Learning From Our Digital Past: Guiding AI’s Future in Healthcare

As healthcare leaders examine AI solutions, they stand at a familiar crossroads—one they have navigated before with electronic health records and the internet. This session will highlight how leaders can learn from healthcare’s digital past to inform current and future healthcare leadership.

From EHR implementations, healthcare learned that technology superimposed on existing workflows without reimagining processes creates burden rather than benefit. Many hospitals purchased sophisticated systems but failed to invest equally in change management, end-user engagement and workflow redesign, resulting in clinician burnout, inefficiencies and unrealized potential. With AI, hospitals can avoid this same pattern by designing and implementing pathways where technology and humans work together effectively.

Internet adoption in healthcare revealed the dangers of fragmented approaches. Organizations adopted websites, patient portals and telehealth as isolated projects rather than elements of a cohesive digital strategy, creating disjointed patient experiences and missed opportunities. As we implement AI tools, we must envision them as interconnected elements of a unified digital ecosystem.

We will focus on how healthcare’s past demonstrated that technology adoption is fundamentally a leadership challenge. With all transformative technologies, hospitals must go through several years of well-managed learning about the value of the technology and the management steps needed to realize it. Using specific examples, we will identify that healthcare organizations who have succeeded do not necessarily have better technology. They have better leaders. Today and tomorrow’s healthcare leaders must create cultures receptive to change, balance innovation with safety and recognize that technology enables true organizational transformation.

This dynamic and interactive session will touch on lessons learned to identify ways forward for hospital executives as they begin to embrace AI’s transformative potential. Using a “fireside chat” approach, Christy Harris Lemak, PhD, will interview and discuss these issues with three industry experts. These nationally recognized leaders have experienced the digital past and now work in their own organizations and across the industry to navigate AI adoption. We will include at least 30 minutes of robust audience questions and answers.