UTMB Faculty Senate Minutes
Monday, August 12, 2024
Teams Virtual Meeting
4:30 PM-6:00 PM 

Open Senate Meeting:

Call to Order – Shannan Rossi, PhD, MBA, Faculty Senate Chair

Attendance “Roll Call” & Establishing Quorum

  • GSBS – Dr. Maureen Laroche
  • JSSOM – Dr. Kelly Carmichael
  • SHP – Dr. Crystal Douglas
  • SPPH – Dr. Sharon Croisant
  • SON – Dr. Shinu Joy

Agenda Adoption: Consent Agenda Adoption – Approved

Review & Approval of Minutes– July minutes are approved and uploaded to Faculty Senate website.

Guest Speakers

Peter McCaffrey, MD, MS, FCAP & Salim Hayek, MD        
Topic: AI as a Catalyst: Elevating UTMB to New Heights by Leading in AI Mastery and Innovation.

  • Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare:
    • Enable the highest standards of specialty care
    • Understand and manage personalized care
    • Simplify scheduling, prescription refills, telemedicine and more
    • Automate and eliminate paperwork
  • Brief Historical Review:
    • Perceptron in 1958, backpropagation in 1980’s, Convolutional Nets (LeNET) 1990’s
    • Convergence of compute, data access, and software tooling blew up AI in 2010’s
    • Advent of Transformers in 2017
    • Modern Generative AI in 2020’s
  • Generative AI:
    • Long-range interactions with modifiable context makes models adaptable
    • Paradigm shift toward zero- or few-shot use cases
    • Language, Image, Video, Audio and multi-modal
    • Robust tooling for prompt development and testing, for agent deployment, for dialogue, and for data retrieval
  • Strategy and Initiatives: 7 Pillars of UTMB’s AI Strategy
    • Drive Volume to Care Pathways
    • Embed UTMB in Important Consortia and Coalitions
      • TRAIN, CHAI (assurance lab)
    • Alleviate Administrative Burden
      • Power CoPilot(Mark Schultze), scheduling in Find-a-Doctor (Mark Schultzwe), Billing/Documentation (Salin/Leah), IHOP Search/Chat (Salim/Shane)
    • Develop AI Expertise/Engagement by Opening Co-Pilots Across the Enterprise.
      • Qualified Health, Proptathons, Prompt Focus Groups, AI Rounds, Innovation Team
    • Make Enterprise Data Accessible to AI
      • FHIR connection (George), Engineering Lab (Vineet), Fax Document Stream (Mark Schultze)
    • Bring UTMB Near to Commercialization Activity
      • Accelerator partnerships (Vineet), Qualified, and Innovation Team
    • Protect UTMB against AI Misuse and Liability
      • Utmb.edu/ai with prompt training, policies
  • AI Addresses the Common Bottlenecks
    • AI is a tool to augment physicians and we desperately need augmentation
    • Our goal is to maximize patient health and to focus clinician time directly toward patient care
  • Complete vs Marginal Automation
    • We often think of AI’s bar as completely performing a human workflow or task: complete automation
    • In reality, it can be disruptive even if automating only part of a task or workflow: marginal automation. Most automation is marginal.
  • Macro Effects and Valuation of Work
    • AI increases case efficiency for Pathologists.
    • This will likely impact the RVU model.
    • Compensation may regress downwards or shift.
    • Either we can find new demand, find new valuation, or we face potential contraction.
  • Primary Initiative: Improve ROI
    • AI-Enhanced documentation to reduce denials and improve payment
    • AI-Guided medical billing, mismatch repair, and provider queries
    • AI-driven opportunistic screening and improved Find-a-Doctor for physician search
  • UTMB Innovation: AI-Enhanced Notes
    • UTMB uses Generative AI to enhance clinical notes
    • UTMB is building AI tools focused on billing requirements and clinical guidelines
    • Target Outcomes:
      • Increase payment rate
      • Reduce AR days
      • Reduce FTE time in appeals
      • Improve Case Mix Index
  • Other Initiatives
    • Save FTE Time
      • Improve IHOP Policy Search
      • Perform AI-driven policy analysis (e.g. contradiction)
      • Clinical Trial Matching and Abstraction with AI
    • Enhance AI Tools and Partnerships
      • Launch Secure GPT for pilot users (Qualified Health)
      • Launch utmb.edu/ai with governance and safety policies
      • Join CHAI (with UT assurance lab) and Microsoft TRAIN
    • Strategic Course for AI
      • Implementation
        • Build, publish and translate
        • Partner to accelerate development
        • Commercialize early products
        • Early site for Epic AIR
        • Early site for Microsoft AI
      • Thought Leadership
        • CHAI and AI assurance labs
          • CHAI: 1,500-member coalition across medicine, industry, and regulators.
            • Establishes the standards for validating and monitoring AI.
            • The “what” for responsible AI.
          • Collaborative Case studies
          • Core member of MSFT Train
            • Microsoft TRAIN: Leading consortium for tools for data sharing and AI monitoring.
              • Access to pre-release tools and input on MSFT roadmap.
              • The “how” for responsible AI.
          • Leaders in UT System AI
          • Define and share best practices
      • UTMB is Leading in Responsible AI
        • UTMB and UT Southwestern are the only UT institutions who are part of Microsoft’s Trustworthy and Responsible AI Network
        • UTMB Co-Chairs the UT System AI Collaborative, representing all UT Health Institutions and setting policy for responsible use of AI statewide.

Updates

Reminder:
September 9th - Faculty Senate Annual Meeting
Location: Levin Hall Dining Room
Time: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm

Unfinished Business & General Orders

  • None

New Business

  • Dr. Claudia Hilton motions to move into executive session. Motion seconded: by Dr. Maureen Laroche

Executive Session

Committee Reports:

  1. Education: Dr. Brian Downer- The committee discussed their presentation for the September annual meeting. The committee is also interested in speaking with Dr. Peter McCaffrey regarding gathering resources for faculty that are interested in incorporating AI in the classroom. The committee further discussed early ideas about initiatives that they want to pursue for the new academic year.
  2. Clinical: Dr. Karren Lewis – The committee reviewed the slides for the annual meeting. Further, the committee wanted to know if there were other methods to distribute their survey findings regarding the RVU’s.
  3. Research: Dr. Laura Dickson – This committee also discussed what information to place in their presentation for the annual meeting. The committee are creating a survey that includes input from the general faculty on a variety of issues found. This is something they would like to highlight in the presentation. Some issues that could be looked at in the coming year are the “indirects” and how they don’t really benefit the people bringing the money in along with bridge funding and how difficult it is for faculty to receive funding under new leadership at the university.  
  4. University: Dr. Jacquelyn Svoboda – The committee discussed the annual meeting and the slides for the presentation. The committee also discussed the review process for the IHOP policies and how to re-structure the process overall. The committee further discussed the survey disseminated in March of this year that provided some ideas on what the baseline knowledge of the perception of the Senate. There will be a new survey sent to the outgoing senators and incoming senators. Senators are welcome to provide input/questions for the survey. 

Announcements:

  • Reminders:
    • Please vote for the APT guideline’s revisions discussed during the July meeting.
    • Senate leadership in FY 25:
      • Dr. Jacquelyn Svoboda – Chair
      • Dr. Sarah Samreen – Chair – Elect
      • Dr. Shannan L. Rossi – Past Chair

Adjournment at 6:00 p.m.