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Dive Overview:
For the fourth consecutive year, artificial intelligence was ranked as the hottest emerging technology in healthcare, according to a survey of executives conducted by the Center for Connected Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Eighty-five percent of respondents agreed that AI should be at the top, suggesting that executives believe the technology has “tremendous potential” to improve management, operations and clinical care, the report said. Executives also said that AI was the technology that had seen the most advancements for the second year in a row, citing advances in large-scale language models and generative AI.
Dive Insights:
The survey, which collected responses from 55 hospital and health system leaders, comes as interest in AI and concerns about its safe and fair use has skyrocketed over the past year and a half.
Generative AI — algorithms that can create new content such as text and images — has become a particularly hot topic for executives, according to the survey. Many technology companies have recently launched products aimed at helping clinicians document patient care, find information from notes and other clinical data, and craft messages for patients.
Leaders said the technology could also help reduce clinician burnout by using it for documentation and automating other clinical tasks.
Health system leaders are excited about AI's potential, but those excitement “must be balanced with a commitment to quality patient care and protecting patient data and privacy,” Robert Burt, UPMC's chief medical information officer, said in a statement.
Experts, lawmakers and researchers have raised concerns that AI could raise questions about accuracy, accountability and bias if it is introduced too quickly or carelessly in healthcare.
The survey also found that healthcare leaders are prioritizing using technology to mitigate challenges in patient care, access and healthcare worker burnout — issues that were also highlighted in last year's report.
But AI wasn't the only promising healthcare technology for executives. The 13 healthcare leaders surveyed also noted improvements in telehealth and virtual care technologies over the past two years. Telehealth was a fairly niche way of delivering healthcare before the COVID-19 pandemic, but its usage has skyrocketed as healthcare providers and patients switched to virtual options to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
While utilization rates are down from the peak of the pandemic, executives who participated in the survey pointed to the benefits of telehealth, including patient convenience, fewer missed appointments and increased access to specialty care.
AI shows biggest advancement for the second year in a row
Number of leaders who say they have seen the most technological advances in the past two years
Another headache for healthcare organizations is siloed data that isn't immediately usable for clinical care — a problem that's exacerbated by growing interest in AI products that require solid data aggregation and analytics practices, according to the study.
