THREE QUESTIONS WITH Venkatesh Bellamkonda, M.D., Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine

How are AI and other tech advancements changing Mayo Clinic’s operations?

Mayo Clinic is a fantastic place for many reasons, including the fact that my teammates are creative and compassionate people with diverse skill sets. From their creativity and compassion for healing people and families, I see exciting pilots for emerging technologies seemingly everywhere! In broad strokes, I feel people are trying to use these novel technologies to reduce time that patients or providers would consider waste within our care delivery system or improve our accuracy in diagnostics, therapeutics or harm-reduction. For example, using AI to reduce the time spent documenting the clinical encounter, while still capturing the relevant information for safe patient care, is an area of intensive focus. Furthermore, can AI be used to predict when patients need higher levels of care even when we, as providers, may not yet recognize the signs? I believe the future of healthcare will be intertwined with AI, large-language models and more to be able to provide even safer, more effective and more accessible care with less human, tangible, time and space resources. I believe Mayo Clinic is among those institutions championing the way.

What is the next technology breakthrough you see impacting emergency medicine?

Ranking impact is quite subjective; I am incredibly excited about the use of extended reality (XR) in the current and future of emergency medicine. We are only standing at the starting point of this journey, and already we can use immersive experiences to distract children from painful procedures (reducing the medications they previously needed for sedation), and we can train our teams how to place a patient on a heart/lung bypass machine using a virtual reality experience. The future may have us wearing extended reality headsets while we resuscitate people – headsets that actively give us insights into what may be going on, help us communicate with other parts of the hospital and still be present at the bedside for our team. You might say, I am truly X-cited!

What do you hope to pass along in your keynote address and also learn from other healthcare professionals at HSPI?

Speaking at HSPI is an incredible honor that I find very humbling. I never imagined a career investigating processes or focused on consistency and efficiency. Yet, because of this way of thinking, my entire world – at home and at work – has blossomed. I owe this to special teachers and the moments that awakened my understanding. My story will shed light on the power that everyone in this audience has to ignite the teammates around them. If you can find a way to communicate the concepts in an accessible way to an audience with a primary skill set different from yours, you might change their lives. More empowered teammates become a system that is more capable of improvement and safer for patients. Teaching everyone the fundamentals of quality improvement and safety so that they can understand, manipulate and communicate with others is among the most important roles for everyone. This is what I hope to convey.

For more information about Venkatesh Bellamkonda, M.D., check out the Keynote Speakers page.