Driving Discipline in AI Implementation: What Healthcare CIOs Are Saying Now

Healthcare’s AI conversation is changing.

As part of Inneo’s thought leadership forum, we recently gathered a panel of health system CIOs from across the country, and we were able to hear the perspectives of healthcare technology leaders firsthand.

A significant change in evaluation: “It’s not an IT roadmap, it’s the hospitals roadmap that we implement”

In the past two years, we’ve seen AI move rapidly to the core of health systems’ IT strategy, but recent data has indicated that this adoption has driven value unevenly. A recent report in Becker’s found that only 4% of healthcare organizations have achieved scaled ROI from their AI investment. At the same time (and perhaps as a result), CIOs have begun to reflect openly on early implementations: What’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.

“Technology alone does not drive adoption”

There are a few factors that have been driving healthcare leaders towards a more disciplined approach:

First, resource constraints amid a general increase in application demand; secondly, growing expectations from boards and executive teams for AI tools to deliver tangible results; and third, a rapidly shifting vendor landscape that makes it challenging to identify scalable tools with staying power.

One CIO’s experience sums it up nicely, “This isn’t just about adding new tools—it’s about how everything fits into an already complex environment.”

“This is what it’s going to look like in the next 5 years”

What distinguishes leading organizations now is their ability to deploy a well-designed, enterprise-wide initiative while allowing time to integrate into operations.

While this can mean saying “no” to promising solutions, it also means reaping the benefits of maintaining strong alignment organization- and enterprise-wide.

What about ROI? Our CIOs say it can sometimes be “squishy”

Are these AI tools driving measurable value?

More than one CIO described the conversation around measurable ROI as “squishy,” meaning, there are real benefits from these tools, but those benefits show up more in terms of patient and clinician satisfaction, more than they do on the bottom line.

When talking about whether an AI tool was deemed a success, one CIO said, “We did not sell this as a revenue generator for the system but as a cognitive benefit for clinicians and because of that, [it was] a smart bet.”

“Planning for the win”

Coming up this June, the Inneo Alliance will be holding an in-person CIO panel to dig deeper on how successful health systems are integrating AI tools and planning for success. Health System CIOs interested in joining Inneo’s CIO Summit can submit an email request to Alliance@inneo.health to be considered. Some of the topics on the agenda are:

• AI risk and governance
• AI’s impact on IT
• AI and the impact on organizational strategy & culture
• The evolution of the CIO role from IT leader to enterprise strategist