With 2018 now officially behind us, healthcare organizations are looking to industry experts to forecast areas of focus and necessary investments for the year ahead.
According to a recent analysis at HITInfrastructure, creating the IT architecture to support artificial intelligence, consumer-focused experiences and blockchain will be among the industry’s greatest challenges.
For example, the article notes that industry experts at Forrester predict that AI will affect two out of three US patients in the coming years, and many will not even be aware of it.
“The key vector will be the growth of commercial AI solutions — from FDA-approved, AI-based diagnostic tools to specialized chatbots for managing patient engagement — that are easy for [healthcare organizations] to buy, available through enterprise health clouds, and increasingly easy to integrate with existing systems,” Forrester explained.
Similarly, experts from IDC Health Insights agree that AI will become a major force in the healthcare industry, with the technology likely to directly affect 25 percent of organizations by 2020.
“AI holds much promise for healthcare,” Mutaz Shegewi, research director at IDC Health Insights, told HITInfrastructure.com. “For example, radiology is the best example we have of the impact of AI. We are starting to see medical device manufacturers embed AI technology that allows radiologists to do their job better and more conveniently.”
“There is also an interesting application of AI in the clinical documentation and workflow. We are seeing vendors introducing algorithms for population health. Another advanced application of AI we’ve seen recently is embedding virtual assistants to facilitate clinical documentation and workflow similar to how we would use Siri on our Apple phones to perform various functions,” he said.
AI can also be used to improve cybersecurity at healthcare organizations, and IDC predicts that 40 percent of healthcare providers will use AI and machine learning “to improve their cybersecurity capabilities with automated threat detection.”
Not surprisingly, analysts also expect the volume of healthcare data to continue to grow by leaps and bounds in the year ahead, leaving organizations struggling to identify and use the most relevant data.
“Through the adoption of enterprise health clouds and the availability of applications that put data into the hands of the healthcare customer, we will be drowning in data. This influx of data will bring a new problem — searching for signals in the noise,” explained Forrester.
In addition, data interoperability will continue to be a challenge as ever more data is exchanged.
“As we look at health data wildly increasing, we see that it is trapped in individual silos. So, we must look at interoperability as a way to free up that data. We see increased adoption of FHIR,” Forrester Research Senior Analyst Arielle Trzcinski told HITInfrastructure.
As interoperability barriers come down, organizations will need to invest more data centers and networks that can manage the influx of new data.
In short, the article notes, to succeed in this challenging environment, healthcare organizations will need to devote time, talent, and resources to the adoption of disruptive and innovative technologies.
“Without a comprehensive plan to develop the underlying health IT infrastructure to support artificial intelligence, big data analytics, blockchain, and more personalized experiences,” the article noted, “organizations may find themselves behind the infrastructure curve in the months to come.”