Survey: AI most exciting emerging technology in healthcare

Health system leaders recently identified AI as the most exciting emerging technology for healthcare in this year's "Top of Mind for Top Health Systems" survey, published by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Connected Medicine (CCM).

The annual survey provides a glimpse into what priorities and concerns healthcare leadership is looking to tackle through digital transformation efforts. This year, leaders from 55 healthcare organizations shared what they view as the most exciting emerging technologies for the industry, what areas of healthcare technology have seen the greatest progress in the last two years and what problem in the industry has the greatest potential to be addressed via digital health technology.

This year marks the fourth time that AI has been cited as the most exciting emerging technology, according to 85% of survey respondents. These participants highlighted the potential of AI to transform administration, operations and clinical care.

For the second year in a row, respondents also indicated that AI has seen the most progress in the past two years. Generative AI, clinical care, ambient intelligence, clinical decision support and large language models were the most mentioned areas in relation to AI's potential to realize positive healthcare outcomes.

However, leaders recognized that AI security and governance remain challenges for the industry.

Alongside AI, health system leadership identified remote patient monitoring and robotic process automation as some of the most exciting innovative healthcare technologies. Further, virtual care/telehealth and interoperability were also cited as technologies that have seen the most improvement in the past two years.

In terms of solving industry problems, respondents noted that patient care, patient access and provider burnout are some of the major challenges that can best be solved with healthcare technology. These problems were also highly cited in last year's survey as health systems prioritized improvements in care continuity and flow, but many organizations have since shifted or split their focus to tackle operational challenges, such as staffing.

Data aggregation and analytics have also presented significant challenges for health systems, which must contend with siloed data that isn't available in easily digestible formats. The survey suggests that these issues might be amplified by healthcare organizations' desire to deploy AI solutions, as doing so requires a strong data aggregation and analytics foundation.

"Health system leaders are understandably excited about the potential for AI to significantly benefit health care by automating time-consuming manual tasks and freeing up clinicians to focus more on patient care," said Robert Bart, MD, chief medical information officer at UPMC, in a press release. "But the excitement also must be balanced with a commitment to high-quality care for patients and protections of their data and privacy."

These findings come after a previous CCM report found that oversight of healthcare AI tools is of growing interest to executives, and a recent survey from The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center revealed that most Americans see the value of AI in healthcare.

Shania Kennedy has been covering news related to health IT and analytics since 2022.