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Departmental disconnect over software selection | AI news watcher’s blog | Partner voice

Thursday, October 10, 2024
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Survey turns up a ‘troubling disconnect’ between clinicians and IT pros, finds operations leaders ‘caught in the middle’

Most hospital-based clinicians, some 72%, feel they should have more say in decisions on software purchasing. This sentiment likely reflects the frustrations of the 43% who won’t say their hospital operations software helps them provide topnotch patient care. 

It also may have something to do with the 60% of IT professionals and 51% of operational leaders who admit they’re reluctant to involve clinicians in software decisions. 

The findings are from an online survey conducted online by the healthcare operations software supplier symplr in partnership with CHIME, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. The exercise drew 283 completed forms from clinicians (33%), IT professionals (29%), operations people (36%) and a few others.

In a survey report released Oct. 8, symplr offers steps provider organizations can take to select and deploy enterprise software that relieves rather than adds to burnout. The report is understandably intended to position symplr as an ideal supplier of such software, but the tips are broad enough to reward a read, regardless. Here are five. 

1. Share priorities.

Discuss and align on healthcare operations software needs, the authors advise. More:  

‘Leaders may find that some needed functionalities already exist through current vendor relationships and are ready for adoption.’

2. Remember: There is no ‘I’ in team.

Think big and look beyond your formal organization, symplr urges, adding it’s wise to consider your vendors as “active, integral members of your team.” 

‘Identify the vendors with whom strategic partnerships are critical to your success and align your strategies accordingly. Such partnerships—whether joint ventures, alliances or vendor relationships—can provide the scale and efficiency needed for your organization to compete effectively.’ 

3. Involve IT.

Consult IT in technology purchases to avoid “shadow IT,” the report recommends. 

‘Engage clinicians in the process by including them in demonstrations and creating forums for feedback to optimize workflows.’

4. Move beyond the basic product. 

What to do if you’ve already made your buy? “To get the most out of [their] software investment, leaders need to reexamine how teams implement and ultimately use the technology,” symplr suggests. 

‘Be ready for business process re-engineering in your workflows, in your organizational structures and in your care models. Involve all stakeholders in redesigning workflows to eliminate unnecessary steps and reduce time wasted.’

5. Operate differently.

“Make small changes in how you engage with the technology and people around you,” the authors write. 

‘Manage the changing roles and responsibilities that new technology enables to find critical efficiencies.’

In their executive summary, the survey analysts note they identified a “troubling disconnect” across teams. They found the chasm especially wide between IT leaders and clinicians. Meanwhile operational leaders are “often caught in the middle.” 

“As IT leaders focus more on cybersecurity,” the authors add, “less time is being devoted to consolidating and optimizing healthcare operations software, leading to widespread inefficiencies and wasted time across organizations.”  

More: 

‘Fed up, clinicians and operational leaders are taking matters into their own hands, using unvetted solutions or requesting more involvement in software purchasing decisions. Most healthcare leaders (82%) agree that streamlining operational processes, workflows and software is the best path to increase staff productivity and save staff time.’

Read the whole thing.

 

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Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

  • Healthcare AI sellers are making promises that their products aren’t exactly keeping. That’s the view of hundreds of healthcare professionals surveyed on technology deployments by Black Book Market Research. The firm received responses from 907 participants. A jaw-dropping 96% of early AI adopters said they’ve been disappointed with ROI so far. A similarly striking 92% indicated their current AI systems are not accurate or actionable enough to do much good in clinical settings. And 85% who’d hoped AI would help automate diagnostics or treatment planning said the solutions they purchased “failed to grasp the complexities of real-world clinical environments.” Worse yet, AI is only one of eight technologies that Black Book found to be “draining value” from healthcare systems. Ouch. 
     
  • On the other hand, large language AI models are likely to reach near-ubiquity over the next 10 years. And the tally of medical devices that are both equipped with AI and cleared by the FDA is soon to top 1,000. The juxtaposition, highlighted in a University of Pennsylvania blog post, seems to suggest a counter to the widespread buyer’s remorse uncovered by Black Book Research. That said, clinical resistance is indeed a major obstacle standing between AI hopes and AI payoffs. “Clinicians have a lot of expertise and authority, which makes changing the way they think and challenging their judgments particularly difficult,” explains Marissa King, PhD, faculty co-lead of UPenn’s Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab. 
     
  • Then again (again), more voices are rising from the naysayers’ side. At UC Santa Cruz and the University of British Columbia, two researchers combine to contend that healthcare AI is “positioned to become the latest in a long line of technological advances that ultimately have limited impact.” How do they figure? Well, AI and like technologies “engage in a politics of avoidance” vis-à-vis “fundamental structural problems in global public health.” The duo isn’t completely down on healthcare AI due to their evident activist instincts (which, after all, may well reflect top priorities for tech wielders seeking to improve population health on a global scale). Hear them out in an item posted by UC Santa Cruz’s news operation. 
     
  • Continuing on that same theme … The Global Health Institute at Duke University hosted an event titled “AI in Global Health: Hope, Hype and Realities” earlier this month. Among the speakers was Moka Lantum, MD, a physician and entrepreneur from Kenya. “The commitments we need to make in healthcare have not yet been made,” Lantum told attendees. “We have to be very deliberate about what we should do with AI—not just what we can do with AI.” Find event coverage plus an hourlong video here
     
  • Say hello to JAMA+ AIThe American Medical Association introduced its newest journal in an Oct. 8 editorial written by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Roy Perlis, MD, and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, editor-in-chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network. They state JAMA+ AI will be “a window into the world of AI across the JAMA Network and a first stop for authors and readers seeking the best science and commentary on AI and its application to medicine and public health.” Read the rest
     
  • After reporting for possible jury duty, a physician found himself with too much time on his hands. Apparently it was one of those “hurry up and wait”—and wait, and wait some more—situations. And what did the good doctor do with all that downtime? What else? Thought about AI in healthcare. “I don’t think any of us is ready to release to a computer the full responsibility of taking care of patients—just as none of us would want, at this point in time, to be tried and convicted by a computer,” writes the physician, Weill Cornell internist Fred Pelzman, MD. “But my hope is that as these systems become more fully fleshed out, we, the doctors and nurses and others in healthcare who are on the front lines taking care of patients, are an integral part of the design and refining of what happens when a computer interacts with a patient.” MedPage Today published the piece Oct. 7. Check it out
     
  • ‘I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had.’ So said the humble Princeton emeritus physicist John Joseph Hopfield upon accepting the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with co-winner Geoffrey Hinton. The “it” to which 91-year-old Hopfield refers was his 1982 study of associative neural networks. This laid the groundwork for Hinton’s contributions to the field, which have earned him the unofficial title “Godfather of AI.” Following this week’s announcement of the Nobel, the two will forever be remembered for “creating the building blocks of machine learning” that are “revolutionizing the way we work and live,” for better or for worse, as put in coverage by the news service Phys.org. For his part, Hinton, 76, told the Associated Press: “Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4. I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it’s a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful.” 
     
  • At the other end of the age spectrum is a recent high-school graduate who’s built a brilliant AI app. Augustus Holm says he started working on the digital tool when he was just 14. Today it’s a ready-for-primetime product called CheckRx. What’s it do? Just make it super-easy for Medicare beneficiaries to manage their Part D plan selections and prescription costs. The app “not only helps seniors,” Holm says, “but also Medicare agents by decreasing the number of CMS allegations while ensuring compliance amid constant policy changes.” News coverage here, CheckRx website here
     
  • Recent research in the news: 
     
  • Funding news of note:
     
  • From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
     

 

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