Physician Builder Spotlight: Morgan Jeffries

We’re shining light on MD-entrepreneurs! Each week, we’ll feature an entrepreneurial doctor who’s building a cool product, company, or working on a big idea that you definitely want to know about. This week, meet Morgan Jeffries, Neurologist & Medical Director for AI at Geisinger. He is a member of the ML for MDs Slack Group which you can learn more about and apply to join here (physicians only). Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn here.

1. Morgan, what inspired you to become involved in AI leadership?

I wasn’t very technical when I was younger. My undergraduate majors were in biology and philosophy. When I entered med school, I thought I was going to go into psychiatry. I wound up enjoying the structure of neurology more though, so that’s what I chose. I didn’t get interested in computer science until I was in my mid-twenties and doing research on eye movements and visual attention. The system that ran the experiments was written in C, and I had to do some hacking to get it to work on my task. Between that and the MATLAB code I wrote to analyze the data, I probably spent close to a thousand hours over two years writing and thinking about code.

After I got married in 2017, my wife and I decided it was time to make a pivot. We moved to Pennsylvania where I took a job as a neurohospitalist with some informatics work on the side. One thing led to another, and I gradually got to the point where I was spending the majority of my time in informatics. I was looking to challenge myself, so I started taking courses in AI. That was probably in early 2022, which ended up being good timing. ChatGPT launched in late November, and I tried it within a few days. A few days later, I emailed our entire informatics group to tell them what was happening and that it was something that deserved our attention. That led to a series of conversations, and eventually I became our Associate Medical Director for AI. TL;DR: It was less inspiration and more a series of small steps guided by a mix of curiosity and practicality.

2. Tell us about your focus and the problem or gap you're solving or filling.

The team as a whole is working very hard not just to maintain existing programs and launch new ones, but also to make changes under the hood that will accelerate our work going forward. There are so many parts to that, but two of the biggest areas involve streamlining our formal change management process and scaling governance. I’ve personally been most heavily involved in launching our generative AI efforts and developing a strategy and materials for workforce education and communication.

3. What's your advice to anyone who's thinking about pursuing a career in health system AI leadership?

If you’re early-career (or mid- or late-career), and you haven’t already realized this, you ultimately want to wind up in a place where you’re spending as much time as possible doing things that you enjoy, that you’re good at, and that you also find meaningful. However, it can take a lot of trial and error to figure out what those things are, so be patient, and be willing to try a lot of things. There will be points along the way where you have to pick up skills you don’t already have. I know two approaches to this: one is to learn whatever it is in your spare time, and the other is to leverage the skills you do have to get a job where you can learn that thing.

If you know you want to work on AI within a health system, you can come to it from a lot of places. If you work in quality and safety, education, informatics, department leadership, or solely as a front-line clinician, try to learn a little about AI and think of where it could be applied in your current job. Talk to people about it. Go from there. Find ways to contribute that require as little permission as possible. Conversely, if you're starting from a technical role, try to spend time with stakeholders on a project so you can understand the challenges they're facing. If you need learning resources, Stanford has a great series of courses on AI in healthcare that you can get through in a few months. The AMA also offers a much shorter series that's free.

Note: Offcall is also hosting a live webinar open to all clinicians that will teach the basics of AI for clinicians and feature Offcall co-founder Graham Walker and Validara Health co-founder Sarah Gebauer. You can learn more about the event and sign up here.

Lastly, I’d encourage people to indulge their curiosity and learn things that may or may not be immediately useful just because they’re interesting. That was the approach I took with programming, and it worked out well. I’ve also spent my limited spare time over the last few months on circuit analysis. Maybe I’ll end up applying that to robotics, but maybe I won’t. It’s been fun though, so it’s no loss either way.

4. What's one lesson you've learned since beginning leadership that wasn't obvious to you before?

Almost none of the challenges are technical. There are some, but the team is generally very good at identifying those early and either deciding the project is a non-starter or working through them. The overwhelming majority of the headwinds we face involve change management in one form or another.

Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn here. Know someone else who should be featured? Reply with their name and their company in the comments!