HIMSS24 keynote: Prioritizing sustainability, protecting against climate change and leveraging AI

ORLANDO – HIMSS President and CEO Hal Wolf officially opened HIMSS24 Tuesday morning with a call to action for the 30,000 attendees from all corners of the world and all facets of the healthcare ecosystem.

“If you don’t like change, you don’t like health care,” he said. “This is not the place to be if you don’t enjoy an environment of improvement and an opportunity to recognize that digital health continues to evolve and that each of you has an incredibly important hand in it.”

From a global pandemic to the rise of generative AI, it’s been a fast few years of rapid change in healthcare, but Wolf said the speed of the industry’s response must be maintained.

“The question that’s kind of driving all of us is our speed of adoption where it needs to be,” he said. “Given all the challenges that continue to hit us in healthcare, if we think about the fundamental progress we’re making, and that’s good, what will you hear a lot in 2024, and tune your ears to that? The question, of course, is: how can Do we pick up the pace? How do we create new tools and develop them in such a way that we can actually move our operational and patient considerations forward as quickly as possible?”

Because the challenges facing healthcare in the U.S. and around the world are not getting any easier to manage, Wolf said.

“Across the ecosystem, our populations will continue to age. And there is no doubt that we have workforce shortages that impact every system worldwide. And funding levels will remain under pressure. There’s not going to be a flood of money to come in and help things out a bit.

“We know that ‘business as usual’ is simply not possible,” he added. “The encounter-based paradigm we all grew up with simply doesn’t work mathematically. There are too many patients, too many needs and, frankly, too few doctors. There is no healthcare system that will not struggle on a daily basis to support and operate what it needs.”

‘Sustainability in everything we do’

That’s why HIMSS is prioritizing a concept this year that consists of one word: sustainability.

It is a “new word that has now crept directly and courageously – and appropriately – into our lexicon,” said Wolf, describing three different areas where it must be put into practice: sustainability of practice, sustainability of delivery systems and environmental sustainability. .

• “Twenty years ago we talked about the sustainability of primary care practice,” Wolf explained of the first concept. “We introduced chat, we introduced text messaging, we introduced video – and we were very concerned about the sustainability of primary care to handle this influx of new communication channels with our patients. Those challenges still exist. We still need to embrace the new tools, the new capabilities and the foundations across multiple disciplines where we push every day.”

• Regarding the sustainability of large healthcare systems, many of them, even the largest and most well-resourced, ‘cannot find a clear strategic path forward under current circumstances to change the care model quickly enough to meet the needs of healthcare . to the needs of their population,” Wolf said. One path forward is to embrace new data that will be brought into healthcare systems from home, through devices and remote monitoring, “information we didn’t have before,” he said. “Outside in is a critical path to system sustainability.”

• The third, perhaps most important area is environmental sustainability. “And this is a very crucial part when it comes to CO2 emissions,” says Wolf. “If you look at some of the experts, we recognize that fundamentally 8.5% of CO2 emissions in the United States are generated by the health industry, and 5.2% globally. So we have an opportunity and a crucial responsibility, and right now it’s so incentivized and voluntary, but it’s there.”

Ultimately, all three areas must be brought together to “create sustainability in everything we do, between the medical model and the health model, our patients and beyond,” Wolf said. “From a strategic point of view, this is the crucial challenge that affects the entire world.

“But this is where we at HIMSS get excited about our new Infrastructure Maturity Model, or INFRAM,” he added. “Because what we’re doing now is recognizing that the environmental components have now been added to cybersecurity, the foundations of infrastructure adoption, performance and outcomes.”

Artificial intelligence will of course also play a huge role.

“We tend to paint AI with just one brush, but that’s not the case,” said Wolf, who listed the three major AI subsets as he sees them.

“One of them is the small devices and applets. The second, where we’re seeing tremendous progress, is operational applications to manage and improve throughput. Third, there are the higher level applications that are starting to use and delve into the components of clinical decision support.”

But for anyone looking for technology — even a rapidly advancing technology like AI — to “solve all our problems, it’s simply not going to happen,” Wolf said. “Technology alone doesn’t do anything. It’s people, processes and technology. All three have to come together. Because if we can’t find the right way to integrate AI, it won’t land.”

‘We need radical transformation’

Wolf introduced the morning’s next keynote speaker, Robert C. Garrett, CEO of New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health.

“Harnessing AI will, I think, be one of the defining tasks of the 21st century,” Garrett said.

Led by the right people and processes, he said, “it can help us cure cancer or extend life and personalized treatment, making it as unique as your fingerprint in today’s healthcare.”

And not a moment too soon.

“We need radical transformation,” Garrett said. “We must build the healthcare system of the future, where people have seamless connections to care, a greater focus on prevention and wellness, and the opportunity to achieve their best health, regardless of where they live or the color of their skin. industry partnerships have the potential to improve the health of billions, and I mean billions, of people.”

Garrett recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where healthcare leaders focused most on four imperatives, he said – all of which can be fundamentally addressed by sophisticated AI applications:

“When trying to improve access to health care in underdeveloped countries or rural United States, I am always struck by the statistic that one in four people does not have a primary care physician – and if you are under 30, that number is one out of two,” Garrett said. “So there’s no doubt that access to care is a major problem. I believe AI can help us really improve people’s access to good healthcare.

“The second priority was to improve outcomes and provide more value to the healthcare system,” he added. “When I think about what AI can do in terms of predictive analytics and predicting the onset of diseases much faster, giving doctors tools that can provide more personalized treatment, and the fact that AI can bring greater efficiency in healthcare and ultimately improve healthcare. more affordable, that is creating real value.

“The third priority was equity in health care,” he said. “And I have no doubt that AI can help advance healthcare equity if done right and managed properly. I think about health care equity in terms of even identifying the social determinants of health. Who is at risk for any of our social determinants of health? How can we really tackle that? By connecting people who have this exposure to great care and great resources, AI can really bridge that gap and hopefully close some of the disparities that exist in healthcare outcomes today. “

Finally, Garrett made special attention to the last priority: climate change.

“You even heard about sustainability and climate change a few minutes ago,” he said. “And I have no doubt that AI can help us identify major climate events and really give us the tools to tackle some of the impacts of climate change.

“Between the years 2000 and 2005, climate change is expected to cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year from conditions such as asthma, malnutrition and malaria,” Garrett added. “One in four people now live under drought around the world. AI can power new solutions to reduce pollutants, improve energy efficiency and help create more renewable resources.”

Align incentives, find ROI

Garrett and Wolf were then joined on stage by Google Cloud President Matt Renner.

“It’s been a great year: it’s clear that the rise of generative AI has really gotten a lot of attention,” Renner said with some understatement. “But a lot of what we see in the landscape here is kind of settling, a year later.”

Thousands of AI proofs of concepts have been launched at healthcare organizations of all shapes and sizes, aiming to address a wide range of challenges.

“But most of them didn’t make it to production — meaning they’ve reached their end state and they’re being used by the public,” Renner said.

“Some of the reasons for that are related to data, data structures, meaning some of the things they focused on or got into were a little bit more hectic than they expected,” he said. “But another big reason was that it might not have the best business case. It wouldn’t make sense to invest and put that into production.”

There are of course other fundamental AI challenges discussed at length by Wolf, Garrett and Renner: data management, data privacy, ‘hallucinations’, etc.

But despite all the hard work, the effort to get AI implementations right is undoubtedly worth it. One factor for success – for clinical, operational or financial ROI, for a successful business case – is “something that is productive for patients, for physicians,” Renner said.

The potential of AI, if applied wisely, to solve some of healthcare’s longest-standing problems is enormous.

Garrett crunched the numbers: “90% of all health care costs in the U.S. go to treating chronic diseases,” he said. “That represents $3.7 trillion a year. And while we work to turn the tide, a new challenge looms. By the year 2050, the number of people aged 60 and older worldwide will double, creating unprecedented demand for healthcare. There is likely a significant shortage of healthcare providers.

“The power of AI in healthcare is fundamentally tied to the quality, accessibility and standardization of data,” he says. “AI algorithms enable rapid analysis of health data, leading to accurate diagnoses and timely interventions. Predictive models powered by AI can detect patterns and trends that promote disease prevention and personalized treatment. Across the world, there is enormous promise in what AI can do.”

Mike Miliard is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.