As with many industries — from manufacturing and construction, to energy and retail — healthcare is undergoing transformation. But it’s not just major pharmaceutical companies and large hospital systems that are evolving.

As Community Health Network (CHN) Executive Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer Dr. Patrick McGill, MD, noted, small and mid-sized healthcare organizations are also modernizing their practices and operations by embracing and adopting emerging technologies.

Becker's Hospital Review recently named Dr. McGill as a top CTO to watch, in part due to his use of AI, automation, and analytics to streamline CHN employees’ daily work, both in the back office and with care management.

Dr. McGill doesn’t just lend his technical and analytical expertise at CHN, though. (All while still serving as a practicing physician.) He’s also a member of our Strategic Advisory Council.

We spoke with Dr. McGill to learn what compelled him to join this select group of highly influential business leaders who help support our portfolio company founders, the trends he’s seeing in terms of healthcare transformation, and the opportunities that exist for future innovation at health organizations in 2025 and beyond.

Tell us a bit about your background and some current initiatives you're working on over at Community Health Network.

Dr. McGill: My background is as a family physician. I still practice, seeing patients usually one day a week.

As CTO at Community Health Network, I have a broader range of responsibilities, including overseeing our data and analytics units that generate insights on population health and value-based care.

I also focus on CHN’s operational areas: care in the home, palliative care, geriatrics, hospice home care — some of those areas.

Recently, we also started a personalized medicine program.

We’re trying to bring together some areas that are more deeply linked with technology transformation, with where healthcare is going, like the implementation of more innovative payment models.

And I oversee our direct-to-employer relationships and contracts, running some of our strategic partnerships with organizations like Walgreens and Microsoft.

We’re always thinking about these efforts from a strategic standpoint, asking ourselves, ‘How can we bring all these programs and activities together — care delivery, digital upgrades, operational changes, payment models — to drive further transformation in healthcare?

Explain the role AI and analytics play in your work to improve operations and care at CHN's primary and affiliate facilities.

Dr. McGill: We leverage a lot of traditional technologies, but we’re also bullish on AI and looking at how it’s being deployed. You know, AI is a buzzword, so everybody's kind of at the peak of the hype cycle at this point, but we’re always looking at how AI can drive real change.

We at CHN certainly recognize we have to be able to leverage technology to improve how we deliver and pay for care.

We recently hired a Director of AI and Data Governance who's going to help us focus and develop our strategy and put some goals and guardrails around it so we can realize operational cost reductions from AI.

Like I mentioned, we've also recently had this increased focus on personalized medicine using data and AI: high-risk genetic screening, detecting cancer early, really just connecting with patients at an individual level to provide the care they need. And, on the administrative and clinical side, we’re even using AI for revenue cycle management.

‍Transformation is certainly occurring across healthcare. What are some notable trends and opportunities you’re seeing today?

Dr. McGill: The big opportunity isn’t a new one, but it’s still something that we've got to continue to address: Healthcare is expensive. It’s expensive to deliver and receive.

We've got to solve this sooner than later, and I think it's going to take a multi-party, multi-modal approach to do that.

It's not just going to be a silver-bullet technology that accomplishes that. And it’s not just on the backs of health systems or employers to address things like cost transparency and affordability.

That said, I feel that emerging technology and new startups are going to play a big role in tackling healthcare affordability.

Related to that: Healthcare is still very clunky to navigate.

There’s a lot of friction on the patient side we have to fix. Their frustration understandingly continues to boil over. We must strive to give people the positive experiences they have with companies in other industries.

Obviously, healthcare is much more complicated, as you're dealing with chronic diseases, life-and-death situations, and serious medical illnesses. That's much different than retailers providing a better online shopping experience for their customers. It’s transactional.

But it’s that kind of truly personalized, attentive experience I think we ought to provide as well.

So it will definitely be interesting to see how new healthcare-centric startups and platforms help organizations like CHN solve for these kinds of ongoing problems in the coming years.

What made you want to join our Strategic Advisory Council?

Dr. McGill: Community Health Network is a mid-sized, community-based health system, so we really feel like the value that we can bring to the HealthTech space is our nimbleness and ability to make decisions quickly.

We bring a sandbox, learning-lab mentality that can aid with the development of new, novel technologies, like those being created by High Alpha Innovation portfolio companies.

I feel that adopting or even just beta-testing their solutions in a real-world scenario and sharing the challenges we face can help them enhance their offerings.

We’re not investing in any of these healthcare startups. But I can work closely with these founders and their engineering teams to provide insight into our operations and clinical environment to help them develop and adapt their solutions and maybe even inform their product roadmap.

That's why I was really excited to get involved in the Strategic Advisory Council: to be able to bring that knowledge to the table and help founders realize their startup-growth goals.

How do you envision you’ll help our PortCo founders grow their businesses during your time on the Strategic Advisory Council?

Dr. McGill: One thing that I can bring is a kind of a practical realism of what challenges I currently face as a healthcare professional and leader at CHN — issues that don’t just apply to us but to most, if not all, health-centric organizations and providers today.

I’ve talked to some tech companies recently, and they all have interesting ideas for new software.

But the problems their tools are trying to solve aren’t really widespread industry challenges.

I think I can really help these portfolio company founders think through, ‘Hey, what's the exact problem I'm trying to solve? Is it actually a system-wide issue, or is it a niche one that maybe only one health system has experienced?’

Really ensuring they’re always thinking big-picture and letting the data guide them, not just anecdotal insights — that's where I hope to have those conversations and be able to provide guidance.

Quite frankly, because I do still practice and see patients and have real-world conversations with them, I feel I can discern which problems are very common and deserve to be solved through tech and startup development.

So it’s really through that unique lens that I think I can help these founders thrive and grow their companies.