This week we had Sara Helvey MD, MPH, MBA, CCIO at Care New England, on The Digital Patient podcast! My 9 biggest takeaways from Sara on Healthcare, AI and Informatics:
1/ Health systems may be overcorrecting in their caution around AI suggestions - for example, when a team of an Epic AI tool out of concern, the tool became effectively useless
2/ Surfacing AI insights right in the clinical encounter risks recreating the very distraction problem that ambient documentation was designed to eliminate - unless it’s carefully governed by clinicians
3/ Durability should be a hidden evaluation criterion when health systems assess Health Tech vendors - an innovative but fragile startup may be a worse long-term choice than a slower but stable incumbent.
4/ The next wave of AI use cases adopted won't have a single “ambient moment” - likely its impact will come from the accumulation of many smaller workflow improvements rather than one dominant use case.
5/ The physician shortage and burnout crisis may force health systems to accept AI handling lower-acuity care, not because it's ideal, but because the alternative - patients waiting months for appointments - is worse.
6/ Financial markets and healthcare informatics share a hidden parallel: changing one variable in a complex system can trigger unexpected downstream consequences that weren't visible at the outset.
7/ Rural patients show higher telemedicine satisfaction than urban patients - why? Likely because their access barriers were severe enough to override their preference for traditional in-person care.