Top Takeaways from HIMSS

Belong Health's Mac Davis and Jeff Cox were on the ground in Chicago for #himss23 global conference, learning and sharing with 40,000 other influential health information technology professionals. Here are a few key takeaways from this year's event.

AI was the talk of the town. Almost without fail the most well attended sessions had to do with CHAT-GPT and generative AI, but underneath all of the excitement was the real AI theme. No one is really using it, everyone is sprinting to develop their plans to use it, and everyone is terrified they don’t have the talent in their organizations to drive successful use case implementations. 

• Nine of ten CIOs from leading health systems and large payers we talked with said they were not using AI in any meaningful way for their orgs. The lone CIO using AI said they were using it for edge cases with questionable ROI and no meaningful increase in their team’s productivity or patient care.
• However, developing a plan for generative AI was in the top three priorities for all ten CIOs. In one CIO’s words, “A plan, ANY PLAN!” Everyone should take some comfort knowing that we are all at the beginning of the AI journey. 

Revenue— for provider, payers, and everyone in between. Over the last few months some of the largest health systems in the country have posted large net losses including Kaiser Permanente ($4.5 billion), Mass General Brigham ($2.3 billion), UPMC, AdventHealth, Cleveland Clinic, MultiCare Health System, Cano Health, CommonSpirit Health, and others. Similarly, payers are seeing increased compliance overhead and model changes that are designed partially to depress revenue in Medicare Advantage like risk adjustment and Stars.

• At HIMSS we presented the importance of compliant risk adjustment practices to appropriately fund health plans to achieve 5-Star status. We also stressed the interconnected importance of appropriate risk programs to drive quality, growth, care management, and benefit design.  
• Besides securing revenue, the other side of the equation is ensuring your medical spending is going to places that help reduce future expense and preventable health issues for our patients and members. We are in an era of “do more with less”. But really it is about rewarding the delivery of high-value care. In a panel discussion with CareAllies and Tandigm, we agreed our role is to help providers feel comfortable taking on more aggressive total cost of care risk arrangements by providing the support legacy payers have struggled to provide. With greater risk comes greater reward. It is clear that both payers and providers need to share in the revenue gains that come with better management. 

Health equity measurement is maturing. For the last few years health plans and health systems talked about health equity “investments” that they treated more like charitable outreach programs. An untold amount of investment went towards well-intentioned causes without clear measurement criteria or infrastructure to collect information about the effectiveness of the intervention. At HIMSS multiple speakers discussed the deployment of SDOH data collection strategies across their care delivery and care management organizations that used to be limited to academics and research groups. 

• Research done by Deft Research, The Commonwealth Fund, ATI Advisory, and others has clearly quantified that Medicare Advantage benefits in food security, medical transportation, housing, and community health staffing consistently show positive ROIs. This is the beginning of a new data boom as the implementation of these strategies allows organizations to put this data to work to drive consistent, effective SDOH interventions.  

Cybersecurity was the most common topic, having more sessions than interoperability. The pandemic demonstrated that more care is going to happen virtually and, consequently, there is more PHI data moving. Combined with an environment where bad actors have gotten more aggressive the topic is more relevant than ever before. 

• According to the FBI, the healthcare industry was targeted with more ransomware attacks than any other industry in 2022, resulting in major service disruptions.  Everyone in healthcare knows what HIPPA is. But it's clear we need more general awareness around cyber strategies to protect against breaches. Cyber strategy awareness is also necessary for all healthcare workers using digital tools to support continuity of business.