A vice president goes in-depth about digital transformation in healthcare.
Robbie Freeman, MSN, RN, serves as the system vice president of clinical innovation and chief nursing informatics officer at New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System.
Mr. Freeman will serve on the panel "Elevating CNIOs for Better Patient Care" at Becker's 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting: The Future of Business and Clinical Technologies. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place Oct. 4-7 in Chicago.
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Question: What are you most excited about right now?
Robbie Freeman: There is broad recognition that technology, when used appropriately, can support efforts to reduce health disparities and address the social determinants of health. We are focused on embedding tools that assist our front-line clinicians and patients alike to connect them with resources tailored to their needs. We're starting to see progress and we have work ahead to ensure technology is accessible to all the patients and communities we serve.
Q: What challenges do you anticipate over the next two years?
RF: Inflation and rising costs will require health systems to become more efficient. Digital will be a key enabler for health systems in the coming years as they look to reach financial, growth and experience targets. Digital transformation allows organizations to reimagine the business and how work gets done while elevating the consumer experience.
Q: Where are the best opportunities for disruption in healthcare today?
RF: We are still in the early days of applying AI to solve our greatest challenges. We are seeing how the current generation of AI products is elevating the quality and safety of care we deliver. We will start to see AI systems deployed at a large scale, leveraging multimodal assets like images and multi-omics to improve and innovate in new ways. From a workforce standpoint, AI will support our care teams using voice and natural language processing that can relieve the burden of documentation and enhance patient-clinician interaction. From the patient perspective, new capabilities with conversational AI will make connecting to care more efficient and shift repetitive tasks to a digital workforce. Collectively, these advancements will lead to transformational change in the coming years.
Q: How is your role as a CNIO evolving? How are IT teams changing?
RF: The way we work is evolving, and technology teams and leaders are helping business units solve problems collaboratively. We're taking an agile approach to product development that is experience-led. We need the voice of our end-users to be embedded in this work and co-design solutions with our patients and front-line team members. We're seeing leading organizations embrace the CNIO role to deliver value and solve challenges facing today's nursing workforce.