AI Ready Data: Donna Roach and Utah Health Innovation

Episode Description

Donna Roach, Enterprise CIO for the University of Utah, brings three innovation leaders from University of Utah Health onto the 229Podcast: Reed Barney, Chief Healthcare Data Officer; Shawn Halladay, AI Strategy & Enablement; and Brent Elieson, Technology Innovation. With Bill Russell they map how DEC and TISG set the roadmap, how an AI intake now walks requesters through risk and priority scoring and will not move without an executive sponsor, and how Reed's team ships reusable, AI-ready data products so clinical and AI groups share one foundation.

The stack is getting physical too. After more than $10 million from the Huntsman family for responsible AI at the university level, CEO Dr. Carter King put about $2.5 to $3 million toward a local NVIDIA environment Shawn describes as a token factory for research, operational, and clinical work. One clinical use, Heal at Home early identify, has saved about 70 patient days since inception, and Donna is clear that even the exciting demos still go through governance once they are ready to scale.

Key Points:

0:00 Welcome, Donna Roach

1:29 Meet Brent, Shawn, and Reed

6:00 EHC Consulting

11:11 Making data AI ready

17:44 DEC, TISG, and intake

23:08 Island

24:48 An AI intake that scores itself

28:25 Rackspace

36:44 AI-ready data products

45:15 Local NVIDIA GPUs

52:16 Heal at Home and about 70 patient days