With its Digital Health Summit, the annual Consumer Electronics Show is giving healthcare leaders a look at the potential for truly integrated care.
As CES 2025 kicks off this week in Las Vegas, healthcare’s innovation and transformation leaders are keeping an eye on the Consumer Technology Association’s (CTA’s) Digital Health Summit, as well as the various consumer-facing technologies, tools, and toys that could play a role in the health system of the future.
Healthcare has long claimed a part of the CES experience, starting with connected devices and apps designed to help consumers manage their health. Over the past several years, though, healthcare executives have joined the party, looking for tools and strategies to bridge the gap between the consumer and the patient.
Rene Quashie, CTA’s Vice President of Digital Health, says the event gives healthcare leaders an opportunity “to explore the future of health tech in the context of a broader, interconnected ecosystem.”
“Unlike traditional health conferences, CES brings together the full spectrum of technology innovators across industries, creating an environment where healthcare solutions are discussed alongside advancements in AI, robotics, IoT, and beyond,” he said in an e-mail to HealthLeaders. “This convergence fuels cross-industry collaboration, helping healthcare leaders identify transformative technologies and adapt them to meet the needs of consumers, clinicians, and payers.”
That integration should continue as health systems and hospitals push more services out of clinical settings and into the home, and as care providers develop programs to track their patients at home and manage care remotely. Strategies like remote patient monitoring (RPM) and Hospital at Home will rely more on consumer-friendly devices as that scale up and build sustainability.
Against that backdrop, there are opportunities for healthcare throughout the CES exhibit halls, which span both the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Venetian Expo. The smart home concept is an intriguing venue, with AI-enabled devices, sensors and appliances that can be used to monitor consumer activity and health, even diet, sleep, behavioral health and bathroom activity. Automobile manufacturers are including health apps and sensors in their new models, and even the popular gaming area includes games and gaming platforms that can be used for healthcare.
Quashie says the theme for healthcare-related events and vendors at CES this year is “the future of health,” with topics including AI, digital therapeutics, genomics, wearables, women’s health and workforce issues.
Will leaders get the answers they need from CES to advance their orginizations? I'll be there to report.
Here's what CNOs were reading in 2024 on HealthLeaders.
2024 was quite the year for healthcare.
This year, CNOs and other nurse leaders faced a wide array of challenges, from expanding the nursing workforce through recruitment and retention, to tackling new technologies like AI and virtual nursing, and to addressing nurse burnout and wellbeing. Many of these issues are expected to continue, while more will appear on the horizon in the new year.
Here are the top five nursing stories from HealthLeaders in 2024.
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HealthLeaders’ most-read stories of the past year highlighted an interest in virtual care and care management, especially when connected to CMS coverage
The growing market for virtual care dominated HealthLeaders’ most-read innovation stories of 2024.
Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers were fighting for the attention of empowered patients/consumers and facing competition from employers looking to control health plan costs and disruptors eyeing the convenient care market. The resulting battle for primary care saw a proliferation of virtual care platforms, giving patients access to primary care at the time and place of their choosing.
2024 saw an expansion of that strategy, with virtual care platforms for specialist consults, chronic care management, remote patient monitoring and other services.
The top story for the past year focused on one of the biggest disruptors in that market, Amazon, which launched Health Condition Programs in January. The online platform matches consumers to relevant health and wellness companies based on their browsing and shopping habits, enabling consumers to create managed care plans based on their health concerns and health plan coverage.
“Amazon wants to make it easier for people to get and stay healthy, and part of that is making it easier to discover the products, services, and professionals that can help them do that,” Aaron Martin, Amazon’s vice president, said in a press release issued by Omada Health, a digital health company that is partnering with Amazon to offer diabetes prevention and care and hypertension care services through the new platform. “Many aren’t aware of the healthcare benefits they are eligible for, that are typically no cost or subsidized by their employer or insurance plan. When customers are shopping for health-related products on Amazon, we can surface these benefits to provide even more support in improving their health, at no additional cost.”
Healthcare providers are bullish on care management as well, and they want to use virtual care and digital health to create those services for their patients. The traditional sticking point has been reimbursement: providers won’t fully embrace new technology unless they’re paid to use it.
The second-most popular story this year was the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) new program to support providers using virtual care and digital health to create value-based care programs. The Advanced Primary Care Management (APCM) model, with HCPCS codes included in the 2025 Physician Fee Schedule, incentivizes clinicians to use technology to create care management pathways around their patients, a key strategy on the journey to value-based care.
“While these new codes come with a number of administrative requirements, the APCM codes provide additional opportunities for practitioners to collect reimbursement for care management services, some of which they may already performing,” Alexandra Shalom, senior counsel with the Foley & Lardner law firm, said in a November blog. “HHS has long noted that effective primary care services and relationships are critical to improve health equity and access to care and as early as 2014, CMS recognized care management as a key component of primary care. As such, CMS’s goal in offering these codes is that it will allow practices to enhance or expand their care management services, which in turn will improve population-level mortality and reduce disparities.”
The third most-read story veered off in a different direction, though still focusing on the idea that providers are using virtual care and digital health to beef up their patient engagement efforts. A panel session at the HIMSS24 conference and exhibition this past March centered on how smaller health systems and hospitals, struggling to make ends meet and faced with competition, are changing their business model to focus on care management and preventive care, rather than ‘sick care.’
“A great deal of our future is in the outpatient side,” Tressa Springman, SVP and chief information and digital officer at LifeBridge Health, a five-hospital system based in Maryland, said during a panel session.
She noted that more than 50% of the health system’s quality-based reimbursement score for the state is focused on the patient experience, making that more important than actual clinical care. So they’re now setting their sights on access, convenience, and outpatient interactions.
“We’re really focusing on the community,” she said.
The draft and final PFS also gave advocates of digital therapeutics some good news: New HCPCS codes that will enable providers to seek reimbursement for some behavioral health treatments that use FDA-approved devices.
On the other hand, CMS did include some small improvements in telehealth coverage, but also said it wouldn’t extend most pandemic-era waivers to telehealth coverage and access. The news stunned telehealth advocates and led to coordinated lobbying efforts to have Congress extend those waivers. That lobbying will continue into 2025, as Congress only extended those waivers for three months in its year-end, stopgap funding bill.
The fifth most-read story of 2024 centers on perhaps the biggest lesson learned this year in healthcare innovation: Disrupting the status quo to achieve true transformation is hard. This past May Dollar General, the nation’s largest retailer by number of stores, announced that it was ending a two-year partnership with digital health provider DocGo.
The news wasn’t exactly, well, new. Walmart, Walgreens and CVS Health had all recently rolled back their primary and virtual care ambitions, highlighting the challenges that the retail and pharmacy chains were having in cracking the healthcare market. The lesson to be learned, perhaps, is that healthcare isn’t an easy nut to crack, and while new ideas from outside the industry may look great on paper, they aren’t scalable or sustainable.
Virtual nursing is so transformative that we are near the first generation of nurses who may never touch the patient.
Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from a larger cover story, which can be found here.
2024 was a year for great innovation.
Health systems made great strides toward implementing new technologies into workflows, including AI, robotics, and wearables. Perhaps the biggest leap forward was made in the realm of virtual care, especially in nursing.
Back in August, HealthLeaders spoke with nurse leaders who are turning to virtual nursing to address staffing and wellbeing, and to learn how they will adapt and advance to this new technology.
The future is now
The use of telemedicine following the COVID-19 pandemic kick started the virtual nursing movement. And while some systems are just getting started, many have been utilizing virtual nursing for years and continue to expand.
In fact, according to Steve Klahn, system clinical director for virtual medicine at Houston Methodist, virtual nursing roles are about to expand exponentially. Klahn predicted that within the next five to 10 years, 60% to 70% of nursing positions across the industry will become virtual or have a virtual component.
"I'd say well over half," Klahn said, "just with [the] massive growth and expansion over the last two years."
Klahn explained that this is largely due to the response to virtual nursing programs.
"This is going to stick with us for a while," Klahn said, "understandably so, because there's such positive response to programs that are engaging a virtual component or fully virtual."
Dr. Shakira Henderson, dean and chief administrative officer and associate vice president for nursing education, practice, and research at the University of Florida College of Nursing, and the system CNE of UF Health, said this strategy will transform the landscape of nursing by enhancing care and improving efficiency.
"One of the facts that struck me was that we are going to produce now the first generation of nurses who could potentially never touch a patient," Henderson said.
Get ready for the new care model
Leaders must keep in mind that with every new wave of technology, there will be an adjustment period as the technology is integrated with workflows. That won’t be any different with virtual nursing.
Klahn said the standard care model for nursing will be highly comprehensive, due to the integration of virtual nursing. It will include both task-driven support from remote nurses and a new way of collecting biometric data.
Nurses will soon be able to monitor a wide variety of healthcare data including blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rates through remote patient monitoring, according to Klahn. The collected data can be automated and synthesized through a software system and delivered to the experienced clinical personnel that are remotely supporting bedside teams.
This new model also enables non-traditional nursing ratios in the form of paired nursing teams, where the bedside nurse can take on more patients while moving a portion of their workload to the virtual nurse.
"Now you can actually have one or two nurses supporting a much larger group of patient populations," Klahn said, "and truly load balancing and taking those calls as they come in and reducing the wait times for that process."
The stopgap budget bill gave key telehealth and Hospital at Home waivers a three-month reprieve. Supporters now have to convince a fractured Congress and new Administration that these waivers are crucial enough to be made permanent.
Telehealth and digital health policy will remain a hot topic in early 2025. But will three months be enough time to convince a fractious Congress and new Administration of the benefits of permanent coverage?
Telehealth advocates and supporters of the Hospital at Home strategy are celebrating what amounts to a moral victory in the last-minute passage of a stopgap budget bill. The 100-page bill—which originally clocked in at 1,500 pages before it was pared down to make the grade—includes extensions of key telehealth waivers and a continuance for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCAH) program.
But those waivers only extend another 90 days—barely enough time to schedule an in-person doctor’s visit--and several other digital health and telehealth provisions were cut.
Supporters are now continuing their full-court press on Congress to make those provisions permanent, something they’ve been working on for several years. They’re hoping the letters to lawmakers signed by hundreds of healthcare organizations and support of dozens (if not hundreds) of House and Senate members will sway Congress.
“We will immediately begin working to ensure Congress makes Medicare telehealth flexibilities and the Acute Hospital Care at Home Program permanent—or secures a much longer extension than 90 days,” Kyle Zebley, senior vice president of public policy for the American Telemedicine Association and executive director of ATA Action, the group’s lobbying arm, said in a press release. “Simultaneously, we will advocate vigorously to reinstate the vital provisions that were left out of this package.”
On one hand, supporters are encouraged by the fact that the telehealth and ACHAH waivers made the cut for the three-month extension—meaning Congress thinks they have enough value to continue. On the other hand, those waivers have been extended before, and the incoming Trump Administration has signaled its interest in cutting costs and reducing administrative clutter. The challenge will be on supporters to push the value in making these waivers permanent.
The final bill includes a 90-day extension (instead of two years, as was in the original bill) on several telehealth flexibilities enacted by CMS during the COVID crisis to expand coverage of and access to telehealth. They include:
Waiving geographic restrictions on telehealth coverage and use;
Expanding the list of providers able to bill Medicare for telehealth services;
Allowing audio-only telehealth services;
Easing originating site restrictions on telehealth so that the patient can receive treatment at home;
Waiving the in-person requirement for telemental health treatment;
Enabling telehealth service for hospice care; and
Enabling Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and Rural Health Clinics (RHCs) to use telehealth.
In addition, the bill extends the CMS waiver for its AHCAH program for three months, instead of five years, enabling the more than 350 health systems following the CMS model to receive Medicare reimbursement.
Among the telehealth provisions that were cut out of the final package:
First dollar coverage of High Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs);
Support for virtual care providers in the Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program;
Improved coverage for digital health in home-based cardiology and pulmonary rehab programs; and
The SPEAK Act (HR 6033), which paves the way for accessible telehealth services.
CMS has already said it won’t extend the waivers any more (though the agency did include some telehealth, remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutic improvements in its 2025 Physician Fee Schedule). So it's up to Congress to decide if there's enough value in the waivers to make them permanent.
Workplace violence prevention requires a proactive approach that disrupts the pathway to violence, according to this CNO.
HealthLeaders spoke to Michele Szkolnicki, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, about staffing challenges and workplace violence, and what health systems can do to address those issues. Tune in to hear her insights.
The HealthLeaders Exchange is an executive community for sharing ideas, solutions, and insights. Please join the community at our LinkedIn page.
William Sheahan of MedStar Health, a participant in the HealthLeaders Mastermind program, says healthcare leaders need to look beyond the technology and prepare doctors and nurses for new workflows
AI may truly be a transformative technology, but its integration into clinical care needs to be managed well before the technology is even introduced.
"How do we get our people, our nurses, our doctors, our clinicians, our revenue cycle teams, to understand how the technology supports the future of their work?" asks William Sheahan, SVP and Chief Innovation Officer at MedStar Health and executive director of the MedStar Institute for Innovation. "We can't just focus on deploying the fun new technology and expect that organically it's going to change your business, right?"
Sheahan, a participant in HealthLeaders' Mastermind program on AI in clinical care, says healthcare leaders need to focus on change management as they embrace AI. That means not only working to bring current doctors and nurses up to speed with the technology, but looking to medical schools to make sure the next generation is prepared for an AI-infused workplace.
William Sheahan, SVP and Chief Innovation Officer at MedStar Health and executive director of the MedStar Institute for Innovation. Photo courtesy MedStar Health.
"We have the imperative to swim upstream, into undergraduate medical education, in nursing schools and medical schools, and insert some of this foundational education," he says.
Sheahan says MedStar Health is pursuing an AI strategy that recognizes how the technology will change healthcare delivery, which includes the effect on the provider as well as the patient. As such, the ROI of a new tool or program looks beyond financial costs to include clinical outcomes and provider wellbeing.
That means getting buy-in from all parties, especially clinicians. Sheahan says innovation leads like to participate in town halls with system physicians to introduce new tools like ambient AI, giving them a chance to ask questions and try out the technology before it's added to their toolkit. The idea, he says, is to include clinicians in the planning so that they're invested in the process from the start.
"This isn't forced change," he points out.
Instead, he says, it's organizational change. That's what comes with a holistic technology that is being embraced by consumers as well as clinicians. Organizations that aren't already properly pursuing this in-demand innovation may otherwise be forced to react rather than act with the times.
With national issues like workforce shortages, cost concerns and increased competition for the patient/consumer plaguing the industry, healthcare leaders are challenged to hit the ground running with AI. Sheahan says he, like any other innovation executive, is excited about the potential for AI to improve clinical care, but they still need to plan out the process and understand the outcomes.
That includes understanding how data is gathered, stored and managed, processes that certainly need to be modernized. Health systems and hospitals have long been gathering data without fully understanding its potential uses. AI promises to make the best use of that data if it's guided and governed properly.
While some health systems have created AI committees or even C-suite roles to manage AI, Sheahan says separating AI from other innovative strategies can hinder progress. He's more supportive of integrating AI governance into existing management structures. In many cases, he says, a new AI tool can have multiple benefits across different departments—like an ambient listening tool that not only improves clinician note-taking but helps the rev cycle department improve coding.
"AI as a technology shouldn't be governed entirely differently than other technologies," he says.
As for the future of AI in the clinical space, Sheahan envisions an AI-enabled operating system serving the enterprise, responding to queries from pretty much anyone within the health system. The platform might help doctors map the best care plan for patients, give nurses direction on inpatient care, help the rev cycle management team deal with a prior authorization or denial, or even map out the best route for a patient to a specialist appointment across town.
"We want to show the many groups that can benefit from AI why and how to use it to make themselves more efficient," Sheahan said. "Ultimately, that is what is going to deliver ROI over time. We can make our business more efficient if we're all in this together."
The HealthLeaders Mastermind program is an exclusive series of calls and events with healthcare executives. This Mastermind series features ideas, solutions, and insights on excelling in your AI programs.
To inquire about participating in an upcoming Mastermind series or attending a HealthLeaders Exchange event, email us at exchange@healthleadersmedia.com.
Some of the obvious solutions for health systems are not even options for rural hospitals, says this CNO.
On this episode of HL Shorts, we hear from Keri Brookshire-Heavin, senior vice president, chief nursing officer, and chief operating officer at Phelps Health, about how the healthcare needs of rural communities differ from those in urban areas.
At Phelps Health, the goal is to create support systems for nurses and to embrace technology, says this CNO.
HealthLeaders spoke to Keri Brookshire-Heavin, senior vice president, chief nursing officer, and chief operating officer at Phelps Health, about rural healthcare challenges and how Phelps Health is tackling recruitment, retention, and new innovation. Tune in to hear her insights.
