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Featured topic and speakers
What is the future of AI in health care? What is the future of RPM? Is telehealth increasing or decreasing? How can AI reduce physician burnout?
Our guest is Margaret Lozovatsky, MD, vice president of Digital Health Innovations at the American Medical Association. AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger hosts.
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Speaker
- Margaret Lozovatsky, MD, vice president, Digital Health Innovations, American Medical Association
Transcript
Unger: Hello and welcome to the AMA Update video and podcast. Today, we're talking about the top trends in digital health to watch in 2025. Our guest today is Dr. Margaret Lozovatsky, vice president of digital health innovations at the AMA. She's calling in today from Charlotte, North Carolina, where I think it's not as cold as Chicago. And you've got a fire in the background. I'm Todd Unger, AMA's chief experience officer in Chicago. Welcome, Dr. Lozovatsky. How are you doing today?
Dr. Lozovatsky: I'm great. Thank you for having me.
Unger: Well, it wouldn't be a surprise if I said that AI was one of the hottest trends in health care this year. And we saw a lot of organizations testing out new AI tools. It might not be a tough prediction, but do you think that will continue in the new year?
Dr. Lozovatsky: Absolutely. I think we know, Todd, that AI is not going anywhere, and we definitely think we're going to continue to see more and more conversations in 2025. We know that 2024 was a big year for AI expansion in health care, in particularly ambient listening. We have seen that become almost table stakes in our health care settings, where most organizations are using ambient listening in their health care environment, and our physicians are loving it.
We're also seeing a lot of tech vendors expand their development of AI tools. And so I think, in 2025, we're going to see many new tools come about. Some major categories that people are thinking about are documentation, communications, so translation, thinking about ways to tailor messaging to both our patients and our health care delivery systems.
Summary of charts—summarization is a huge area. Automation tools—things like order entry, looking at extracting follow-ups and automating those. And what I'm most excited about is the fact that we're going to finally get to a place where we can deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. And that is something we've been looking to do for a long time in health care.
Unger: Well, you got to love that a lot of the work that's happening, then, with AI is focused on dealing with a lot of the burdens that physicians face. I mean, you outlined some of the key developments there that just put so much burden on physicians during the workday and after the workday. When you think about how AI will continue to advance—and I'm sure it's not going to slow down—what do you think the evolution is going to look like over the next year? And what are some of the things that we should keep in mind as it gains traction?
Dr. Lozovatsky: I think that there will be less hype in the coming year and a lot more balanced conversation about the how and thinking through the future of these tools, looking at long-term trajectory of how we're going to utilize these tools. We know that AI has been used in health care for a long time. There are many tools that have been deployed, and yet they've often been done piecemeal.
And so I think, in the coming year, we're going to have a lot more conversation about thoughtful implementation. We're going to really focus on the fact that technology is moving very quickly, and yet we haven't necessarily figured out the people and the process. And so that is where I see the focus in the coming year, looking at governance, putting processes in place across health care systems to thoughtfully integrate these tools in a way that they're going to bring the most value.
We know that we need to support both large institutions and smaller practices. And so a lot of focus will also be on health equity, making sure that there is equitable access to these tools and also that we are evaluating all of these AI tools within the health setting, such that we are providing equitable care to our patients. And that, in my opinion, is going to be one of the most important topics. The AMA has principles for ethical, equitable, responsible and transparent development of these tools and also thinking about deploying them in a very thoughtful manner so that we can continue to keep the patient at the center of it all.
Unger: Well, I love, first of all, move beyond the hype and focus on the help. And that sounds like a big improvement in terms of the deployment of this particular technology. Also, I think what you point out there, it's not just about the tech. It's about people, process and operations and really need the ability to catch up with the focus on patient care at the middle there.
Let's move to a different topic, one that we talked about a lot this year. And that is wearables and remote patient monitoring. Dr. Lozovatsky, what innovation will we see in 2025 there? And how is it going to change the way that doctors practice?
Dr. Lozovatsky: Much like AI, wearables and RPM have been around for a long time, and yet we have not necessarily, similar to AI, integrated them into our care models. And so that's what I see happening in 2025, is more conversation about expanding hospital at home, really, truly developing best practices of how to manage chronic diseases, and thoughtfully integrating remote patient monitoring and wearables into the chronic disease management process.
We know that value-based care arrangements will often depend on this integration, and so it's going to be a really important aspect of how we deliver care. We also think that this will have a huge impact on quality of care. So if we are able to touch our patients more frequently and thoughtfully integrate these touch points into their care models, we know that we're going to improve the quality of care. And yet there haven't been a lot of clinical guidelines necessarily.
And so, again, the technology is there, and yet we need to continue to focus on the people and the process. And there are a few key points that we need to keep in mind as we think about RPM and wearables. Interoperability is one of them. We need to make sure that the data flows seamlessly through our technology so that our clinicians are able to evaluate it and also thinking about the fact that there's a lot of cognitive burden that physicians experience today, and all of the data that's coming at them has the potential to contribute to that cognitive burden.
So again, integrating this information into very thoughtful workflows so that our clinicians are able to evaluate this information and it actually drives their ability to provide care and does not contribute to cognitive burden is going to be a challenge we're all going to face. And finally, patient engagement. Patients have the opportunity to participate in their care through wearables and remote patient monitoring. And it's really important for us to continue to engage them in our care models.
Unger: That makes so much sense. Let's go to a third topic, and that's telehealth, which, of course, Accelerated dramatically over the course of the pandemic, have been a lot of discussion about it this year. You mentioned the word "table stakes." I think everybody has now incorporated that into their workflows, of course. How do you see its role in patient care evolving in the year ahead?
Dr. Lozovatsky: Yeah, it's a great question. And it's been interesting to watch how the rates of telehealth have changed over the years. We know that the technology was available well before the pandemic, and we also saw huge increases in telehealth during the pandemic, for obvious reasons. But then what we saw is that the rates came back down.
And so we're asking ourselves the question of why, and how do we, again, thoughtfully integrate telehealth into our care models so that we have some clear clinical guidelines on where to use telehealth modalities and how it can be integrated into the entire care delivery model? There are some concerns in the coming year about potential coverage. So we know that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 had the geographic location and site of service restrictions on Medicare telehealth services that was lifted during the pandemic, and that will end in January of 2025 unless Congress acts before the end of the year.
So there is a concern that Medicare patients will not have access to these services unless there's an action before the beginning of 2025. And we know that it's very important for our patients to have access to these technologies, both in the ambulatory setting, but also in the inpatient settings where there may not be access to specialty care. And this is an opportunity to receive specialty care in remote locations. So we're going to be watching this very carefully. And once again, the technology is available. It's out there. And yet we have a lot of work to do to make sure we have coverage and clear integration into care models.
Unger: Absolutely. OK, we've talked about AI. We've talked about wearables. We've talked about telehealth. What do you think are the other big trends that we're going to see next year?
Dr. Lozovatsky: Well, like you said, we've talked about AI, so I won't mention that. But that will, of course, stay top of mind. I think that, in the coming year, we're going to see more and more emphasis on recognition of some of the burdens that we discussed that clinicians are experiencing. We know that there is a significant cognitive burden that continues to be top of mind in our discussions of wellness.
And so there is a clear opportunity for us to think about leveraging technology to decrease some of these cognitive burdens. And I will mention AI because it is one of the tools that we think can be useful, as we consider all of the data that is coming at physicians.
I recently heard a statistic that, 50 years ago, when we were on paper, clinicians had about seven pieces of data on an ICU patient that they had to keep in mind. Today, it's about 1,300. And so it's very clear that our physicians are not able to keep all of this information in their head. No human can do that. And then you think about wearables and remote patient monitoring and all of this other data that's coming at us. And so to me, in the coming years, technology has the opportunity to synthesize that data into useful information that clinicians can then use to care for patients.
We can't visualize trends the way technology can present them to us. We can't necessarily see all the numbers on every patient at the same time. There's a huge opportunity here for us to think about managing workforce challenges, thinking about our aging population, chronic disease burden, and gathering all of that information that clinicians can use to address all of those issues.
Unger: Well, that certainly gives insight into the term "cognitive burden." Those numbers that you quoted there from 7 to 1,300, I mean, that's just not something that people can do without the kind of assistance that you're talking about from technology. What an important role that would play. And it makes sense, then, that AMA has made a huge commitment to making technology work for physicians. How are we going to continue to do that in the new year?
Dr. Lozovatsky: Yeah, absolutely. And as you know, I take care of patients myself. And so I feel that viscerally in my own clinical practice. And as we've been considering the needs of physicians when it comes to technology, we have really revamped our strategy to make sure we're focusing on research, on resource development and programming that will help optimize existing technology and also look at the innovation pipeline to enhance care delivery and make sure that technology is truly an enabler to support physicians in their ability to care for patients.
So a couple of things that we're working on. We are looking to refresh the digital health research that we did several years ago to make sure we're current with what physicians' needs are with technology. So we're going to be asking a lot of questions of, what are the challenges that physicians are facing today in their use of clinical technologies, and how can we impact them right now? And also looking at what they're thinking about the future.
We'll be continuing to work on AI, of course. That's very top of mind. We have an AI governance toolkit kit coming out, and this is a really important resource because everybody is struggling with how they're going to evaluate these new tools, how they're going to integrate them. So there'll be lots of information on that.
We'll be launching a learning collaborative where we'll be bringing organizations together to discuss some of these issues on AI governance. We're also working on resources about the importance of having the physician voice at the table and the role of clinical informatics in both implementation, integration and optimization of technology. We have a digital medicine coding resource. Lots of questions we receive on these coding modalities. And so that's coming out.
And finally, we have done a lot of work to update our strategy on the Physician Innovation Network, where we will continue to focus on supporting our clinicians in working with the innovators and helping folks that are developing technology really understand what physicians need. So please stay tuned for all of these resources, and we're always happy to take questions and comments from all of our stakeholders on how we can continue to support you in your use of clinical technology.
Unger: Dr. Lozovatsky, one just final question, listening to you talk about all the work that's going into this. It's kind of unspoken that we've had prior rollouts of technology like EHRs, where we kind of weren't ahead of the curve necessarily in thinking about how that would impact physicians and add burden. Do you feel like, in regard to AI, telehealth, some of these other things, that we're out in front of this to an extent that we weren't before?
Dr. Lozovatsky: You know, I really do. And I think there are many reasons why, in the past, we have struggled. Part of it is we didn't know what we didn't know. And what we did is we took paper and we put it into the computer. And much like you don't take a website and put it into an iPhone without redesigning it, that was not an approach we should have taken. And we're all responsible for that because we didn't fully understand the extent of the data that will be available in these systems and the fact that you can't process it the same way.
And I do think that these newer tools will help us take what exists today, rework it in a way that we now understand the importance of workflow integration, and allow us to actually use the power of the computer to help us take care of our patients. And so I am very enthusiastic about the future.
Unger: Well, Dr. Lozovatsky, just the fact that you're at the AMA, and we've got so many people thinking about this particular situation, putting us out in front. I love the idea of the learning collaborative. We're going to tap into so many folks out there and really make this technology work for doctors and for patients. Thanks so much for joining us today. There is, as you said, a lot to look forward to in the year ahead. And we'll be talking to you again soon as the year progresses.
To support the AMA's efforts to make technology work for physicians, we encourage you to become an AMA member at ama-assn.org/join. That wraps up today's episode, and we'll be back soon with another AMA Update. Be sure to subscribe for new episodes, and find all our videos and podcasts at ama-assn.org/podcasts. Thanks for joining us today. Please take care.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and/or do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the AMA.
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