HIMMS 2024: Key Takeaways

Author’s Note: The views expressed below are my own and not affiliated with any organization.

HIMMS 2024 was my second global healthcare conference, and much like the last one, I had the privilege to be amongst changemakers, innovators and disruptors. The energy of people transforming healthcare around the world was palpable and invigorating.

While the theme of Artificial Intelligence continues to hold its importance, its applications to modernize and evolve health systems are maturing at an exciting pace. My inner nerd battled the socially anxious introvert constantly throughout the week. I learned from the people I met, the sessions I attended and the exhibitors I spoke to, and I want to share my learnings with those who did not have a chance to attend the conference. Those who did, please feel free to add your thoughts.

Impact of AI – AI has been around for decades and its applications range from Machine Learning to Natural Language Processing to the latest buzz on Generative AI. While each of these AI subsets holds a significant promise in transforming a health system, I wanted to share my learnings from the conference using the Quintuple Aim and added a sixth vector – environmental sustainability. As health systems across the world have a significant impact on the environment (approx. 5%), vendors, healthcare providers, payors and other organizations in the ecosystem must explore use cases that help us improve the health of the planet.

1.     Patient experience: While there was an explicit track dedicated to patient experience at HIMMS 2023, this year there was a consistent dialogue on how data and technology are elevating the patient experience and the challenges we still need to address ranging from making solutions user-friendly to removing bias from data that fuels the AI applications.

• The Challenge(s): Last year, in one of the sessions a term that caught me by surprise was – “patient burnout”. The panelists of the session highlighted how patients and their family members / caregivers have difficulty navigating the health system and the mass amounts of information they have to consume to find the right care at the right time in the right place, leading to burnout. We are also witnessing the change in preferences and evolution of patients into healthcare consumers across the world, resulting in a higher demand for personalized care and seamless care experiences. Patient-centered care is, or rather has to be the core principle for any provider or health system caring for its population.
• The Promise: Many provider organizations and vendors presented their care models and solutions that are increasingly leveraging virtual care and remote monitoring solutions to deliver care in the home or using these solutions to support hospital@home care models. Generative AI in combination with chatbots is being used to deliver educational materials, guide preventative health programs, and empower patients to make informed decisions about their care. Healthcare organizations across the world are creating digital front door applications / platforms to communicate, engage and care for patients, when and where they need it, throughout their care journey.
• Something to think about: How can we combine the power of extended reality (XR) / metaverse and Generative AI to develop digital therapeutics (e.g., dementia care)? What are the potential behavioural health side effects of increased interaction with technology (i.e., reduced human interactions)?

2.     The health of the population: There was a clear focus on how telemedicine, AI applications and increased use of data integration across the broader public health system can drive significant improvement in population health outcomes and deliver value-based care.

• The Challenge(s): Two key challenges heard in conversations this past week were – the digital divide for the remote / underprivileged populations that prohibits access to telemedicine and other digital care interventions and the lack of integration of healthcare data with the broader public sector and social determinants of health (SDoH) data.
• The Promise: While infrastructure enhancement continues to be a focus for every health system, some innovators like Thursday’s keynote speaker showcased how robotics, automation and AI are revolutionizing healthcare logistics, particularly in delivering care to underserved populations. Health systems are leveraging community health centres in combination with telemedicine to deliver remote care and virtual nursing programs. Some healthcare providers are also integrating SDoH to identify population health trends and key areas of intervention, develop preventative health programs and deliver health education resources to reduce the use of ED and higher-cost acute care services. Additionally, XR solutions are being used to create and deliver programs for long-term chronic pain management, resulting in reduced dependency on pharmaceutical pain medications. AI applications powered by data from traditional healthcare records, genomic and other data are helping predict the onset of diseases, conduct research on rare diseases, accelerate drug development, drive pharmacogenetics, and create personalized care pathways. Many vendors working on these solutions and integrating them with EHRs which will provide significant cost savings for healthcare organizations.
• Something to think about: How can health systems integrate healthcare, SDoH and public health data to identify, design and deploy programs that enhance population health outcomes and reduce the burden of the increasing demand?

3.     Provider experience: Every healthcare organization and system is developing programs and interventions to create an attractive environment for the healthcare workforce to continue to do what they do best – care for their patients.

• The Challenge(s): While workforce burnout was worsened during the pandemic, health systems are also faced with shortages that becoming ever more critical to address. There is increased adoption of digital technologies and data to augment the workforce, but the medical education curricula have not changed to train the clinicians of tomorrow on how to use these tools.
• The Promise: Generative and Ambient AI-powered clinical documentation assistants continued to drive the dialogue from the last HIMMS conference. EHR vendors are also developing these capabilities rather than just offering integration with their platforms. Many healthcare organizations are starting to deploy these solutions to free up administrative time for physicians and nurses, allowing them to work at the top of their scope of practice, spend more time with their patients and see more patients. These solutions, especially Generative AI, are helping pull together relevant clinical information at the push of a button, aiding in point-of-care decision-making and clinical research at speeds never seen before. Virtual in-patient nursing solutions where remote nurses support bedside care teams are helping with the issues of clinician burnout and workforce shortages and supporting aging in place.In addition to deploying digital solutions, healthcare organizations are trying to understand the generational differences in the needs of the workforce and introduce programs that meet their evolving needs to recruit top talent and more importantly retain their healthcare workforce. These interventions include – flexible & personalized schedules, optimizing workflows & reducing digital “clutter”, strengthening the quality of the work environment through increased recognition and autonomy, engaging the workforce in the transformation process, and creating a restorative, learning workplace culture.
• Something to think about: While healthcare providers are starting to realize the importance of up-skilling their workforce’s digital skills, how can the vendor community support workforce training programs? How can healthcare organizations work with medical schools and universities to modernize the curriculum, allowing the clinicians of tomorrow to be ready to use the digital tools being deployed?

4.     Value for money: The deployment of AI solutions has a big impact on this vector of the quintuple aim and vendors continue to introduce advanced solutions that are aimed at reducing the cost of delivering care. Healthcare organizations are deploying AI applications to automate, augment and optimize their operations.

• The Challenge(s): One of the key challenges for healthcare organizations continues to be managing the ever-rising costs of delivering care and the dollar value attached to deploying large-scale transformative solutions. With every healthcare organization working across a range of digital maturity and solutions, simplifying their technology stack was a common concern heard at the conference.
• The Promise: Solutions such as command centers, digital twins, robotic process automation, enterprise resource planning, etc. are modernizing the operational processes of healthcare organizations across the world. With these solutions, providers can predict and manage patient flow, optimize the use of and maintain their clinical assets & resources, and create efficient workflows. Additionally, the use of predictive analytics is improving quality and safety monitoring, which reduces errors in care delivered and improves patient outcomes. Generative AI is now starting to be used to develop and update clinical practice guidelines but with the caution of closely monitoring the quality of the data being used.
• Something to think about: Healthcare organizations need to invest in fundamental infrastructure, data governance, cybersecurity, interoperability, change management and workforce up-skilling before, while and after deploying advanced AI solutions.

5.     Health equity: While this is a relatively recent addition to how healthcare organizations and systems evaluate their performance, enhancing health equity through digital health technologies and AI has been a focus for years.

• The Challenge(s): The strain on the health system from the increasing demand (both in terms of volume and complexity of care) has resulted in inequitable access to care. Depending on how the health system is funded and the range of the population it serves, each health system across the world is faced with its set of health equity challenges that are being exasperated by the digital divide.
• The Promise: With the increased integration of data, especially SDoH, healthcare organizations can leverage AI solutions to predict and deploy interventions that improve access to care and health outcomes. The National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the United States recently launched a playbook that supports clinicians, administrators, and medical practice staff in efforts to leverage health IT to identify, understand, and address SDoH needs for their patients and the communities they serve.Through community-based partnerships, health systems can design and deliver programs powered by digital solutions to meet the needs of remote and underprivileged populations, creating a more equitable health system. Virtual care, remote monitoring and other telemedicine solutions are being increasingly deployed through new care models to improve access to care for all populations.
• Something to think about: How can hospitals and residential care providers partner with community care providers, the broader public sector and mental health organizations to provide care for the homeless?

6.     Environmental sustainability: In the opening keynote on Tuesday, the speaker highlighted the importance of addressing the significant impact a health system has on the environment. While healthcare organizations are starting to make progress in this area, we need to accelerate our efforts to improve the health of this planet.

• The Challenge(s): While everyone understands the importance of environmental sustainability, it is often an afterthought. Improving environmental sustainability needs to be an operating principle for every healthcare organization.
• The Promise: Technologies such as digital twins, command centres and other AI-powered solutions can be deployed to understand the environmental impact of the operational decisions made by a healthcare organization. Health system resources can be more efficiently deployed to manage waste and resources that reduce the carbon footprint and improve environmental sustainability. One of the healthcare providers in the States is using an AI-powered solution to identify where EMS can deploy virtual care interventions compared to sending an ambulance, reducing carbon emissions, providing faster access to care and reducing the cost and wait-times associated with an ED visit. This is a prime example of how AI and digital tools can be deployed to improve the environmental impact of a health system / organization.
• Something to think about: Vendors should assess and highlight the net environmental impact of healthcare organizations deploying their solutions (e.g., reduction in carbon emissions from virtual care solutions). Four out of five healthcare executives that I spoke to at the conference would rather see the dollars invested in swag go towards charities, NGOs, research and addressing climate change impact. It was encouraging to see some vendors starting to move in this direction and the conference host making environmentally conscious choices, but we have a long way to go.

Preparing for an AI-driven revolution – As the applications of AI towards improving and transforming the health system mature, so must the capabilities of healthcare organizations to deploy these solutions. During the conference, I had the chance to learn from providers and vendors on how they have deployed digital and AI solutions and the lessons learned from them. Below are four key areas that every healthcare organization needs to mature to fully absorb the value of the AI-driven revolution.

1. Interoperability: This is critical in achieving seamless and standardized data exchange across disparate systems. Adherence to standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) will allow healthcare organizations to enhance interoperability. The many interoperability challenges health systems faced over the last few decades are being cracked to create interconnected healthcare ecosystems that empower the delivery of integrated, patient-centered care. EHR and other digital solutions / platforms are being developed with interoperability and scalability as core principles. The move of EHRs to the cloud is helping create an open ecosystem and streamline operations that will drive significant value in advancing digital transformation goals and partnerships to accelerate research.
2. Governance & Cybersecurity: As Generative AI and open APIs democratize access to AI applications, healthcare organizations must have strong data governance and cybersecurity capabilities to deploy solutions safely and securely. Health systems and organizations need to develop and deploy a framework for trust, responsible AI, privacy and security. AI applications in cybersecurity are enhancing the speed and efficacy with which modern systems can detect and eliminate cyber threats, but the ‘dark side of the force’ is getting stronger at using AI to create more nuanced threats to the systems. As healthcare organizations deploy digital solutions using remote monitoring, Internet of Medical Things and wearables, they need to ensure all these new end-points are safe and secure.
3. Workforce training: While Generative AI is empowering healthcare organizations with synthetic data to train medical AI algorithms, AI applications and the workforce, every organization needs to invest in workforce up-skilling and change management processes to effectively adopt the next generation digital technologies and AI applications.
4. Innovation & Research Ecosystems: One of the key themes of the conference was the importance of partnerships across the healthcare ecosystem, including vendors. Given the constrained resources, evolving needs and increased financial pressures across any health system, it is critical for providers, vendors, payors and other parts of the healthcare ecosystem to collaborate. The data shared through these collaborations will power the next-gen solutions that allow a health system to meet the evolving needs of its population. Also, providers need to have an effective operating model that supports their innovation pipeline, allowing ideas to progress from design to a proof of concept / pilot to the operations phase where it successfully graduates from the innovation portfolio to operations.

While these are some of my major learnings from the HIMMS 2024 conference, I invite my colleagues and fellow healthcare nerds who attended the conference to share their thoughts and learnings. Additionally, here is a LINK to some notable announcements made by a few vendors. I particularly enjoyed exploring the new areas EHR vendors are exploring to enhance patient transitions, clinical decision-making and provider communications; new solutions, devices & platforms launched to enhance patient experience; and the various virtual nursing platforms and digital whiteboard solutions that are improving the health workforce experience.

What are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months in how AI can transform a health system?