CHIME-KLAS on Healthcare AI: The Hype Is Becoming Real

AI Successes, Challenges and Best Practices Profiled in New Report

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN AND SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, NOVEMBER 6, 2019 – Healthcare organizations that are early adopters of AI are experiencing increasing success in clinical, financial and operational areas, according to a newly issued report from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and KLAS Research. Healthcare AI 2019: Actualizing the Potential of Artificial Intelligence focuses on industry insights and context, identifying best practices for meeting continuing challenges with AI solution capabilities, industry support and training, and healthcare organization staff acceptance and adoption.

“We are beginning to see the promise of AI realized in applications that benefit patients, clinicians and healthcare organizations,” said Russell Branzell, CHIME’s president and CEO. “We are on the cusp of a huge transformation in healthcare, and our members expect AI to play a major role in that change. This new research provides a roadmap, based on proven best practices, for organizations to develop their AI strategies.”  

“Organizations need vendors (solution partners) who offer comprehensive solutions, not just tool kits,” said Adam Gale, president of KLAS Research. “This includes a higher standard of training and support appropriate for a cutting-edge technology that is still evolving. Vendors also need deep knowledge of healthcare delivery and clinical practice, because this is touching human lives and impacting patient outcomes.”

Among the research findings:

- Best practices for healthcare organizations – based on the experience of the most successful AI users – include embedding AI in the clinician workflow and promoting AI insights to clinicians as extra information to act on, not extra hoops to jump through; promoting interdisciplinary collaboration by experts on AI data science, modeling, analytics, and subject matter; and taking a social engineering approach to getting staff engaged in implementing changes and reporting progress and successes to the staff.

- Solutions partners can help drive client success by delivering comprehensive services for AI platforms, including client success managers, dedicated data scientists, and field engineers to ensure models are built and deployed successfully and in a timely fashion; and providing strong customer training, including training the healthcare organization’s analysts to give them the data science expertise needed to build, deploy and maintain their own models. In addition, clients need solutions partners who are transparent about their own learning curve, acknowledging their need for customer partners in development, and responsive to constructive feedback.

The research is based on interviews with 57 organizations reporting KLAS-validated use cases across 11 categories. KLAS validated a total of more than 90 use cases – including population health, clinical decision support, clinical research, patient engagement, clinical education, value-based reimbursement, revenue cycle, financial health, waste/cost/fraud avoidance, employee experience and bed/patient and staffing management. Measured in the reports are purpose-built AI companies that are focused on analytics and AI, and analytics platform companies with AI infrastructure whose technology is often used as the embedded AI foundation for other products that are industry specific. Not measured are EHR suppliers with AI capabilities and HIT application suppliers with AI capabilities.

About CHIME

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers (CIOs), chief medical information officers (CMIOs), chief nursing information officers (CNIOs), chief innovation officers (CIOs), chief digital officers (CDOs) and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 3,200 members in 56 countries and over 150 healthcare IT business partners and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and care in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit CHIME's website

Contacts
Candace Stuart
Director of Communications and Public Relations, CHIME
734.665.0000
cstuart@chimecentral.org

Joshua Schneck
612-709-8500
Founder & Principal Snow Communications, Inc.
www.snowcommunications.com

About KLAS
KLAS is a research and insights firm on a global mission to improve healthcare delivery by amplifying the provider's voice. Working with thousands of healthcare professionals and clinicians, KLAS gathers data and insights on software, services and medical equipment to deliver timely reports, trends and statistical overviews. The research directly represents the provider voice and acts as a catalyst for improving vendor performance. Follow KLAS on Twitter