Digital health’s maturity milestones and new horizons
Digital health innovation remains closely tied to ROI
As digital health investment tightens, both within healthcare organizations and the start-up community, digital leaders are increasingly pressured to prove return on investment (ROI) for their proposed investments. This shift influences how digital health teams are positioning new and continued work.
Instead of creating net-new experience artifacts, implementing large-scale transformations, or building custom application solutions, healthcare organizations are focused on three key areas: the possibilities of GenAI, proof-of-concept testing, and integrations and simplification.
GenAI, digital humans, and the ability of digital health to increase outcomes and decrease burden
The convergence of electronic health records adoption, genomic testing, and wearable devices has created a tsunami of healthcare data with the potential to revolutionize how we predict, prevent, and cure illness and disease. But with an estimated 2,000 exabytes of healthcare data generated annually, the health information galaxy has surpassed the human ability to convert data into actionable insights. In fact, Microsoft estimates that healthcare organizations only use about 3% of the data they collect.
While AI in medicine has been around for more than 50 years, advancements in deep learning and GenAI are rapidly unlocking new potential—empowering healthcare professionals to discover new patterns, launch targeted interventions, and ultimately, democratize personalized medicine.
Unlike previous technology waves, healthcare leaders and consumers alike seem compelled to pioneer new use cases and applications in AI—but not without caution. From source data bias to accidental disclosures, malicious actors, and AI “hallucinations,” healthcare leaders must proceed with prudence when navigating the AI frontier. Resources, including the NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework and the Coalition for Health AI Blueprint for Trustworthy AI, provide guidelines for responsible AI.
Having the difficult but necessary conversations now with legal and compliance builds an enterprise GenAI framework with security at its core and defines what risk an organization can and will take throughout the maturity journey. Those with pragmatic GenAI governance will be long-term winners in the digital health GenAI race. Regardless of the potential risks, one message has reverberated across the industry: start now.
Proving new concepts before scaling across a system
Like it or not, “pilots” are here to stay in healthcare. Whether a healthcare organization is interested in investing in GenAI, a contact center revamp, or a new digital front door experience, the onus is on digital technology teams to prove the concept before gaining wide-scale investment in a broad solution implementation.
Across the industry, we’re partnering with digital health leaders to support proof-of-concept solutions that hone in on a specific patient or employee journey segment or experience or focus on a well-thought-out, low-risk, high-ROI use case. Once the proof-of-concept is proven and the scaffolding of future-state planning is built around it, organizations can scale their investments quickly, knowing they are investing in proven solutions that work at their organization. We see patient and member communication leading the charge.
Simplifying the tech stack
2024 is going to be the year of integrations and simplifications. Because of the compliance and data regulation in healthcare, integrations between systems in a digital ecosystem have traditionally been clunky and often silo data to create the dreaded “what is the source of truth” question. Additionally, as organizations have custom-built solutions, they quickly lose their scalability, and there’s almost no ability to turn those solutions into true products that could commercialized.
These two factors—integration blockers and custom builds—have made many healthcare digital ecosystems unmanageable behemoths that can’t easily pivot to support new innovations, like GenAI solutions. This is especially important in the mergers and acquisitions world, yet at least the deal creates a forcing function. In 2024, we will continue to see healthcare systems define their core enterprise systems and invest in them to improve experience and efficiency for patients, members, and clinicians.
Slalom contributors: Tiffany Fitzgerald, JJ Hadley, Ellie Rice
