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Six healthcare marketing trends for 2018
Healthcare’s confluence of unknowns and erratic overtures coming out of Washington has stalled many healthcare biggest stakeholders—payer, provider, and pharma. Success in transformative, threatened markets requires companies to continually reassess strategic direction: anticipate and absorb change, generate situational-driven strategic insights, and act with deliberate speed. Healthcare leaders need to step back, ask tough questions, and manage through a new set of obstacles to capture opportunity.
For healthcare marketers it’s a time to rethink basic assumptions, challenge institutional bias, breakdown silos, and force debate around longstanding approaches to marketing. Tomorrow’s marketers will be healthcare orchestra leaders. They will help set strategic pillars, sequence strategic execution, and lead go-to-market implementation that is results-driven and measurable.
Following are six healthcare impact trends that will challenge marketers in the upcoming year.
- Payers–providers blurring the lines. Its healthcare’s Wild West as health insurers become providers and health providers become payers. With spending for hospital care and total private health insurance expenditures each topping $1 trillion, paying for and delivering health services is truly in a transition. Health insurers, are venturing into primary care centered delivery models, value or outcomes-based payment schemes, retail-type customer experiences, and innovative frameworks fostering prevention and wellness. Equally as robust is the trend of hospitals getting into the insurance business in an effort to take control of the complete patient lifecycle. We’re even seeing payer-provider collaboration and joint ventures get traction around value-based care, direct primary care, digital patient communities, and chronic or behavioral care management.For healthcare marketers this is often unchartered territory. Insurers are used to looking at customers as members; hospitals look at them as patients. The marketing continuum of awareness to acquisition to experience to loyalty is very different for both sets of these customers. Each takes a diverse mix of brand, direct and content marketing, as well as customized customer experiences. For hospitals tackling the ‘business of insurance’, selling and retaining health plan members is very different from traditional hospital-patient marketing. Similarly, as insurers acquire or launch provider organizations, whether retail primary care, urgent-care clinics, or hospital service centers, marketing challenges such as service-line marketing, physician engagement, and community-based branding require new approaches.
- Navigating an out-of-pocket ecosystem. At a time when one-in-three Americans say healthcare is the biggest financial burden they face, high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) have gone mainstream. HDHPs are approaching half of all employer-based coverage and almost all individual policies. This shifting financial burden creates an out-of-pocket ecosystem forcing consumers to take a close look at their healthcare budgets. It’s the fuel of the healthcare consumerism movement. Once consumers find themselves in control of spending health dollars out of their own wallets, you get their attention. However, buying healthcare services—from insurance to prescription drugs to routine check-ups to MRIs—in a ways similar to other consumer goods isn’t easy given health literacy disparities and inconsistent access to consumer-centric resources, plus…“Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated.”For healthcare marketers this means recognizing that retailization of healthcare is here to stay. In fact, 2017 may go down as the year of the ‘Amazonification of Healthcare’. Marketers cannot underestimate healthcare consumers’ willingness to comparison shop if it means they can save money. Shopping for healthcare may not be the same path-to-purchase as other necessities, but for most Americans it’s one of the most important buying decisions they make. They compare products and services, ask friends, read and publish reviews, price check, and quickly cast aside brand loyalty for a better deal. Being a smart healthcare shopper able to make confident, value-based choices isn’t easy. That’s where marketers can play a critical role: create reliable, understandable information and decision support tools to help consumers navigate healthcare’s massive maze of bureaucracy with confidence.
- Healthcare consumerism, a dilemma of health inertia. We live in a nation where 190 million people have at least one chronic condition. These patients account for $3 out of every $4 spent on medical care. Still, most people believe they are significantly healthier than they are, lessening their interest in taking action to improve their health. Millions of dollars and countless hours are spent each year to try to get healthcare consumers to do what’s good for them. It’s a long, slow slog that sees only modest behavior change. It’s the dilemma of ‘health inertia’…getting people to face personal health challenges, adhere to a plan of action, and stay motivated to proactively deal with their health. Preferred healthcare brands are those that forge emotional relationships with consumers to motivate better health decisions…they’re brands that understand that nothing is more personal than someone’s health.For healthcare marketers this means knowing what’s important to people, what truly matters to them and why they do what they do. Changing behavior takes moving away from company-centric educational-based efforts overloaded with clinical messaging about conditions and treatment options. Cognitive research shows that consumers’ perceptions and emotions have the greatest influence on their actions. To affect behavior change, marketers need to shift their orientation from education to inspiration, from features and functions to gut-level appeals that move people to act and engage. It’s about connecting across the customer lifecycle around personal, relevant motivations and deep, sometimes even unconscious desires, like freedom, happiness, personal goals, or the ability to be a better parent or partner.
- Social engagement is king and content is queen. Social media cuts across every customer segment and every aspect of the customer relationship. every minute there are 452,000 tweets sent, 120 new LinkedIn accounts created, 46,200 Instagram posts, and 900,000 Facebook logins with more than 50% on a mobile device, according to Business Insider. Healthcare companies are creating social communities to connect, collaborate and communicate with consumers. Patients are bonding with their network of providers, insurers are servicing their members, and population health management programs are deploying social apps for measuring, monitoring and tracking conditions. Inspiration is coming from healthy reward programs, community competitions, and gamification. And, patient-to-patient dialogue has never been greater through crowdsourced social health networks such as The Mighty, PatientsLikeMe, and CureTogether.
For healthcare marketers social media is a critical tool to extend reach and enhance engagement. More than 65% of chief marketing officers say they use social media to drive business and build their digital brand. Done well it boosts awareness, generates new business leads, and builds more intimate, connected customer relationships. Purpose-driven healthcare social media comes down to a brand’s respect for the importance of content. Today’s perpetually connected consumers are impatient. Their most valued brands engage with them in an evocative, relevant dialogue. They look for social media content that is shareable, fresh, unique, and above all, worth reading. Its compelling healthcare content that attracts their interest and holds their attention around a personalized, interactive value exchange.
- Value is in the eye of the beholder. Truth be told, value-based care is a trend that has appeared in previous years, however as momentum continues to build, it needs to be highlighted once again. Pay-for-performance reimbursement—from basic risk sharing to accountable care organizations to bundled payments—are rapidly moving healthcare toward outcomes-based financing system. Incentives and disincentives based on quality of care and patient clinical results are the new normal. That said, moving from volume to value-based payment alone is not enough to bend healthcare’s cost curve. Payers and providers must add to the mix solutions to address social determinants of health, those circumstances that people are born into and live in that impact them as patients. While it complicates pay-for-performance, it’s critical to achieve the right balance between reimbursement schemes and social forces such as poverty, guns, violence, trauma, racism, and inadequate education.
For healthcare marketers the challenge is bringing key stakeholders along for the ride. Moving from traditional fee-for-service to value-based payment means answering the question “what’s in it for me?” Not only for patients, but equally as important are the providers of care responsible for living within the guardrails of high-performance, consumer-centric healthcare built on new models of financing, care delivery, and patient engagement, and measured on cost and quality of clinical outcomes. Marketers must use successes to demonstrate the value in value-based care, and use any failures as lessons learned.
- Innovation disruptively disrupting market disruptors. Innovation is sweeping across the healthcare landscape. Over the last six years there has been more than $18 billion invested in healthcare technology ventures with 2017 going down as the largest year ever for digital health funding. These companies, labeled HealthTech, MedTech, or FinTech, are seeking to reduce health expenditures, improve quality of life, introduce infrastructure efficiencies, increase individual productivity and extend life expectancy. Both startups and established companies alike are seeking to leverage technology to empower patients. Consumers are adopting and using technology to take ownership of their health, so it’s easier to self-diagnose a condition or symptom, change a health habit or behavior to reach a goal, enable compliance with a course of treatment, and interact with their community of care providers.
For healthcare marketers, innovation isn’t just a substitute for brand narrative or value proposition, it’s a means to an end. Simply stating ’we are an innovative company’ won’t cut it. The storyline has to read…we are an innovative company that delivers value to our customers, improves health outcomes and does it in a way that changes healthcare delivery. Entrepreneurs and risk-takers are making stunning advances in cancer, Alzheimer’s, population health, and wellness. And, they’re the agile innovators breaking down barriers with wearables, blockchain, artificial intelligence/AI, Internet of Things, and precision medicine. If storytelling is the new marketing, marketers will have a treasure trove of material to draw from in this era of digital health technology.
Healthcare marketers have seen sweeping changes over the last few years. Gone are days where ‘product, price, place, and promotion’ is the ultimate marketing framework. As healthcare marketers face full-blown marketplace transformation, there’s a new priority: the need for marketing to have a power seat at the c-suite business strategy table. Why? 72% of CEOs believe the next three years will be more critical to their industry than the last 50 years—and the question is how many are ready, according to KPMG. Marketing can no longer take a functional or tactical focus, it has to expand its influence and integrate with leadership’s vision-driven corporate business strategy.
Microsoft Healthcare is a new effort to push doctors to the cloud
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17509096/microsoft-healthcare-cloud-systems
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Microsoft has been working on health-related initiatives for years, but the company is now bringing its efforts together into a new Microsoft Healthcare team. This doesn’t mean you’ll be visiting a Microsoft Store anytime soon for human virus scans, instead it’s a bigger effort to create cloud-based patient profiles, push doctors to the cloud, and eventually have artificial intelligence analyzing data.
The software maker has hired two industry veterans to help out: Jim Weinstein and Joshua Mandel. Weinstein is the former CEO of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system and joins Microsoft as the VP of Microsoft Healthcare, and will work with healthcare organizations to move systems to the cloud. Mandel joins as Microsoft Healthcare chief architect, after completing a nearly two-year stint at Google as an executive for the company’s Verily venture (formerly Google Life Sciences). Mandel will be working closely with the open standards community to create an open cloud architecture for all healthcare providers.
Microsoft’s new Healthcare team appears to be a more formalized approach to the company’s Healthcare NExT (New Experiences and Technologies) company-wide initiative that kicked off last year. NExT was designed to foster health industry partnerships and bring together Microsoft’s research, AI, and cloud teams to focus on healthcare.
Microsoft is trying to find ways to move healthcare data to the cloud securely and in a way that doesn’t break strict compliance requirements for confidentiality. The new Microsoft Healthcare team will be part of Microsoft’s broader AI and Research division. “At Microsoft, we’re confident that many aspects of the IT foundations for healthcare will move from on-premise doctors’ offices and clinics to live in the cloud,” explains Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Healthcare. “We are taking concrete steps with an initial ‘blueprint’ intended to standardize the process for the compliant, privacy-preserving movement of a patient’s personal health information to the cloud and the automated tracking of its exposure to machine learning and data science.”
Lee admits the company has its “work cut out for us,” and this certainly won’t be an easy task for Microsoft. There’s an ongoing race to bring more technology to healthcare and, in particular, artificial intelligence. IBM, Baidu Google, and Alibaba are all working on similar healthcare initiatives, but IBM has struggled with its own efforts. Some analysts predict that AI use in healthcare will grow over the next decade and potentially generate huge savings for the US healthcare economy. Microsoft is clearly part of the broader race to introduce cloud technology, IoT devices, and AI into healthcare, and this new team will be responsible for that. Microsoft now plans to share more about Microsoft Healthcare later this year.
Epic President says EHRs are not walled off, integrations are just hard
Tapping real-time analytics to create a digitally enabled organization
As a society, we can and are collecting data in many ways. The question is not how to get more data, but how to use it effectively?
By 2020, approximately 1.7 MB of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet.1 That is an incredible amount of data!
Yet, of all the data the world is creating both personally and professionally, less than 0.5 percent of it is ever analyzed and used.2 Analyzing less than 0.5 percent leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.
Not just volume, connection and integration
Clearly, as a society, we can and are collecting data in many ways. The question is not how to get more data, but how to use it effectively? In healthcare, how do we capture greater knowledge from the right data at the right time for truly actionable insights?
Many healthcare organizations have started down the road to digital transformation by capturing more data from various service lines with different technologies and systems. However, that information is often captured and used within silos, which limits the impact. The true transformational change occurs when we put all of the data together – i.e., integrate the data, analyze and then share those insights across the organization.
Rapid analysis, insights and action
Better integrating and connecting data is, however, only one part of the equation. Insights from big data days, weeks, months or even years later limit our ability to make corrections and find opportunities for improvements. Speed to insights from the data is critical.
Technically, the data must be made available and analyzed in time to affect decisions. For example, near real time information is typically important for clinical care decisions. Once the data, analysis and insights have been generated, the individual making the decision needs to make that information part of the workflow and the decision-making process.
The digitally enabled organization
The organization needs to build trust in and adopt these new insights as tools to assist making the best decisions for each patient at the right place at the right time. This requires making the organization a digitally enabled organization.
The digitally enabled organization leverages experience, expertise and the best data-driven insights to make the right decisions, and operate most efficiently. The digitally enabled organization is agile and is enabled by the right insights at the right time. The digitally enabled organization drives the expansion of precision medicine, transforms the delivery of care and improves the patient experience.
Witness firsthand how digital agility and the digitally enabled organization can improve patient care and engagement. For example, organizations can create data-driven solutions to patient leakage challenges and rise to their operational opportunities. The result is optimal utilization and enhanced patient experience.3
Into the future
Achieving a digitally enabled organization lays a strong foundation to adopt new tools, ways of working and driving continuous improvement. This shift also allows the organization to incorporate predictive approaches and other advanced analytics that may include artificial intelligence. A layer of trust in insights creates a powerful data-driven culture that is transformative.
Machine learning is a big idea, but hospitals need business plans first
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/machine-learning-big-idea-hospitals-need-business-plans-first
Elizabeth Clements, business architect at Geisinger Health, will be hosting a session at HIMSS18 on March 7.
Don’t get lost in the complexity of large-scale use cases.
Machine learning has the potential to transform healthcare through new knowledge discovery and improved productivity, but many health systems do not have a business plan in place to support advanced analytics beyond research and development.
As health systems consider how best to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence, it will require a shift in IT strategy to focus on not just data, but managing the model itself. This means, among other things, defining the value of machine learning and providing a framework for evaluation and application.
Health systems need to keep things simple when moving into machine learning, said Elizabeth Clements, business architect at Geisinger Health.
“When working with new technology and developing a service from scratch, it can be easy to get lost and slow progress down with the complexity of a large use-case,” Clements said. “If you keep your scope narrow and define near-term goals, you will find you are able to make more meaningful progress in a short amount of time.”
And healthcare professionals dealing with machine learning must themselves learn how to partner with the business.
“Understanding the current and future state use of the machine learning solution is critical,” Clements said. “If you don’t consciously determine how much you want or need human intervention with the model, it will make your solution much more difficult to implement and gain buy-in.”
Clements said a simple framework for thinking about machine learning in the context of the business is needed. That includes understanding its value and use-cases before embarking on this type of analytics advancement, as well as knowing the basic challenges and how to design a program that takes those into account.
“Machine learning is the next wave of advanced processing technology offering us new avenues for information discovery and productivity enhancement,” she said. “It has the potential to transform how we conduct business; however, it will require a shift in our IT strategy.”
It is not just about the data or the application, it is also about the model itself. IT leaders should consider how to complement their existing IT and data scientist teams with new skill sets and consider how machine learning can advance existing task execution, she added.
Clements will be speaking in the HIMSS18 session, “Managing Machine Learning: Insights and Strategy,” at 11:30 a.m. March 7 in the Venetian, Palazzo D.
The 5 drivers pointing toward the decentralization of healthcare
http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/decentralization-health-care-health-2-0-keynote/506377/
Health 2.0 co-chairs Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt said these factors pose big questions to healthcare companies, including “What is your job in the new healthcare ecosystem?”
The decentralization of healthcare may be a great talking point and the ultimate end with patients at the fulcrum of care delivery business practices, but first, many hurdles need to be overcome.
Health 2.0 co-chairs Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt outlined the five factors driving the decentralization of healthcare during their keynote address at the conference this week. They posed two big questions to healthcare companies, including, “What is your job in the new healthcare ecosystem?”
Holt and Subaiya shared their vision of where they see the industry going, mapping out the five drivers for the decentralization of healthcare:
- The new interoperability: With new standard protocols like FHIR and technology like blockchain, a new health IT paradigm could emerge where the monopoly of a user enterprise system (like an EHR platform) could disappear.
- Machine learning/artificial intelligence: Through the use of these tech tools, communication will change, leading to new form factors. The market has already seen the early spoils of this with products like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home. Subaiya noted that, backed by the new interoperability, data transactions and services could become extensions of those new modalities.
- New entrants: One of the larger themes sprouting from 2017 is the looming question of, “What counts as a healthcare company now?” The short answer is all of them count. All of them are healthcare companies now. While that may be the cheeky answer, the fact, as Holt and Subaiya reminded the audience, is that many companies are looking into the digital health space. These new entrants are taking cues not from legacy healthcare companies but are bringing their own flavor, whether it’s offering customized nutrition plans or blending gym and healthcare business principles. What’s more, many of these companies are focused on consumer principles in an attempt to add a layer of stickiness to their core mission/product.
- Business model disruption: Early players in the space like Epic, Allscripts and Athenahealth have both seen changes in how they view their flagship products and all are prepping to adapt their offerings to a market that’s changed since they came to power. Largely, both consumers and clients want more functionality and capabilities to more easily interact with the products. The aforementioned new entrants are disrupting the business models for these legacy companies as well as changing the idea of what an entrant can be. Payer companies like Bright, Oscar and Clover, for example, are putting the customer at the center of their models and using technology not as an afterthought but as a core differentiator for operations.
- New environments: Healthcare and its care delivery services are increasingly being thought of outside of the four walls of traditional healthcare spaces. The prevailing innovative idea is to think of managing and preventing adverse health events by mixing and elevating a population’s environments. These new environments could express themselves in numerous ways such as rehabilitation parks. As Subaiya noted, health happens everywhere and these new environments could influence new players’ abilities to influence health.
The drivers that the presenters outlined point to a changing demographic where the patient is at the heart of care delivery services and wellness management while using new technology, a theme for which the conference is known for.
It’s a lot to take in, but Holt and Subaiya stated these new drivers require companies to ask of themselves “Who am I?”
For one, companies need to ask “What does value mean?” and, as Holt stated, not in the traditional venture capital way where a value proposition is another way to define why someone should give you money. Rather, what is the purpose and value a company is looking to add to the healthcare ecosystem, leading a company needing to answer “What is your new job in the new ecosystem?” Questions of who is the customer and what is the company’s job will be critical to navigate the healthcare business landscape going forward, especially since the environment is ripe for winners and losers in many facets of the industry.
While these thoughts are provocative about where the industry is heading, the business community of Silicon Valley and the policy makers in Washington, D.C., still need to recognize that those on the front lines of healthcare have a different perspective than a pie-in-the-sky take.
An article published in the new issue of Health Affairs found “hospitals’ use for patient care of data from outside providers was low, with only 18.7% of hospitals reporting that they ‘often’ used these data.”
“Our results reveal that hospitals’ progress toward interoperability is slow and that progress is focused on moving information between hospitals, not on ensuring usability of information in clinical decisions,” wrote the authors.
Thus, there may be a disconnect of current interoperability practices and where industry wants to go. The study plays on the tensions between end-users and health IT product makers, with both trying to navigate the end results to something usable and reliable.
Legacy EHR companies are looking to change. Epic is trying to incorporate more patient-sharing with Share Everywhere, for example. At Health 2.0, Allscripts CEO Paul Black stated the company is attempting to disrupt itself, or else others will come into the market and disrupt it for them. He added that Allscripts will soon be announcing different tools/offerings that seek to reimagine how a clinician interacts with a keyboard and how a patient interacts with an EHR.
Elsewhere at the conference, National Coordinator for Health IT Dr. Donald Rucker stated that new standards like FHIR and blockchain are still in an early stage of development. Technology changes in the healthcare space will largely be driven by consumers armed with apps that blend clinical data and lifestyle data. “That’s what the big drivers are and providers are sorting them out,” Rucker said.
The great technology dance between end-users, developers and policymakers continues on, but all seem to point to the need to keep the consumer at the forefront. Their businesses depend on it.
84% of Execs: Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Healthcare
Artificial intelligence has the potential to completely revolutionize the way healthcare systems interact with their patients.
More than 80 percent of healthcare executives polled by Accenture believe that artificial intelligence is on track to completely revolutionize healthcare, and a similar number believe that the advent of machine learning and digital healthcare is driving a significant restructuring of industry economics.
“AI is the new UI,” proclaims the report. “It’s a new world where artificial intelligence is moving beyond a back-end tool for the healthcare enterprise to the forefront of the consumer and clinician experience.”
“AI is taking on more sophisticated roles, with the potential to make every technology interface both simple and smart – setting a high bar for how future interactions work.”
The report envisions a healthcare environment where AI can take over the majority of processes currently overseen by humans. Consumer relations and patient engagement are likely to be among the first tasks to undergo the shift.
Eighty-four percent of executives believe that AI will fundamentally alter how they gain information from patients and interact with consumers. A similar number have prioritized the implementation of centralized platforms that take advantage of messaging bots and other services.
More than three-quarters believe that these decisions will make or break their ability to develop a competitive advantage over their peers in the near future. Eighty-two percent agree that industry leadership will be defined by how well healthcare organizations architect comprehensive, seamless digital ecosystems that truly understand what motivates the choices of their patients.
“The new frontier of digital experience is technology specifically designed for individual human behavior,” the report asserts. “Healthcare leaders recognize that as technology shrinks the gap between effective human and machine cooperation, accounting for unique human behavior expands not only the quality of the experience, but also the effectiveness of technology solutions.”
Turning Healthcare Big Data into Actionable Clinical Intelligence
How can healthcare organizations turn their big data assets into actionable clinical intelligence?
Healthcare organizations on the hunt for lower costs, better outcomes, and value-based care bonuses have invested heavily in hoarding as much big data as they can get their hands on.
From customer service call logs and clinical documentation to satisfaction surveys and patient-generated health data from the Internet of Things, providers of every size and specialty have fully accepted the notion that no scrap of information will go to waste in the era of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and semantic data lakes.
This may be true in the very near future. In just the past few years, the healthcare industry has made huge leaps forward in clinical decision support and predictive analytics.
The use cases for big data are proliferating rapidly as organizations move deeper into population health management and accountable care, and consumers are keeping pace with their growing demand for cost-effective services that leverage the convenience of their favorite apps and devices.
But despite the data-driven promises looming just over the horizon, the majority of healthcare organizations still have a great deal of work to do before they can turn their budding big data analytics competencies into truly actionable clinical intelligence.
A chronic lack of direction, exacerbated by deeply entrenched interoperability issues and a widespread inability to secure a qualified data science team, have left organizations in something of a slump. A series of industry surveys from recent months point out significant staffing gaps, frustrating health data exchange roadblocks, and organizational planning deficiencies that are keeping providers from breaking through their data doldrums.
“The point of analytics is to help make better decisions on a timelier basis,” says Dr. Danyal Ibrahim, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Saint Francis Care. “But as we all know, there are so many times when our data ends up siloed. One component goes to the finance department, another to IT, and another to the quality improvement team.”
“So even though the data is supposed to be connected around a single patient’s story, ultimately it lands in different siloes all around the organization, and that can be a big barrier to using data to improve care.”
In order to develop a successful big data analytics initiative that can overcome every obstacle from data collection to point-of-care reporting, providers must not only understand where the challenges lie, but also what lies ahead once they overcome their issues.
What does it mean to achieve success with big data analytics, and how can healthcare providers reach their ultimate goal of extracting valuable insights from their rapidly expanding data stores?
Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare Will Make Decisions For Doctors
Artificial intelligence could soon make tough medical choices
Patients are often willing to put themselves in the hands of healthcare professionals when they need to see a doctor, and this includes accepting the technological devices that help physicians. But, artificial intelligence making vital decisions for doctors is another story.
AI is already playing a significant role in healthcare. The healthcare organization, MedyMatch says it is, “creating a new category of AI-driven diagnostic tools” and “leveraging the richness of 3D imaging, the breadth of patient-specific data, and other relevant data… to deliver precise clinical decision support directly to the physician.”
MedyMatch recently announced a major collaboration with IBM Watson Health. The aim is for artificial intelligence applications to work alongside doctors in emergency rooms and other acute care settings.
AI can use deep learning to help physicians by highlighting regions of interest that could “indicate the potential presence of cerebral bleeds in suspected head trauma and strokes.”
Better decisions from better information
So what would AI decision making in a hospital setting look like?
“Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is where the greatest opportunity exists to make an impact,” MedyMatch CFO Michael Rosenberg told TechDigg.
While it’s well known that better decision making comes from having better information, it’s also well known that healthcare professionals are constantly short of time, making it difficult to process a lot of information.
“CDS in its classical sense has been about decision trees, if this then do that… when it comes to AI, we take it to a whole other level,” Rosenberg said.
“When looking at decision support, we aren’t looking at a set of rules, but a set of considerations highlighted for the physician, whether they be statistical data looking at similar patients across a population or highlighting regions of interest.”
This also has a positive financial impact, because: “better decisions lead to better outcomes, and better outcomes mean the reduction of costly errors, which means cost savings for the healthcare system from the Provider, Patient, and Payer.”
Speaking on the relationship between artificial intelligence and doctors, and the stage that relationship is now at, Rosenberg said:
“I think we are seeing the very early stages of an evolution where the definition of a doctor changes. AI will never replace the physician, at least not in our lifetime. The physician will always be the ultimate decision maker, however that decision will be influenced by recommendations that an AI platform recommends.”
“We think of AI as a capability that can be used to enhance the work of a physician… the final diagnosis will always be the responsibility of the doctor, but it will rapidly increase the number of physicians that can perform at an expert level.”
Can we be sure artificial intelligence decisions are safe?
There are many areas of life where people are both excited and cautious about the role that AI can play. Healthcare is perhaps the number one area where the public needs to know it can trust the technology.
“The great thing in healthcare is the regulator,” Rosenberg said. “The FDA is looking out for the patient, and close collaboration between the healthcare industry and the AI provider will result in the best quality for the marketplace.”
Even the best doctors get tired and short of time, and artificial intelligence could be on hand to do the work they simply can’t do themselves.
HENRY KOTULA 