Embracing AI and digital transformation is no longer optional for health systems—it’s essential.
Health systems that fail to adopt AI risk losing their future competitiveness and falling behind in both patient care and clinician recruitment. Add on thin margins and a shortage of care workers, and hospitals can’t afford to waste time wavering on whether or not to invest. In fact, within the next five years it’s projected that AI technologies available today could generate $24 billion to $48 billion for hospitals in annual run rate net savings from administrative costs.
With stakes this high, it’s no surprise that healthcare leaders are embracing AI and digital solution experimentation—and that CIOs are now finding themselves integral to strategic decision-making. In fact, year-over-year we’re seeing CIOs’ roles in leading AI strategies increase from 31% to 86%, while CEO involvement dropped from 34% to 8%.
A comprehensive, actionable roadmap for healthcare leaders—by healthcare leaders
Qventus recently published a white paper with learnings from CIOs, Chief Medical Information Officers (CMIOs), and other senior IT leadership at medium and large health systems to offer a roadmap to help navigate through this rapidly evolving, and often overwhelming, landscape.
The white paper dives deep into how hospitals and health systems are investing in AI to deliver increased quality care to patients through more efficient treatment and discharging of patients, boosted capacity, and more productive, happier workers.
It touches on big issues like navigating build-versus-buy decisions for AI solutions—and reminds us of the importance of aligning with business impact when making those decisions. The white paper also examines the key criteria for evaluating and selecting AI vendors, identifies and measures high-ROI AI use cases, and discusses what is required for successful AI implementation.
And, it offers insightful quotes from hospital leaders working every day to meet the challenges and opportunities of embracing AI, such as this one from Joseph Sanford, M.D., the CCIO and Director of University of Arkansas Medical Center’s Institute for Digital Health and Innovation (IDHI): “As a Chief Clinical Informatics Officer (CCIO), bringing new technologies like AI into a health system is rarely straightforward. There are so many moving parts – figuring out the right adoption strategy, deciding how to measure impact, and making sure it supports financial goals, and most importantly, patient care standards. It can be challenging when resources that measure how other health systems are approaching AI adoption are limited.”
With large data sets comes great responsibility
In the survey and one-on-one interviews, CIOs highlight the risks inherent in AI itself: the massive amounts of sensitive personal health information required to run large language models make it potentially vulnerable to nefarious actors. This places the responsibility of protecting that data on the health systems.
As it stands, only 11% of executives self-report that they’ve fully implemented responsible AI capabilities, which include data governance, upskilling, embedding AI risk specialists, third-party risk management tools, and monitoring and auditing.
In an array of unknowns, proper governance is another issue raised by CIOs. As one Director of IT at a California-based nonprofit integrated health system points out, there still aren’t standard government regulations on AI within healthcare, and this makes many health systems slower to take the technological leap.
Facing the future with clear direction
In an effort to operationalize AI, some CIOs are opting to move forward with their existing electronic health records (EHRs) instead of building a custom solution or purchasing an off-the-shelf AI product. This choice may be more driven by familiarity and established workflow integration than by optimal effectiveness, however, as 60% of CIOs said it was “early days” when asked where they thought their electronic health records (EHR) system was in its AI journey. Only 2% deemed it “mature.”
Despite the evolving nature of AI and its unknowable future, the white paper provides an industry benchmark and clear guidelines for successfully moving forward with AI to obtain meaningful results.
Read the findings here: How healthcare CIOs are shaping AI’s role in patient care and operations