How New Technologies Are Changing the ED

This week’s The Winning Edge took a look at how AI, virtual care and digital health are helping to improve the fast-paced environment of the Emergency Department.

In the fast-paced Emergency Department environment, new technologies like AI and virtual care are creating order out of chaos and improving clinical outcomes as well as provider workflows.

That was the biggest take-away from HealthLeaders latest The Winning Edge panel, which took place on Tuesday afternoon. In the last TWE event of 2025, three health system executives – Anthony Roggio, Medical Director of Telehealth at the University of Maryland Medical System, Allen Hsiao, MD, FAAP, FAMIA, CHIO at the Yale New Haven Health System, and David Chestek, CMIO at UI Health – offered insights into how new technology is making a difference in one of the hospital’s most impactful venues.

Hsiao noted that the ED of the last decade “didn’t have a lot of information” to work with, as clinicians relied either on what their patients could tell them (if they were conscious), what the ambulance or EMS crew could offer, or what they could find in paper charts when they had a chance to look for the.

Now, AI tools are pulling in data from the EHR and other sources, giving clinicians chart summaries and offering care suggestions, and helping stratify patient needs and plan the patient’s discharge or admittance.

Hsaio noted that Yale New Haven is using an ambient AI tool in the ED, capturing data from the clinical encounter and giving doctors and nurses less time on the computer and more time in front of their often-overwhelmed patients and families.

Allen Hsiao, CHIO of Yale New Haven Health. Photo courtesy Yale New Haven Health.

“We’ve gone from an information desert to an information overload and a cognitive burden overload, and now we’re really more of a happy medium where we can focus more on patients,” he noted.

Roggio, whose health system spans the length of Maryland, from busy Baltimore to the rural Eastern Shore, said virtual care and digital health platforms are enabling UMMS’ 11 hospitals and four freestanding EDs to pull in resources they might not have on hand. The platform is especially crucial in enabling ED clinicians to connect with specialists, from neurologists to psychiatrists.

This means patients access care much faster, reducing those long hours of waiting for a specialist to call or drop in or trying to make an appointment weeks or months later.

‘We don't have enough resources to service all of our patients, and [that] results in prolonged wait times and lots of patients coming in who may decide to leave without being seen, which of course is a bad thing,” he noted.

Roggio said tech platforms also give them the ability to improve patient throughput and make staffing plans.

Anthony Roggio, Medical Director of Telehealth at the University of Maryland Medical System. Photo courtesy UMMS.

“We're taking [predictive] analytics to figure out where patients should go and [facilitating]  transfers within our system, and to putting patients in certain beds,” he said. “And when we can expect this next patient to come through, or when we can expect a bed to be made for someone who's not even here yet.”

Roggio said UMMS is also working with ambulance and EMS departments, especially in rural places, to improve care at the scene.

“Many emergency medical service groups have been exploring those options where they are doing a screening or a telehealth visit with the patient when the ambulance crew arrives, oftentimes with an emergency trained physician to assess the patient's needs,” he said.

He noted that virtual collaboration can help avoid costly and unnecessary transports for “very low acuity type patients, where maybe they're only looking for a medication refill or they have a sprained ankle or something like that - where we can get them to a more appropriate setting.”

Chestek noted that AI tools are giving clinicians access to data that not only helps to diagnose a patient, but map out a game plan.

“Most clinically practicing emergency medicine physicians don't have that luxury [of waiting for a specialist to check in or going off to check the medical literature],” he said. “And so this allows you to have almost any sub-specialty as a consult for a quick question or a quick step check. I think that is as it improves it’s going to be extraordinarily game changing.”

In addition, he said, AI can create better discharge instructions.

“I don't have to give a patient a canned, pre-made, educational set of chest pain instructions that doesn't say anything at all really,” he said. “I can give somebody something that is tailored to a 65-yea- old African American female with five grandchildren at home that she's the primary caregiver of, and [I can] give specific instructions that relates to that person. It’s the ability to be more personalized.”

David Chestek, CMIO at UI Health. Photo courtesy UI Health.

One other area of improvement is in communication. Many health systems are moving to digital communications, like secure text messaging, and moving away from the base radio approach. This means ED staff can collaborate with each other via text message, while EDs can send messages back and forth with ambulance and EMS crews.

As with any new technology installation in healthcare, the biggest challenges aren’t with the technology, but with people and processes.

“The first hurdle is you always want to show them that it's not going to slow them down. … It’s meant to help them with their throughput and workflows,” Roggio said. “I think, also, emergency docs are sometimes a little more skeptical of new technologies because of the potential for disaster. We don't want to take any chances when it comes to our patients. We want to make sure that they get the care that they need, and some tools help and some tools don't.”

Roggio and Hsiang both said it’s important to introduce new technology gradually, so that clinicians have an opportunity to get used to it, rather than mandating it or telling them they need to use it now. Roggio said he often relies on physician champions to give him insights into how each ED is working.

“Finding a champion in each of these emergency departments has been the way to go,” he said, “because that person can do the hard work for you, and speak on the level of the people who are working there - because, you know, I don't know from beans what my Upper Chesapeake providers have to deal with on a given day. The patients that they see in Aberdeen are probably a lot different than the patients I see in Baltimore. So their challenges are different as well.”

At the end of the day, the panelists said, it’s all about data and access. EDs are using new technology to harness that data for better care management and coordination, and they’re using new tools to reduce the barriers to access that patients often face. That means, ironically, using tech to take away the tech that separates doctor and patient.

“We're trying to create a more digital world, but a world that's also more personal and more patient-centric,” Hsiao pointed out.