Urging Health IT Leaders to Act Swiftly on AI Matter at ViVE 2023 Conference
In the rapidly evolving world of healthcare, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly integral part of the industry's landscape. At the recent ViVE 2023 conference, health IT leaders discussed a variety of current and future AI use cases aimed at improving clinical workflows, patient engagement, and personalised care.
One promising tool emerging in this field is AI-powered smart glasses. These innovative devices, equipped with multi-modal sensors and large language models (LLMs), offer real-time monitoring, chronic disease management, and personalised treatment planning. By providing context-aware and interactive health recommendations, they serve as a vital interface between providers and patients for continuous, personalised health management, enhancing telemedicine and assisted medical services.
AI is also making strides in clinical workflows, currently supporting tasks such as documentation, billing, and notes. However, its greatest potential lies in complex analytics areas such as genomics, cancer stratification, and chronic disease prediction. These applications help expand access, optimise outcomes, and enable mass customisation of treatment plans, potentially saving lives.
AI-driven patient communication is another area of focus, with chatbots and conversational agents (powered by LLMs like ChatGPT) improving patient interaction. These digital assistants enable more natural conversations for scheduling, medication reminders, mental health support, and tailored interventions through mobile and virtual reality platforms. For instance, robot avatars and virtual coaches are being used to extend mental health support between visits.
Internal development of AI capabilities within healthcare organisations is crucial for maximising impact. Examples include Mayo Clinic’s AI command centre reducing ICU stays by 16% and Blue Shield of California cutting claims rework by 40% through AI-driven audits. SCAN Health Plan is deploying AI predictive models to identify high-need patients for targeted interventions and hospitalisation prevention.
AI-powered empathy training is another innovative application being pursued to improve communication skills and patient care quality. Taiwanese hospitals, for example, are using immersive VR and AI to enhance empathy among healthcare providers.
The implementation of AI in healthcare is not without concerns, with some clinicians and healthcare staff expressing worries about AI eliminating jobs. However, the benefits of improved efficiency, better work quality, and work-life balance cannot be overlooked.
Health IT leaders are encouraged to engage their teams in conversations about tasks they wish were off their plates to frame the AI implementation process differently. Transparency is key in handling unconscious bias in AI, and organisations have a responsibility to include diversity in their teams and data capturing efforts.
Michelle Greene, executive vice president and CIO of Cardinal Health, emphasised the need for governance around AI, while Ashok Chennuru, chief data and analytics officer at Elevance Health, expressed excitement about AI's potential for capturing information from multiple sources to come up with the right treatment patterns and find early indicators to prevent disease.
Cynthia Bero, senior adviser for Manatt Health, discussed future use cases for AI in healthcare, including medical image analysis, personalised medicine, drug development, and remote patient monitoring. As new AI solutions and opportunities arise, IT leaders will have to work with a sense of speed and urgency.
In conclusion, the use cases discussed at ViVE 2023 highlight how AI is transforming healthcare through enhanced decision support, personalised medicine, improved patient communication, workflow efficiency, and even training and empathy development. Future adoption will likely involve more integration of AI with AR/VR, proactive health management via wearable devices like smart glasses, and addressing challenges in data fragmentation to ensure model accuracy and trustworthiness.
In the realm of health-and-wellness, AI-powered smart glasses are being developed to offer real-time monitoring, chronic disease management, and personalized treatment planning, thereby serving as a crucial interface for continuous, context-aware health management. As for technology, AI is making strides in domains like genomics, cancer stratification, and disease prediction, aiming to expand access, optimize outcomes, and personalize treatment plans in clinical workflows.
