When Jochen Reiser arrived at the University of Texas Medical Branch three years ago, he inherited the oldest medical school west of the Mississippi, a BSL-4 national biosafety lab, aerospace medicine, a telemedicine program serving ships at sea, and responsibility for 82 percent of Texas prison healthcare.
The first task, he told an audience at the Becker’s at the 16th Annual Meeting, was not to transform any of it.
“You can’t really walk into an organization like that and say, okay, let’s open a new service line,” said Dr. Reiser, who serves as both president of UTMB and CEO of UTMB Health. “It’s just not going to cut it.”
He started by tearing down walls — not physical ones, but the institutional silos that had long separated academic affairs, clinical care, and education at the 130-year-old health system. His solution was what he calls an immersive leadership style with weekly senior management meetings that include the provost, deans of education and clinical leadership. He’s tapping into the health system’s brain economy.
“We can’t talk about AI and implementing AI in a health system without you beginning to teach our students differently,” he told skeptical academic leaders who initially wondered why they’d been summoned to the C-suite. Over time, the approach worked. “We became much more than one institution with this leadership style.”
The second move was adding innovation as a formal fourth pillar alongside research, education, and patient care, and hired a vice president of innovation, Dr. Vinit Gupta, a serial entrepreneur, to lead it. The goal was not innovation as an aspiration but as an economic engine. UTMB created a vehicle called Medical Branch Innovation, took equity stakes in AI companies, and licensed its health data in exchange for co-ownership.
“We don’t want to just give our data safely to you and innovate together so that we can get a better patient journey or derive more revenue,” Dr. Reiser said. “We want to co-own a piece of your company.”
The early returns have been significant enough to show that innovation can pay off in a “very short period of time.”
But AI adoption cannot be driven from the top down. Leaders who return from conferences with vendor partnerships and implementation mandates — without preparing the workforce — will hit a wall.
“If leadership drives the process and says, ‘I was at Becker’s, I connected with two or three AI companies, they want to do revenue cycle or supply chain,’ and then try to implement that, your workforce is not ready for it,” said Dr. Reiser.
Instead, he recommends building an organization where students understand there is a path from medical school into health tech or biotech, where clinical trials and small pilots are treated as normal rather than exceptional, and where people at every level feel they are part of the innovation journey.
“People are now excited to be at UTMB,” he said. “We’re recruiting from really all over the United States. We’re bringing people from Houston down to Galveston and people are feeling this joint journey of innovation.”
When UTMB began pursuing AI and broader strategic ambitions, Dr. Reiser made an early commitment to double down on care delivery in Galveston. The system opened an urgent care center and a patient coordination center, a physical office where anyone can walk in with multiple health issues and have all their appointments scheduled on the spot.
“When you have a story like that and it starts working in Galveston, you have your foundation solidly rooted,” he said. “People in Galveston said, ‘You know what, all they are doing with AI is fine because the basis is covered.'”
The financial results have followed. UTMB’s top-line revenue is nearly a billion dollars higher than it was three years ago. The system recently ranked number one in Texas and number seven nationally by Vizion for inpatient hospital services, and is working toward Leapfrog A designations across all its hospitals.
The initiative Dr. Reiser speaks about with the most apparent conviction is one he encountered at the World Economic Forum in Davos: the brain economy. The concept links investment in brain health and cognitive resilience to measurable economic output — and frames the decline in workforce cognitive performance, accelerated by technology overload, as both a public health crisis and a strategic opportunity.
“In 2010, way before the pandemic, the brain capital of populations was going down,” he said. “We are in cognitive overflow right now. We are in stress from all the technology and that drives burnout, it drives a cry for wellness.”
UTMB has become the first health system developing a master plan across all domains to address cognitive skill, brain health, and mental health as organizational strategy. One near-term initiative is providing an 18-hour email-free window for staff not on call.
“We want to bring time back to people and allow for the brain capital at UTMB to rise,” Dr. Reiser said. “With that we’re going to be more ready for innovations that are AI driven.”
The system also deployed a workforce connectivity app called Wambi, adapted specifically for UTMB. Dr. Reiser expected a few thousand sign-ups in the first three months, but gained 20,000 over six weeks.
“There is a huge thirst for connectivity along the workforce,” he said.
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