More than 600 health care innovators met in Nashville, Tennessee, last week for the 2023 Consumer Experience & Digital Health Forum. During the conference, attendees participated in interactive sessions, engaging workshops, and thought-provoking discussions led by renowned experts and top voices in digital health. For those who couldn't join us this year, here's a quick recap with quotes that you need to read.
On AI and Tech Adoption
"Technology is an enabler, right, it's not an end goal unto itself. So, whether it's AI or some of our digital tools, it's as good as the content and the ability to engage with our members."
— Alice Hm Chen MD, MPH, Chief Health Officer, Centene Corporation
"Some of the challenges of our U.S. health care system mean that diagnosis is often delayed, and administrative processes are often confusing and burdensome. Generative AI, because we're modeling it in a way, is a bit like Waze for health care. ‘I want to drive from point A to point B. I want to get from sickness to wellness. Tell me the best route.’ It will reduce the burden for payers, providers, and consumers because the data of the patients in the past will inform the care journeys in the future.”
— John D. Halamka, MD, MS, President, Mayo Clinic Platform
“We need you to bring innovative ideas, we need you to bring things that are disruptive, but we need you to simplify them in such a way that they can be adopted.”
— David Holmberg, President & Chief Executive Officer, Highmark Health
"We can now use artificial intelligence for our platform to generate more content, that is more relevant, in a language in which the consumer wants to be spoken to, and at the time in which they want to be engaged at."
— Will Johnson, Vice President & General Manager +Oscar, Modular Solutions, Oscar Health
"We're going to be approaching [AI] as the federal government as: How do you maximize the benefits? How do you ensure that we all are able to take advantage of it — strike that balance — which is very importantly a different message from 'make sure nothing bad happens.'"
— Greg Singleton, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
"The recipe for success for many of the AI and machine learning deployments I've supported is a combination of technology, process, and people. When you talk about an AI project, having a really thoughtful description of the problem that you're trying to solve is often where I see a lot of projects and initiatives fail and fail fast."
— Alya Sulaiman, Partner, McDermott Will & Emery LLP
On Health Equity and Patient-Centered Care
"If we're going to think about using machine learning and AI in health care settings where we need to pay attention to potential inequities, how do we actually create that math so that it actually has intentionality in terms of trying to achieve equitable outcomes?"
— Erich S. Huang, MD, PhD, Chief Science & Innovation Officer, Verily Life Sciences
"Equity and equality are not the same, right? We traditionally have thought about this as... just to equally give everyone a solution... One solution doesn't fit everyone, so you have to think differently in your approach."
— LaShawn McIver, MD, MPH, Chief Health Equity Officer, AHIP
"My son was diagnosed with leukemia… the doctors told me that he had an 85% chance of living. What I didn't realize is one room over another parent was being told that their child had leukemia, and he had over a 90% chance. And the difference was my son was black and that little boy was white. And so when I think about health equity, I think about it from a standpoint of: How do we make sure that no parent has to hear a lower number?"
— Timshel Tarbet, Chief Equity Officer, Providence Health Plan
On Trust Building and Ethical Use of Data
"What AI and predictive modeling can do is allow you to identify certain behaviors in somebody's life that might lead them on the trajectory to having one of these extreme events that's high cost and lowers their quality of life. And if you can identify that behavior early enough, that gives you a chance to do some of these interventions that might nudge them off that path into a better place."
— Peter Blankenship, Data Scientist, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina
"The best way to build trust is to deliver results."
— Ariele Faber, Chief Experience Officer, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
"Quality requires that in the digital mental health space, we begin to measure what we're doing.... Digital's completely set up to do that…we have some really good tools, I think, to improve quality to measure outcomes to get quantitative estimates of what's going on. We just haven't done that.”
— Thomas Insel, MD, Psychiatrist, Neuroscientist, and Author
"If there's one basic principle [with data], it is cool, not creepy. And what I mean by that is it is so easy to get lost in that data and forget that on the other side, there's a human being."
— Jay Sivasailam, Executive Vice President & Chief Growth Officer, UCare
"I believe that any implementation of these types of breakthrough technologies can only happen at the speed of trust. So, how do we engender that trust? It's all about being very transparent about how data is used."
— Vardini Vishwanathan, Chief Clinical Digital Officer, Elevance Health
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