What is Top of Mind for Top Health Systems?

Each year, it’s an honor for KLAS to collaborate with the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM) at UPMC to find out what technologies are top of mind for the C-suite in healthcare. Our findings are published in the Top of Mind for Top Health Systems report; our newest one was released in August. To make sure we get the full picture of the current trends in healthcare technology, we use the same 3-question survey.

Here are the highlights from 2024:

• 85% of responding healthcare executives identified AI as the most exciting emerging technology.
• Healthcare leaders also recognize AI as the technology making the most improvements, including telehealth and virtual care.
• Organizations are continuing to prioritize technology that can help with patient care, patient access, and provider burnout.

The Most Exciting Technology

As we saw in the 2023 Top of Mind report, AI has been top of mind for some time now. We're really starting to see providers adopt AI solutions. In fact, 85% of responding healthcare executives identified AI as the most exciting emerging technology.

Generative AI was cited most often, and people noted its potential to help with decision-making and clinical care. In particular, ambient speech is showing some initial success in helping healthcare organizations and their physicians with work-life balance.

Improvements in AI

Though AI has been around for many years, ChatGPT highlighted that anyone can use generative AI in a variety of ways. A big reason that we're seeing AI progress is that it has become more visible and accessible. People are a little less scared of it because they've seen it in action.

We continue to see an evolution in healthcare AI. In the past, a few people used large language models and machine-learning capabilities for specific situations like targeting at-risk patients or predicting hospital capacity. Now, AI is being used every day at the point of care and is helping  many providers be more efficient.

On the other hand, there is still some fear around AI because it is well known that tools can hallucinate and make up things. Providers are aware that AI is easy to use, but they also are concerned about making sure it's accurate and doing what it's supposed to. Referential AI can help with this because it, like an encyclopedia, shows where it got its information from. Providers can tell that the information is from an actual medical journal and not Wikipedia.

The Challenges

We've continued to see organizations prioritizing technology that improves patient care and patient access. This is because as healthcare systems are trying to take on more risk, they need to make sure their patients get care that they need so that they can proactively prevent adverse events where patients end up in the ER. We're seeing a lot of potential for those types of solutions.

We've also seen provider burnout become even more front and center with continuing staff shortages. Many solutions are really trying to tackle this issue because no provider can work 24/7. As previously mentioned, technology like ambient speech that fits into providers’ workflows can help providers feel like they can focus on their patients more.

Some of the other AI tools we're seeing may have a lot of potential to take more cognitive load off providers, like a tool that helps draft emails. Even if clinicians must read through the email to make sure it’s okay to send, they're not having to create a new email every single time.

Learn More

For more insights and information on our findings, I recommend reading the full report.

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