But how can organizations innovate effectively when margins are still tight and around 37% of hospitals are still losing money?
“The biggest challenges right now are financial and regulatory, full stop,” said Richard Zane, chief innovation officer of UCHealth. “The financial pressure is on healthcare right now. I’m fond of saying, not in a nice way, that it’s white knuckle time in healthcare. We’re all going to have to make really difficult decisions and set priorities in an unapologetic way, and it’s going to be about execution.”
Many health systems are focused on deploying AI across their enterprises in a variety of ways. There will be machine learning, prescriptive analytics, computational linguistics, natural language processing and generative AI projects in the clinical, administrative and research arenas expected to have a clear return on investment.
“We want to apply it to the routine and the mundane,” he said. “We want humans working to the top of their scope and we want, whether it’s a line of code or a bot, to work at the top of their scope. We are laser focused on making the routine and mundane easier, simpler, more efficient, cheaper and better.”
But AI isn’t silver bullet for everything. The decision to incorporate AI into a new process or workflow can’t be made lightly. There are risks involved and hidden costs in the time and resources it takes to smoothly integrate a new platform or application into existing workflows.
“AI is not magical. It’s just math. And there’s a lot of constraints within AI, and it can be scary or it can be exciting. We are right now at the peak of the Gartner hype cycle on AI, but we have to be rational and patient on how we deploy it and what we use it for,” said Dr. Zane. “I think at the end of the day, it’s going to make things better for our patients, and for society, but we have to be patient and rational.”
As the innovation leader at UCHealth, Dr. Zane sees new ideas and AI-driven applications come across his desk daily. To keep his team focused, he subscribes to the “three C’s of innovation” in healthcare: “compassion without competence is crap.”
“What that means is we are going to have to execute flawlessly to stay in the game,” he said. “The other part that’s really difficult is that we have an unsustainable regulatory burden. The number of people and amount of time that we’ve had to increase in the last five years to meet regulatory demand is suffocating.”
To meet the demands of today’s healthcare environment, Dr. Zane recommends simplifying processes and eliminating complexity.
“That’s where adopting technology can help you execute on that goal, or it can go in the opposite direction,” he said. “What I tell everybody that I work with, and who works for me, is that your job is to simplify and eliminate complexity. If you’re going to present me with a plan that has 19 steps, I’m going to ask you why it doesn’t have three. Then we’re going to figure out how to make it simpler and more adaptable, and how execution can be flawless.”