Lissy Hu, M.D., M.B.A., was recently named CEO of Ascend Learning, which officers educational content, software, simulation, and analytics, serving hundreds of thousands of nursing and medical students, fitness professionals, first responders, and allied health professionals. She recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about her new role and how medical education and training are evolving to keep with the pace of change in the industry.
Hu joined Ascend after the company she founded, CarePort, was sold to WellSky for $1.3 billion in in 2021. After spending three years post-acquisition at WellSky, she now leads Ascend following the retirement of former CEO Greg Sebasky.
Healthcare Innovation: Could you talk a little about the early stops in your career and how they prepared you for this new CEO role at Ascend?
Hu: I’m a physician by background, and I started a company, CarePort, when I was in medical school focused on how we help patients who are coming out of the hospital get all the aftercare that they need. Previously this had been a very manual process, so I came up with a software system that basically allowed you to search for the care that you need. Over time, it grew and we made a couple of acquisitions along the way, and by the time that I left this year it was in 2,500 hospitals and 130,000 post-acute care providers, so basically it had reached national scale.
HCI: And then CarePort was purchased by WellSky, correct?
Hu: Yes, Wellsky is an enterprise healthcare IT company that serves across the care continuum — from acute to post-acute to home-based care, so it made a lot of sense for CarePort to become part of WellSky because we were connecting different parts of the care continuum.
HCI: What interested you in coming over to Ascend? What did you find intriguing about opportunities in medical education?
Hu: Two things. One is, from a mission perspective, having been a founder/CEO, it was really important to me that I find something that inspired me, that was a problem that I really wanted to solve. Ascend is a healthcare education technology company that trains many of the key members in terms of our care teams, Its solutions enable the training of 60% of the nursing schools in the U.S. It trains allied health, which is only increasing in importance as we try to figure out how to care for higher acuity patient populations.
Also, I think that how we define healthcare has continued to expand. Previously, healthcare was what happened in your doctor’s office, and over time, that has grown to what happens in nursing homes, home health agencies, the social determinants of health. We also train a huge amount of fitness and wellness professional wellness professionals — personal trainers and healthcare coaches. So Ascend is a critical solution in the healthcare industry, because so many of our care teams are being trained through the software that Ascend offers.
HCI: Are there some significant changes taking place in the way that training is delivered? Is AI impacting that like it is everything else?
Hu: Yes, absolutely. For learners, it’s not just the content itself, but also how the content is delivered. And there is a nurse educator shortage, so we think about how we can make them more efficient. One very crisp example of that is we roll out a product called Claire AI, which is an AI technology that allows nurse educators to build custom assessments for their students. Every class is a little bit different; every cohort is a little bit different. You can use AI to come up with custom assessments that are tailored to your student population. It allows nurse educators to make sure that they’re testing and assessing students on the areas that are truly important for that particular class rather than just a generic assessment that you deploy. Prior to AI, that’s something that would have been very difficult to do. You can’t ask your educator to create a new assessment for every single class that they’re teaching every single year. This is a way to leverage AI to make the educational experience much more personalized to the students and the needs of that particular classroom.
This is important because, as I was saying, one in 10 nurse faculty positions is vacant, so even from an efficiency standpoint, it is really important that your nurse educators can spend more time working with students and less time building tests.
Also, being able to personalize that learning is becoming important as you think about how to make sure that you’re developing your workforce in a way that gives them all the information that they need in a world where there’s a bigger body of information that they have to absorb.
HCI: What are some other things that are becoming more important in how people learn in in healthcare?
Hu: Case-based learning is becoming really important, because of the increasing complexity of patients and variety of care settings. Not every student can get out to a nursing home or a home health setting, so being able to have some of those cases is important. It gets back to your original question of why I joined Ascend, which is because I think there’s a tremendous impact that you can have as you think about continuing to personalize the learning experience, both to the learner as well as to the educator and the organization that they’re working in. And especially given how dynamic healthcare is, and how many changes are happening, being able to prepare people to enter the workforce is really important.
Even after you enter the workforce, learning never stops. You have, clinical nurse level one and two and three and different specialties, right? Can they work in the oncology unit or labor and delivery? Or for this medical assistant, what’s their onboarding process in the clinic versus the hospital? We have made two recent acquisitions that focus on how we continue to develop that workforce, even as they’re entering into the hospital or other work settings. At WellSky, as I spoke to providers, onboarding, developing and retaining the workforce was always a top issue.
HCI: Within a health system, who’s the customer that Ascend sells to? Is it someone who’s the head of a nursing program or is there an educational office for a health system that decides what kind of training they’re going to do across the whole health system?
Hu: Great question. So it definitely is something that chief nursing officers are thinking about. Nurse retention and recruitment are top of mind. To your point, there are dedicated educators, and even an HR perspective on it. I think in the conversations with CNOs and chief human resource officers and educators, everyone recognizes that retention, onboarding and development are challenges, and they’re looking for solutions.
HCI: What are some things you’re looking forward to working on in the next year?
Hu: Some of the conversations we’re having right now are around how we can better enable our providers through technology, but I don’t think there’s enough conversation around how we leverage technology to develop the providers themselves, There’s enabling technology, right? Instead of them having to document everything, they can have an AI scribe. But that doesn’t fundamentally help you figure out how to enable these providers to practice at the top of their license and practice in a way that’s tuned to the delivery model or patient population.
Right now, a lot of people just think about onboarding as watching a bunch of different videos and then, boom, you’re done. Then all the training after that is done ad hoc. I think we want to be more intentional about what type of technology we are building to help our workforce advance and practice in a way that’s tuned to these environments that they’re in, and that’s actually a great way to also drive better patient outcomes. It’s the technology that’s enabling the human capital aspect of it, because at the end of the day, health systems are made up of providers who provide care, so how do we make those providers better?
