The opening session at the ViVE conference, taking place this week at Nashville’s Music City Center, on Feb. 17, had speakers acknowledging the complex and challenging policy and operational landscape around healthcare information technology adoption, along with statements strongly affirming the role of advancing technology promising to help clinicians and patient care organizations deliver better patient care.
On the Country Music Stage, the venue for keynote and other major sessions, Russ Branzell, president and CEO of CHIME, the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, welcomed attendees to the conference on Monday morning. His welcome was immediately followed by that of Rich Scarfo, CEO of HLTH, the other sponsoring organization of ViVE.
After noting some of the healthcare IT breakthroughs that have been taking place, Scarfo told the assembled audience that, “Alongside innovation, we’ve faced challenges” over the past year in U.S. healthcare, making particular mention of “the fires in California,” and how California’s fire catastrophe pointed up “the critical need for preparedness, adaptability and support. Los Angeles was our home last year, and we’re pleased to return next year, February 22-25,” he announced.
“We’re also facing an unprecedented political climate,” Scarfo continued. “It’s important to focus on the people who need healthcare the most, but also often lack access. We’re dealing with mis- and disinformation. Our responsibility is to uphold the integrity of science, champion evidence-based care, and ensure that trust remains the cornerstone of healthcare.”
As for innovation trends, Scarfo noted that, “Last year, AI was a buzzword; this year, AI is still a buzzword. But it’s very real. Interoperability is finally moving from aspiration to reality. You can experience these in dedicated zones right here on the exhibit floor. Focuses on nurse-led innovation, physician-patient relations,” would be among the areas that attendees would hear about this week, along with “clinician-centered innovation, health equity, operational excellence, healthcare policy and administration changes,” all of which are areas of focus at this year’s conference.
Scarfo’s brief speech was followed by a presentation by Joe Petro, senior vice president of health and life sciences at Microsoft, who expanded on the theme of AI advancement.
“The problem we have in AI in general is that a lot of executives believe that it’s a technology problem; but it’s a people, process, and technology problem,” Petro said. In fact, he added, “It’s the people problem that makes failure more likely than success.”
Petro spoke at length of the challenges involved in rapidly improving the accuracy and sensitivity of core tech solutions, including Microsoft’s Dragon Medical/DAX. “When I joined the company 15, 17 years ago,” he said, “Dragon Medical was actually 80-percent accurate. We had 200,000 physicians using it. If you did a pizza order that ended up being only 80-percent accurate, you’d run screaming from the room. So went spent ten years working intensively to get to the level of human agreeance that we have now”—the level of capability that provides for a nearly error-free experience for the physician in terms of the company’s core ambient listening solution. Now, because of the intense work of teams of Microsoft (formerly Nuance) programmers, he emphasized, “The experience of the radiologist in PowerScribe, is blisteringly fas; it’s mindblowing. And on Dragon Medical One, 650,000 physicians and two-thirds of the radiologists. Ambient is going from ambient speech to ambient intelligence. Dragon Medical One is no longer about speech per se. And where all of that is leading, he said, is that “Dragon Medical, PowerScribe, all the tools are going to be brought together into a single unified dial tone” for clinicians.
Meanwhile, Petro told the assembled audience, “In 2023, we risked it all, by announcing that we were going to create a generative AI tool. We weren’t trying to solve the listening and speech problem, but the intelligence problem. If we could get it to work, that would be the breakthrough. From January to June 2023, we created the prototype. And during the middle of 2023, we were the first team in the world to fine-tune GPT-4. Every expert in the world said we couldn’t fine-tune the large language models. We proved them all wrong. And in 11 months, we went from zero clients to 600 health systems and nearly 500,000 physicians, are using the product.”
Importantly, Petro predicted, the future lies in the Microsoft community of solutions companies, including hundreds of AI companies, placing their solutions on a platform based on Microsoft. “Those companies want to get to the endpoint with the physicians, but can’t. If we can open up the DAX endpoint so the 9,500 companies can publish solutions into the DAX endpoint, we can move forward. This will crack the code. Imagine you can go into an app store and download these capabilities. Imagine an iPhone. Imagine if Apple were the only company that can publish apps on the iPhone; we’re talking about being able to open up DAX to partners.” That, he said, could begin to “open up a new layer of proactive intelligence.”
And, Petro emphasized, key words for Microsoft in all this development work are responsibility and trust: “We’re unwilling to put you at risk. The features have to be fully baked and battle-hardened, and we have to know what their performance is. This is where trust absolutely trumps performance.; this is not about a shiny ball,” he said, showing the audience a slide that noted physician time savings and operational efficiency derived from the company’s suite of products.
ViVE continues through the end of Wednesday; Scarfo noted that over 8,000 attendees are gathered for the conference, and more than 700 vendors are participating.
