After a week at the HLTH 2024 conference, key trends emerge for aligning care priorities, innovating business insights, and driving better outcomes across the healthcare ecosystem.
The HLTH 2024 conference gathered innovators, thought leaders, and decision-makers from across the country to dive deep on some of the most important topics and most pressing pain points affecting the healthcare industry today and likely to shape its needs and goals into the coming year.
As technology evolves, Wolters Kluwer Health is looking for new ways to innovate solutions and partnerships to drive impact from the patient bedside to industry benchmarks. Many key trending topics at HLTH aligned with our vision for supporting improved health outcomes and operational efficiencies with our UpToDate® and Medi-Span® solution suites.
Despite the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) in the broader sphere of technology, the question for many in the healthcare industry is: How can we believe what comes out of AI?
This very question was posed to conference attendees by Dr. Sheila Bond, Director of Clinical Content Strategy for UpToDate, and Dr. Dick Taylor, Chief Clinical Informatics Officer at BJC Healthcare and Washington University in St. Louis in their presentation, “Generative AI: How care delivery got left behind.”
An essential part of building trust in the quality of AI-powered decision support is being transparent about its sourcing, they explained. Like any traditional clinical decision support solution, transparency of the evidence is what sets responsible clinical AI solutions apart from open-source AI and allows healthcare professionals to confidently use the tool effectively in their practice.
In a 2024 Wolters Kluwer Health survey of physicians on their perceptions of generative AI, the majority of respondents (58%) said the single most important factor in selecting an AI tool is knowing the content it is trained on was created by medical professionals. Additionally, 91% of physicians said that before they would use an AI-enhance tool to inform their clinical decisions, they would have to know its source materials were created by doctors and medical experts.
To ensure continuous, responsible AI innovation and development, AI-powered improvements will be layered into the trusted content of UpToDate over time, but only once rigorously tested with customers and partners to help ensure patient safety.
Modern health systems have to keep pace with the rapidly changing healthcare landscape, and harnessing insights from their own data is essential to impacting care, operations, education, and quality. Using advanced analytics, health system leaders are discovering new ways clinical data can help fill administrative gaps and shape strategic plans.
For Wolters Kluwer, that potential impact was part of the impetus for creating UpToDate® Enterprise Edition. This latest UpToDate experience leverages the power of clinical decision support data through a self-service analytics portal to allow for more in-depth insights on utilization and potential strategic improvements.
In healthcare business, disparate teams are concerned about aligning data and standardizing evidence to bridge value gaps. As rapid investments in specialty drugs and novel medicines continue to gain approvals, payers and PBMs will evolve or develop new benefit designs and will increasingly assess therapeutic alternatives from competing therapies. Pharmacy and medical benefit teams referencing the same source of evidence-based information and research can make more aligned decisions based on proven guidance and the latest recommendations.
“The shift towards consumerism in healthcare is undeniable,” solution thought leader Matt Sullivan said during his Tech Talk at HLTH 2024. He noted that:
“This growing trend underscores the need for a healthcare model where consumers actively participate in their care, fostering a partnership between provider and patient,” Sullivan said.
Virtual patient engagement, digital consumer education, and the ability for both professionals and patients to seamlessly personalize the wellness journey help improve the patient experience. Sullivan called it a “longitudinal” experience that can be tailored to the patient or consumer’s own educational needs and meet them where they are on the device and at the time and place of their choosing. With more control over their healthcare educational journey, patients feel more empowered to manage their own care and wellness, resulting in increased medication adherence and improved outcomes.
The overall takeaway from HLTH 2024 is that even small steps toward health tech innovation, when thoughtfully executed, contribute to a larger, more impactful transformation of the healthcare experience. By embracing small, strategic advancements, we can work collectively toward achieving a holistic, digital-forward healthcare model that benefits all stakeholders involved.
Learn more about Wolters Kluwer’s responsible development of AI-powered clinical content.
