Digital health, AI and automation are transforming healthcare delivery via predictive insights, analytics and virtual care. By deploying such technologies — while consolidating, eliminating and streamlining others — organizations are aiming for increased operational efficiency, improved patient outcomes and a more connected, patient-centered healthcare ecosystem.
These were insights from Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting at a session sponsored by CSL, featuring:
• K. Nadeem Ahmed, MD, chief medical information officer, Valley Health System (Paramus, N.J.)
• Matt Hare, vice president of network growth and client success, CoverMyMeds
• Shahidul Mannan, system chief data officer, Boston Medical Center Health System
• Hillery Shay, chief marketing and experience officer and senior vice president, communications, Children’s Minnesota (Minneapolis)
Here are three key takeaways from the session:
1. Ambient AI continues to enjoy adoption among clinicians
AI scribes are now widely used for clinical notetaking because they enhance the physician experience by reducing the cognitive load of typing while engaging with patients. The next frontier for AI in clinical documentation is the expectation that AI will be able to retrieve information from patients’ often lengthy medical records and produce accurate, trustworthy summaries. “That’s records and documents a physician doesn’t have to read,” Dr. Ahmed said.
To ensure the trustworthiness of AI, Valley Health has created an internal task force to vet new AI technologies, inform end users of the data used to train those technologies and determine if there is potential for drift, bias or hallucinations. “Our policy says AI cannot make clinical or operational decisions,” said Dr. Ahmed. “If it messes up, you can’t blame the AI.”
“Organizations are being really thoughtful about the risks of AI, including staff concerns, but also expect to keep up with the speed of the market,” Matt said.
2. Agentic AI has potential to transform a wide range of functions
Agentic AI holds vast potential for healthcare organizations, from increasing the efficiency of contact centers and hospital pharmacies to better orchestrating patient journeys and revenue cycle operations for improved continuity, speed and alignment.
Being a large safety net hospital in New England, Boston Medical Center is exploring how to embed agentic AI into its systems, including its EHR, to improve workflows such as scheduling, patient engagement and post-encounter follow-up.
“We are looking at the full continuum of care and how AI and data-driven capabilities can support real-time decision-making across this journey,” Mr. Mannan said.
3. In the future, healthcare leaders will look to AI to design experiences — not just digitize tasks
“We need more systems thinking about how the organization functions — how we can create true designed experiences versus executing digitized tasks,” Ms. Shay said. She noted that healthcare is in great need of systems with less friction and more predictive modeling.
Orienting AI adoption and implementation toward system-level design will hopefully rein in the current trend of acquiring AI tools without considering how they integrate with other tools, Matt said. “One of the risks is continuing to layer on additional tools. That spirals out of control if you don’t have systems in place.”
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