What is your AI IQ, EQ, and AQ?

The dissemination and implementation of artificial intelligence in sick care is increasing. End users in operations, finance, and clinical care are experimenting and testing ways to use the technologies to achieve the sextuple aims.

The barriers to deployment are substantial.

Human factors, like how and whether doctors will use AI technologies, can be reduced to the ABCDEs of technology adoption. Research suggests the reasons more ideas from open innovation aren’t being adopted are political and cultural, not technical. Multiple gatekeepers, skepticism regarding anything “not invented here,” and turf wars all hold back adoption.

Attitudes:?While the evidence may point one way, there is an attitude about whether the evidence pertains to a particular patient or is a reflection of a general bias against “cookbook medicine”

Biased Behavior:?We’re all creatures of habit and they are hard to change. Particularly for surgeons, the switching costs of adopting a new technology and running the risk of exposure to complications, lawsuits and hassles simply isn’t worth the effort.

Cognition:?Doctors may be unaware of a changing standard, guideline or recommendation, given the enormous amount of information produced on a daily basis, or might have an incomplete understanding of the literature. Some may simply feel the guidelines are wrong or don not apply to a particular patient or clinical situation and just reject them outright.

Denial:?Doctors sometimes deny that their results are suboptimal and in need of improvement, based on “the last case”. More commonly, they are unwilling or unable to track short term and long term outcomes to see if their results conform to standards.

Emotions: Perhaps the strongest motivator, fear of reprisals or malpractice suits, greed driving the use of inappropriate technologies that drive revenue, the need for peer acceptance to “do what everyone else is doing” or ego driving the opposite need to be on the cutting edge and winning the medical technology arms race or create a perceived marketing competitive advantage.

In addition, medical schools, graduate medical education and graduate schools are not doing enough to train knowledge workers how to be more effective.

Patients are also pushing back. Healthcare consumers see AI-delivered healthcare as standardized and therefore neglectful of patients’ individual needs, which is one reason they tend to be less accepting of healthcare delivered by AI than that provided by humans.

The biggest obstacles are changing doctor and patient behavior and the people part of AI.

Upskilling requires a change in AI knowledge, skills, attitudes, competencies and mindset and measured by your AI literacy and dexterity readiness and maturity (IQ), how you apply EQ Vs. IQ: Navigating The AI Revolution With Emotional Intelligence ( forbes.com ) and, given the rapid pace of change, how facile you are adapting to the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment (VUCA AQ).

AI READINESS AND IQ

In his book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank described what has become the gospel of lean startup methodologies: Customer validation, customer discovery, customer creation and company building

The path to sick care digital transformation is a bit shorter, but certainly no less difficult and plagued by failure: Personal innovation readiness, organizational innovation readiness and digital/AI transformation i.e. people, process, culture and technology.

These authors elucidate the primary components of a QMS (Quality Management System) namely People & Culture, Process & Data, and Validated Technology, as the impetus for HCO’s strategic efforts to integrate research rigor and clinical excellence into a cohesive system and close the AI translation gap.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Here are five specific strategies for CEOs and leaders to enhance EQ among their teams.

? Lead by example: Demonstrate self-awareness and empathy in your interactions with employees. Model the behavior you want to see, such as active listening and handling conflicts with emotional intelligence.

? Provide training and development: Offer workshops or coaching sessions focused on emotional intelligence skills like self-regulation and empathy.

? Encourage feedback and reflection: Foster a culture where feedback is valued and encourage employees to reflect on their emotions and interactions.

? Promote collaboration and teamwork: Create opportunities for employees to collaborate and emphasize understanding others' perspectives and emotions.

? Recognize and reward emotional intelligence: Acknowledge and reward behaviors that demonstrate emotional intelligence, such as resolving conflicts peacefully or showing empathy.

There are two modes of experimentation :

1. Explore - Exploring is about testing wide to find your points of leverage in your growth model so that you can focus your limited resources and exploit.
2. Exploit - Once you find our points of leverage, you move into exploit mode by testing deep and narrow.

ADAPTABILITY

?Strategic fitness is a leader’s ability to learn from and adapt to their environment to set direction and create a competitive advantage. A study of 77 C-suite executives over four years found that strategically fit leaders excel in four disciplines : 1) Strategic fitness, or setting clear direction and calibrating when necessary; 2) Leadership fitness, or refining their style to meet the moment; 3) Organizational fitness, or investing in thinking about the future state of the business; and 4) Communication fitness, or effectively collaborating with internal and external stakeholders. A series of questions can help any leader evaluate and exercise their own strategic AI fitness.

That means we need people who are the new AI triple threats.

Measure and track your AI competencies by asking yourself:

1. Why should I use it?
2. When should I use it to solve a particular problem?
3. What do I need to do to achieve dissemination and implementation at scale?
4. How should I adapt and learn from testing AI and learning from the results?

Innovation starts with mindset. Changing your mindset is hard. For many, it will be impossible, given their backgrounds and how they have come to see things. For a handful, though, their efforts could change the world.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack