Some things will never happen unless specific events meet the right conditions. Take the mystery of sailing stones—rocks that sail across the desert floor, creating a story etched in the sand. What is their secret? A perfect balance of ice, water, and wind.

Another series of events has come together at exactly the right time—the partnership between Sailing Stone Solutions and the Canadian Health Information Management Association (CHIMA).

Stéphane Ouellet (Steph) is a seasoned, certified health care executive and the founder of Sailing Stone Solutions. He is deeply committed to harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly generative language models, to enhance operational efficiencies in health care.

Steph’s ability to navigate the complexities of the health care landscape comes from his intuitive approach to consulting and executive leadership, background in Information Technology (IT), and knack for identifying solutions amidst challenges.

Helping people deliver what matters to them excites me. My emerging passion for AI centers around how we can help staff and health care organizations be more efficient in what they do. How can we be creative with the use of technology and leverage AI to suggest improvements in processes, protocols, and policies to make work more efficient?

Steph and his partner, Andrea Wilkinson, a Certified Health Information Management Professional (CHIM), have recently joined forces with the CHIMA team to support their members in embracing digital transformation more effectively. This dynamic duo aims to leverage Andrea’s extensive expertise in electronic medical records systems (EMRs) and clinical informatics, along with Steph’s enthusiasm for information technology and executive leadership, to advance the remarkable contributions made by health information management professionals.

We reached out to CHIMA because we’re interested in conducting surveys with their team to learn more about some of the pain points and pressure points with Health Information Management Professionals in hospitals and healthcare centers nationwide. We want to understand what daily tasks bog their members down, preventing them from spending time growing their teams or working on their passion projects.

The data collected from these surveys will assist Sailing Stone Solutions in creating playbooks and toolkits to help alleviate these pain points and pressure points, encouraging standardization, best practices, and adherence to ministry and CIHI guidelines or mandates, with AI complementing these efforts to address the challenges.

The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, and for me, it’s about helping to get the right data, in the right place, at the right time, by the right person, and if AI can help create efficiencies in the minutiae of tasks, health care organizations can enhance their information management practices.

It seems that streamlining and simplifying are Steph’s motto.

How will AI change health records and the patient registration experience? Does it make sense to leverage AI within a healthcare setting where patient information is private and confidential?

When used ethically—we would never use any patient information within an AI system—AI can extrapolate data sets that we can use to improve quality and inform decision making. If we can leverage AI to do all the repetitive, transactional tasks that would free up health information professionals to engage in more important conversations within the organization. This would ultimately help other departments better understand the extensive role of health information professionals. That’s the value.

Steph is dedicated to achieving goals, cultivating meaningful connections, and driving action.

“Shoot for action, shoot for results, and build relationships along the way.”