be super careful that we're listening more to the engineers versus the faces of organizations that stand to benefit from people buying into whatever they're saying because it helps their stock prices go up. It gives them additional opportunities and investors.
Crystal Washington:We have to wait.
Daniel Williams:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay.
Daniel Williams:I was telling you offline that health care leaders, those are who are MGMA podcast listeners are, they're juggling everything from staffing to compliance to efficiency to just the complexity of the healthcare world, trying to keep their practices profitable or bringing in as much money as they can while providing the care that's needed for their patients. They don't have the time, like maybe you do, to to be an expert in AI. How do they embrace it without being overwhelmed by it? What can they do, as health care leaders?
Crystal Washington:I mean, do think we have to set aside time for learning, period. But I understand you know, when we talk about leaders in the medical field, my gosh. You know, from staffing shortages to challenges in getting certain supplies right now and global supply chains, I know there's not a whole lot of extra time. So I just wanna say that my the next thing I say is gonna come from someone who strongly, both appreciates and empathizes, with the situation. But even if it's just setting aside ten, fifteen minutes to just have just it it could be just looking at what's coming out for your industry.
Crystal Washington:It could be reading something like TLDR. That's too long, didn't read. It's a it's a a blog that comes out daily, and you don't have to read it daily. But, you know, just kinda look and see. And you can do a search for medical to see if it mentions any type of AI that's going to impact the medical industry.
Crystal Washington:I think we just have to be open to see. What I do try to discourage people from, and I think maybe the folks listening to us right now will appreciate this, Daniel, is that I tell people the goal is not to be an early adopter or first adopter of any of this technology. Being the first with these types of technologies is extremely painful because there's a lot of hiccups. There's a lot of potential law ish legal issues. There's a lot of potential PR issues if you don't do this right.
Crystal Washington:And I am someone who's sometimes hired to come into corporations as they walk back access to generative AI from their people because they've seen how it's blown up in their faces. And so I think it's a matter of being open, but also really being clear about what are the top three challenges in your practice or your organization right now. And then if you hear of any type of generative AI or any other type of technology that addresses those specific challenges, then spend some time looking into it. What's happening right now is we live in this very interesting world where leaders of all kinds of industries are doing the opposite. They see a new technology.
Crystal Washington:It's shiny. Oh, let me figure out how I could use this. That is backwards. That's not a good use of your time. If you identify your challenges, then if you see the technology, oh, let me see if this helps with one of those three things.
Crystal Washington:Because that's a quick lookup. Nope. Okay. I keep moving. Because there's a lot of wonderful technology that might actually add value, but it may not add value to you, your practice, your organization, your career, your patients.
Daniel Williams:Okay. Now I know you are tight on time. You've got other appointments today, but I wanted if you could leave our listeners with one thing. You're gonna be speaking in Orlando on generative AI for leaders. What is something fun?
Daniel Williams:What's something exciting that you could share with them that they can expect to to learn or hear or listen to in that keynote?
Crystal Washington:Well, I think really one of the biggest things you're gonna get out of this is, yes, we're gonna talk about the applications for the medical industry. But you're going to leave with some very practical and even funny ways that you can use some of this stuff in your everyday life that's not intrusive, but that's actually helpful. So just, you know, for anyone that feels overwhelmed, which is most people right now. Right?
Daniel Williams:Yeah.
Crystal Washington:I don't want you to come feeling like you're going to have all this stuff downloaded into and it's gonna be overwhelming. It's not. We're gonna make this practical. We're gonna make it fun. And really, just like, you know, in the medical field, some things really aren't as complicated as people make them out to be.
Crystal Washington:It's just having a basic understanding. And we're going to strip this down so it's as pragmatic as possible and fun. You're gonna see it's interactive too. It's fun.
Daniel Williams:Alright. Well, Crystal Washington, keynote speaker, author, futurist, thanks for joining us on the MGMA podcast.
Crystal Washington:Thank you so much, Daniel.
Daniel Williams:Alright, everyone. Crystal will be speaking at our leaders conference on generative AI for leaders, staying ahead in a machine driven world. Again, that, conference is in Orlando, September 28 through October 1. You can go to mgma.com/leaders right now and register or learn more about it. Thank you so much for being MGMA podcast listeners.
