4 Trends That Will Set the Tone at HIMSS24

As the annual conference and exhibition opens this week in Orlando, healthcare executives are looking anxious for some good news, or at least positive ROI

The healthcare industry is in a rough spot right now, buffeted by cybersecurity issues, disruptors with big dreams, workforce declines, labor unrest, mangled mergers and closures. As the annual HIMSS conference convenes in Orlando this week, a lot of people are looking for some good news. We’re at that point in Marcus Welby, MD, or Emergency or St. Elsewhere or ER or Grey’s Anatomy or House or Chicago whatever that the patient is on life support and everyone’s just sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike,

Might AI be that shining moment? Could VR save the day? How about FHIR? Perhaps.

As the camera pans out and HIMSS24 steps into focus, here are a few thoughts on what we’ll be seeing and talking about this week in the land of Disney.

AI comes of age. As this week’s flurry of announcements can attest, healthcare organizations are turning AI loose on some of the industry’s most vexing pain points. The HIMSS agenda is filled with sessions detailing how health systems are using the technology, and a casual walk around the exhibit hall will unveil plenty of vendors armed with use cases and examples of ROI.

Indeed, many of the press releases coming out this week are focusing on new partnerships or capabilities around AI. Providers are collaborating with their EHR providers and digital health companies to move data through the platform more efficiently, giving doctors and nurses what they need at the point of care to improve their work and, ultimately, their work-life balance.

The most popular use case at present is the development of ambient AI tools to capture conversations and convert them to clinical notes. Healthcare executives are eager to see how the technology can take documentation and data entry out of the clinician’s hands, which not only gives the doctor or nurse more time to spend in front of patients but reduces the tasks that cause stress and eat into home and family time. But this isn’t the only example of how the technology is being used, and savvy decision-makers will be looking beyond the obvious to find other use cases that help struggling hospitals improve workflows and reduce cost.

A looming battle over value? While AI use cases are all the rage, there’s plenty of talk about how the technology will be governed. The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) made news recently with the announcement of several advisory boards and a couple of collaborations aimed at creating guidelines for the ethical use of AI, but that news caused more than a few critics to wonder how a struggling health system might weigh the financial value of an AI tool against its potential to boost clinical outcomes.

The argument isn’t new to healthcare, especially as the industry tries to wrap its arms around value-based care. But the speed at which AI has moved into the healthcare ecosystem is putting pressure on health systems to take a closer look at what the “ethical use of AI’ really means. Can the industry find a common ground on which to measure value? Will recent stories around the use of AI by payers to sort and deny claims be enough of a warning sign to spur meaningful conversation? And will the industry work with the federal government to set the guardrails?

The Change Healthcare ransomware attack is having an impact. As expected, the ongoing cybersecurity attack on UnitedHealth Group’s IT platform is affecting both attendance and conversations. Some health system executives are shortening or cancelling their plans to be in Orlando to deal with the outage, while cybersecurity vendors are using the outage as a conversation starter.

The outage has elevated the “workaround” to a common topic of conversation, as beleaguered healthcare providers look for alternate strategies to keep the doors open in the wake of delayed payments. It has also forced many executives to take a closer look not only at their internal and vendor security protocols, but their cash-on-hand strategies. In fact, healthcare organizations seem more focused on how they can weather the next big cybersecurity incident than on how to prevent it.

This will be a huge topic of conversation at HIMSS. Cybersecurity incidents are occurring with such frequency in healthcare now that organizations are putting more thought into limiting the damage when something happens. And as the Change Healthcare outage proves, healthcare organizations have to plan not only for something that happens to them, but also for something that can affect a large swathe of the industry.

Setting a solid foundation. Finally, one of the bigger takeaways from ViVE was that healthcare organizations were paying more attention to how they gather, store, and manage data. That hasn’t changed in Orlando, and HIMSS’ longtime focus on interoperability will keep that conversation going. Innovation in healthcare these days is less about the new toys and more about how data is used to improve things inside and outside the hospital, clinic, or doctor’s office. From smart hospital rooms of the future that gather and funnel information wirelessly, to remote patient monitoring and hospital at home programs that create a data highway from care team to patient, to SDOH programs that mine data for healthcare challenges and barriers and create programs around addressing those challenges, the connecting concept is connectivity.

While strategies like TEFCA and FHIR aim to create a nationwide interoperability platform, providers are just as interested now in strategies and technology that can handle the data they have or want to have. They want tools to pull it in from outside the enterprise, sort it quickly and efficiently without the need for manual labor, and get it to the right people at the right place at the right time, regardless of EHR platform or HIT framework. They’re looking at more data  than they’ve ever had before, and the volume or value certainly won’t decrease.

This week’s conference is more about making those connections that work, finding value in partnerships and technology that make things run easier at a time when healthcare is desperate for efficiency. So any use case this week with solid ROI will be trumpeted, as will any collaboration that “pushes the needle” on improved outcomes.

Healthcare needs some good news before the final credits roll.