A hopeful week in the Netherlands with health care’s innovators

I returned to work inspired after spending a week in the Netherlands hearing about the innovations health systems are engaged in across the globe. During EY’s Smart Health Ecosystem Symposium, we saw first-hand how data and analytics are being used to keep people healthier, to ensure access to appropriate treatments and to cut environmental waste while improving the lives of clinicians along with the planet.

Our symposium participants, who work for leading health systems across the globe, brought many examples of how AI and GenAI are being used ? and can be used ? to improve care, but I was taken by the fact that when we asked what they see as the greatest enabler in moving toward a healthier world, they told us: “working together,” “culture,” “data x humans,” “patient-centric approach with open data platforms,” “leveraging technology to maximize human effort and spirit,” and “patients first.” You get the picture.

We visited the Erasmus University Medical Center, a top-notch health care system that realized a smart hospital vision designed around the patient, and systems codesigned with clinicians to reduce their burden. This system has as its goal to use technology to achieve a true balance between capacity and demand, by prioritizing areas that reduce care consumption, identifying avoidable or excess care and by stopping efforts that don’t add value. For example, their research agenda has a focus on identifying less intensive treatment pathways that have equivalent outcomes for patients, saving patients from treatments that can be painful or unpleasant, and saving the system from using resources in ways that don’t actually improve health.

?During the week, we presented new EY research findings that clinicians are sounding the alarm about unsustainable care delivery models that are putting them in positions where they lack autonomy and worry about patient safety. They lament spending appointments facing a computer screen to enter data, only to not see the benefit through actionable data insights that can help them make better care plans for their patients.

Attendees told us the obstacles they see keeping them from deploying digital hybrid care models at scale: “willingness to change,” “incompatible systems,” “funding,” “skills needed” “payment mechanisms,” and “ROI worries.” But the reality is that systems will have to move toward digital hybrid care models to become sustainable.

And of course, AI and GenAI took up much of the conversation during our meetings. We heard how most of the implementation of AI in medicine is stuck in prototype and development, still not deployed at the bedside. The challenge seems to be not in how we develop complex models, but how we safely and responsibly implement at the bedside as well as continuously manage these models over time. Several systems are still grappling with data governance, noting they are accelerating current efforts around data management and standards, platforms and common data models as the pressure to advance to AI governance looms.

The top priority for many of our participants was how to use AI responsibly and ethically, which our presenters addressed. “AI is for life. We have to manage the life cycle of AI, with external validation and transparency. Who is going to do this kind of work in managing AI?” asked Rachel Dunscombe, CEO of openEHR International. Participants discussed the importance of guarding against data bias, not only in the datasets and algorithms, but in the health care workers making decisions off the information.

As far as AI investments in the next 18 months, executives told us they are investing in AI models around certain conditions such as sepsis, in GenAI powered medical scribes, and in building AI infrastructure and skills development programs. Many are midstream in defining AI strategies and governance frameworks. Participants also noted that they are not yet confident in determining where it make sense to deploy traditional AI vs Generative AI vs RPA or a combination therein.

With the urgency of the societal challenges that we all face, from an aging and chronically ill population, health care worker shortages and lack of budgets, the health ecosystem must embrace a purpose driven mindset around data creation, activation and insights for patients and care givers. With humans at the center, collaborative cocreation and preemptive ethical safeguards, the opportunity for AI enabled health transformation is endless! ?