Physicians and other workers in the healthcare delivery chain are always looking for ways to improve workflow. Similarly, hospital and health system leaders are always looking for modern ways to develop their employees – the same people are looking for better workflow.
All of these executives, caregivers and employees want to ensure that their organizations are performing at the highest levels to ensure patient safety. Nothing is more significant.
It is in these three areas of healthcare that Stacey Caywood, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, sees the development of artificial intelligence in 2025. In her opinion, these three areas – workflow, workforce development and patient safety – this year they will benefit most from the exploit of various AI technologies.
At Wolters Kluwer Health, Caywood was responsible for leading a global company providing clinical technology and evidence-based systems that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students.
We spoke with Caywood to better understand her thoughts on AI in 2025.
Q. How will AI change healthcare workflows in 2025?
AND. In 2024, we saw the health technology sector really begin to focus the AI interest of 2023 on real systems that make physicians’ everyday lives easier and more productive. Tackling the physician burnout epidemic has put a spotlight on the strategies underlying many of the health AI technologies that will come to market in 2025.
According to the AMA, almost half of American physicians report that you are suffering from burnout.
While the burnout epidemic appears to be a monolithic and systemic challenge, what is remarkable is that it is being addressed from many different perspectives.
Take, for example, transformative technology like GenAI’s ambient listening scribe, which dramatically reduces administrative burdens, including sometimes cumbersome documentation in the EHR and keeping track of immense volumes of emails.
In 2025, look for greater synergies and partnerships between AI and complementary technologies that will serve as a multiplier for AI’s potential to escalate clinical workflow efficiency, provide burnout relief, and deliver value to healthcare systems.
Artificial intelligence brings a modern level of energetic scale and speed to enable the targeting of multiple tasks and processes. This may introduce completely different ways of thinking about how we exploit trusted clinical resources.
For example, over three million clinicians worldwide exploit our clinical decision support tool, UpToDate. What if we “unpacked” this evidence-based store of knowledge and incorporated it more seamlessly into our workflow?
Artificial intelligence can aid deliver the right content at the right time, e.g key points in the clinical workflow, so physicians never lose confidence with trusted knowledge and recommendations for treating patients. There is enormous potential for such novel synergies across the resource and continuum.
2025 will be about building on the foundations of 2024 to truly begin to unlock the possibilities of artificial intelligence, reimagining the way healthcare teams work and collaborate. We’re excited about this collaboration, which helps us change the way we think about how we solve problems at the point of care and behind the scenes in administrative processes.
And if we have happier, more satisfied physicians and patients, better staff retention and better outcomes, I call that a victory.
Q. How will AI aid with workforce development this year?
AND. Facing staff shortages in 2025, artificial intelligence will aid future clinicians quickly become ready to practice. Nursing education tools are being completely redesigned to take advantage of the power of artificial intelligence.
For example, AI can aid nurses prepare for licensure, allowing students to learn from their mistakes with smarter and more personalized reinforcement.
Look for AI chatbots to transform virtual reality training by providing realistic conversations with virtual patients. AI will also accelerate the development and adoption of changes in clinical practice as hospital nursing leaders turn to AI to support the often cumbersome process of updating nursing practice protocols.
In 2025, steaming Artificial intelligence and virtual reality will radically change the way students, residents and researchers develop imperative skills. This also applies to healthcare professionals who are just starting to practice.
These immersive learning environments can reflect what life is like when caring for patients. Not only do they develop clinical skills and clinical judgment, but they can work on the “soft” interpersonal skills that are imperative to providing high-quality care. This can aid modern nurses develop by alleviating some of the growing pains modern hires may face.
Question: Finally, you mention patient safety as a massive area where artificial intelligence is expected to be strengthened in 2025. How so?
AND. AI-based health technology is largely focused on helping doctors. I would expect this scope to expand as AI plays a greater role in patient safety.
In 2025, look for AI technologies that go deeper into live health data streams to identify gaps in care that are often missed and may impact patient safety. Imagine an AI “helper app” that runs in the background 24/7, identifying instances where healthcare providers may be missing a patient’s potential test or treatment or, worse yet, illegally prescribing medications to patients, potentially harming them. .
One of the most convincing The applications of AI for patient safety lie in its potential to combat medication errors and diversion of medicines. Consider an AI-powered application that runs constantly in the background and monitors for anomalies in prescribing or dispensing patterns.
This tool can identify suspicious activity, such as unusual prescribing habits or discrepancies in drug listings, and alert administrators to potential fraudulent activity. Stopping drug diversion with AI is just one example of scaling AI across the system to comprehensively improve patient safety.
Artificial intelligence can also provide healthcare systems with the ability to zoom out and scan analytics regarding safety measures in their facilities. Look for AI-powered predictive analytics that can show how an organization is managing care patterns and identify emerging trends or anomalies so organizations can plan for interventions and improvements.
Taken together, these systemic improvements in patient safety reflect a broader trend: AI is shifting from a reactive force in healthcare to a proactive one. In the coming year, artificial intelligence will begin to play a modern role in efforts to improve patient and physician safety.