AI was the star of HIMSS 2023

Nowadays it seems you can’t go a day without hearing the words ChatGPT or AI, so it won’t come as a shock that when Healthcare Brew asked HIMSS attendees what their main takeaways were, pretty much everyone mentioned implementing artificial intelligence in healthcare.

“The future is about AI. Everybody’s looking to cut costs…and better invest money,” Samuel Santos Tomassini, a medical director at Metro Pavia Health System based in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, told Healthcare Brew at the 2023 Global Health Conference and Exhibition.

But AI is not just the wave of the future—there are already practical uses, Tomassini said. Walking around HIMSS, he found an exhibitor that used AI to analyze medical images and create a preliminary report for radiologists to lessen their workloads. “That’s very innovative,” Tomassini said. “It’s very exciting to see that.”

Alisahah Jackson, president of Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health’s Lloyd H. Dean Institute for Humankindness & Health Justice—an organization dedicated to increasing health equity—said she’s cognizant of potential biases in AI algorithms and how her system can address them. “AI is still created…by people, and as people, we all have implicit bias,” Jackson said. “You have to be mindful of that in your design process.”

There were also a lot of conversations at HIMSS about making sure technology is not exacerbating health disparities, Jackson added. “I think that the equity conversation is much more prevalent…since Covid-19,” she said, adding the pandemic “highlighted some of the disparities that exist in this country.”

Jessica Schappacher, a consultant at HealthArch, a division of UCF College of Medicine in Orlando that works with small, independent medical practices, told Healthcare Brew she learned about using AI ethically. The important thing is figuring out how to use AI as a tool to improve workflow efficiency, but not to completely replace providers when it comes to things like diagnosing patients, she said.