There are a lot of new ideas and technologies being made to better the world of healthcare. These new ideas and technologies are only successful, however, if enough people collectively take notice and talk about it in order to make it trend. But in a time when our industry is facing high staff overtime and burnout, there’s simply no way that we can be aware of everything happening in health IT. This then results in certain topics being neglected – regardless of their quality and how much you would personally like to see them trend.

So what trend isn’t being talked about enough? What should be trending right now in health IT? To help shed a light on these topics, we reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to see what health IT trends they believe deserve more attention. The following is what they had to share with us.

Mateusz Krempa, COO at Piwik Pro

Broader reflection and discussion on HIPAA-compliant technologies would help the industry see beyond popular solutions and identify tools that balance successful data processing with regulatory requirements. Areas to be focused on: Data Ownership – only this guarantees that patients’ data is safe and secure. Ownership means an organization knows where the data is stored and who has access. This excludes unauthorized data transfers to third parties (e.g., advertising platforms). Privacy features for HIPAA compliance would mean means and features that allow organizations to exclude PHI from data collection or redact the PHI to make it anonymized.

For privacy law compliance, a solution should offer tools to align with various privacy regimes, such as opt-out mechanisms or consent management. Willingness to sign BAA – this regulates the responsibilities of healthcare organizations and the vendor. The vendor will safeguard the data similarly to what the orgs would if doing on its own. Analytics and marketing features – it’s a popular misconception that compliance vastly trims other capabilities of analytics/marketing products.

Patrick Rooney, Chief Financial Officer at Net Health

As factors such as inflation and workforce shortages continue to impact the healthcare industry, organizations should prioritize setting themselves up for financial success. Leveraging data and technology the right way will be instrumental in reducing costs and spurring financial growth without adding complexity for staff. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to improve financial forecasting, risk management, and decision-making processes while automation can streamline routine operations and improve productivity to reduce costs. There will be an increased focus in the healthcare industry on investing in digital infrastructure and technologies, such as AI and automation, to support staff by streamlining and simplifying workflows to fuel financial growth.

Dr. Lawrence Werlin, Board Certified Reproductive Endocrinologist at HRC Fertility

Fertility preservation will be one of the most significant fertility topics in 2024. Major companies like Apple and Google now offer fertility benefits to their employees and acknowledge the growing demand for Gen-Z and Millennials to build their families on their own timelines. It’s a competitive advantage for companies to target and retain top talent. I predict the momentum will continue for organizations to add these benefits next year. When accompanied by accurate information from a credible expert, this will be a positive trend that allows for proactive family planning and greater career longevity.

Heather Bassett, Chief Medical Officer at Xsolis

With ongoing policy changes and ambiguity surrounding the Two-Midnight Rule and CMS 4201-F going into effect, there is an increased need for the shared, objective determination of medical necessity between payers and providers regardless of position. Data transparency and AI-backed technology will play an even more critical role in facilitating this. Leaders on both sides are increasingly seeking ways to reduce friction or improve operational efficiency, but such applications of AI must also be transparent, tested, and proven to build trust over time. Ultimately, this will help improve payer-provider relations.

Colin Banas, MD, MHA, Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst

Although interoperability between healthcare systems is nominally ‘solved’ by the ONC’s project to require standardized data-sharing capabilities, hospital IT teams continue to face challenges in making interoperable data usable by the receiving systems—cleaning up dirty data and filling gaps in clinical information. One challenge is extensive nomenclature differences across physician practices, hospitals, and pharmacies. Another challenge is the continuing prevalence of free text rather than codified data. Machine learning and AI can help with this, but the actual test for health IT professionals is how to see through the pie-in-the-sky promises from so many AI solutions to recognize the practical and proven solutions using AI to optimize data and prevent patient harm.

Nick Stepro, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Arcadia

There are several trends in health IT that I see few people talking about:

1. We won’t see accelerated adoption of interoperability standards (e.g., FHIR, HL7). The combination of evolving data lakehouse architectures and powerful generative AI unlocks unprecedented value in loosely structured and unstructured data and, increasingly, machines are much less discriminating between a finely structured FHIR document and a poorly scanned PDF—and the latter may be richer than the former.

2. We won’t see healthcare organizations pour more money into data science. Counterintuitively, the emergent capabilities of large language models will obviate the need for in-house data scientists to develop models. Instead, we’ll see investment in traditional analysts and application engineers who can build workflows around finely tuned public models available via friendly APIs.

3. While we will certainly see a flurry of AI startups in healthcare, we won’t see any broad success in new foundational model development beyond the tech behemoths (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta). The scale and capital required to compete is just too great. What we will see is success for startups enabling companies to get the most out of models from the big players.

Zach Evans, Chief Technology Officer at Xsolis

Cyber threats were on the rise in healthcare prior to COVID, a concerning trend that has escalated and continued post-pandemic. Adopting a cloud-based security approach can promote agility in meeting customer needs and improve the resilience of a healthcare organization’s cybersecurity response. If a ransomware attack happens, an organization can respond much faster in the cloud than with on-premises infrastructure and will have a better chance of accessing protected backups. Healthcare organizations are dependent on data insights to provide critical and timely services to their patients, so mitigating disruptions that can have a negative impact on clinical outcomes is paramount.

Lindsey Klein, Chief Strategy Officer at QGenda

Anything related to the non-physician/provider workforce should be trending in health IT. Almost everything we see in healthcare tech innovation falls into two buckets: patient-focused, or operations optimization-focused. While those are the right macro buckets, the clinical operational improvements are focused almost solely on physician/provider workflow optimizations (patient documentation, AI to improve diagnosis and treatment pathways, etc.).

This focus is missing a critical aspect of the equation because nursing and clinical support workforce is currently the most stressed and overworked and is likely to be the breaking point of healthcare organization’s ability to serve patients. From what I see, organizations still spend very little of their innovation mindshare thinking about improving the experience and operations of that employee base; often just continuing to do what they’ve always done to serve this workforce while applying small Band-Aids to address challenges. I’d like to see organizations apply the same rigor they do to improving the provider experience and patient throughput to enhancing the day-to-day for nursing and support staff.

Ariel Gamiño, Lead AI and Machine Learning Engineer at epocrates

One major aspect of health IT that deserves more attention is leveraging technology to improve mental healthcare access and quality. In particular, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants have huge potential for providing initial mental health screening and support. These could listen empathetically to patients, have conversations to evaluate mood and state of mind, provide counseling or coping strategies, and refer to human specialists as needed.

Developing more sophisticated AI that can understand emotions and have nuanced exchanges could make mental health treatment more available and reduce stigma. With the pandemic spotlighting the prevalence of conditions like anxiety, depression, and trauma, increased focus on AI-enabled mental health tools could provide many patients with the help they need but aren’t seeking out.

Bobbi Weber, Vice President of Product Marketing and Customer Success at QliqSOFT, Inc.

Prioritizing treatment of the root cause of healthcare worker burnout is in the best interest of patients and staff. Leaders need to move beyond offering work stress-related coping strategies. Operational waste found in inefficient and frustrating processes and workflow is a huge contributing factor to staff burnout, compelling trained workers and professionals to leave their jobs in droves. Left behind are staffing shortages and workload problems that drive up billions in costs and degrade the patient experience. Leaders must focus on eliminating manual repetitive work to let employees work at the top of their license and spend more time with patients. Prioritizing employees’ well-being in tandem with streamlining administrative complexities is a major win-win for everyone.

Joan Butters, Co-Founder and CEO at Xsolis

Payer-provider alignment is a historic challenge that reached new heights in 2023, thanks to record inflation coupled with continued revenue and staffing deficits. In this challenging climate, it’s become even more clear that something’s got to give. 2024 will see prioritized investment in technology solutions that get providers and payers on the same page – interoperable, shared data views that encourage more collaboration and partnership – as a means to a better end: a more sustainable healthcare system.

Kem Graham, VP of Sales at CliniComp

In 2024, an exciting alternative for independent, community, and cost-conscious healthcare entities is a System as a Service (SYaaS) EHR model. SYaaS uniquely allows healthcare organizations to clearly realize the cost of deployment at the outset of procurement, eliminating the uncertainty and overhead of backend services expenditures. This seismic shift in the EHR landscape is certain to provide exceptional opportunity, facilitate improved patient outcomes, and streamline healthcare delivery at the bedside.

So many health IT trends to think about here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote and thank you to all of you for reading this! We could not do this without all of your support. What health IT trends do you think more people should be talking about? Let us know either in the comments down below or over on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!