Improving access to care and boosting patient and provider experience via digital — with and without AI — were among the main talking points at this year’s Becker’s Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference. Here are five key themes from the conference, which took place Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 in Chicago and […] The post Becker’s Health IT conference: 5 key themes appeared first on Becker's Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
Improving access to care and boosting patient and provider experience via digital — with and without AI — were among the main talking points at this year’s Becker’s Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference.
Here are five key themes from the conference, which took place Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 in Chicago and featured over 600 speakers and 2,500 executive-level attendees:
1. Ambient AI is a starting point — and its real value so far is cognitive offload.
“What ambient documentation has done is actually put the provider back in the room with the patient,” said Rebecca Mishuris, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer of Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham. “And that really addresses the joy of medicine.”
Ambient AI was associated with a 20% reduction in clinician burnout per a study at Mass General Brigham and Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare — though only a 10-minute-a-day drop in “pajama time,” aka after-hours work.
In a pilot program, Rochester (N.Y.) Regional Health experienced a 25% drop in total documentation time but a 50% reduction in burnout and a 75% decrease in providers who said they wanted to quit.
Adoption hasn’t been universal, however, with some clinicians describing it as “life-changing” and others simply not using it or saying it’s not ready, leaders say. AI governance is also critical for the technology’s continued deployment.
Ambient AI moves next into the nursing and inpatient spaces, though nurses have been even slower to find it useful, leaders said.
2. Access is the existential pressure digital must help ease.
Health IT leaders remain focused on increasing access to care through digital, optimizing schedules, finding right-site care for patients and relieving primary care provider burden.
Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System has found success with bidirectional SMS texting that looks like it’s coming from the physician’s office, which has had 79% engagement, and voice bots to follow up with patients after discharge from the emergency department or who called a 24/7 nurse helpline, boosting care coordination. Baby boomers, surprisingly, have been the most engaged with digital tools at Memorial Hermann.
Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine has been focused on patient experience tools that will improve access through better online scheduling and waitlist management, while Boston Medical Center Health System has installed digital welcome kiosks in multiple languages, freeing up time for more appointments.
“We realized we’re not going to build our way out of this capacity crisis. We need to think differently,” said Danny Metzger-Traber, vice president of strategic business operations for Mass General Brigham Healthcare at Home.
3. Hospital at home works — policy whiplash doesn’t.
Hospital at home at ChristianaCare had a net promoter score between 90 and 100 (the iPhone hovers around 55) and had only 1% of patients go on to a skilled nursing facility (compared to 20% of inpatients in a control group).
But that was before CMS cut off funding for the program with the government shutdown Oct. 1, forcing Medicare patients to be discharged or sent back to the hospital.
Hospital at home also eases hospital capacity and emergency department gridlock and has high registered-nurse retention and provider satisfaction, leaders said.
Uncertainty over the CMS hospital-at-home waiver — which has been tied to short-term government funding — stalls admissions, strains staff, scares off technology vendors and disincentivizes smaller organizations from adopting the care model, executives said.
Advances in hospital at home could include preenrolling high-risk patients and triggering care directly from the home (under the CMS waiver, patients had to come from the hospital first).
4. Winning technologies are tested, well-governed — and actually used.
Durham, N.C.-based Duke University Health System, like some other healthcare organizations, has launched innovation units to test and measure the performance of technologies before scaling them.
Mount Sinai merged its AI and digital governance with bottom-up idea intake (like a wound care nurse suggesting an AI bed sore prevention tool) and top-down alignment, with the C-suite signing off on the roadmap.
“You can’t do transformation to the business. You have to do it with the business,” said Bill Sheahan, senior vice president and chief transformation officer of Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health
Cincinnati-based Bon Secours Mercy Health is rationalizing its app portfolio from over 2,000 to about 600, and invests in startups as part of an “operating cosponsor” venture capital model so investments become live implementations not just logos on a website.
“Fundamentally, you go back to what problem you’re trying to solve,” said Michael Pfeffer, MD, senior vice president and chief information and digital officer of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care. “A lot of problems in healthcare don’t need AI. They need other things like better processes.” (Stanford, however, does have a lot of healthcare AI in the works.)
5. Unsexy tech uses make or break return on investment.
AI for prior authorizations and coding stabilizes margins and smoothes scheduling. Computer vision for supply chain management keeps units stocked and avoids waste. Contact centers become more automated.
Leaders said employing tech to streamline back-office functions will make healthcare more efficient, enjoyable and cheaper for all.
Penn Medicine, for instance, upgraded its telephony system to an AI-powered cloud platform, combined four websites to one, and consolidated 13 patient outreach systems to four.
“None of this is cool, sexy technology … but it was necessary for us to lay the foundation to get us ready for things like agentic AI,” said Philynn Hepschmidt, vice president of patient access at Penn Medicine.
The post Becker’s Health IT conference: 5 key themes appeared first on Becker's Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
