Hospitals are judged by numbers that begin with a person reading a chart. Surgical complications, cancer outcomes, cardiac and stroke measures, and many of the quality scores that shape public rankings all trace back to clinical registries. Those registries don’t fill themselves. Trained staff comb through each patient’s record and enter the details by hand. It’s slow, meticulous work that most people never see, but it’s how healthcare performance gets measured.
To check that work, registries
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
The Hospital IT Operating Model Is Under Pressure. What Comes Next?
Hospital CIOs today face enormous and seemingly contradictory pressures.
Hospital CIOs say they face ever-growing demands for IT services despite tight operating budgets, constrained staff resources, and aging technology infrastructure.
What’s a beleaguered hospital CIO to do?
A need for flexibility
There’s a lot on the CIO’s plate: finding ways to optimize the use of the EHR, improving systems interoperability to sharpen data analysis and reporting, strengthening
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Redesigning Pharma Adherence Around Patient Behavioral Signals and AI-Native MCP Rails
AI’s biggest contribution to adherence can be a new model: reading the signals patients leave before they stop, and responding with support built for that moment, but only if pharma decides who it wants to be to that patient.
In 2003, the World Health Organization reported that adherence to long-term therapy in developed countries averages about 50%. Since then, the industry has taken on that number in waves: first as a compliance problem, then as a cost problem, then as an infrastructure
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How Real-World Data (RWD) Is the Turning Point for Pharma Innovation
The pharma industry is accustomed to operating in a highly regulated and risk-conscious environment. While companies continue to invest in scientific innovation, they have been slower to adopt technology.
Long cycle times and uncertainty around new platforms have made organizations hesitant to disrupt entrenched workflows. That hesitation has led to many leaders falling into a “watch and wait mentality,” missed opportunities to lower costs, shorten timelines and deliver new treatments
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Why Patient Access Is Healthcare’s Highest-Leverage Growth Lever
Patient access has long been managed as an operational necessity — scheduling, registration, referral intake — the plumbing that keeps the clinical enterprise running. Revenue cycle is measured on collections. Digital engagement is judged on portal logins. Each function optimizes for its own number.
Treated together, these three functions tell a more useful story: how easily a patient can get an appointment and navigate their next step in care determines whether that patient — and their
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Do Patients Need to Understand AI Before They Can Trust It?
AI is being rapidly integrated into healthcare, and its role is expanding quickly. Yet, despite this rapid adoption, AI trust among patients remains critically low. That is a problem because trust is fundamental to healthcare. Patients who trust their healthcare providers are more likely to share information, follow recommendations, and actively engage with their care. In my current professional role, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the reasons why patients should trust
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Why Healthcare Can’t Skip Steps on the Way to Conversational AI
Healthcare software is moving toward a future where clinicians can simply say what they need. Document this encounter. Show me the latest CBC. Pull up the relevant imaging. Start an order. Instead of navigating a maze of screens, clinicians can interact with clinical software and data through natural language.
There is good reason to want that future. Physicians spend an average of 13 hours each week on indirect patient care, including documentation, order entry, test results, and referrals.
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Consumer AI Is Healthcare’s New Front Door. Who’s Deciding What Happens There?
One in four U.S. adults, more than 66 million people, have now used AI tools or chatbots for health information or advice according to a West Health–Gallup survey released in April. Most aren't using it in place of care. They're using it around care: 59% of recent users researched their medical question with AI before seeing a doctor, and 56% did so afterward.
I see this in practice. A patient arrives with a cough, fever and body aches, and a chatbot has already suggested pneumonia. It might
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Why the AMA’s AI Liability Policy Shifts Risk to Health System Data Access Logs
The AMA says physician oversight can’t substitute for adequate evidence and system design. That puts the burden on whoever holds the usage records.
In many hospitals, an AI tool is reading patient records through a shared service account that no one can tie to a person. That gap matters more now. The American Medical Association's new framework, released October 29, 2026, divides responsibility among developers, physicians, and the health systems that deploy AI tools. Of the three parties,
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Advancing Clinical Trials Through Digital Health Technology
Decentralized and hybrid trials continue to grow in popularity, making it essential for contract research organizations (CROs) to seamlessly integrate remote wearable technologies into trial operations. Traditional, site-based trials often miss meaningful changes between participant visits, so remote wearable devices are appealing because they improve study quality through continuous, real-world data collection. One study showed that a 14-day adhesive ECG patch detected arrhythmias in 59.5% of
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