LAS VEGAS – Panelists at AHIP26 on Wednesday focused on a few common themes: return on investment and improved patient outcomes. For AI, it’s about fostering integration and fighting isolation. For financial and clinical improvements, it’s about thinking long term and simplifying processes.
Quality over quantity
Robust data is at the foundation of successful AI strategies. However, healthcare continues to grapple with gigantic, fragmented legacy architectures.
“Large enterprises like us, who have grown inorganically … actually have siloed data,” said Ratnakar Lavu, chief digital Information officer at Elevance Health. Lavu added that enterprise scale can complicate data synthesis. “If you don’t spend enough time on data and the context for AI, we’re going to get bad outputs,” he said.
Clinicians also are contending with data volume that doesn’t hold any value. Karen DeSalvo, former chief health officer at Google and former National Coordinator for Health IT, said EHRs suffer from “note bloat” and redundant, copy-pasted information.
“[More data is] not always better, and it’s not always necessary,” DeSalvo said.
Encouraging data sharing
Thomas Keane, the current National Coordinator, said data liquidity is his top priority.
“We understand that data has to flow privately and securely for the benefit of the patient, at the direction of the patient,” Keane said.
In addition to empowering patients, data can also be leveraged to coordinate care, identify care gaps and to train AI models, Keane said. “Data is really the currency of the realm.”
Federal initiatives to promote and improve data flow include the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, which has now shared more than 1 billion documents on its voluntary network, according to Keane. Regulators are also discouraging data hoarding by imposing stiff financial penalties for information blocking, Keane said.
“Taming” the system
Care management often revolves around data aggregation and clinical trial benchmarks. Ezekiel Emanuel, however, said following through on best practices after data informs clinicians is where healthcare falls short.
Emanuel, a vice provost and professor at the University of Pennsylvania and adviser to the director-general of the World Health Association, cited the nation’s 120 million people with hypertension as an example of this breakdown. Despite evidence showing that an 80% control rate is entirely feasible, only a quarter of Americans currently have their blood pressure managed.
Keep it simple
Healthcare spending in the US makes up about 18% of the country’s GDP, noted Emanuel, who added that the system doesn’t need more funding. Instead, Emanuel called for simplification and “taming” the system.
The future, Emanuel said, requires a move toward standardized quality metrics and a transition away from fee-for-service models, which do not support integrated care.
Sustainability, Emanuel stressed, will be born from significant and collective change across the healthcare continuum.
“We’re not going to change the system by adjusting something here and a little over there,” Emanuel said. “For that, we need to have comprehensive reform that’s going to affect everyone, every part of the system. And that can only happen, in my opinion, if everyone jumps at the same time.”
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