A Sneak Peek of KLAS’ 2024 Digital Health Investment Symposium (DHIS)

KLAS’ 2024 Digital Health Investment Symposium is proudly sponsored by some of the leading names in the healthcare IT industry. Four sponsors joined our recent webinar:

• Clare Barnes, Director at TripleTree
• Alya Sulaiman, Partner at McDermott Will & Emery
• Doug Greenberg, North America Market Leader for Healthcare at Korn Ferry
• Walt Breakell, EVP of Marwood Group

Justin Long, Managing Director of Investor Services at KLAS, hosted.

The webinar addresses four of the seven panel topics being covered during the symposium, focusing on why each one matters now.

Points to Know

• Clare Barnes focused on the importance of having discussions around patient conversion and engagement in today’s healthcare environment.
• Doug Greenberg tackled cybersecurity and what building a more resilient and secure healthcare system looks like.
• Alya Sulaiman spoke around AI and the tools that are emerging that demonstrate real promise.
• Walt Breakell’s topic of choice was on going back to the basics of care coordination across post-acute care verticals.

Read on for quick summaries of each sponsor’s comments.

A Focus on Patient Conversion

Barnes started by saying, “Patient engagement is an essential component for thriving in a value-based care environment. And frankly, I think it can make or break the success of a practice.”

She defines success in several ways, including supporting clinicians that are driving superior outcomes, and ensuring that we enable practices to be profitable. With the tremendous amount we’ve learned from COVID-19, she then brought up many questions that the industry now needs to grapple with, including how to engage with patients virtually and how to maintain engagement post care.

“There are so many pressures in our healthcare ecosystem around labor and workforce, burnout, reimbursement, patient retention. I think these pressures are honestly the very reason why patient engagement today is essential.” She states that figuring out tools to success will become increasingly vital to the value-base care conversation.

Summing up the importance of this topic for DHIS, she said, “Having these discussions at the upcoming conference, connecting different perspectives, is really what's going to help facilitate and optimize a good path forward and what those tools look like for success.”

Building a More Resilient and Secure Healthcare System

Greenberg reiterated that cybersecurity is affecting all healthcare organizations today and is top of mind for many. He states, “Just in the last two years alone, nearly 50% of all healthcare organizations have experienced a breach. [And the] average cost of a breach in healthcare is much higher than any other industry…. Close to 50 million Americans [were] affected by healthcare breaches, just in 2022 alone.”

Why is this? Greenberg points to the many cost pressures hospitals, health systems, and AMCs face. That strain means that health systems haven’t been able to put a lot of capital toward security, which causes huge tech debt. That debt has created a less-than-ideal security infrastructure.

Greenberg notes that there is also a rise in cybercrime, and medical records are the gold standard in these crimes. Using the example of the attack on Change Healthcare, he illustrates just how quickly such attacks bring the healthcare industry to its knees. He finished by stating the question to focus on: What can we do to protect healthcare organizations and then, most importantly, patient data moving forward?

The Real Value of AI in Healthcare

Sulaiman talked about last year’s discussion on separating the hype from the impact of AI. She looks forward to talking more about AI during DHIS, especially on the panel that will focus on the tools that are emerging through the hype cycle that demonstrate real value in solving the problems in healthcare.

Why? She shared stats showing that people are getting sicker and that many Americans are entering the phase of life when they need more care. But we don’t know whether the healthcare system is ready for an increase in patients. She says, “When I speak to healthcare organization leaders, what keeps them up at night is how to safely do more with less and shore up their economics. And there are a lot of artificial intelligence enabled solutions entering the market that promise to be able to help them do just that.”

Sulaiman points out that healthcare is prone to think of tools that really “admire” the problems, but she is seeing AI solutions now that position themselves as tools that help solve problems instead of admiring and explaining them. She pleads for healthcare to take the longview in AI and not to get caught up in “AI FOMO.”

Sulaiman finishes by talking about how DHIS also addresses interoperability and data access, which are key to realizing that the promise of AI is understanding its limitations as these tools are only as good as the data they have access to. “It's going to be a really interesting series of conversations at the event, talking about real, practical frameworks that you can use to separate the hype from the high impact and try to get your data governance interoperability house in order so that you can realize the full benefit of some of these exciting new tools.”

Why Care Coordination

Walt said “I'm most excited to go back to basics of care coordination in the post-acute world. I've been around long enough to remember when that used to be the hot topic, not AI. Now, [we’re] coming back to something that has really kind of progressed underneath the surface while other technologies have gotten the spotlight in the post-pandemic, telehealth world.”

He further shared some of what is happening in this space. “You're starting to see a lot of the larger payers starting to kind of aggregate up platforms…. You're starting to see more of a focus on how to not just coordinate but also position yourself in value-based care. And so, putting a spotlight back on an area that may have been a little bit neglected over the last few years is something that I'm really looking forward to digging into. Having been involved in DHIS since the beginning, it never ceases to amaze me the breadth and depth of the topics that are covered during the conference.”

Other Panel Topics

These four topics are a large part of the discussion, but they are not the only ones. We will also have panels on:

• RCM optimization and outsourcing
• Ambulatory and specialty HIT
• IT outsourcing

To watch the entirety of the webinar, check it out here on YouTube. You can also learn more about DHIS by visiting our DHIS event website.