Renewed Excitement and Generating Value: Our Five Takeaways from ViVE2024

Billed as “where digital health execs go to do business,” the ViVE conferences are a great opportunity to actively listen to leaders from payer, provider, and health technology organizations about what is causing them pain and how they are working to solve these challenges.

For ViVE 2024, the team from Genzeon participated in over 170 separate conversations with these stakeholders at the Genzeon booth, during Payer/Provider Connect sessions, through a CHIME focus group, and during lunches, receptions, and other informal settings.

Here are the top five takeaways* that our team had from this industry event.

* Note: While the cybersecurity breach and resulting issues at Change Healthcare and Optum were very much top of mind during the show, we do not go into that in this article. While this issue was top of mind in the moment, we identified these other topics as year-long takeaways.

Workforce Staffing Challenges and Burnout Accelerate

This was the first year with a Nurses @ ViVE program and unsurprisingly clinical workforce shortages and burnout were top of mind for many of the sessions at ViVE. The common theme of these sessions was in finding innovative ways to mitigate these issues. “Innovation isn’t just about creating or building. It’s really about a creative way of solving a problem,” Sara Vaezy, EVP and Chief Strategy and Digital Officer at Providence stated during a panel session.

Beyond just clinical workforce, acquiring and retaining technical and administrative talent was also repeated often, in particular during our Sunday afternoon CHIME focus group, Lessons Learned From One Year of GenAI: Measurable Outcomes from Clinical and Business Optimization. The war for talent has been going on for years, as echoed in Venkat Thumula’s stage appearance in last year’s ViVE conference, but new automation technologies and AI-assisted process are beginning to see true optimization gains.

Picture: Genzeon's Pranita Rai, Harsh Singh, and Venkat Thumula speak with participants at Genzeon booth.

Provider Financial Health Rebounding, Ways Still to Go

We were excited to hear from several provider technology leaders that financials are more positive than a year ago, where post-pandemic incentives had dried up and fear of recession loomed large. While organization leaders are still sensitive to the precarious margins in the industry and in enacting large capital projects, they are interested in investing in optimization initiatives to grow that margin further (and alleviate the aforementioned staffing shortages).

“Every conversation we’ve had recently with payers and provider organizations have boiled down to two things: AI and efficiency of the clinical staff,” said Ilanko Kumaresan, CEO of Genzeon. “Reducing waste and automating manual processes are key for these organizations’ success in 2024.”

While provider organizations still face a tough road ahead financially, the general consensus was around a moderate spend in the near term to try to accelerate a return on digital investments (RODI).

Renewed Healthcare Investor Energy

Last year’s ViVE convention was a strange year for health investors, accented by Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in early March right before the show. In fact, 2023 saw the lowest annual venture funding for digital health over the previous four years at $10.7B. Furthermore, fears of recession, inflation, global instability, and regulation all put a damper on overall investment.

Source: PitchBook and SVB proprietary data

This year, however, we noticed more excitement and conversations occurring with various venture capital, incubation funds, and private equity leaders. As quoted in a recent Forbes article, Zafar Chaudry, Chief Digital Officer & CIO at Seattle Children's Hospital said “ViVE2024 this week reflected a healthcare landscape where digital investments roar, change management dominates, AI is accelerating and EMR/ERP remains a cornerstone.”

Picture: Harsh Singh talks with technology leaders during CHIME focus group

Gen AI Conversation Maturity

Last year saw the explosion of generative AI (Gen AI) as both a potential technology, and as the dominant buzzword. There were hardly any booths that did not promise some generative AI aspect or feature in a dominant headline.

While Gen AI, and AI more broadly, still dominates the technology discussion this year, the focus has shifted to how to make these initiatives operational, rather than just proofs of concept (PoC). At our booth and in our focus group, we talked about how our HIP One platform was turning these PoCs into operational functions, seeing 30-50% improvement on processes in short fashion.

“Generative AI is now proven to be capable of improving clinical and operational efficiency,” said Harsh Singh, GM of Healthcare at Genzeon, “What enterprises are now looking for is assistance in scaling up individual initiatives across the enterprise with minimal disruption and transitioning from PoCs to production-ready solutions.”

Questions remain about which AI initiatives will have the greatest impact over the next 18 months, not whether it will at all.

Focus on Business Value, Not Technology

Similar to the last point, the focus at ViVE was about the business case or value rather than any specific technology or buzzword. While technology (and people) enables that value, our conversations tended to pertain to specific pain points and the process to solve these challenges. One technology leader at our booth spoke specifically about needing consultative advice on how to evaluate and choose different LLMs, not just in purchasing a product with a built-in model.

This focus on value is key for business leaders in making the difference in their organizations. Technology is a lever in this value, but so are trusted partners and advisors who can guide them along in this journey.

We at Genzeon had a fantastic time at this show and look forward to the rest of our upcoming events in the first half of 2024. But more importantly, we’d like to hear from you. If you were at the show, what were your takeaways?

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