HIMSS CEO Hal Wolf talks about AI, technology and improving care

For years, Hal Wolf has said that the digital transformation of the healthcare industry is critical to offering better patient care around the globe.

Wolf says he sees more people are recognizing that reality. Wolf, the president and CEO of HIMSS (the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), says health systems need to use digital tools to offer health care in areas where it isn’t available.

“People get it now,” he says. “They see it.”

This week, he will focus on this conversation - and many more - during the 2025 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas. The big annual event spotlighting the intersection of health and technology kicks off today.

More than 30,000 healthcare leaders representing hospitals, tech companies, start ups, service organizations, government agencies and other players are expected to attend. Ahead of the conference, Wolf spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® about the evolution of technology in healthcare, the growth of AI, its limitations, and the ongoing challenges in exchanging data.

(See part of our conversation in this video. The story continues below.)

Wolf says he sees more people accepting the need to look at digital solutions to provide care, largely because of the math. There aren’t enough clinicians.

“I have not yet been in a healthcare system that has an abundance of nurses and physicians available to them,” Wolf says.

“The utilization of digital health in order to do predictive modeling at the individual level and resource management, as well as at the system level or the country level, or the hospital level or the clinic level, this is where the emphasis is occurring,” he continues. “We don't have enough healthcare workers, and we won't be able to take care of the demand in this aging population that is all around us. So this is where digital health transformation has to occur.”

Wolf is very enthusiastic about the potential of artificial intelligence to help health organizations ease burdens on their workforce. He sees providers using AI to streamline some administrative work and allowing clinicians and staff to focus more on patient care.

He says conversations about AI are getting more nuanced, as hospitals, providers and other organizations say they want AI tools if they solve specific problems. Health organizations are less inclined to pick up the latest AI tech and then hope to find a use for it.

“When you go back three years ago, AI was on the cover of every magazine, and it still is, to a degree,” he says. “But it was brand new. And you can hear provider leaders who were going into their boardroom and the boardrooms like, we got to be cool, we got to be using AI. Where are you using it? And so people were grabbing what they could.”

“Now it's substantive. Now there are competing applications. Now we're learning how to use it, how to measure it,” Wolf says.

• Read more: How health tech companies drop the ball in pitches to hospitals

AI will clearly be a dominant theme of the HIMSS conference this week.

“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 utilization of AI,” Wolf says. “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," he adds.

Many hospitals and health systems are still cautious about using AI tools to help doctors in reaching a diagnosis, and Wolf says that’s understandable.

“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,” Wolf says. “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.”

Wolf has also been an ardent champion for interoperability in health care, so organizations can share patient data more easily.

Even though there has been much progress made in making it easier for providers and payers to exchange information, Wolf says there’s still work to do. Any patient who has been flustered that doctors or hospitals haven’t shared lab results or information about procedures can attest to ongoing problems in exchanging information.

At this point, the challenges aren’t resting in technology, Wolf says.

“Interoperability is still an issue,” Wolf says.

“You've heard this too many times, maybe, but it's people, process and technology,” he says. “We have the technological capability to do any of this. We need the process, and we need the agreement of the people, to work together in order to ensure that every patient's care is taken care of, and there's an unbroken link between providers and clinicians. We can't afford to be less efficient.”