Hims 2024
Healthcare leaders, including CIOs, CMIOs, CNIOs, and other C-suite members, focused on AI as a central theme at the HIMSS conference in Orlando. They looked at how healthcare organizations can better leverage clinical data. They identified security, AI platforms, and workforce optimization as his three key areas of healthcare AI development.
safety
Healthcare providers are actively grappling with the disruption of Change Healthcare, and leaders remain focused, especially as concerns about lost revenue from system outages continue. For his CIO at HIMSS, ensuring the security of medical equipment, patient data, and physical devices that healthcare providers may not control internally is a top security priority. Medical device security is also high among concerns, as is third-party compromise.
The Food and Drug Administration has released final guidance on medical device cybersecurity, presenting it as a guide rather than a requirement. While this step is in the right direction, it means that healthcare provider organizations remain liable in the event of a breach. Improving the security of medical devices requires holding vendors accountable for violating cybersecurity insurance policies.
In the healthcare industry, an increase in connected devices containing patient data, as well as increased levels of remote work and merger and acquisition activity, has resulted in an increase in IT hardware assets that require secure and proper management and identification.
AI platform
Big tech companies like Google, AWS, and Oracle Health are expanding their AI platforms.
Google Cloud has enhanced the capabilities of MedLM, a family of foundational models for healthcare applications. They introduced a new API to help clinicians more effectively classify chest radiographs for screening and diagnostic purposes. Additionally, we launched another API that provides clinicians with a chronological list of patient conditions, along with a short AI-generated summary.
AWS Healthcare customers announced new solutions during HIMSS.
Philips announced a partnership with AWS to help pathology laboratories and healthcare organizations more effectively store, manage, and analyze growing amounts of digital pathology data. Through new solutions, Philips aims to enhance the integration, access and reliability of digital workflows, advance patient care and enable advanced AI/ML capabilities. Many companies are now developing ambient solutions, and they are becoming mainstream. These solutions allow a physician to specify what she wants to see in her patient's progress notes using AWS Healthscribe.
Oracle Health has updated its HealthData Intelligence platform, originally designed for population health management and analytics. The platform now integrates and analyzes data from a variety of sources, including EHRs, corporate applications, insurance claims, and demographic records to provide a more comprehensive view of individual patients. This update includes enhancements with new generative AI services to increase efficiency in care management.
Workforce optimization
Healthcare organizations are actively implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The reason is that most businesses need to upgrade to modern cloud ERP solutions that are currently no longer supported.
Healthcare ERP vendors are integrating AI to help hospitals align staff to patient care needs and ensure high-quality, safe patient care. The solution incorporates AI to help identify solutions that balance cost, demand, and compliance issues.
For example, healthcare providers can integrate AI and data to identify surgical supplies that meet payer contractual agreements and maximize reimbursement. For human capital management (HCM) departments, solutions leverage AI to allocate staffing, match scope of clinical shifts, and ensure appropriate patient-to-clinician ratios. This strategy increases employee satisfaction and engagement, empowers employees to perform at their best, and reduces clinical burnout.
AI dominates the discussion at HIMSS, and industry and executives are bullish about its potential impact on the healthcare industry.
