Plugging the shortfall of workforce with digital health
Healthcare systems around the world face persistent and growing challenges, including an aging population, health inequities and workforce shortages.
With the recent pandemic further widening the healthcare workforce gap – the WHO now predicts a shortage of 18 million healthcare workers by 2035 – there are two things health organizations can do now to mitigate its impact.
In the keynote session “Health that connects, technology that cares,” Hal Wolf, president and CEO of HIMSS, proposed making digital health an extension of healthcare facilities and training the workforce to build this infrastructure.
As part of this strategy, the critical role of AI in providing personalized care cannot be overstated. Through AI, hospitals now have predictive modeling capabilities that allow care teams to prioritize cases and reallocate time from manually testing patients to providing actual care.
However, providers must “view AI as a tool and not as a target,” Wolf emphasizes.
When developing such AI applications, Wolf reminded providers that there must be “a clear understanding and a clear direction.” “We need to recognize that there are biases and challenge those biases in applications.”
Data integrity must also be ensured, he added. “We all know in our hospitals today that if we have bad data, we just have to make decisions based on what we have. But it’s a constant improvement, and EHRs and the back-end data structure will help us.”
In addition, connectivity must also be established so that healthcare teams can seamlessly access tools and applications everywhere. Wolf referred to the Indonesian plan to establish itself satellite connectivity for puskesmas, or community health centers in rural areas, as an example of initiatives to increase health equity in underserved communities.
During this digital transformation journey, Wolf encouraged participants to share their learnings from their digital transformation journey.
“We talk about the scars on our backs and the hard work of what we’ve been through to get to where we are today. If we fail to share both in the successes, we will fail ourselves,” he said in closing.