Physicians and other workers in the healthcare delivery chain are always looking for ways to improve workflow. Likewise, hospital and health system leadership always wants to find new ways to develop their workforce — the same people who are looking for better workflows.
All of these executives, caregivers, and workers want to ensure that their organizations are operating at the highest levels of patient safety. Nothing is more important.
And it’s these three areas of healthcare that Stacy Caywood, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, sees AI being empowered in 2025. She says these three areas – workflow, workforce development, Patient Safety – You will benefit more this year from applying different artificial intelligence technologies.
At Wolters Kluwer Health, Caywood was responsible for leading a global company delivering clinical technology and evidence-based systems that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students.
We spoke with Kaywood to get a deeper understanding of her thoughts on AI in 2025.
Q: What will AI do for healthcare workflows in 2025?
A. In 2024, we see the health tech sector really starting to focus the AI excitement of 2023 on tangible systems that make doctors’ workdays easier and more productive. Addressing the clinical burnout epidemic has brought greater focus to the strategies behind many of the health AI technologies coming to market in 2025.
According to the AMA, Nearly half of American doctors Reporting fatigue.
While the burnout epidemic appears to be a monolithic and systemic challenge, what is striking is that it is being approached from a wide range of angles.
Take, for example, transformative technology like the genAI Ambient Listening Transcriber that dramatically reduces administrative burdens, including sometimes cumbersome documentation in the electronic health record and following up on large volumes of emails.
In 2025, look for more synergies and partnerships emerging between AI and complementary technologies that serve as a force multiplier for AI’s potential to enhance efficiency in clinical workflows, provide relief from fatigue and deliver value to health systems.
AI delivers new levels of dynamic range and speed to target multiple tasks and operations. This can offer very different ways of thinking about how we use trusted clinical resources.
For example, more than three million doctors around the world use our clinical decision support tool, UpToDate. What if we “took out” the evidence-based knowledge store and inserted it more seamlessly into the workflow?
AI can help deliver the right content at the right time and at the right time Key points in the clinical workflow, so that doctors never lose track of their steps while leveraging reliable knowledge and recommendations to treat patients. There is very great potential for new synergies like this across resources and across the continuum.
2025 will be about building on the foundations of 2024 to truly begin to unleash the power of AI, reimagining how healthcare teams work and collaborate. We are excited about collaborations like this that help reframe our thinking about how we solve challenges at the point of care and at the backend in administrative processes.
And if we have happier, more satisfied doctors and patients, better staff retention, and better outcomes, I call that a win.
Q: How will AI help develop the workforce this year?
A. Amid staffing shortages, 2025 will see AI help future doctors get on the fast track to practice readiness. Nursing education tools are being completely reimagined to take advantage of the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
For example, artificial intelligence has the potential to enhance nurse licensure preparation so that students learn from mistakes through smarter, more personalized reinforcement.
Look for AI-powered chatbots to transform VR training by providing realistic conversations with virtual patients. AI will also accelerate the development and adoption of clinical practice changes as hospital nursing leaders turn to AI to support the often cumbersome process of updating nursing practice protocols.
In 2025, conjunction Artificial intelligence and virtual reality will dramatically change the way students, residents, and researchers develop essential skills. This also applies to healthcare professionals who are just starting out in practice.
These immersive learning environments can reflect what life will be like when they care for patients. Not only do they build clinical skills and develop clinical judgement, they can work on the ‘soft’ interpersonal skills that are vital to high-quality care. This can help new nurses strengthen their abilities by alleviating some of the growing pains new employees may experience.
Q: Finally, you point to patient safety as a big area for AI to advance in 2025. How so?
A. Health AI technology is largely focused on helping doctors. I expect to see this scope expand as AI plays a larger role in patient safety.
In 2025, look for AI technologies that delve into live health data streams to identify care interruptions that are often overlooked and can impact patient safety. Imagine an AI-powered “assistant app” running 24/7 in the background to identify instances when healthcare providers might fail a potential test or treatment for a patient, or — worse yet — illicitly divert medications from patients, potentially It causes harm to them.
One of the most convincing Applications of AI in patient safety lie in its ability to combat medication errors and drug diversion. Consider an AI-powered application that runs continuously in the background, monitoring anomalies in prescription or dispensing patterns.
This tool can identify suspicious activity, such as unusual prescription habits or discrepancies in medication inventory, and alert those responsible for a potential diversion. Stopping drug diversion with AI is just one example of scaling AI system-wide to comprehensively improve patient safety.
AI can also give health systems the ability to zoom out and scan analytics related to safety measures across their sites. Look for AI-powered predictive analytics that can show how an organization is performing against standards of care and identify emerging trends or anomalies so organizations can plan interventions and improvements.
Altogether, these systemic improvements in patient safety reflect a broader trend: AI is moving from a reactive force in healthcare to a proactive one. Next year, artificial intelligence will begin to help play a new role in efforts to improve patient and physician safety.
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Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
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