Author and Managing Director of Second Century Technology before introducing panelists from Kaiser Permanente, Intermountain Healthcare, and Clalit Health Services to discuss how they have implemented artificial intelligence to improve their organizations. Tom Lawry framed the conversation about the benefits of scaling AI as follows: Its role in winning the pandemic.
“During the pandemic, many, but not all, leaders are competent, willing to accept the status quo, and truly proactive digital leaders,” Lowry said yesterday at the HIMSS23 ML and AI Forum before a packed audience. I was willing to drive change.
“When I looked into what happened during the pandemic, I found that humans fought and won. But their weapon of choice was… AI.”
Although costly, AI can help healthcare move faster, and the speed of this change is remarkable, he noted.
“If you’re looking at the speed of change that happened during the pandemic, I think we’ll look back a year from now and it would have been slow going.
What are the obstacles to increasing the value of AI?
Lawry said healthcare faces many challenges despite a talented workforce.
“I think AI is a big part of what we can do for change.”
“When you look at the AI initiatives that are being deployed, it has a lot to do with things like process changes and significant workflow improvements,” he said.
“Often, when you see where an initiative or organization fails, it’s not the technical staff’s fault, it’s not the device’s fault.” To move healthcare forward, leaders must develop a new set of skills. He said there is.
Lawry mentioned Gartner’s new hard and soft skills for C-Suite. AI is a cutting edge hard skill and design thinking is a cutting edge soft skill that was covered throughout the session.
Driving data-driven healthcare by design
Vivian Tan, Vice President of Strategic Information Management and Global Relationships at Kaiser Permanente, said the focus of AI at nonprofit healthcare company Kaiser Permanente is to support hospitals and clinicians in daily care delivery. said to be in
For example, Kaiser’s Operations Watch mobile app provides real-time, location-specific data to support care delivery. Another AI tool that improves routine operations alerts hospitals to deteriorating patient conditions, predicts when a patient will go to her ICU, and prevents patient mortality by 16%.
She said healthcare companies have many AI-driven tools aimed at streamlining operations and improving patient care, running 600 learning models, including deep learning models added during COVID-19. said there is.
In response to an attendee question about design thinking, Tan said the provider has user experience staff on all frontline projects and hired its first UX/UI designer seven years ago. rice field.
Through an Agile process, the development team shares wireframes every two weeks.
“And whenever it adds value or doesn’t add value, we change things. So it’s very iterative.”
Preventive Medicine Drives Pandemic Preparedness
Ran Balicer, Ph.D., chief innovation officer and deputy DG of Clalit Health Services (one of the world’s largest health maintenance organizations and one of Israel’s largest healthcare organizations), said the provider has been digital for more than 20 years. , said it was collecting data.
“Our underlying concern is keeping patients healthy,” he said.
When Raleigh asked why Israel’s health system was “ahead of its time” when the pandemic hit, Walliser said it was because it already had massive predictive data that could quickly respond to a crisis. I was.
For example, through Israel’s early warning system, the country has notified the 200,000 patients that Clarit’s predictive models identified as having the highest risk of COVID in its population by March 2020. They quickly transitioned those patients into a virtual practice. rate and mortality.
“The results of that first wave show that Israel is one of the least affected countries globally,” he said.
Clalit, a data-driven healthcare system, is also moving from individual projects to systemic change.
“We seek to transform the operational part of what we do from the old paradigm of reactive and intuitive care to a more proactive and predictive one driven by decision support. is.
Frontier Focus, Explainability, and AI Fabrication
Albert Marinez, chief analytics officer at Intermountain Healthcare, said the provider is focused on helping people live as healthily as possible and staying away from high-cost healthcare areas. said.
A lot of work on AI is about “How do we change the operational architecture of how we work? ” says Marinez.
He is told that doctors have a lot of data, but “we are hungry for information.”
Speaking of expanding AI, Marinez said Intermountain is focused on how to empower doctors “with the real-world data analytics they need to discover new strategies and actually implement them in their workflows.” .
Intermountain is also using AI to better understand patient flow and discover where barriers to discharge lie.
“This is a huge opportunity. We’re actually piloting it now,” he said, noting that it could save the organization $15 million to $20 million.
Answering the question about AI machines “fabricating” information, digital leaders need to improve their explanations.
“Too much AI feels like it’s combining thoughts. ,” Marinez said.
Andrea Fox is senior editor for Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
