These trends in the new year ahead will see healthcare provider organizations innovating solutions and practices to improve healthcare, one expert predicts.
Healthcare information technology will see many changes in 2020 spurred by newer technologies that will enable CIOs and other healthcare leaders to successfully innovate in various areas of healthcare, predicted Tim Costantino, vice president and head of product at AdvancedMD, a vendor of EHR and practice management software.
First and perhaps foremost, artificial intelligence began maturing in healthcare in 2019, and 2020 will see the complex and useful set of technologies really come of age in the industry, Costantino stated.
AI pushing into the mainstream
“Healthcare AI technology is currently in the testing phase and organizations will continue to push into the broad adoption phase,” he said. “The possibilities are endless; the key is that when done successfully, it won’t even feel like AI. AI will simply be another tool in our toolbox to help payers and providers.”
For example, he mentioned AI-powered practice management assistance: patient acquisition, efficient intake and scheduling, and efficient billing. AI will be able to identify patterns between a practice management activity and the end action and predict behavior moving forward.
“Another example, AI-powered EHR assistance,” he said. “Seamless clinical decision support and efficient note-taking and transcribing. For clinical decision support, AI and specifically deep learning can recognize the input results and make recommendations to the physician for next steps. The challenge with AI is reproducibility and understanding the detailed ‘why’ behind the recommendation. As a result, AI likely will be implemented as an assistant to the physician, who ultimately will make the decision.”
A further AI example, Costantino added, is AI-powered patient engagement: Recognizing the patterns that lead to disengagement and automatically taking action to help.
“The simplest pattern could be multiple missed appointments, but that is not a challenge to detect with classical systems,” he said. “AI can combine all of the data inclusive of missed appointments, lead time for scheduling an appointment, time-to-respond to an appointment confirmation, even time of the year, perhaps. Disengagement is seasonal or based on the time of day. The power of AI is the ability to take an ever-increasing set of variables and produce a predictive model with more powerful predictive power than what could be explicitly coded.”
Continue reading to learn more about additional trends, including 5G and Augmented Reality, in 2020.
“Healthcare AI technology is currently in the testing phase and organizations will continue to push into the broad adoption phase.”Tim Costantino, AdvancedMD
