At HIMSS24, Veronica Walk from Gartner highlighted artificial intelligence (AI) and hospital-at-home technologies as key emerging trends in healthcare. AI, particularly generative AI, is swiftly advancing, offering potential to alleviate clinician burnout and enhance care team capacity by automating administrative tasks and potentially improving clinical decision-making. Meanwhile, hospital-at-home technologies, driven by workforce shortages and a desire to improve patient outcomes, are seeing significant growth, with virtual nursing emerging as a notable application. Walk emphasizes the importance for healthcare C-suite executives to not pursue technology for its own sake but to focus on solving organizational challenges and achieving specific outcomes. She advises the use of tools like Gartner's Hype Cycles to assess technologies' maturity and potential impact, and stresses collaboration among C-suite members to effectively implement and derive value from these emerging technologies.

A Gartner expert points to AI and hospital-at-home as the biggest emerging technologies at HIMSS24 | Healthcare IT News Healthcare IT News

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now being used to address the slow and costly process of clinical trials, aiming to counteract the diminishing efficiency in drug development, known as Eroom's law. AI applications in trials include designing study protocols, enhancing patient recruitment, selecting eligibility criteria, and data analysis. Innovations such as predictive algorithms for trial success, automated patient recruitment systems, and digital twins to reduce control group sizes are notable examples. Furthermore, AI assists in optimizing trial parameters in real-time, identifying suitable patient candidates from databases, and employing wearables for data collection. These AI-driven methods not only expedite clinical research but also aim to broaden inclusivity in trial populations, potentially making drug development more efficient and inclusive.

How AI is being used to accelerate clinical trials Nature

The article discusses the significant cyberattack on Change Healthcare on February 21, 2024, by the AlphV hacker collective, which disrupted a large portion of US health payments and compromised up to 85 million patients' records. This event underscores the vulnerability of the complex, proprietary medical payment system, likening its impact on American healthcare finance to the "Deepwater Horizon" disaster. It delves into the evolution of Change Healthcare, tracing its origins back to the internet-based e-commerce initiatives spurred by HIPAA in the mid-90s, leading to its acquisition by UnitedHealth Group's Optum subsidiary in 2021. This centralization of health payment infrastructures under a single entity like UnitedHealth Group, combined with the cyberattack's ramifications, calls for a policy response to decentralize and secure the payment system, drawing parallels with the Medicare Administrative Contractor system's success. The article advocates for federally regulated and competitive contracting to provide claims management services, enforcing stringent data security protocols to prevent future cyberterrorism, while simplifying and standardizing health payment rules to reduce administrative waste and enhance national health security.

Will The Change Healthcare Incident Change Health Care? | Health Affairs Health Affairs

At the HIMSS conference in Orlando, Hackensack Meridian Health CEO Robert Garrett emphasized AI's transformative potential in healthcare, particularly in building healthier communities at an unprecedented scale and pace. Garrett outlined four critical areas where AI could make a significant impact: increasing access to care, improving patient outcomes, advancing health equity, and addressing climate change. He highlighted examples like the partnership between Indian digital healthcare platform Apollo 24|7 and Google Cloud for AI-powered telemedicine, and Grifols' collaboration with Google Cloud to develop new plasma-based drugs. Garrett also pointed out the use of AI in early detection and treatment pathways, such as an AI tool by Carenostics for advanced kidney disease diagnosis and an app from Phoenix Children's Hospital for identifying malnutrition in pediatric patients. Additionally, Garrett spoke on the need for AI to address social determinants of health and climate change's health impacts, stressing the urgency of developing solutions that are energy-efficient and reduce pollution.

Hackensack Meridian Health CEO: These 4 Priorities Should Guide AI Strategy MedCity News