Lissy Hu, MD, MBA, was recently named CEO of Ascend Learning, which delivers educational content, software, simulation and analytics, serving hundreds of thousands of nursing and medical students, fitness professionals, first responders and professionals. of allied health. She recently spoke with Healthcare innovation about his new role and how medical education and training is evolving to keep pace with change in the industry.
Hu joined Ascend after the company he founded, CarePort, was sold to WellSky for $1.3 billion in 2021. After spending three years post-acquisition at WellSky, he now leads Ascend following the retirement of former CEO Greg Sebasky.
Healthcare Innovation: Could you talk a little about the first stops in your career and how they prepared you for this new CEO role at Ascend?
Hu: I’m a doctor by training and I started a company, CarePort, when I was in medical school and focused on how we help patients leaving the hospital get all the aftercare they need. Previously, this had been a very manual process, so I came up with a software system that basically allowed you to seek the care you need. Over time, it grew and we made a couple of acquisitions along the way, and when I left this year it was at 2,500 hospitals and 130,000 post-acute care providers, so it had basically reached national scale.
HCI: And then WellSky bought CarePort, correct?
Hu: Yes, Wellsky is an enterprise healthcare IT company serving the entire continuum of care, from acute care to post-acute care to home care, so it made perfect sense for CarePort to become partly from WellSky because we were connecting different parts of the system. continuity of care.
HCI: What interested you in coming to Ascend? What did you find intriguing about the opportunities in medical education?
Hu: Two things. One is that from a mission perspective, having been founder/CEO, it was very important for me to find something that inspired me, that was a problem that I really wanted to solve. Ascend is a healthcare education technology company that trains many of the key members in terms of our care teams. Its solutions enable the training of 60% of nursing schools in the US. It trains allied health, whose importance is increasing as we try. to figure out how to care for higher acuity patient populations.
Additionally, I think the way we define healthcare has continued to expand. Previously, health care was what happened in the doctor’s office, and over time that has grown to what happens in nursing homes, home health agencies, and social determinants of health. We also train a large number of fitness and wellness professionals: personal trainers and healthcare advisors. Therefore, Ascend is a critical solution in the healthcare industry, because many of our care teams are being trained through the software that Ascend offers.
HCI: Are there any significant changes happening in the way training is delivered? Is AI impacting that like everything else?
Hu: Yes, absolutely. For students, it’s not just about the content itself, but also how it is delivered. And there is a shortage of nurse educators, so we thought about how we can make them more efficient. A very clear example of this is the launch of a product called Claire AI, which is an artificial intelligence technology that allows nursing educators to create personalized assessments for their students. Each class is a little different; each cohort is a little different. You can use AI to create personalized assessments that fit your student population. It allows nursing educators to ensure that they are testing and assessing students in the areas that are truly important for that particular class, rather than simply implementing a generic assessment. Before AI, that was something that would have been very difficult to do. You can’t ask your educator to create a new assessment for every class you teach every year. This is a way to leverage AI to make the educational experience much more personalized to the students and the needs of that particular classroom.
This is important because, as I was saying, one in 10 nursing teaching positions is vacant, so even from an efficiency standpoint, it’s really important that your nursing educators can spend more time working with students and Less time preparing tests.
Additionally, being able to personalize that learning is becoming important as you think about how to make sure you develop your workforce in a way that gives them all the information they need in a world where there is a greater amount of information than them. have to absorb.
HCI: What are some other things that are becoming more important in the way people learn in healthcare?
Hu: Case-based learning is becoming really important due to the increasing complexity of patients and the variety of care settings. Not every student can go to a nursing home or home health care facility, so it’s important to be able to have some of those cases. It goes back to your original question of why I joined Ascend, which is because I think there’s a tremendous impact that can be had by thinking about continuing to personalize the learning experience, both for the learner, the educator, and the organization. which they are working on. And especially given how dynamic healthcare is and how many changes are happening, being able to prepare people to enter the workforce is really important.
Even after entering the workforce, learning never stops. You have level one, two and three clinical nurses and different specialties, right? Can they work in the oncology or labor and delivery unit? Or for this medical assistant, what is your onboarding process in the clinic versus the hospital? We’ve made two recent acquisitions that focus on how we continue to develop that workforce, even as they enter the hospital or other work settings. At WellSky, while speaking to providers, workforce onboarding, development and retention was always a major topic.
HCI: Within a health system, who is the customer that Ascend sells to? Is it someone who is the head of a nursing program or is there an educational office of a health system that decides what type of training they are going to do throughout the health system?
Hu: Great question. It’s definitely something nursing managers are thinking about. Nurse retention and recruitment are a priority. In his opinion, there are dedicated educators and even a human resources perspective on this. I think in conversations with CNOs, HR directors, and educators, everyone recognizes that retention, onboarding, and development are challenges and are looking for solutions.
HCI: What are some of the things you hope to work on over the next year?
Hu: Some of the conversations we’re having right now revolve around how we can better empower our suppliers through technology, but I don’t think there’s enough conversation about how we leverage technology to develop the suppliers themselves. There is enabling technology, right? Instead of having to document everything, they can have an AI scribe. But that doesn’t fundamentally help figure out how to allow these providers to practice at the top of their license and practice in a way that fits the delivery model or the patient population.
Right now, a lot of people just think of onboarding as watching a bunch of different videos and then, boom, you’re done. Then all subsequent training is done ad hoc. I think we want to be more intentional about the type of technology that we’re creating to help our workforce advance and practice in a way that fits the environments that they’re in, and that’s actually a great way to drive better results for patients. It’s technology that enables the human capital aspect, because at the end of the day, health systems are made up of providers that provide care, so how can we improve those providers?
