This is a preview of the October 15 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursdays. Ahead of Newsweek’s AI Health Summit a few weeks ago, we hosted an executive roundtable to discuss how AI is changing the way hospitals operate. Ashley Beecy has stuck with me.
Beecy—a cardiologist and clinical informaticist who currently serves as chief AI officer at Sutter Health, based in Sacramento, California—was describing the increasingly expensive vendor pitches crossing her desk. That's nine hundred thousand dollars,’” Beecy said. But do I want to build that?” She raised a dilemma I suspect more hospital executives will face as AI development becomes faster and more accessible.
Technology that once required a substantial investment in outside vendors might now be within reach of an organization's own developers. But the actual building is only one part of the build-buy equation. Jennifer Litton, chief clinical research officer at MD Anderson Cancer Center, summed up the challenge: "Easy to build, but hard to sustain." Others questioned whether health systems were introducing new complexity by layering AI onto already fragmented workflows.
Nabil Chehade, chief clinical transformation, innovation and strategy officer at The MetroHealth System, based in Cleveland, Ohio. I heard a similar argument this week from Michael Meucci, president and CEO of health care data company Arcadia, which recently launched Ascent, an AI-enabled platform designed to help health systems and health plans translate data into improvements in clinical and financial performance. "Even though it has become easier to build software than it has ever been, it doesn't mean that you should," Meucci told me.
He encouraged health system leaders to consider partnerships with established technology companies and invest in the organizational changes required to make new tools work. "We spent more money on change management than we did on EHR tech in 2009 to 2013," he said, and now, “we’re in the same wave." Read on for more from my conversation with Meucci in this week's Pulse Check. And as always, I’d love to hear from you: How is your health system weighing the costs of building AI tools against the responsibility of maintaining them?
Email me at [email protected] and let me know. Last week, health care data company Arcadia launched Ascent, a new AI-enabled platform designed to help health systems and health plans move beyond analyzing performance to taking action. Its five solution suites address everything from identifying gaps in patient care and coordinating outreach to managing financial risk, evaluating provider networks and delivering predictive insights.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
