HIMSS 2025: The changing conversation around AI

There have been countless conversations about AI in health care, but the nature of the discussions is changing.

Hal Wolf, president and CEO of HIMSS, said there’s been a notable shift in conversations about how hospitals and health systems are looking at AI. Providers are seeking AI tools that relate to their problems, and are less interested in grabbing the latest shiny object.

A few years ago, the HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition featured introductory and explanatory sessions about AI. The 2025 HIMSS conference, which kicks off Monday in Las Vegas, will also devote considerable time and space to AI.

But now, Wolf says health systems and tech leaders are looking at where AI tools are proving to be effective, and where there’s work to be done. He talked with Chief Healthcare Executive® about the shifting conversations regarding AI.

Q: How's the AI conversation changing over the last couple years?

A: “One hundred percent. So if you go back two years ago, and this will be the third year AI has been prominent, we had an opening conversation and an opening panel that was built around, what is AI, what are its potential successes, what are its potential failures, right? And there are even cautions that were being brought forward in terms of, you know, where's AI going to go? It was very new. It was very upfront. The chat was starting to occur. Last year, we heard of a lot of organizations that were just very much on the forefront of what they were expecting to do.

“This year, you're going to be hearing a lot of conversations of what has already been done and how that's being utilized, and what are the successes in the utilization of AI? And it's really focusing on that operational side, which is where the majority of this work is occurring.

“And also you're going to hear some interesting conversations about AI and its use in clinical decision support. So it's going to be front and center, and it's absolutely seeing a maturity in the use of AI and results and what's working, what isn't, and where the opportunities are. And then we also have within the AI Pavilion, which is new, all the innovation and applications that actually exist.”

Q: Obviously, like you said, more folks are using it on the operational side, like streamlining business or taking some burdens off staff, but I’m starting to hear, at least in some modest ways, more clinical use, at least in, like you said, decision-making support. So is that a shift we're starting to see, maybe a little bit more now than, say, two years ago, or even, like, 12 months ago?

A: “Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I started off 20-plus years ago inside healthcare, building clinical decision support applications. And what does that take? Well, it took knowledge management and how to figure out how to pool knowledge management together, working with our quality departments, figuring out what were important documents to bring forward and make available to the physician, the nurse practitioner, the clinician. “What AI does is it has the ability to synthesize large volumes of information, and that lends support to the decision-making process in conjunction with the clinician, and that's really cool. But this is also where the highest level of caution exists for AI, because this is where biases come in. Where are the opening data sets? What are the assumptions that sit behind it? So that refinement is where you hear the caution, appropriately so, that's brought forward.

“When you turn around you look at the operational level. Now it becomes about efficiency, about value, about bed turnover, predictive modeling of consumption of resources, and that's really fascinating. Because it allows more efficient use of ORs and staff, less people waiting for room time, and where the resources need to be focused. And that's where you see that big bulk in the middle that you'll see a lot about in conference, which just goes immediately to the efficient side of operations.”