Q&A with Virtua Health Chief Digital Transformation Officer Tarun Kapoor, MD: Innovation “is never really done”

Since it was first introduced a year ago, generative AI has been the biggest topic in healthcare, and for good reason. The potential it has shown in improving medical education and clinical documentation has been nothing short of remarkable. In fact, when Tarun Kapoor, MD, was first introduced to ChatGPT, he had “a borderline out-of-body experience.”

Along with excitement, however, AI has also prompted a great deal of hesitation among leaders, according to Kapoor, who believes “an appropriate and healthy degree of skepticism” is going to be necessary as organizations get their arms around the technology. During an interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor at healthsystemCIO, he stated that AI literacy is one of the biggest challenges for leaders. But it also presents an opportunity to foster “deep, meaningful conversations” about the possibilities, as well as the hurdles that exist.

In the discussion, Kapoor, who serves as SVP and Chief Digital Transformation Officer with Virtua Health, talked about his approach with digital health initiatives, which starts by asking some critical questions. He also shared insights on the two sides of innovation, why the focus should be on product – and not project – management, and the human responsibility when it comes to AI.

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Q&A; with Tarun Kapoor, MD, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Virtua Health

Gamble:  Thanks so much for taking some time to chat. I know there’s a lot going on.

Kapoor:  There’s a ton going on everywhere, but thanks for reaching out.

Gamble:  Sure thing. I’m really interested in talking to you about your role and then what you guys are doing at Virtua.

Kapoor:  So, I’m an internal medicine hospitalist by training. I’ve been with Virtua for 15 years. I’ve been very fortunate; I’m now in my fourth or fifth role with the organization. I’ve been a hospitalist, an informaticist, chief medical officer of our medical group, and I headed up population health. In 2019, I took on digital health as a stretch assignment.

The best career advice I can give to anyone is that it’s always better to be lucky than good. So then March of 2020 came along, and all of a sudden digital health accelerated more in a few weeks than it had in previous decades.

Creating a digital transformation office

We specifically spun up a digital transformation office in 2020 to take advantage of the rapid changes and the rapid adoption that happened during that time, and to see how we could hard-code it. It was amazing; everything that people were doing and how much advancement we were able to make in a relatively short period of time, understanding that this pandemic would eventually ease. And so, with some of the urgency we had behind it, how do we create an environment where innovation can continue to happen?

The most important thing about innovation isn’t the experimentation; it’s the adoption. That’s the key piece. And so, we took the incubator and accelerator model from Silicon Valley and said that anything that a traditional operational division would normally do in two or three years, we would partner with them and try to help them pull it off in six months. That’s where the idea came from.

We maintain a portfolio and we rebalance the portfolio several times a year, just like with a 401K. We go where the organization needs us to go. That’s a little bit about the digital transformation office.

Digital doors

Gamble:  I want to get into some of those initiatives. Can you talk more about that?