Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. In the meantime, we want to continue with AI. Phillip's eleventh annual Future Health Index. It is out now. It examines how AI is already changing the way clinicians work, how they deliver care and manage pressure across the healthcare system. Now, among its findings, how healthcare executives are discovering that AI just isn't about cost savings. So let's get into it. Jeff Delulo is
CEO at Phillips North America. It is the largest regional market and division of the Dutch health tech company Giant Phillips NV. Those ADRs trade in the US. They're done about three percent year to date. As we said, jeffs joins us in here in studio. Welcome, Welcome, How are you wonderful?
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's good to have you here. We do feel like we are spending so much time talking about AI. It's just coming into every aspect of our world. Tell us so about the study that you guys do. It is your eleventh annual. What it's all about, who you talk to and what are some of the findings.
Well, thank you for having Carol. I want to set the table here very quickly, because what I talk to healthcare CEOs on a weekly basis, and the same three things always are putting pressure on that system. As you said, they're delivering more care longer to people that are living longer, and that complex complexity of that care is increasing, so
that's actually putting stress on the system. They have staff shortages which continue to persist and get worse post pandemic, and then the cost of delivering that care is actually continuing to go up. So all those three things are really putting stress on the system. But the opportunity that we see is AI in healthcare is becoming quite of age.
Where a year ago in this study, roughly twenty thousand people, two thousand clinicians, eighteen thousand patients, And what we saw from year to year is they've gone from experimenting and piloting and AI applications to add much more broad adoption and impact impact in time back they can spend with patients, impact in quality, diagnosis, and impact in well being, And they've been very clear about that in the study.
What do those AI applications in healthcare actually look like in practice?
So I'll give you a simple A simple example that everybody can relate to. So the average physician in this study said that they're getting five more patients per week because of tools that they're deploying in their practice. So when I go to my general practitioner, I get maybe ten or fifteen minutes if I'm lucky with him for and most of that time it's sitting on the keyboard asking me questions. Right, what we're seeing is they're getting
the chance to ambient speak. What they're talking that dialogue, it's translating it into the medical record. So what they're doing is they're spending time looking you in the eye, asking you more questions. That's better for more patients they can see because they're spending quality time in the room, or maybe even more patients like we're seeing.
Do doctors feel or medical professionals Jeff feel that we are just barely scratching the surface when it comes to AI in healthcare.
Yeah, a prudent approach is good because you want to make sure that you have responsible AD deployment. And we're hugely as a tech company. We want to make sure it's responsible. What I actually think, we're the scraps at the table and the feast is yet to come.
What do you think that feast looks like?
So take the life of a radiologist. So the average radiologist has to work all day, sees patients, maybe do procedures. Then they take all these studies, two hundred studies home at night and they have to go these go through these studies. That's pajama time, right, it's there. It's long days for radiologists, which.
It makes me always nervous as a radiologist who might be tired exactly and reading my like.
I yeah, exactly, So you have the real days. They's stressful, and I know.
There's great doctors out there, so I don't want to diss.
This, but the system that's meant for them to have balance. And so what we're seeing is AI in the in the work, in the pathway, the whole. If you if you don't think of AI as a bunch of point solutions that do discrete things in healthcare, it has to fit to the radiologist. It has to fit into their workflow. So I can I can scan somebody with great AI much faster I get it into their workflow. I can determine who the most important person is to look at.
I can find the slices in their scan that are the most important things to look at and even recommend. We think it looks like this, you should look right here. If you can do that at scale for two hundred studies a day, you're improving quality life that radiologist in the study, a third of them say they take a lot less work home and they're suffering less burnout and they're just charged in their in their balance. That also adds to quality exactly like you're saying.
I also feel like the data that is input right, Like, there's just more data sets that scans can be compared against, whether it's an MRI, right, Like, do you know what I'm saying?
That data coming you can use, but AI can use it, right And I'll give you an example.
That I mean, when they're comparing scans, right, it's something that might be overlooked. Again, not dissing anybody professionally, but when you've got just hardcold data, that's what they're looking at.
In the study, it'll say roughly half of the physicians that use AI as a as a buddy or as a check or actually more confident in the ability to make their own diagnosis because of the buddy check and a quarter of them are saying that it's a significant improvement in there in the result that they deliver. They're missing they're not missing medical issues, they're not misidentifying, and
they're not missing things. And that's from the physicians themselves that are saying it's actually helping them have higher quality diagnostic which if you're dealing with something like cancer potential, this is a big deal.
How do you kind of, I guess, help the physicians who maybe see, you know, an introduction of a new technology as just another thing that they have to deal with on top of their already busy day, Like do you get pushed back from maybe I'm trying to think of some of those old school doctors who still you know, do everything by hand. They still have paper notes, they still have all their files, you know, in a pay per form, this is a pretty advanced technology if we have to implement.
I go back to this triple threat, the fact that there are not enough people to do the work today and they're burning out the ones that are doing it, And so we actually find in most of the larger health systems there's a huge appetite to embrace this. If we're doing the design along the clinical workflow. The challenge is we took in the industry typically have thrown technology of people and said digest it and the workflow has to change. We're not doing that at Phillips. We walk
alongside our our customers. I work with most of all the largest health systems in the US and Canada and we're walking alongside them. So when we're designing it, we're having them in mind. The beauty of AI driven tooling is that it can actually do the work if in the process that they're in, we can adapt to do the work. That's a lot different than deploying software and complex things that you have to learn, screens and all that.
All that goes away and that's really the promise that's not this magic black box thing that's actually happening today and some of the leading else's.
So where do you see it all going? Like what are you in terms of generative AI and how what role do you see in like I don't know in the next three to five years, Like do you have a feel of how dramatic the impact is well? I think, or what are you hearing from the doctors that you talk to.
I think it's a journey that will be rightly done. With some conservativism. Again, the operational aspects of clinical practice will have dramatic improvement. That's going to give staff back time to be with patients, and you're going to get a better workforce, and you may even draw people into the practice because they actually have these tools that help them be better at what they do and they continue
to have better balance. The sky's the limit, But we want to make sure when it comes to generative AI, that were really thoughtful about not getting over our skis and allowing hallucinations because trust is the number one thing. If we build trust with clinicians and we do it in the right way, that embrace and that self check process actually improves the quality of the output. I've met
with a bunch of CEOs here in New York last night. Yeah, really really top notch institutions, and they're actually telling us in six months the quality of the generative AI algorithms that they're building is improving itself at a rate they didn't anticipate. So again, I think, do it where there's high trust, build that trust with clinicians, design it around
the workflow, and then you'll really get better adoption. And we're seeing that we're seeing year to year, we're seeing a massive improvement and adoption of tooling that is giving life back to a community that joined the practice to serve other people. So it's exciting time.
Okay, So in maybe three to five years, is the artificial intelligence actually going to be making clinical decisions?
I e.
You can go as a patient into a doctor's office and instead of actually seeing the doctor, there's there's not a human involved. Essentially the AI is giving you the diagnosis and telling you.
I think it would be foolhardy to think about what could be in three to five years because the rate of innovation is so fast. What I can tell you is we believe as a technology company that decisions always land with the physicians, and so we want to augment that physician with as much of the non value add work and as much of the diagnostic quality they can so that they can make the best decision clinically for their patients. And I wouldn't I can't see how that'll change in the near future.
Jeff, What does it mean for the devices that you guys, whether it's MRIs or cat scans or sonog like the device is the medical equipment? How does it impact you guys as a company, and how you have to think about, Yeah, well we're borating AI or is it kind of pretty easy?
It's interesting we've made the step to become more of a productivity company than a product company. I mean, that's a pretty big leap in this business. We think the beauty of orchestrating a workflow for healthcare concerns is where we want to be. It's not about the products anymore. And so when we think of like our patient monitoring journey, we're thinking about how do I have a monitoring, persistent monitoring experience across every aspect of where a patient could
be in a healthcare system, even at home. And so we're building these platforms around radiology, around cardiology and cardiovascular intervention, and around patient monitoring from home to hospital to home, where we give hospitals that rich data and that physiological data from patients. And we think of it as the software layer or the platform that you can start to build these AI algorithms into exactly right, think about the
apps on your iPhone. Oversimplified, but think about apps on your iPhone.
Right.
You plug the apps and that do certain things, but the platform itself and that's where we've really moved our R and D.
Hey listen, we'd be a remissed you've only got about a minute and a half left here, but I got to ask you about the macro You see a lot. Your company obviously is global charge of the North American unit. How would you describe the business environment and the consumer side of things?
Actually pretty strong for both, at least for Phillips. In the consumer segments we're in, we're seeing double digit growth across the globe, particularly strong here in North America. Consumer demand has actually gone up for us, and we've got a great portfolio. In the health system side, again, we've seen double digit growth last year, where we've consistently outpaced the industry for some time. But about the industry itself, we see strong demand because of all the things we've
been talking about. We're pivoting to be less about the product and more about productivity. And you think that's going to be a game changer for health systems. That's long term demand.
How are you guys using AI at your company?
So we're deploying everything from our financial systems to my commercial operations, to contract management, our services portfolio so that we can deploy agents to look at systems health systems products that we have in the field to be able to do automatic determination of root cause and a correction path. We're as committed internally to driving productivity and efficiency so that we can grow with our customers at at pace.
Yeah, it's kind of falling. I know, I know, I know your.
Own dog food.
That's right, that's exactly Jeff Delulo, he is CEO at Phillips North America. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Yeah, we appreciate it.