Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health is requiring executive sponsors to commit to funding successful artificial intelligence pilots before the health system evaluates launching them.
“We’re not evaluating launching a pilot unless the executive sponsor commits to paying for it if it’s successful,” Lee Schwamm, MD, senior vice president and chief digital health officer of Yale New Haven Health, said during the “How Executives Collaborate and Find Common Ground on AI” panel at Becker’s 11th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference in Chicago.
“That quickly changes the conversation about KPIs and makes it real very quickly,” Dr. Schwamm said.
Dr. Schwamm said the requirement changes conversations about how an AI project will be measured. He also said health systems have to recognize that not every worthwhile technology investment will produce direct financial savings.
“Some of the most important interventions we can do in medicine don’t save money,” he said.
Yale New Haven is looking for solutions that can drive margin or create cost savings, but Dr. Schwamm said those projects should not make up the health system’s entire portfolio. Some resources should also support investments that improve the clinical experience for patients or make clinicians’ jobs better, safer or easier, he said.
The economics of AI are also shaping how the health system approaches vendors. Dr. Schwamm described a model in which the costs associated with frontier AI models are passed through to health systems, with additional costs added by third parties.
“That’s not a sustainable model for a system like ours,” he said.
Yale New Haven instead wants vendors to share some of the risk and is looking at co-development partnerships, Dr. Schwamm said. He said the health system can bring its intellectual property, research, expertise and validation capabilities to those arrangements as a way to negotiate more favorable operating costs.
