Digital solutions — particularly AI — hold enormous potential in healthcare for improving patient care, labor productivity, and revenue cycle management. Yet digital solutions and AI also present challenges related to data governance and privacy.
These were major themes in the discussion ‘Future of Healthcare: Incorporating AI for Impact’ at Becker's 14th Annual Meeting led by Bree Bush, GM, Command Center and Pharma Solutions, GE HealthCare.
Panelists were:
- Jill Hoggard Green, PhD, RN, President & CEO, The Queen's Health System (Honolulu)
- Jim Terwilliger, President, Puget Sound Market, Northwest Region, CommonSpirit Health (Seattle)
- Kristie Barazsu, ACOO, Duke University Hospital (Durham, N.C.)
The panelists shared how digital solutions can improve the access to and quality of care.
Four key takeaways were:
1. Digital transformation in healthcare is being driven by the need for improved access, quality and efficiency. Many health systems cannot meet their local demand. "One of our major barriers right now is access," Dr. Green said. "We could have over 200% census in some of our hospitals."
Meeting increased demand cannot just be done through physical expansion; The Queen's Health System is also using data to help deal with the growth in demand. "Our command center helps us see across the whole state, where patients are coming from, how they're being transported and which ones could actually be staying in their communities versus coming to us," Dr. Green said. "It helps us see where we need to find more effective ways to provide access."
2. AI can enhance clinical decision-making and improve patient outcomes. The key will be using AI to optimize clinicians' expertise. "We need to see how [physicians and AI] are not competing but are complimentary," Jim said. "The aggregation of this data into useful operational, clinically relevant bites is the next great frontier."
3. A goal in adopting AI is to make it easier and more efficient for providers to deliver quality care. "If we can find a way to make it easier, faster, better for the caregiver so they can be more present and able to provide the right service at the right time, that's the holy grail from our perspective," Dr. Green said.
Kristie shared an example of how AI has improved care and increased efficiency at Duke. "We rolled out a tool that uses AI to forecast census hourly for the next two days and daily for the next two weeks that delivers both financial and operational outcomes," she said. "We also have touchscreen monitors at our charge nurse station and throughout our units. Now, our team can quickly access needed data and have real-time conversations about patients at the same time."
4. When implementing AI in healthcare, governance and data sovereignty are crucial considerations, especially when used with diverse populations. "We have the most diverse population in Hawaii," Dr. Green said. "The issue of how you use patient information is critically sensitive here. Patients are already concerned when we use data in HIPAA-appropriate ways. When we start looking at sending that data to another entity, that is where it crosses the data sovereignty line. Patients want explicit ways to opt in or out of that decision."
While AI has tremendous potential to help health systems improve access and productivity, it will be critical to focus on sensitive data governance and privacy issues.