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Major healthcare events of 2024

Aditi Verma
• December 5, 2023

(12 min read)

Healthcare workforce shortages have reached crisis proportions in recent years and are anticipated to remain beyond 2024, compelling healthcare organizations to do more with less as their financial condition has deteriorated.

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Meanwhile, healthcare professionals realize the importance of addressing rising health inequities as well as environmental problems in order to make health systems viable and accessible to everyone. These ten healthcare technology trends demonstrate how advances in AI, virtual care, and other areas may benefit healthcare workers, patients, and society as a whole.

1. Workflow automation and optimization enabled by AI

Healthcare companies are adapting their workforce strategies to attract and retain talent, offering greater flexibility to healthcare professionals who want a better work-life balance while battling recurring staff shortages. They are also increasingly relying on automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up routine procedures and measurements, reducing the pressure on healthcare professionals.

Integrating artificial intelligence into CT scanners, for example, can automate some of radiologists’ most time-consuming tasks, allowing them to spend more time focusing on the patient. Artificial intelligence-based reconstruction produces the high image quality that radiologists need for a precise diagnosis. With comprehensive 3D quantification, cardiac modeling, and other automated metrics, AI can also reduce the complexity of cardiac ultrasound. This helps sonographers take and analyze images correctly, allowing doctors to provide better and more efficient heart care. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence in healthcare will give a boost to automation in the coming years.

In the coming years, automation will get a further boost from the rise of generative artificial intelligence in healthcare. A recent study by Bain and Company found that healthcare leaders see the greatest near-term opportunities for generative artificial intelligence to reduce the administrative burden on staff and improve operational efficiency. Some of the most promising applications include automated documentation and  patient visit summaries, freeing up clinicians’ time to focus on more valuable tasks.

2. Virtual collaboration to address workforce and skills

A health technology trend that goes hand-in-hand with automation is the use of virtual collaboration to mitigate the effects of staffing and skills. The expected growth in this field has the additional advantage of improving access to care in peripheral and rural areas where specialists are typically lacking.

A good example is the ongoing deployment of radiology operations control centers. This cloud-based hub-and-spoke model enables virtual shoulder support from experienced imaging technologists to their less experienced or specialized colleagues in remote locations while the patient is on the scanner table. Similarly, real-time virtual collaboration with ultrasound can expand the scope of specialty care by allowing doctors to  communicate with their team and patients remotely, whether they are in a hospital, clinic, or remote satellite office. In both cases, virtual collaboration can help make knowledge more widely available to achieve equity across the healthcare system.

Tele-intensive care (or tele-ICU) programs  also continue to be popular as healthcare providers increasingly look to seamlessly integrate virtual care to improve bedside care. Remote intensivists and nurses can use AI-based monitoring technology to reduce the burden on on-site staff, complementing rather than replacing them.   

As the healthcare workforce ages, such virtual collaboration models create new career opportunities for older and more experienced healthcare professionals. They can guide and mentor their younger fellow students at a distance and retain valuable knowledge and experience that might otherwise be lost as more doctors decide to retire early and more nurses  plan to leave health care.

3. Using technology to address health disparities

Billions of people around the world still lack access to the health services they need, and even in countries with well-funded health systems, health disparities are widening. The need for more equitable and sustainable health care has never been more urgent.   

The pressure to address health disparities has led leaders to increasingly look to health technology to help fill many of health care’s most pressing gaps while  reducing the industry’s environmental impact. Partnerships to advance health equity are key to leveraging technological innovation in ways that fulfill the promise of digital transformation to improve care, especially  in marginalized and underserved communities.

Philips’ recent collaboration with Emory University is one example of how technology can be used to address health disparities. With the help of the Philips Lumify portable ultrasound and the Philips HeartStart AED, the Farm Worker Family Health program is helping to expand access to health care for Georgia’s vital and vulnerable farm workers. In another partnership with Heart  Australia, the mobile hospital on wheels solution will bring diagnostic imaging services such as X-ray and CT scan services to hard-to-reach  areas. In partnership with New York’s Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, a similar mobile solution provides life-saving cancer screening to those who would otherwise not  have access.    Going forward, health technology companies will need to innovate in ways that deliver more equitable and sustainable health care—not just for some, but for all. And achieving this goal requires a new kind of collaboration between different sectors.

Healthcare Events of 2024

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