Health Systems Must Find the Right Path To Meet Demand for Care

Data Governance Is Crucial To Get Right

Jain is also a part-time physician at Cleveland Clinic, where he’s seen his fellow clinicians excited about AI. He notes that when it comes to adopting new solutions, it’s less about the technology and more about change management.

“Most of the time, when we’re transforming healthcare, it doesn’t fail because of the technology. It fails because we don’t catch that people and workflows were misaligned. We were taking existing workflows that are, for the most part, broken, and we were trying to replace them with technology and AI, as opposed to saying, ‘Here’s the problem we’re trying to solve, now let’s go break it apart into its core components,’” he says.

For organizations to truly find success in AI and autonomous workflows, they need to solidify their data governance.

“Most organizations don’t really have an AI problem, per se. They have a problem with connecting the data with the workflow. That’s the foundational problem,” Jain says. “You can’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy.”

Data access and liquidity are an industrywide concern, he notes, and while interoperability has made strides in recent years, there’s still room to grow. He believes everyone, from technology partners to regulators, plays a role in improving healthcare information sharing.

“As we ask AI agents to do more, it’s in our best interest to make sure that we’re bringing the entire industry along for that journey, not just a single vendor,” Jain says.

GET EXPERT GUIDANCE: Deliver seamless, patient-centered care across care settings.

Is Your Infrastructure Secure?

To advance on data and AI initiatives, healthcare organizations must modernize their infrastructure to make sure workflows are secure and well connected.

“Many organizations are struggling to keep up with both AI and security. Clinicians and executives have all of these expectations with AI, but security needs to be a central element,” says Cletis Earle, healthcare field CTO at Citrix and a former health system CIO.

That means grounding innovation in zero trust and setting up environments such as sandboxes where teams can experiment with AI in a controlled setting. After all, healthcare workers aren’t strangers to emergency situations, so ongoing security trainings must be a part of the change.

“How do we help everyone become more resilient? How do we help people do more active tabletop exercises? What happens when you have downtime, when systems have to be refreshed or need a major upgrade?” Earle says. “I recommend training throughout the year, microtraining different departments. Just keep training your teams.”

Organizations may not even need to break their budgets. Many times, optimizing what’s already available can work just as well, Earle notes. A partner can help to enhance the stack health systems already have, keeping costs from ballooning.

“This is the thing that a CFO would love to hear: What are the things that we already own that we can keep using that we may be underutilizing, and how can those tweaks help?” he adds.

Is Your Environment Well-Connected?

Finally, health systems must re-evaluate their networking and connectivity as they break down silos across campuses and service lines. This is especially apparent in rural healthcare, which has seen more of a spotlight recently with the Rural Health Transformation Program. Robin Goldsmith, practice leader for healthcare, insurance and life sciences at Verizon Business, is keeping an eye on the program to see how it will impact innovation.

“How do we make the system easier? A lot of that has to with data sharing between providers, patients and payers. We need to increase access points to care, and not just to the traditional hospital or clinic, but to the home, pop-up clinics, mobile clinics,” Goldsmith says.

With organizations dependent on more devices in their environments and a growing need for real-time data, they may want to explore options such as private 5G and failover networks.

“We're seeing an uptick in clinical mobility, of handheld devices,” Goldsmith says. “We’ve seen big deployments of modern, handheld devices that can run the Epic Rover app, for example, but it has to connect to a network to have good coverage. When we think about the connected hospital, every inch of it has to have robust connectivity.”

He notes that solutions such as ambient listening are becoming table stakes, which means that more secure, dedicated lanes of traffic may need to be deployed for such use cases. “How can we, through technology, keep our patients healthier through measurable outcomes? We need to leverage technology more to get to this better system,” Goldsmith says.