With more than half of 2024 in the books, healthcare leaders are shifting their gaze to 2025, specifically regarding how they will maintain a competitive edge in the tech landscape.
Brian Hoberman, MD, CIO of the Permanente Federation, a part of Kaiser Permanente that supports Permanente Medical Groups, based in Oakland, Calif., connected with Becker's to discuss strategies for harnessing success through existing and emerging technologies.
Dr. Hoberman said his primary focus for the balance of this year and for 2025 is maximizing the capabilities of existing technology within his organization.
One example he noted is how Kaiser Permanente uses ambient listening technology. The health system deployed it to every physician in 2024 and will prioritize refining its efficiency. The organization uses it to record physician-patient interactions and curate visit notes. But despite its success in streamlining the documentation process, it still requires physicians and clinicians to take extra steps that will be removed with new enhancements.
Dr. Hoberman highlighted the prominence of administrative burden on physicians and care teams, and the opportunity that refining this technology holds to decrease workload and increase patient interaction.
"Data entry is important, but for physicians and clinicians, it’s not the primary focus of their job. The goal is to enable physicians and clinicians to concentrate on the job they’re trained to do. That includes spending more time focused on the patient and less time focused on a computer screen," he said.
A theme Dr. Hoberman has observed in his career is that some employees would prefer to maintain familiarity with respect to technology and avoid a timely relearning process, so he utilizes two strategies to combat hesitation.
For existing technologies, Dr. Hoberman's strategy focuses on making the user experience entirely effortless. He said any extra steps could be enough to deter employees from using the tool all together.
For emerging technologies, he emphasized leaders' responsibility to introduce tools in a meaningful and digestible way. He noted that openness to new technology exists on a spectrum regardless of age or level of education, and employees are disinterested in traditional training. With these in mind, he centers his approach on communication and user support.
One example of this method is choosing a team member who is well-liked and interested in the latest technology to undergo more in-depth training. From there, that person acts as a resource who emphasizes the benefits of the tool and offers operational assistance.
"It’s at the level of trying to get it spread in a human way, and then the challenge for a leader like me is to construct an organization that accomplishes that by tapping into that human structure," Dr. Hoberman said.
Dr. Hoberman emphasized the importance of being strategic when choosing new technologies to avoid getting caught in the hype cycle. He said leaders must understand the core fundamentals of how such endeavors fit into the existing infrastructure and delivery system.
Additionally, he said the persistent challenge of improving access to care holds significant opportunity for new developments. He said care will always have more demand than supply, but evolving technology such as telehealth and AI assistants can revolutionize care by decreasing unnecessary in-person visits and increasing access for patients who need in-person care.
"What we're going to see is that the world will change in terms of access through extremely well-designed evidence-based agents that help patients in ways that we don't yet imagine," Dr. Hoberman said.
He also emphasized the importance of using these tools in a responsible, unbiased and equitable way. He discussed his hope for a future in which AI tools are trained on a corpus of representative medical knowledge that is screened for biases, opposed to the current training process that utilizes data sets from the internet.
Dr. Hoberman stressed the importance of remembering that care delivery is human. As for Health IT leaders navigating the evolving tech landscape, he advised them to be end user-focused, not IT-focused. He drew a comparison to the expectation of hospitals to prioritize the patient over money: the job is taking care of the patient, not mastery of the technology.
"You can get deeply into the focus on all the IT stuff because it's so fun and fascinating, but ultimately, care delivery is a human sport," Dr. Hoberman said. "You've got to really focus on the human aspects of this."
Dr. Hoberman will speak at Becker’s 9th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Meeting: The Future of Business and Clinical Technologies on a keynote panel titled "Exploring Essential Tech for 2025." Plan to attend the Hyatt Regency Chicago from Oct. 1-4 to hear more from Dr. Hoberman and hundreds of healthcare leaders from across the country.