Four CIOs and IT executives of health systems from across the U.S. shared their perspective on headwinds their anticipating in the next year during episodes of the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.”
Umberto Tachinardi, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Health Digital Officer at UC Health (Cincinnati): There are many challenges because like anything completely new, we are seeing that AI in particular is a game changer. While we were used to being on the edge of digital innovations, clinical decision support is something we have been doing for a long time, but not necessarily at the pace and to the extent that AI allowed us to do. One of the challenges that comes from that is the speed, size and complexity of those new technologies. While they may not be in isolation completely new, they are coming in such a big volume and so fast that it’s a challenge.
We need to learn how to deal with the avalanche of new things coming at us at a very fast speed. The other challenge is adding more components to the digital ecosystem and the management of the new fabric is now much more plural and diverse, and bigger, which also becomes a challenge. How you manage and govern so many pieces working together from different vendors and origins using different technologies on the back or on the front. That alone is constituting the second big challenge.
With the first challenge, everyone now in the organization feels that they could be helped by some of these new advancements, and that becomes the third challenge. How do you govern the prioritization of deployment, acquisition, introduction of those technologies? Because everyone wants everything and that becomes a huge demand for us. How do we manage expectations, educate people in the new digital literacy world?
Michael Archuleta. CIO of Mt. San Rafael Hospital and Clinics (Trinidad, Colo.): Cyberthreats are really evolving as we’re trying to stay ahead with next generation security strategies within the organization itself, which is so critical to recruiting top talent. Rural healthcare isn’t always the first choice for IT professionals, but we’re building a team that’s just as elite as those major metropolitan hospitals.
There are also regulatory complexities. As AI and digital health expands, compliance will become more of an issue and we need to be ready to really navigate the landscape with precision. We don’t just face challenges; we really try to engineer solutions that turn them into true opportunities.
Zafar Chaudhry. Senior Vice President, Chief Digital, AI and Information Officer of Seattle Children’s: The first headwind is going to continue to be workforce shortages, especially in the clinical space, with increasing labor costs. There’s burnout impacting healthcare organizations and retention issues as well.
The other thing is financial pressures. There’s a rising cost of care delivery, including inflation in medical supplies, labor expenses and now tariffs, which is straining healthcare organization budgets. We’re also seeing reimbursement challenges from payers, including potential cuts and increased denials that will add to financial difficulty. We are mid-sized, but we have to be good financial stewards moving forward.
There are also regulatory changes and uncertainty with evolving regulatory requirements. Some of the executive orders, including changes to privacy mandates, are creating some challenges. It’s a moving target going forward because there’s also changes in healthcare policy due to political shifts that can create uncertainty. We’re seeing a rising cost of delivering care and that’s going to be a combination of what we buy, what we pay in labor, and what the tariffs bring around medications and medical supplies as well as hardware and software.
We’re seeing a focus and headwinds around more integration in tech. How do we integrate new technologies into existing healthcare systems? That can be complex and expensive.
Let’s not forget about cybersecurity threats. That is on an all time high, and that is going to create some challenges for us. The other thing we’re looking at is how do we maintain equitable access to healthcare for all populations and address any disparities? How do we prioritize? When you take all of those different headwinds, they create a complex and challenging environment. We’ve got to have adaptability, focus on innovation and efficiency to navigate these challenges.
Michael Hasselberg, Chief Digital Health Officer, UR Medicine (Rochester, N.Y.): One of the biggest challenges is understanding what the regulatory landscape may be around the use of specifically generative AI on the healthcare side. We know there are a lot of changes happening at the federal level in this space and we’re trying to understand that. When push comes to shove, as a healthcare institution, our primary business is to provide high quality care to patients. That is the essence of what we do, so it doesn’t really matter what regulations come out, or maybe lack of regulations that come out. We still have to hold ourselves accountable to making sure that these technologies are safe and trustworthy when delivered within clinical care settings. We need to make sure we can create assurances for our clinicians using these tools so they can trust the output we’re seeing from the AI.
We’re really trying to get a handle on and figure out how we create free deployment and validation opportunities for these generative tools and post-deployment auditing and monitoring systems to watch what these tools are doing. That is a space I see a lot of opportunity, but again, there is a lot of challenge given there’s so much we don’t know about in these large foundational models. That has been the big thing we’re running into and thinking about.
It’s never been easier to build a point solution. We can do that really, really quickly. But to go from pilot to full scale across the health system in a safe and trustworthy way, that has been a challenge and difficult. It’s because of not having that clarity or mechanisms in place to monitor and audit these tools at scale.
