Welcome to another episode of Impact Unfiltered, where we dive deep into honest conversations with leaders creating real change in healthcare and beyond. In this session, host Philippe sits down with Dr. Lisa Birdsall Fort, an emergency physician and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) at Ochsner Health, where she also leads virtual care transformation across a 40-plus hospital system. Dr. Fort shares her path from a rural South Louisiana healthcare family, through a pivotal Hurricane Katrina experience as a medical student, into the emerging world of clinical informatics.
Together, they explore what a CMIO actually does and how Dr. Fort bridges the clinical, administrative, and technical sides of care, a discipline she affectionately calls “clin-gineering.” She walks through Ochsner’s virtual emergency department, which has helped more than 17,000 patients and kept over three-quarters of them out of the ED, and unpacks how artificial intelligence, from ambient listening and record summarization to smart rooms, wearables, and agentic technology, is reshaping the way care is delivered.
Packed with practical insight and a healthy dose of optimism, this episode is an inspiring look at innovation, patient navigation, and the future of remote care, especially for rural and aging communities. Dr. Fort also offers candid leadership advice on staying flexible, committing to lifelong learning, and never giving up on the next amazing thing. Whether you work in healthcare technology or simply care about where medicine is headed, you won’t want to miss this one.
1. Introduction to Impact Unfiltered and Episode Overview
- The podcast’s mission: honest conversations with leaders driving real change in healthcare and beyond
- Introduction of guest: Dr. Lisa Birdsall Fort of Ochsner Health
- Setting the themes: clinical informatics, artificial intelligence, and virtual care transformation
2. Meet Dr. Lisa Birdsall Fort: Roles and Day-to-Day
- Emergency physician who still practices clinically, calling it “the best day of my week”
- Associate CMIO over inpatient care at Ochsner Health, spanning EDs, medical-surgical areas, ICUs, and procedural areas
- Keeps the Birdsall name as a tribute to her father, a rural South Louisiana family physician
- Secondary board certification in clinical informatics, Epic physician builder, and formal training in artificial intelligence
- Medical director and leader over Ochsner’s virtual care center, providing centralized monitoring across 40-plus hospitals
3. What Is a CMIO?
- Chief Medical Information Officer, a relatively new title emerging over the past decade to decade and a half
- One of four associate CMIOs, each covering a domain such as inpatient, digital medicine, pediatrics, or ambulatory care
- Core work is translating between the clinical, administrative, and technical sides of healthcare
4. The Path from Provider to Technology Leader
- Started in operations as an ED medical director around 2011–2012
- Tasked with bringing electronic health records into the emergency department during the “meaningful use” era
- Joined Ochsner in 2017 and moved into quality work on sepsis, heart attack, and stroke care
- Learned that delivering standardized, effective care requires fluency in informatics
5. Finding Her “Why”: Hurricane Katrina
- A third-year medical student who evacuated to Baton Rouge during Hurricane Katrina
- Volunteered at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center at LSU, caring for evacuees arriving from New Orleans
- Inspired by an emergency physician’s breadth of skill: “that’s what I wanna be”
- A pivotal, defining moment that rooted her passion for emergency medicine
6. Defining Impact: “Clin-gineering”
- The humanity of emergency medicine lies in being present with patients during acute injury or illness
- Impact multiplies when you design and deliver effective systems of care
- “Clin-gineering” pairs bedside insight with an understanding of the system needed to support it
- Guiding philosophy: do as much as you can in the time you have to help the most people
7. Technology in Practice: The Virtual Emergency Department
- Stood up in roughly five weeks to help patients who don’t truly need the ED find the right care
- Navigates patients coming from nurse-on-call, urgent care, primary care, and specialty clinics
- More than 17,000 patients seen, with over three-quarters kept out of the emergency department
- Often delivers services virtually and connects patients directly to whatever they need
8. Staying Aligned with Community Need
- Observe the environment and talk to the people doing the work, not just the leader voice
- Include frontline staff in the design of innovative projects and process improvements
- Consolidate, centralize, and standardize resources through the virtual care center and virtual nursing program
- Virtual nurses add a layer of protection, catching gaps such as a missed antibiotic at discharge
- Redesign the whole model rather than simply adding things on top of things
9. Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Augmentation, Not Replacement
- AI is not new to healthcare, but tools like ChatGPT opened an entirely new toolkit
- Ambient listening captures the conversation so clinicians focus on the patient, not the screen
- Summarization tackles records “the length of Moby-Dick,” though clinicians must verify before acting
- Smart rooms, wearables, and patches help monitor for fall risk, pressure injuries, and more
- Better information handoffs help nurses take over patients with consumable, well-placed data
10. The Future of Healthcare: Remote Care and Agentic Technology
- Strategy horizons are shrinking, making it hard to project even seven months, let alone seven years
- More remote care ahead, vital for rural South Louisiana and an aging, multi-specialist population
- Delivering care beyond “the four walls of the hospital,” including in patients’ homes
- Agentic technology can handle high-volume outreach that human staffing can never fully scale to
- “Faith or fear”: partnering with trusted digital companions to free people for the most complex work
11. Legacy, Leadership, and What’s Next
- Advice to her younger self: stay flexible and pivot when opportunities cross your path
- Commit to lifelong learning; she challenges herself to pick up a new skill every year
- “Never give up on the next amazing thing”
- Healthcare is a rewarding field for many kinds of experts, not only physicians
- Upcoming: speaking at a Hearst Healthcare conference in April on elevating women in healthcare leadership
- Her true north: enhancing experience, access, and quality in everything they do
