Perspectives on AI from our Clinical and Product Leadership
We asked Michelle Skinner, TeleTracking Chief Clinical Executive, and Michael Guidry, VP of Product Development, how they see AI benefiting healthcare operations. They share unique perspectives of how TeleTracking’s AI tools will revolutionize the operations landscape.
Big picture, how do you anticipate AI altering the healthcare ecosystem?
Michelle Skinner: AI has the potential to ease one of the biggest challenges in healthcare—cognitive load. Frontline staff are constantly making decisions, many of which aren’t critical but still demand mental energy. Think about any given situation: you have the care plan, bed availability, the logistics of patient transfer, coordination with multiple teams. Even the most experienced clinician can only process so much information at once. The default, at least in terms of healthcare operations, often becomes a reactive response. There simply isn’t the bandwidth to make the best decisions both clinically and operationally.
When we lessen that burden, not only do we improve efficiency, but we also protect patient experience. That’s where applied AI can make a real impact—by supporting caregivers in those operational decisions so they can focus on what truly matters, improving both patient outcomes and experience and care team well-being.
Michael Guidry: Much like past technological advancements, AI has the potential to significantly impact healthcare operations. Early in my career, working with robotics, we focused on identifying tasks robots could perform better than humans – often mundane, detail-oriented, and repetitive actions where human error is common. AI isn’t necessarily about solving new problems but rather approaching longstanding challenges in more effective ways.
Candidly, TeleTracking created the industry around patient flow—the problem has been around for a long time—and the interesting or intriguing part of AI is solving that through a different approach. Our customers still need to expedite processes and improve flow, and AI will assist with automating processes and providing insights without requiring constant human intervention. It’s about delivering the same benefits, but in a way that works within the realities of modern healthcare.
Hospital staff are often burdened with repetitive tasks, how do you see AI reducing or eliminating them? Are there any that stand out as being ideal candidates for AI intervention?
Michelle Skinner: As a nurse, I know firsthand how much cognitive load clinicians carry every day—juggling direct patient care alongside a flood of administrative, logistical, and operational tasks. There isn’t one single task AI can eliminate to magically fix everything, but it can steadily reduce the burden.
One area where AI can make an immediate impact is decision support for bed management and patient flow. These are complex, time-consuming processes that don’t need to be manually managed at every step. By streamlining these workflows, AI frees up valuable time—time that clinicians can redirect toward patient care.
Michael Guidry: We’re not looking at AI to simply eliminate repetitive tasks, but to address a much bigger challenge: the sheer complexity of modern healthcare operations. There’s too much data, too many interconnected factors for any individual to realistically consider. Think about it: you’ve got historical trends, real-time bed availability, current ED demand, and a million other data points, all influencing how a hospital functions. We’ve seen customers try to tackle this manually with spreadsheets, and it quickly becomes overwhelming. They can’t make sense of all the relationships and dependencies.
So, while the task of predicting demand and matching it to capacity is inherently repetitive, it’s a level of complexity that humans can’t handle. Our focus with AI is to do what people can’t – process that monumental amount of data, understand those intricate relationships so that we can predict demand and optimize hospital capacity. That’s how we unlock entirely new ways to solve longstanding problems.
How would you define a hospital’s readiness for AI?
Michelle Skinner: A hospital’s readiness for AI isn’t just about having the right technology; rather, it’s about making adoption as easy as possible for the people using it. It’s about people, process and technology—a three-legged stool, if you will.
Part of the process is on us, the technology provider, to ensure that clinicians clearly see how AI benefits their work and their patients. At TeleTracking, we take a multidisciplinary approach to implementation and ongoing account management so that we can be a part of that process, ensuring AI is implemented in a way that supports staff, sustains long-term process improvements, and drives real outcomes. And if something isn’t working? We adjust, refine, and continuously improve. That’s how AI moves from being just another tool to something that truly transforms patient care.
Michael Guidry: A hospital’s readiness for AI hinges on a few key factors. First and foremost: data. The quality and integrity of their data is paramount, because AI is only as good as the data it learns from. Our advantage at TeleTracking is our years of investment in building a data platform specifically designed to clean and stage data for analytics. This gives us a wealth of both data and expertise, which accelerates adoption of our AI solutions.
The second piece is change management. AI can provide insights and recommendations, but success ultimately depends on frontline staff trusting and acting on those recommendations. We’re not asking them to enter more data or engage with a new system, but we are asking them to use AI-driven feedback to improve outcomes.
This requires a closed-loop process—AI predicts an outcome, the hospital acts, and the system learns from what actually happened. Over time, this visibility helps build confidence, making AI not just useful, but essential for optimizing hospital performance.
What excites you most about TeleTracking’s approach to AI? How do you see it impacting client operations?
Michelle Skinner: What excites me most about TeleTracking’s approach to AI is that we are designing AI-driven solutions with frontline care teams in mind—not just as an administrative tool but a critical enabler of better patient care and improved hospital operations.
As a clinician, I see AI as an opportunity to restore time and energy to the bedside, where it belongs. TeleTracking’s AI-driven approach ensures that the operational side of healthcare works in service to patient care, not as a barrier to it.
Michael Guidry: I’m most excited by the fact that our clients are actively seeking the very benefits we’ve always focused on: more efficient and optimized operations. When we share our AI vision with them, their response is overwhelmingly positive. They recognize the need for these benefits but also understand that they must be delivered in a way that’s easy for their staff to use.
We are going to market with a unique, differentiated solution that’s truly desired by our customers. The feedback has been incredibly positive, from informal presentations to in-depth pilot programs. It’s an exciting time to be bringing this technology to market at scale.
