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2. Maturing Data Management as a Foundational Measure
But before organizations can even begin to envision a chatbot or other AI solution, they need to make sure the data these solutions need is well managed and appropriately governed. Healthcare leaders need to understand the importance and best practices of data governance before adopting new technologies that rely on their organization’s data.
There are many definitions of data governance, but one in particular is gaining acceptance within the healthcare industry: Data governance is a program of decision rights and accountabilities that treats data as a strategic asset, including managing, leveraging and protecting it accordingly.
Within data governance, there are seven functional areas, three of which are key to both traditional and advanced analytics/AI use cases: data stewardship/ownership, metadata management and data quality. Metadata is data about the data — the necessary documentation that helps with transparency requirements related to AI solutions. What data was the model trained on? What are the associated definitions? This is foundational to understanding and measuring bias, which also needs to be addressed.
In addition to data governance, health systems must continue to mature their ability to organize and integrate their data, leveraging modern data platforms and adopting processes to support better integration of their data, both within and outside their environment.
EXPLORE: Why are data governance strategies important for healthcare AI success?
3. Transforming the Physical Care Space
The accelerated adoption of AI will bring new technologies into the patient room. To make sure everything is integrated, organizations need to consider change from a smart hospital approach. Powerfully paired ambient listening and visualization solutions will become more familiar.
Newly built patient rooms are expected to be multipurpose — so, not just a medical-surgical room, but also a higher-level acuity care room, adapting to what the health system needs based on patient flow.
Hospitals want to improve the patient experience not just to provide excellent care but also to become the patient’s top choice should he or she need care again. Patients have options, so healthcare organizations need to offer the best services to stand out in a competitive market.
4. Evolving Security Priorities as Partnerships Become Commonplace
In 2024, there was a spike of interest in third-party risk management as security events dominated headlines. As healthcare organizations continue to share their environments in strategic partnerships, they will need to adapt their approach to security. It’s incorrect to think that because they’ve handed over control of an asset to a partner that they don’t need to worry about security at all. In fact, it’s the opposite.
That means healthcare organizations need to scrutinize their partner’s security even further. They might need to conduct audits, reconfigure contracts and apply more oversight. External data release processes will need attention. Data security and privacy are also top priorities.
UP NEXT: These should be your three focus areas for a powerful cyber resilience program.
Organizations also need to have stronger backup strategies and business continuity plans. Should another global IT outage happen, for example, how would an organization make sure it doesn’t significantly impact operations? If an organization is attacked, will it understand how it happened, and why?
Creating isolated recovery environments will continue to be important, so organizations are not just isolating their data but also have an isolated infrastructure, an area that is always clean and protected. They can test systems to see if they’ve been hit or not, but they can also rebuild their systems easily in a clean environment because they control the data in and out. This will help organizations get back up sooner so that they can go back to caring for patients.
This article is part of HealthTech’s MonITor blog series.
