Artificial intelligence and digital technology rapidly transformed healthcare delivery in the last 18 months. What will be possible in the next three years because of technology?
Five leaders in health IT talked about their vision for the future with Becker’s. All leaders featured here will speak at the Becker’s Health IT + Digital Health + Revenue Cycle Conference, Sept. 30-Oct. 3 in Chicago. Click here to learn more and register.
Chris Carmody. Chief Technology Officer of UPMC: This is my personal view based upon what I see and what I experience. I think we’re on the cusp of technology truly breaking down those four walls of being in a hospital. We talk about, you know, the patient at home and remote patient monitoring, telemedicine and patient portals. I think we’re at the cusp of really leveraging that transformation to where not only are we going to make access easier, we’re going to make it more broad, more scaled out, so people can actually be seen in a timely manner. They can be seen when it’s convenient for them and when they need to have that care, whether it’s a PCP visit or with the top specialists in the world.
Technology is going to help continue to make the delivery of healthcare more efficient, more effective and increase the quality of the outcomes of what we’re trying to do. We’re so close, we’re almost there to really seeing that transformation, and I think that’s exciting. An organization like UPMC is just going to be brimming with possibility and opportunities and how we can touch people’s lives, both on the care delivery side and also from an insurance services provider side, to make it an overall better experience and to give people better lives.
Edwina Bhaskaran, MSN, RN, Chief Clinical Systems and Informatics Officer of Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.): We will see more care delivered in the home, offering patients more options that meet them where they are, when they need it. Today, our approach to care is still quite prescriptive in both the type of care provided and how we interact with patients. The pandemic helped push the boundaries of what’s possible, both virtually and in person. I’m excited to see an expansion in patients’ ability to choose what best meets their needs.
I hope to see the healthcare community place greater value on patients’ time. Too often, patients are expected to work around our schedules. It would be wonderful to see that dynamic shift. We can use the data we’ve collected to be more precise in determining how much time we truly need with them. Time is an increasingly precious commodity — not just for our healthcare resources, but also for the patients we serve.
I also believe we’ll continue to share more data with patients, empowering them to be co-architects of their care. As patients become more informed, they’ll increasingly engage with data — whether it’s genomics or synthesized insights that help educate them about their health. I look forward to seeing that future take shape. As both a mom and a daughter to elderly parents, I’m hopeful about what this can mean for families like mine.
Roberta Schwartz. Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Houston Methodist: There’s a lot of buzz around what artificial intelligence can do, even what we’re seeing today. Three to five years out feels like an eternity, especially given the advances that we continually see in this space.
AI is going to be front and center, if I take a look at three key areas, from my perspective: one is, I think AI will continue to get better in really helping providers and clinicians synthesize the vast amounts of data that are available about a patient. There’s just so much that is available about us, whether it’s test results, whether it’s labs, all these different things aggregate together to give a profile of a patient, but it’s really hard as humans for us to synthesize all of that data and to make sense of it. But more importantly, to identify that particular thing that says that’s an indicator we need to go dig into, so I really think these technologies are going to give our providers and clinicians insights that we’ve never had before, so they can develop very personalized and very prescriptive care plans for us, and hopefully getting in front of potentially major conditions that we can identify early and treat early.
I honestly think too, and this is one that’s been a little controversial, but I think some of these technologies are really going to change the way our clinical teams engage with our EHR. I still see the EHR as a source of record across the board. But if you take a look at what’s happening in that ambient listening space today, and how that’s shifting, the way a provider is able to engage with the patient, but also appropriately chart and code an encounter. There’s going to be huge shifts over the next three to five years, in what that interface looks like. It may be less about a keyboard and much more about voice, and how that voice is then appropriately instrumented within the EHR.
Ultimately, what we’re thinking about is how can I build a digital health companion over time to where it’s a companion that knows about me. It gives me insights. It gives me recommendations. It gives me prompts and nudges of things I need to do. Maybe it’s time to go out for a walk, because it looks and sees that the weather is great, and it wouldn’t hurt for me to get my 10,000 steps in today, and so it can engage with me on a daily basis, but also keep my care team informed and watch for trends and alert them. There’s a huge opportunity for these things to come together with all the data that we have, and really, you know, building a companion that will help us manage our health each and every day.
Michael Hasselberg, PhD. Chief Digital Health Officer of University of Rochester (N.Y.) Medical Center: AI today is very different than AI of three years ago. There’s a lot of hype that we’ve been hearing around AI. A lot of folks jumping into this space; it’s almost like you can’t do a podcast episode or have a conversation without saying the word AI. But there is significant reality behind that hype, and you know, we’re already seeing that disruption happen with ambient language documentation for our providers. We’re hearing stories across the country of providers saying, I’m going to work another 10 years, because I have access to this technology.
When I think about our nurses, and I think about what the future is going to be for them, I think of a world where a nurse is going to go into that that room and and check that wound, pull the dressing up, and there’s going to be a camera in that room that’s assessing that wound, and it’s going to do that documentation. I see a mixed, multimodal AI situation where there is a patient coding, and you have the nurses and the physicians coming into that hospital room, and they’re yelling out, this is what I’m doing. This is the order that I’m doing it. The ambient language is capturing a lot of that data, but you also have the computer vision and the cameras filling in the gaps and capturing what’s happening in that room. After that patient’s life is saved, the clinicians can then move on to the next patient, and don’t have to worry about remembering all the things I did during that crash scenario to make sure it was all documented correctly. That is going to happen sooner than later.
As folks get more comfortable with AI, and as health systems and hospitals continue to invest in that technology infrastructure for things like virtual nursing, that future will be here really soon, where that documentation burden is now off the shoulders of our clinicians and they can do what they really wanted to do, and what they went to school for is actually doing that hands on care and developing those therapeutic relationships with those that they’re caring for.
Tim Skeen. Executive Vice President and CIO of Sentara Health (Norfolk, Va.): Technology probably isn’t the right limiter. I’ll go in reverse order of what I see as the core limiters to getting us where we need to be. I think three to five years from now, there probably are no limits to what the possibilities are. If you think about the tools we have out there, how fast they’re developing and how smart they’re getting, what can we imagine is, from a technology standpoint, how are you going to link them together? How are you going to chain them together, make them interoperable? Obviously, they have to be secure in how they’re interacting in all those ways. But I think that is the least of our problems.
I’d say the two bigger problems that are going to limit wherever, whatever that looks like in three years, the only thing that will limit it to being everything you can imagine, to the to the future of what it could look like in terms of autonomous robots for care and other things being being able to instrument at home, various things to take care of all sorts of chronic conditions and other things in a much more effective way, with a much smaller footprint of clinicians really working more efficiently. It first is going to be the regulatory environment. I’ll call it federal and state regulations around this, I’ll add to that the perception of the regulatory environment. I’ll throw out there from our General Counsel and our legal folks that have a perception that even taking that regulation and making it even broader in terms of limitation, they may even go more conservative. That is one of the biggest governors on it.
Then the next piece of this is the governor that will happen by how quickly people can adopt and get comfortable with that technology in their care environment. Now put that both on the provider side and the consumer side. So adoption and engagement, both by the provider and by the consumer, is going to be a big wild card. I’ll frame all of that around reimbursement. You can call it regulation, but where you’re reimbursed tends to drive behaviors and how people adopt or take on new models of care, new new models that inject technology. Injecting a technology that may be great for the provider and great for the consumer, that nobody will reimburse, it’s going to be dead on arrival.
Unfortunately, we have to figure out framing so reimbursement is important in terms of the flexibility of that model. On the other side around adoption, I’ll put the consumer and myself in the middle of that. As consumers, we need to be the CEO of our own health. That’s not happening in this country, right? It’s seen as a God given, right, that you get this care and you can use as much of it and whatever it is, it is, and you should be able to have access to it, there’s a certain amount of accountability, responsibility and liability to how you want to live your life and your health.
