The expansion of artificial intelligence in healthcare has garnered significant industry hype over the past year, as health IT executives recognize its potential to transform healthcare delivery — and its efficiency. According to the recent Health IT Industry Outlook Survey, which highlights healthcare CIO strategic goals and pain points, 32% of hospital CIOs recognize AI and machine learning as the top health IT priority for the next year.
While not a new concept, the advancement of machine learning algorithms has accelerated generative AI’s potential to solve health system challenges, like provider shortages and clinical burnout. This has created a sense of urgency amongst healthcare organizations to rapidly implement and expand these technologies. However, IT departments — struggling with their own workforce challenges — bear heavy operational burden if resource and support strategies aren’t in place to shoulder these evolving tools and their growing user expectations.
Before expanding AI initiatives, hospitals and health systems must address operational barriers and process inefficiencies. Finding the proper balance between workforce optimization and automation is key in developing a successful IT support framework.
Securing qualified IT resources amid staffing shortages
Despite compounding IT team workload, talent strain remains a top obstacle for hospital and health system CIOs this year, with 44% of survey respondents highlighting “retaining and budgeting for qualified IT resources” as the greatest operational challenge.
To secure resources and strengthen support processes, IT executives must first evaluate their current support models, gauging their capacity to withstand project load, user experience needs, and budgetary pressures. Having identified support gaps, leaders can then consider workforce optimization initiatives — improving retention strategies, seeking staffing partnerships, or utilizing blended support frameworks — to ease talent strain.
Survey results also revealed that most healthcare CIOs (36%) deemed “flexible IT staffing support to ramp up or down with project demands” as the No. 1 area in which they desired stronger support. By moving beyond conventional staffing approaches, hospitals can develop adaptable IT programs, better equipped to support advancing consumer expectations, compete with new market entrants, and maintain new care models.
Construction is an expansive field, and each industry presents its own set of challenges and requirements for building. Health construction stands out as being unique among others industries due to the distinctive features it brings with it. Here, we will highlight these differences between health construction and other fields so as to give an in-depth understanding of what it takes to construct within this particular sector.
Architectural Planning in Health Construction
Health construction planning requires an in-depth knowledge of both medical functionality and patient comfort. As opposed to other sectors, healthcare facilities like hospitals, clinics or care homes must accommodate complex equipment while adhering to hygiene standards while aiding patient recovery. Furthermore, designing such environments must account for medical professionals working there as they must move quickly during emergencies requiring more rigorous planning processes involving specialists from various fields like medicine, engineering and architecture.
Architectural Planning in Hospitals
Hospital architectural planning presents unique challenges. To meet them, architects often face increased complexity when planning hospital structures. Not only must hospitals meet general construction requirements, they must also ensure seamless coordination among their departments such as emergency, radiology, pathology and surgery. Architectural designs must enable quick patient transfers, accommodate large medical equipment and create an environment conducive to recovery. Furthermore, design layout plays an integral part in infection control, crowd management and emergency response. Considerations for expansion or modification are typically included in the initial design, anticipating future demands and technological developments. Such attention to detail rarely seen elsewhere is reflective of hospital construction’s special demands.
In September, Mikael Öhman took the helm of CORL Technologies, tech-enabled managed services for vendor risk management and compliance, and its sister organization Meditology Services, which provides information risk management, cybersecurity, privacy, and regulatory compliance services for the healthcare industry.
Öhman comes to CORL and Meditology from KMS Healthcare, where he was CEO of the global technology services company. Previously, he was a consultant at McKinsey and Company in Stockholm and Atlanta, managed international operations for Cerner, and led mergers and acquisitions for McKesson’s IT business. In addition to his executive health IT experience, which also includes serving as COO for software, services, and device companies, Öhman co-founded an urgent care business that was sold to Piedmont Urgent Care by Wellstreet.
We recently sat down with Öhman to discuss the current healthcare cybersecurity landscape, what’s on the horizon, and his plans for CORL and Meditology.
EHR: How would you describe the current state of cybersecurity in healthcare?
Öhman: Big, big, big worry. For everybody. Anytime you look at the news, you hear about another health system getting hit with a ransomware attack or a vendor being hacked. That’s why cybersecurity is absolutely a key priority. The bad guys know that healthcare data has tremendous value; you can get rich by holding somebody’s data hostage or selling it.
Healthcare is complex. It requires a highly networked system with many vendors involved at many different points. Data doesn’t just live in one place anymore. While all the data sharing and integration points to move information between on-premises systems and cloud environments are fabulous, they also raise the security threat level by magnitudes. The criminals are going to find the weakest link. When they do, the damage that can be done because of data aggregation is much, much higher. It’s why security is an obvious priority.
Managing and securing healthcare is a much bigger job now than it was 10 years ago when most of your systems were sitting in a data center behind your own four walls. You could see and touch it and feel that you had control. Now, there is a proliferation of cloud-based and SaaS vendors that, if not properly vetted and controlled, can create new exposure points that you may not know even exist. Every provider and payer – anybody using multiple vendors – must be prepared because it’s going to continue to get riskier every single day as new technologies come out.
The great challenge of the American healthcare system in the 21st century has been its accessibility. Hospitals are overrun with patients, doctors and nurses are bogged down by staffing shortages, and rural Americans still suffer in huge stretches of medical deserts where the nearest hospital could be fifty miles away or more.
The question then becomes, in a digital era when so many processes and organizations are becoming more efficient, flexible and convenient, can the same be accomplished in the healthcare complex?
Telehealth and digital medical technologies have begun to create a bridge in healthcare where there once was a widening gap. Patients who suffer from chronic illness and/or receive end-of-life care are often made to endure an interminable cycle of rehospitalization. These patients are shuffled endlessly between hospitals and homes, a journey that in some areas of the country could take hours to traverse. They are packed into waiting rooms and ushered through hospital hallways, where oftentimes the risk of contracting another serious illness is far higher, and they are put through a gamut of medical testing and vitals checking before they are finally able to receive the care that they desperately needed. These patients not only require the high-acuity care that hospitals can provide, but also the means to access this treatment in a comfortable and convenient setting.
Home health agencies have long provided quality care in the comfort of patients’ homes with the help of acute home care models and outpatient-at-home programs. However, as our healthcare system continues to have undue pressure placed upon it, these agencies are forced to provide higher levels of care and services to more and more patients.
This feat can be accomplished, but not without these services being buoyed by the latest in available medical technologies. We can now monitor vitals remotely and provide actionable insight to doctors and nurses who can offer treatment plans and prescribe medications that are then delivered directly to patients’ doors. In addition to this new level of virtual care, teams of mobile clinicians and nurses become integral in the delivery of quality care outside of hospital walls and help to further expand their reach into the surrounding community.
As healthcare advances, so does the complexity of conditions and treatments. But as the global population lives longer, doctors’ time to translate increasingly complex clinical notes diminishes. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, hospitals are looking at a labor shortage of up to 104,900 physicians by 2030.
Doctors need help documenting each patient as well as taking the time to follow up and monitor the treatment plan’s progress. Patients not sticking to treatment plans means several more check-ups, and the severity of illnesses can multiply in that time.
It’s not just about following the doctor’s orders — the sources of information and patient comprehension of the treatment plan itself all play a role in whether patients adhere to the healthcare provider’s recommendations. This is where generative AI can relieve some of the pressure. Its advanced algorithms bring years of clinical data to the fore in seconds. With sentiment analysis tools built-in, it takes this complex information and summarizes it for patients in a conversational tone so they can understand their treatments comfortably.
Let’s look at generative AI in healthcare and how the latest chatbots can help patients feel confident in understanding and completing their treatment plans.
For many elderly family members, the goal once they retire is to make the most out of their remaining years. After two years of reeling from a global health crisis, many have found immense value in taking their elderly loved ones to communities where their well-being is secured.
As the need for senior care services grows, you might be thinking of ways to build an efficient facility. The secret lies in using technology. In this article, we look at some of the best ways you can harness new tools to provide optimal comfort to your elderly residents:
Cybersecurity plays a pivotal role in shaping the landscape of healthcare delivery, influencing various aspects of patient care, data management, and overall system functionality. As healthcare systems increasingly transition towards digital platforms, the impact of cybersecurity becomes more pronounced and critical.
Here is everything you need to know;
Impact of Cyber Security on Healthcare Delivery
Cybersecurity safeguards patient data, besides, it is critical for the continuous and efficient operation of healthcare systems. As healthcare delivery becomes increasingly dependent on interconnected technologies, any disruption caused by cyberattacks can have immediate and detrimental effects. Downtime in electronic systems could lead to delayed patient care, canceled appointments, and communication hindrances between healthcare professionals. This underscores the importance of implementing robust cybersecurity measures to ensure the uninterrupted flow of information and services within healthcare organizations.
There is no question that artificial intelligence (AI) has tremendous implications for the world of healthcare. The list of applications is long. From using machine learning to analyze medical images to facilitating patient communication through chatbots and even using predictive tools to identify high-risk patients, AI has the potential to enhance healthcare systems.
And that’s not to mention all the time AI can save on the backend by automating things like data entry and appointment scheduling, thereby granting healthcare professionals more time to focus on actually diagnosing and treating their patients.
Still, many in the industry have approached this new technology with trepidation. Potential violations of medical privacy laws are a perennial concern for healthcare organizations, and AI—with its seemingly opaque algorithms and its potential susceptibility to breach—can seem like more trouble than it’s worth on this front.
The reality is more complicated. Yes, generative AI does present a risk to healthcare organizations when handled without the proper precautions, as any technology does. In fact, nearly 60 percent of healthcare industry respondents to a recent survey conducted by Portal26 cited at least one GenAI-related security or misuse incident in the preceding six months. But with the right security mechanisms in place, the benefits of AI significantly outweigh the possible downsides.
The problem is that—as the same survey revealed—almost 30 percent of healthcare respondents said their employers lack any guidelines or policies at all surrounding AI usage. Building those guidelines—implementing AI as carefully, and cautiously, as possible—is essential to realizing the true possibility of this technology.
Secure full visibility into your AI systems
At the center of any concern around AI and medical privacy violations is protected health information (PHI). PHI encompasses any information relating to:
The past, present, or future physical or mental health/condition of an individual.
The provision of health care to that individual.
The individual’s payment history.
Feeding PHI into the large language models (LLMs) that are at the foundation of GenAI can pay massive dividends to healthcare organizations looking to optimize their day-to-day operations. But successfully achieving this objective, with a minimum of risk, requires taking an extremely proactive attitude towards precisely how this data is being used.
The key word here is “visibility.” If you are going to be feeding massive quantities of sensitive PHI into your systems, you need to ensure that you are aware of what it is, who is using it, and for what purpose. The need for this is especially acute given the rise of “shadow AI”—i.e., AI-related activities occurring out of sight of those tasked with overseeing it.
Unsurprisingly, 67% of healthcare industry respondents to the Portal26 survey are concerned about shadow AI at their companies. It is a problem that is growing daily—and one that can only be curtailed through increased visibility.
Construction is an expansive field, and each industry presents its own set of challenges and requirements for building. Health construction stands out as being unique among others industries due to the distinctive features it brings with it. Here, we will highlight these differences between health construction and other fields so as to give an in-depth understanding of what it takes to construct within this particular sector.
