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  Today in Health it, the Healthcare Digital Revolution is in pilot stage. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health, IT at channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. I. And engaged. Don't forget to sign up for clip notes, hit our website, hit the subscribe button, sign up for clip notes.

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Check out our website, our YouTube channel, and our LinkedIn page, and see if following us makes sense for you and your career. All right to today's story, this is again, we're, we're just going through a lot of the stories from the HIMS conference. This is also from the HIMSS 21 floor. This is in Healthcare finance news.

The title of the story is The Digital Revolution has Begun, but 52% of executives have not progressed beyond pilot stage. Alright, lemme give you a couple of excerpts from this. Healthcare is moving towards a post pandemic world in which COVID-19 has influenced nearly every aspect of care. From telehealth to a new focus on hospital at home models to find out how provider and payer executives and patients feel about where healthcare is headed and their role in the new normal HIMSS gathered insights from over 3000 stakeholders.

Dr. Ann Snowden, chief Scientific Officer at hims. And a panel of experts released the results of the research from the HIMSS Trust during the future of healthcare Wednesday at the HIMSS 21 in Vegas. So here is some of the stuff that they talked about. Tom Keysaw, senior partner at the Charters group who talked about the findings from serving 220 executives on such issues as digital health machine learning and ai.

52% have not progressed beyond pilot stages for digital integration. But understand the need for digital transformation. Keysaw said, close to half, 47% cite digital as the top organizational priority and 80% plan to increase their digital investments. One interesting statistic is that 7% said they believe AI and machine learning are a top priority for the future, and the same percent.

That they are a distraction. So 7%, it's the future. 7% is a distraction. Executives question whether making an investment is the best way to begin. But a good warning sign that more planning is needed is that new technology plus an old organization equals a costly old organization. Keysaw said most, 88% said they believe commercial payments need to grow to support long-term financial health.

That is. A problem. Interesting to hope that that's how we're going to fund things. I would be looking in other directions to fund things. Investment needs to be prioritized. One area that stood out for investment is hospital at home. A care model that has gotten more attention as an alternative to inpatient care.

During COVID-19. Hospitals are even looking at models for acute care in the home. About three quarters are prioritizing hospital at home while a third are not. Over the next five years, Keysaw believes the ones that are will have a first mover advantage. Let's see. Go down a little bit. Dr. Darrell Gibbons, Isaac, clinical innovation subject matter for Accenture goes on to say 71%.

Of clinicians say they will continue to use digital health tools to some or a greater extent. At the end of the pandemic, he said 80% are interested in AI for clinical use cases, and 76% said AI is not a threat to their job security. That's good progress. I will say this, that John Halamka has an article that I'll probably cover here where he talks about how AI has a lot of hurdles to get over before we see a lot of clinical use.

Ish, Ari, principal and a health plan gave the payer perspective on value-based care. The fee for service model is going to have its natural death in five or six years. Ari said, that's an interesting prediction, but to really reduce the cost of care, there's a growing realization that the entire ecosystem has to come together.

Ari said. Lauren Goodman, director of Marketing Intelligence for himss talked to 262 respondents who had a clinical visit in the past 12 months. Patients imagined that one third of visits being remote as ideal. She said an estimate 61% said they would use wearable technology, and 63% said they would use an at-home medical test.

Answers varied by age demographic with younger consumers more likely to accept digital care and baby boomers less likely. Here's my so what, I covered this story, actually. I covered it when it first came out. In the form of a report, and this was really done from a marketing perspective to promote HIMSS 21.

The reason I cover it again is 'cause now you have these experts coming on stage and providing some color around the report, and I think the color is really interesting, the fact that 52% of. Executives have not progressed beyond pilot stage, that's problematic. We've gotta ask ourselves a question, how do we move things beyond the pilot stage?

And I would say focus is your friend here. Sometimes we start too many pilots and we don't have the intention of moving them forward. I. That is one of the things I would caution against is when we do pilots to delay a decision, you really should be making a decision before you start a pilot. This is something we believe has promised this is something that we want to do, and so leaving things in the pilot stage or not even getting to the pilot stage is really unacceptable.

You should be doing pilots around things that you believe will add value and you should be making a determination. The pilot. Is a quick way to get to do a determination of if that approach is going to add value. And digital transformation is a really a non-negotiable at this point. Healthcare is going to be changing.

It's either gonna be changing. Because the digital tools are gonna be offered by the payers. They're gonna be offered by new entrants, or they're gonna be offered by the providers. And those are really the options. And if you are a provider who's playing around with pilots, you're potentially gonna see upstarts and payers and others come alongside and start to offer your consumers a little bit better way to navigate their health.

I'll say some of the other interesting findings, again, I'll go come back to this. Commercial payments, they're going to inch up slowly, but there's a general backlash heading in the direction of increasing the cost of healthcare. I think we need to look at other methods for raising revenue around this.

It is either through efficiencies where most gains have come in the use of technology in every other industry. And we somehow are trying to avoid that. If we're going to implement technology, it should make us more efficient. It should make us more efficient in how we interact with our consumers, give them more access, provide more touch points, more ways to be creative about billing for additional services.

But those services have to add value. And when people are paying through insurance carriers, they generally don't want to pay for anything else. We have to find things that people are gonna look at and say. Yes, that adds value to my life. I'm willing to pay a little bit more for that service. Those are few and far between, to be honest with you.

I understand that. But the efficiencies that could be gained through the use of robotic process automation and other types of tools and engaging the consumers are there to be had. We just have to be looking at them from the perspective of can they provide efficiencies? So anyway, I'm looking at this and saying.

I don't believe we can continue to bank our future on increased pricing for healthcare. I think there's just a growing backlash and we have to be more creative and look at those things. And then some of the other findings, you know, is fee for service debt in the next five years. I don't know, I, I'm not sure.

I'm banking on the fee for service model going away, but I'm also planning for it to get reduced over time. And I also think we are going to want to take on more managed care and risk-based contracts moving forward because it offers a little bit better diversity in our revenue stream for things like the pandemic.

And we may be, as Dr. Fauci has said, I. Entering a pandemic era, in which case we have to model our financials around such a thing. And so finally they give you some consumer insights. I don't think the consumer insights are that great. I would look at other studies to get consumer insights and really look at the breakdown on those consumer insights, but I would also absolutely.

I. Figure out a way to gain those insights from your personal community because the broader demographics might apply to you or they might not apply to you, and you should have a way to have a constant dialogue with the consumers in your marketplace. Alright, that's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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