From the first telehealth visit to advancements in remote robotic surgery, healthcare has seen many tools transform care delivery. Now, with artificial intelligence (AI) centered in seemingly every discussion and baked into the latest technologies, the focus on change management is clear.
“There’s little question that we’re fundamentally in a time to listen, to understand and, frankly, get ready for change at an unparalleled level,” said HIMSS President and CEO Hal Wolf in the opening keynote address at the annual HIMSS global conference and expo in Las Vegas Tuesday. “If you don’t like change, you’re absolutely in the wrong ecosystem.”
Before he took the stage, the session highlighted leaders from member chapters in Europe and Asia, emphasizing the international reach of not just HIMSS but healthcare itself. Changing funding environments, workforce concerns and the need to create healthcare access outside of hospital walls are industrywide and not limited by borders.
Similarly, policies and approaches to AI have far-reaching implications. Wolf noted the European Union’s AI Act, which he believes will impact legal frameworks on other continents. And in Asia, a number of healthcare organizations have been pushing forward AI’s technical capabilities in the industry, raising demand for training and deploying new complex systems.
One of those health systems is Samsung Medical Center in South Korea, which was featured during the opening keynote session.
“What fundamentally underlies each and every component of what we do is the reason many of us were motivated to get into healthcare in the first place,” Wolf said. “We think about the goals and the vision of every person that we serve to realize the full health potential of every human everywhere.”
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Teta Alim