All things AI was the dominant theme at last week’s ViVE conference in Nashville. Dozens of companies launched new AI solutions at the event, experts spoke about the technology during most panel sessions, and AI was of course a frequent discussion point in my interviews and conversations.
The leaders I spoke with agreed that healthcare AI is developing at a rapid rate — and that the industry’s attitude on how to best regulate and deploy this technology is evolving every day.
They also agreed it’s clear that AI will play a major role in care delivery for years to come. One factor that is indicative of this is the fact that med tech giants like Epic and others have been so nimble in their efforts to release AI, said Scott Arnold, CIO and chief of innovation at Tampa General Hospital.
“The Epics of the world — they move very quickly on artificial intelligence, and they’ve traditionally been about four or five years behind where we’ve needed them to be. It’s been really interesting to see some of our big partners moving that way — GE, Phillips, they’re all putting AI into their firmware for their diagnostic equipment. They’re doing anything that can be done to tell us that something’s wrong before it goes wrong. It’s amazing,” Arnold declared.
Healthcare providers are also growing more comfortable in their efforts to test and scale AI models, pointed out Simon Nazarian, chief digital and technology officer at City of Hope.
AI tools are being viewed less and less as shiny, unconventional objects in the healthcare world, he said.
Nazarian highlighted a trend of providers increasingly focusing on the applicability of AI — as he puts it, “how to maneuver AI properly and best take advantage of it.”
His colleague — Nasim Eftekhari, City of Hope’s executive director of applied AI and data science — added that healthcare providers are growing increasingly interested in agentic AI.
Last year at this time, many conversations about healthcare AI centered around generative AI and large language models — now, more and more leaders are discussing how to apply AI agents to automate tasks, Eftekhari stated.
As healthcare providers continue their AI deployment efforts, “the hardest thing is separating the wheat from the chaff,” said another expert — John Halamka, president of Mayo Clinic Platform.
With these organizations looking at solutions with more of a discerning eye, startups in the healthcare AI space that sell point solutions will have a much harder time thriving, he pointed out.
“Will there be just one platform to rule them all? The answer is no, but there will probably be categories — and our challenge right now is just having a thousand point solutions, each of which solve a niche disease, problem or function. That’s not something a CIO is likely to buy. Where is a differentiated product? Where could this serve as a platform for a category or function?” Halamka explained.
Even though these questions are yet to be answered, AI development for healthcare use cases show no signs of slowing down, according to Aneesh Chopra, chief strategy officer at Arcadia.
While responsible and ethical AI remains a key priority for the healthcare sector, the change in presidential administration could give way to a faster pace of innovation, he remarked.
“I think the shift in tone from the administration gives a little bit more comfort to the stakeholders that if we are responsible on our own, with more self-governance, we might be able to move a little bit faster in a more responsible way. I’m sensing the gas pedal getting a bit more of a push towards adoption in healthcare,” Chopra declared.
Photo: MR.Cole_Photographer, Getty Images
