DLT – In the future, distributed ledger technology, such as blockchain, will be an important part of healthcare payments and identity management. Healthcare enterprises can reduce waste, save costs and increase quality of care by using DLT to create a trusted set of data so that people can act on the information rather than having to go back to the source of truth to verify its authenticity. DLT shows great promise for qualifying individuals for insurance benefits, identifying patient payment obligations and credentialing providers, rather than clinicians having to go through a similar process across multiple care settings. The Professional Credentials Exchange (ProCredEx) is a distributed ledger program that cuts—for providers and organizations vetting providers—the time, cost and complexity associated with the credentialing process.3 The Synaptic Health Alliance intends to use DLT to create a cooperatively owned provider data exchange to collect and share changes to provider data, starting with demographics.
AI – When asked to rank which of the DARQ technologies will have the greatest impact on their organization over the next three years, 41 percent of healthcare executives ranked AI number one. AI has perhaps the greatest number of emerging use cases in healthcare. The constellation of artificial intelligence technologies is already having tremendous impact on labor, a substantial line item in healthcare. AI is used in contact centers, for payment activities, medical chart reviews and it can help patients take part in self-service.
Healthcare organizations are using the full collection of AI technologies to change how we interact with doctors. AI will augment diagnoses—it can already identify diseases based on facial features,4 retina scans, X-rays and speech—and it can even help patients to self-diagnose before they walk through the doors of the doctor’s office.
Froedtert Health and the Medical College of Wisconsin partnered with Buoy to deliver an interactive digital tool that allows users to enter their symptoms and receive—in real time—personalized analysis and recommendations for care options. Buoy uses an algorithm to listen and calculate input, and it gets smarter as more people use the tool.5