With how fast the world of healthcare is evolving, it is impossible to stay up to date on every single thing that is happening, especially once you factor in the amount of work that is required in every health IT job. There is no way that health IT leaders can be aware of every single threat or opportunity they need to keep an eye on, or at least there’s no way to do that if they try to do it alone. Thankfully, we are here to make sure that none of you are left to handle all that work by yourself. In order to get a good range of insights and opinions on what threats and opportunities health IT leaders should be looking out for, we reached out to our incredibly talented Healthcare IT Today Community while at ViVE 2024. The following video is a compilation of their answers!
Tejas Inamdar, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Turquoise Health
I think there’s a really interesting dynamic emerging around price transparency. There’s bipartisan support, motivated regulatory actions, as well as a groundswell of patient activism and entrepreneurial companies who are really tapping into the theme around price transparency.
Peter Bonis, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Wolters Kluwer
There is a lot of money flowing into AI, so there’s a lot of compute power that’s being built – I mean you can look at Nvidia’s stock price and its growth to just underscore that point – so I think the industry with all that money flow has a lot of pressure on it to onboard some of these AI capabilities. I’m concerned about that in a healthcare domain, which is very high-stakes, that that’s done safely and effectively, so for health IT leaders I think there’s certainly opportunity there but there’s also a threat to make sure that we’re not jumping the gun to onboard things that perhaps aren’t ready for prime time and for use in that clinical domain.
Meghan Gaffney, Co-Founder and CEO at Veda
I think it tracks to the announcement we made this morning. The partnership with Humana is really about staying ahead of where the regulation from CMS and State Medicaid agencies are going around provider directory accuracy and ensuring that patients can get information about where to see an in-network care provider easily. We agree with Humana’s stance that it’s really about member experience. We need to go beyond regulation and I think you’re going to see states like California and Illinois starting to be more stringent in their requirements around provider directory accuracy. We’re excited as a company to be out in front of that trend.
Bill Furlong, CEO at Vale Health
The way people engage with health boldly defined is dramatically changing. The average person only visits their traditional healthcare provider less than two times per year but people engage with health and wellness solutions all the time. There’s a bunch of actors in the space who are now looking at that as an opportunity to establish that relationship with the customer/consumer. We think that healthcare providers really ought to be the hub of that experience, we think that having that engagement is going to be critical to their success.
Larry Adams, EVP of Growth at ShiftMed
I think health IT leaders really need to think about the healthcare industry and how we’re going to brace innovation and solving the workforce shortages within the nursing strategies itself. I think having an on-demand platform like ShiftMed that allows them the flexibility within the healthcare community so these individuals from the healthcare professionals can pick up shifts as flexible as they can.
Sara Shanti, Partner at Sheppard Mullin
I think we’re so optimistic and so excited about how AI can solve things that it’s hard to look forward to what new problems that it could really make. I think even where panels have really tried to talk about the perils of AI, it’s really hard to have that conversation. Also think beyond healthcare – healthcare is such a leader in technology, which is fabulous, but then thinking about how some of that technology could be misused or proliferated within society and potentially harmful. So even though we’re really excited, I think we have to bring some of our brilliant minds and really think about worst-case scenarios.
Jim Mooney, Senior Director, Marketing Strategy & Campaigns – Healthcare at Ricoh
Clinician shortage in terms of clinicians needed versus supplied. That delta has never been bigger and by many accounts, by 2034 that’s going to grow to over 100,000 clinicians that are needed. In addition, you have nurses and other extended-care staff leaving healthcare in record numbers. There was one survey done in 2023 that included over 18,000 nurses and the hypothesis was that as many as one-third of active nurses in the United States will have successfully made a career change within the year ahead.
Gene Scheurer, CEO at Optimum Healthcare IT
I think the threats are still in the financial area. I think there’s a lot of pressures for efficiencies and cost reductions. I think hospitals are still coming out of the COVID-years where revenues are down and so they’re having to do less with more – so I think that’s always going to be a threat until we get out of this macro environment that we’re in, unfortunately.
Heather Hudnall, BSN, RN, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at NTT DATA
I think they need to keep an eye on their outdated infrastructure networks. We see it all the time – they want to bring in all this new innovating emerging technology, well they have very outdated old infrastructure that can’t support all this new great technology they want to bring in. I’ve actually seen it and it has impacted the staff and patient experience because it’s just not great and you have to have that technology be supported. I think if they keep trying to bring in more technology without addressing that foundational problem, the experience is just not going to be great for anyone.
Dr. Brad Ryan, Chief Growth Officer, National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA)
I think one of the biggest opportunities that is a little undervalued right now are the IT investments and interoperability that have been coming and coming more frequently in the last couple of years. Whether we’re talking about provider API, the patient access API, payer-to-payer, and now prior authorization requirements that are coming through policy – a lot of those investments are being viewed as IT-owned investments and that’s kind of a check-the-box exercise.
Diana Zuskov, Associate Vice President at LexisNexis Risk Solutions
I think the biggest threat and opportunity is definitely this fragmentation. There are so many new folks coming into healthcare, but what’s that really going to mean for the consumer experience? In some ways there’s a huge opportunity for consumers to be stewards of their own data – own all of that data and really take it from provider to provider. Huge threat though that that data starts to get messy, not shared properly, or not linked correctly.
Chris Larkin, CTO at Concord Technologies
The biggest threat in healthcare with AI is the hype. There’s so much going on that our joint customers can have a tendency to turn it all off because there’s so much hype and so much noise. So really figuring out, ‘alright, what should we be focusing on?’ – there’s tremendous pressure in the healthcare industry on costs, there are tremendous problems in staffing and being able to then use AI to be able to offset the issues of staffing and cost as a very practical matter.
Steve Vlok, Founder and CEO at Celo
One thing we’re seeing a lot of is basically shadow IT – so tools that are not approved by organizations being used at really the cold face. Busy surgeons and busy doctors working in a really busy hospital choosing tools on their own (WhatsApp, iMessage, text messaging) happens all the time and, obviously, this is a threat for patient privacy. It can also be seen as an opportunity. We know clinicians are using these tools which are easy and make their lives easy to communicate, but I think if you can find a way to formalize that it can really empower clinicians to do the same thing they’re doing already but in a formalized way that’s controlled.
Dr. Nele Jessel, Chief Medical Officer at athenahealth
AI, obviously, now is front and center with the invention of generative AI and we felt the need to ask physicians: How do you actually feel about AI? Do you think there’s a potential for things to improve? For your workload to decrease? For patient care to improve? By and large, physicians felt pretty optimistic about the potential of AI – about 83% of physicians stated that yes, they do feel there’s potential. Now I will say that there was also significant skepticism. More than half of physicians thought ‘well, it could just be yet another thing that we have to deal with as far as technology solutions’ and then over 60% of physicians were really worried about the loss of human touch with the invention of AI. I think it’s super important that we involve physicians from day one in any development of AI to make sure that it’s really clinician-facing and it helps to improve patient care and reduce the administrative burdens physicians are feeling.
Brian Kalis, Managing Director at Accenture Health
One area that health IT leaders should be focusing on is both a threat or an opportunity depending on how you respond. A big part of that is how there’s a set of healthcare enterprises that are really reinventing and using a technology-driven reinvention on a strong digital core. A strong digital core is cloud as the enabler, data as the driver, and AI as the differentiator – including generative AI. There’s a side of organizations that are kind of leading with that reinvention, centered on those elements, that are really starting to drive improvement on how they finance care, deliver care, and create new services for consumers.
Katie Boston-Leary, PhD, MBA, MHA, RN, NEA-BC, Director of Nursing Programs at American Nurses Association
I think healthcare IT leaders should realize that technology has not been kind to nursing over the years. Having nurses at the table to address a lot of challenges and bring in their own expertise to address a lot of the things that are considered to be their pain points have been long stemming. Almost in the place of being wicked problems is the answer for us to get through a lot of the issues that we’ve been facing particularly as it relates to nurses’ well-being and their willingness to stay in the arena where patients need them the most.
Huge thank you to Tejas Inamdar, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Turquoise Health, Peter Bonis, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Wolters Kluwer, Meghan Gaffney, Co-Founder and CEO at Veda, Bill Furlong, CEO at Vale Health, Larry Adams, EVP of Growth at ShiftMed, Sara Shanti, Partner at Sheppard Mullin, Jim Mooney, Senior Director, Marketing Strategy & Campaigns – Healthcare at Ricoh, Gene Scheurer, CEO at Optimum Healthcare IT, Heather Hudnall, BSN, RN, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at NTT DATA, Dr. Brad Ryan, Chief Growth Officer, National Committee for Quality Assurance, Diana Zuskov, Associate Vice President at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Chris Larkin, CTO at Concord Technologies, Steve Vlok, Founder and CEO at Celo, Dr. Nele Jessel, Chief Medical Officer at athenahealth, Brian Kalis, Managing Director at Accenture Health, and Katie Boston-Leary, PhD, MBA, MHA, RN, NEA-BC, Director of Nursing Programs at American Nurses Association for taking the time to speak with us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time to read this article and watch this video! We could not do this without all of your support. What threats or opportunities do you think health IT leaders should be keeping their eye on? Let us know either in the comments down below or over on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!
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