Healthcare leaders have a pivotal — and increasingly essential — opportunity to reduce complexity in care delivery with emerging technologies.
This was the main theme of an executive session sponsored by ServiceNow at Becker's 12th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, where Drew Koerner, healthcare chief technology officer of ServiceNow, led a discussion on addressing complexity in healthcare and how ServiceNow is leveraging generative AI to meet this aim.
Three key takeaways were:
- Healthcare delivery today is inefficient and disconnected.
According to data Mr. Koerner shared, 40% of care teams face communication challenges and 60% of health systems rely on 50 or more technology solutions. It is "human middleware," he said, that ties these disparate processes and technologies together. This results in a lack of productivity, care team frustration and patient safety risks.
"We need to figure out a way to optimize tasks that we can lift off the clinician's plate," Mr. Koerner said.
- Service requests consume too much time and effort.
According to Mr. Koerner, service requests play a critical role in a healthcare organization's overall efficiency, given the frequent and ongoing nature of these requests.
"Every day, someone needs to know something or get something, or something is broken," Mr. Koerner said. "Those requests might come through a phone, EPIC, voice integration or some other channel." He added that multiple potential initiation points for service requests, combined with uncertainty about who is responsible for responding, result in complexity and wasted resources.
- ServiceNow's AI-powered experience layer is beginning to generate results — with massive potential ahead.
When using ServiceNow's platform, Mr. Koerner explained how a provider accesses a single portal, logs in and makes a service request. "The system will present a different subset of services based on whether you're a doctor, nurse, employed by the system or a non-employed student," he said.
Using one platform with one architecture and a single data model, ServiceNow takes incoming requests and assigns tasks to various teams. The platform orchestrates and automates work to resolve issues faster and improve patient care.
Health systems are seeing results. Stanford (Calif.) Health Care, for example, has improved patient care by providing 15,000 employees access to centralized services. Reid Health (Richmond, Ind.) has experienced a 40% increase in timely resolutions.
In the future, the platform will enable patients to interact with an AI assistant for discharge instructions and follow-up care. Health systems will also be able to integrate ambient listening technologies so service requests are initiated automatically.
"The sky's the limit," Mr. Koerner said.