Health Systems Must Find the Right Path To Meet Demand for Care
Data Governance Is Crucial To Get Right
Jain is also a part-time physician at Cleveland Clinic, where he’s seen his fellow clinicians excited about AI. He notes that when it comes to adopting new solutions, it’s less about the technology and more about change management.
“Most of the time, when we’re transforming healthcare, it doesn’t fail because of the technology. It fails because we don’t catch that people and workflows were misaligned. We were taking existing workflows that are, for the most part, broken, and we were trying to replace them with technology and AI, as opposed to saying, ‘Here’s the problem we’re trying to solve, now let’s go break it apart into its core components,’” he says.
For organizations to truly find success in AI and autonomous workflows, they need to solidify their data governance.
“Most organizations don’t really have an AI problem, per se. They have a problem with connecting the data with the workflow. That’s the foundational problem,” Jain says. “You can’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy.”
Data access and liquidity are an industrywide concern, he notes, and while interoperability has made strides in recent years, there’s still room to grow. He believes everyone, from technology partners to regulators, plays a role in improving healthcare information sharing.
“As we ask AI agents to do more, it’s in our best interest to make sure that we’re bringing the entire industry along for that journey, not just a single vendor,” Jain says.
GET EXPERT GUIDANCE: Deliver seamless, patient-centered care across care settings.
Is Your Infrastructure Secure?
To advance on data and AI initiatives, healthcare organizations must modernize their infrastructure to make sure workflows are secure and well connected.
“Many organizations are struggling to keep up with both AI and security. Clinicians and executives have all of these expectations with AI, but security needs to be a central element,” says Cletis Earle, healthcare field CTO at Citrix and a former health system CIO.
That means grounding innovation in zero trust and setting up environments such as sandboxes where teams can experiment with AI in a controlled setting. After all, healthcare workers aren’t strangers to emergency situations, so ongoing security trainings must be a part of the change.
“How do we help everyone become more resilient? How do we help people do more active tabletop exercises? What happens when you have downtime, when systems have to be refreshed or need a major upgrade?” Earle says. “I recommend training throughout the year, microtraining different departments. Just keep training your teams.”
Organizations may not even need to break their budgets. Many times, optimizing what’s already available can work just as well, Earle notes. A partner can help to enhance the stack health systems already have, keeping costs from ballooning.
“This is the thing that a CFO would love to hear: What are the things that we already own that we can keep using that we may be underutilizing, and how can those tweaks help?” he adds.
