How AI Drives Healthcare Innovation: HIMSS Survey
According to Deloitte, 2019-2023 global healthcare spending will rise at a compound annual growth (CAGR) rate of 5 percent, nearly double the estimated 2.7 percent in 2014-2018.
At the same time, healthcare systems need to reduce the costs of delivering high-quality and effective patient care to achieve financial sustainability. A typical $2 billion US healthcare provider with a current 3 percent margin that maintains the status quo, says Deloitte, “will likely see margin degradation of 6 percent to a negative operating margin of 3.5 percent by 2023, based on actuarial analyses and market trends.”
Healthcare organizations are turning to advanced digital technologies—like cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine/deep learning (ML/DL), secure and open platforms, interoperability, and data fabrics, for example—to deliver the cost savings and operational efficiencies that will pave the way for newer, more cost-effective care delivery. In fact, one analysis shows that, by 2026, AI is expected to create up to $150 billion in annual savings for the healthcare industry.
To better understand where healthcare systems are at, in terms of their cloud and AI adoption, Logicalis partnered with NetApp and the Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society (HIMSS) to survey them. We wanted to know:
- What is the current status of their AI adoption? What is the perceived adoption horizon?
- What are the challenges that organizations face on their path to AI?
- How is the transition to cloud positioning organizations to better take advantage of AI?
Results: AI figures in cloud deployment strategy
Like other industries, healthcare systems have dramatically increased their adoption of cloud and AI solutions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked C-suite executives (77 percent) and directors (19 percent) about how their cloud strategy enables AI. Seventy-five percent report that enabling AI is a primary or prominent factor in their cloud deployment strategy.
They also reported that transitioning compute and storage workloads to the cloud would enable them to lower their overall costs, increase their data processing capacity, better enable their in-house AI initiatives, streamline clinical workflows, and make it easier to access backups.
And we found that 98 percent of respondents were currently taking steps to implement AI, machine learning, and deep learning. What steps? Most (59 percent) were increasing storage capacity, while:
- Integrating with third-party AI solutions – 49 percent
- Normalizing data across disparate systems – 48 percent
- Creating an enterprise-wide AI strategy – 46 percent
- Investing in a faster computing and network infrastructure – 45 percent
Read the complete HIMSS executive brief.
NetApp: AI solutions for healthcare
The success of AI and ML/DL depends on breaking down data silos and accessing and analyzing large amounts of structured and unstructured data from disparate sources—such as clinical applications, IoT/IoMT, genomics, insurance claims engines, research databases, etc. This data can then be used to identify patterns, develop predictive insights, and enable increasingly accurate autonomous systems in pursuit of greater efficiencies and better patient care.
NetApp helps accelerate your journey to AI. You can integrate your data fabric and streamline the flow of data from ingestion and collection at the edge, to preparation, training, and inference at the core, to analysis and tiering using the world’s biggest clouds. NetApp’s unified data management supports seamless, cost-effective data movement across the hybrid multi-cloud environment.
“Keep options open and realize the promise of this multi-cloud world,” says Esteban Rubens, NetApp’s Healthcare AI Principal. “It doesn’t matter where the data lives; what matters is that it can be harnessed for the most benefit.”
NetApp’s world-class partner ecosystem provides full technical integrations with AI leaders, channel partners and systems integrators, software and hardware providers, and cloud partners—all to help you achieve your business and clinical goals. Some use cases:
Logicalis: Your NetApp and healthcare solution experts
Part of NetApp’s world-class partner ecosystem, award-winning Logicalis combines its in-depth knowledge of NetApp solutions with deep healthcare expertise to deliver cloud solutions that enable your organization to increase its operational efficiency, lower costs, and leverage the all-important data needed to help improve healthcare outcomes and deliver better patient care.
Leveraging your existing assets, we can help you prepare for innovation by modernizing your infrastructure, increasing storage capacity, normalize data across disparate systems, and integrate with third-party solutions to support your business and clinical goals.
Download the infographic for more survey results. For more information, consider a tailored executive workshop or contact us.