At HIMSS25, All that Artificial Intelligence Talk Suddenly Got Very Real
As usual, the HIMSS Conference saw numerous thousands of individuals (according to HIMSS president and CEO Hal Wolf, the estimated attendance this year was 28,000) dashing hither and yon, and spinning all their different plates furiously. The annual HIMSS Conference is nothing if not a huge beehive of intense activity of every possible kind, around healthcare information technology and every related endeavor.
But one of the things that has impressed me most about HIMSS25 in Las Vegas has been the extent to which a tone of resolute realism has seemed to embed itself in every discussion about artificial intelligence. Of course, AI was on everyone’s lips, and it was absolutely clear this year as it had been last year in Orlando, that expectations around AI have reached new heights. Yet at the same time, I heard not a single speaker offer a wildly overdrawn picture of what AI will do in healthcare; instead, I heard speaker after speaker talk in very realistic terms about what’s been achieved so far in the AI sphere, and what the next steps might be in any number of areas of endeavor and development.
Just take the final panel of the day on Monday, during the AI Preconference Forum. With a title like “Synaptic Sync: Building Strategic Technology Partnerships for Effective AI Integration.” With a title like that, it was hard to imagine the discussion would not prove stimulating; and indeed, it was. But even on a panel designed to bring out some idealism, there was at least as much of a feeling of realism. For example, when moderator Neri Cohen, M.D., asked his panelists, “How do we create the partnerships to align to improve care?” Nancy Beale, Ph.D., R.N., of Catholic Health, noted that “There are a lot of stakeholders in the space who don’t even understand what AI is. Ai is not one thing, it’s many things. And we need to ask ourselves, what is the problem we’re trying to solve? And if AI is the right tool, then we should pursue it.”
And Amy Zolotow of quantumShe responded by noting that “The AMA just did an update focusing on the documentation, the ambient listening. We’re seeing a lot of focus on lifting the administrative burden.” Further, Zolotow said, “We’re also focusing a tremendous number of efforts on diagnostics as well. And the data shows we’re seeing a significant increase in provider buy-in. So the opportunity is to focus on the people. And once we start investing in our people, that’s where we’re going to see the most opportunity taking shape.”
And, asked how healthcare system leaders can align their AI governance work with investigational use and true science, Deepti Pandita of the University of California Irvine Health, said that, “In the context of AI governance, those should not be in separate silos; governance should be nuclear, singular, and not divorced. The last thing you want to do is to separate research and clinical governance, because if you’re not aligned, you’ll end up with very different outcomes.”
Clearly, the tone of that panel discussion was realistic and quite clear-eyed, with the panelists focusing on very concrete steps that patient care organization leaders must focus on, in order to reap the rewards of AI adoption over the long run.
Yes, “concrete” describes so many of the discussions I’ve been hearing this week at HIMSS25. And that speaks to this moment, in which patient care organization leaders have made first, and even beyond-first, strides, and are now working forward very pragmatically, with large numbers of them working in such areas as leveraging generative AI to support the creation of draft responses to patient inquiries, on behalf of physicians and nurses, for example. As Irene Louh, M.D., put it during Monday morning’s AI panel entitled ““Navigating AI Integration Through Change Management and Workforce Inclusion,” “AI is so promising for healthcare, for our workforce and teams,” Dr. Lowe said. The core of the healthcare provider is that we want to care for our patients and really improve patient health. Over time, healthcare has made it more difficult because of the structure and function, so any way we can really relieve that burden, is important; there are a lot of opportunities leveraging AI, so this is a really exciting time to be in healthcare and healthcare IT,” she said.
The maturing of discussions around AI was demonstrated in another panel on Monday at the AI Preconference Forum, in a discussion entitled “Lead Your AI Or It Will Lead You.” On that panel, Graham Walker, M.D., of the Permanente Medical Group, put it plainly when he said that “Process is friction. Friction is, do you have to turn or slow down? Process is where that friction exists. What we’re really trying to do with AI, he said, is to reduce the friction stuck on humans, and offload some of that onto AI. You can can’t get rid of all the friction, because you’ll go flying off the roller coaster, but you can get rid of a lot,” Walker said. He cited the example of using analytics to streamline the triaging of emergency department patients, so that EDs are no longer overwhelmed with patient traffic on a day-to-day basis.
These and so many other examples gave attendees a very different flavor from even a year ago, when it comes to AI development and adoption in patient care organizations right now. There’s no question that leaders in hospitals, medical groups, and health systems have in recent months moved into the most challenging, yet also ultimately one of the most fruitful, stages of development and adoption, and that is, the hard, sometimes-slow-ish work of developing initiatives that will really bear fruit. Many hospitals, large medical groups, and health systems are now out of the “honeymoon phase” of AI adoption, in which the world looks bright and beautiful, but also vague in its focus, and are now into the bricklaying phase, in which they are developing algorithmic, generative, and even agentic, AI, step by step by step.
I’ve gotten such a positive sense of things this year at HIMSS25, not because all the problems have been solved, but, rather paradoxically, because all the problems have begun to make themselves known. That is precisely when leaders know that they’ve hit paydirt: they are no longer simply wishing upon a star, they’re building the AI equivalent of the Transcontinental Railroad, sometimes one pickaxe blow at a time. Even discussions on the exhibit floor followed that same general cue; of course, I could only participate in a handful, but I didn’t hear a single vendor promise the Moon, either, this year.
It'll be great to attend HIMSS26—which, it turns out, will also be at the Venetian Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas—and get a sense of the buzz next year. What will next year’s conversations around AI development sound like? Well, everyone will just have to show up again next year and find out.
