Today I read a piece appearing in Becker’s Health IT which offered excerpts from interviews with health system CIOs to see how they would like to see their hospitals’ technology improve in the coming year.
The article featured excerpts from interviews with four CIOs. One focused on better using IoT to create better at-home care experiences, another on using data aggregated across institutions to improve decision support, a third CIO focused on using predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to get ahead of supply chain and capacity issues arising during the pandemic, and the fourth CIO’s interests included the use of robots and AI to create companions for isolated patients.
To me, what was striking about these discussions is that they were different from many years of “looking forward” health IT pieces I’ve read over the years. Rather than shooting for the stars, they mostly involved fairly mundane extensions of what hospitals are doing. Given the pandemic’s continued strength I’m not surprised by this, but the lack of 10,000 foot thinking here is still striking.
Even in the midst of the pandemic, healthcare IT leaders may be cutting themselves off at the knees by failing to think past the usual routine and imagine some bigger picture changes to their systems that could address even longer-term entrenched problems. In other words, I’d argue that it’s time to get back to the future — a future no longer dominated entirely by COVID — if for no other reason than that stagnation means we may not be doing our best work for patients.
Here are just a few issues that we clearly need to keep exploring:
- Next-gen in-home care: Right now, when we discuss in-home patient care we focus mostly on monitoring and telemedicine. However, particularly when it comes to elderly patients, our real goal to be to decentralize care even further and base it in the home.
- Better integration of AI tools: As I’ve written about previously, healthcare organizations have largely adopted AI or made plans to do so. It’s more than time to think about these technologies can be integrated into the larger health IT infrastructure.
- Enriched telehealth services: It is time to build out telehealth into a robust service delivery platform rather than an extra option. How will that work? That’s just the question we need to start asking ourselves, in ways that address a post-pandemic (or at least a post pandemic crisis) world.
Of course, taking our eyes off the COVID ball is risky. As we battle yet another surge, right now might seem a terrible time to think of anything but managing the pandemic and its impact on our organizations. Not only that, many of us just don’t have the bandwidth to think about anything else, nor the staff to even explore new ideas on a practical basis.
Still, I’d argue that where we can, it’s wise to keep asking ourselves when we can get back to designing the future of health IT. Right now it may not seem necessary to be terribly creative, but the truth is we shouldn’t forget to keep improving how things work.
