Everyone is talking artificial intelligence at HIMSS23. ChatGPT saw to that. But AI truly is a ground-breaking technology for healthcare. And natural language processing, a form of AI, has a lot of potential.

Dr. Tim O'Connell is a practicing radiologist and founder and CEO of emtelligent (HIMSS23 Booth 6017), which works with healthcare provider organizations to structure unstructured medical data with the aim of boosting safety, operating efficiency and the quality of care.

We interviewed O'Connell to get his opinions on the pressing trends of the day and his company's technology message for providers at HIMSS23.

Q. What is the most pressing issue or trend facing healthcare information technology at this moment as the industry gathers for HIMSS23?

A. We should never forget that information technology as a practice and industry exists to serve its users, which are both healthcare professionals and – perhaps more importantly – their patients. If we instead ask, “What is the most pressing issue facing healthcare IT users today,” I would argue the biggest issue is that of sustainability of our health systems.

I don’t mean sustainability in terms of the environmental impact of IT servers and data centers, though that clearly is important. Rather, I’m talking about the current issues we face in healthcare that are increasing costs and decreasing service levels across the industry.

These are things like an aging population that requires more healthcare, decreasing reimbursement, providers retiring from the industry due to burnout, an aging infrastructure and IT projects with billion-dollar price tags that require organizations to turn themselves inside-out to implement.

The entire healthcare IT industry needs to come together to build new and better solutions that can be implemented to address these needs. More foundational technologies like standards and interoperability need to be created and used.

We need to work with users to enable new and smarter workflows in healthcare to improve system efficiency – always the low-hanging fruit – instead of just trying to scale up with more of the same.

Q. What is the primary message that your company is trying to get through to the healthcare provider organization health IT leaders on the exhibit floor at HIMSS23?

A. Our primary message is that we have a technology that is ready to use today to achieve some of these sustainability goals. It’s a natural language processing [NLP] platform, and like all AI products, it is a work in progress. There are ways to safely implement it today that can increase service levels and reduce manual human effort, and by doing so, improve system efficiency and sustainability.

Using NLP in this way, if we can save care providers 15 minutes a day – and reduce frustration – think of what that means for reducing burnout. If we can help payers have better actuarial models, it may mean lower rates for patients.

If we can help hospital administrators have better data about what is going on inside the walls of their institutions, they’ll be able to make better decisions about staffing and care delivery.

Q. What should CIOs, CMIOs, CISOs and other health IT leaders at provider organizations keep their eyes on in the year ahead?

A. One of the things they need to be very careful with is as we enter this amazing age of AI with its promises to improve sustainability is having appropriate oversight of all the projects involving AI going on inside of their institutions.

There is great risk that some well-meaning individual in their organization will either come up with a home-brewed project or bring in an outside vendor – even possibly hidden in an existing vendor – that lacks appropriate oversight and starts influencing patient care in negative or unforeseen ways.

There needs to be institution-wide oversight of all projects involving AI in healthcare, and one solution might be that we need "CAIOs," or "Chief AI Officers," who understand machine learning and healthcare workflows and regulation and healthcare oversight to ensure that all of these projects can be tracked and ensure safe implementation.

With regard to Mark Zuckerberg’s motto of “Move fast and break things”? Move fast – yes – we need to improve our health systems quickly. But "break things"? Definitely not in healthcare.

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Email the writer: bsiwicki@himss.org
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