It’s been a long week at HIMSS24, filled with educational sessions and an exhibit hall full of the latest and greatest healthcare information technology. Needless to say, artificial intelligence has dominated the conversations.
Veronica Walk is a senior director of healthcare and life sciences analyst at consulting firm Gartner, where she specializes in emerging clinical technologies. On Monday, we asked Walk for an interview at the end of HIMSS24 week to gain her insights from her experiences on the show. These are her expert observations.
Q. You specialize in emerging clinical technologies. What is the most important emerging clinical technology you saw at HIMSS24 this week, and why is it so important?
A. It’s impossible to deny the dominance of AI and generative AI, and how quickly the development and adoption of these technologies have accelerated, even since HIMSS last year. We moved from an existential debate about genAI during last year’s keynote to conversations focused on how these technologies can be operationalized and scaled in a way that manages risk and delivers real value.
AI capabilities are in the booth of almost every vendor, especially clinical technology solutions – and I think for one key reason – the potential of these technologies to reduce the burden on the healthcare team and increase clinical workforce capacity. Physician burnout and workforce shortages are widespread and persistent issues in the industry, and these technologies can really address these issues.
Initial use cases for genAI focused more on reducing administrative burdens such as clinical documentation, but there is also significant optimism about the potential of these technologies to improve clinical decision making and patient care.
Obviously, these are higher risk use cases and more challenging to implement from a technical and organizational perspective, so I think we’ll continue to see slower progress on this front. That said, I’m curious to see what leaps we make between now and next year.
Q. What is another important emerging clinical technology you saw at HIMSS24 this week, and what role can it play for provider organizations?
A. Virtual care technologies aimed at delivering next-level care, such as a virtual hospital or a hospital at home, were also present at the conference. One of the applications receiving the most attention is virtual inpatient nursing, in which nurses remotely support the care team at the bedside.
Once again, this is driven by the issues surrounding physician burnout and workforce shortages, especially in nursing. The results of some of these programs are incredible: significant reductions in staff turnover, improved patient outcomes (including fewer adverse events and deaths), and improved patient satisfaction.
Technology options for virtual nursing have also increased in recent years, and vendors are evolving their solutions to provide more advanced capabilities, such as environmental monitoring of patients, and to enable a broader range of virtual care use cases.
Q. What should C-suite executives and other healthcare IT leaders at healthcare organizations be paying attention to in the coming year?
A. With the proliferation of new solutions coming to market and the hype surrounding them, it can be tempting to lead with technology – but it’s important to remember that you need to lead on the organizational problems to be solved or the results to be achieved. that need to be achieved.
Physician burnout is an obvious phenomenon, and technology will increasingly become a differentiator in physician recruitment and retention. It is also important to continue to look clearly at the emergence of some of these technologies and the internal resources and efforts it may require to successfully adopt them.
One of the tools our Gartner clients use to assess emerging technologies is our Hype Cycles, which provide a visual representation of the expected benefit, maturity and adoption of each innovation. It is a useful tool for drawing up technology roadmaps and investment plans.
The organizations that have successfully implemented these emerging technologies are taking a highly collaborative approach to researching and implementing new solutions. At Gartner, we have found that CIOs who collaborate with their executive colleagues (CxOs) to co-deliver new technologies are significantly more likely to realize value from these investments.
So in the coming year, CIOs and CxOs should look for opportunities to collaborate on their organization’s most pressing problems or goals and evaluate opportunities to adopt emerging technologies and then share responsibility for success.
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.