Over the past couple of years, advanced technological development, adoption, and implementation have grown exponentially across industries, including health care. What started with the adoption of advanced electronic health records (EHRs) — 96 percent of hospitals and 88 percent of physicians have adopted EHRs within the last decade — is now developing into the rapid growth of AI to support administrative tasks and data analytics. A 2024 survey found 86 percent of medical organizations had started to leverage AI in workflows, and the American Medical Association found 38 percent of clinicians were using some form of AI assistance in their practices.
While other industries have quickly embraced technological advancements to streamline administration and support decision-making, development and deployment of advanced solutions and analytics within health care carry even greater significance because these technologies impact care and critical patient touchpoints.
As a registered wound care nurse with over 15 years of experience, I’ve witnessed the evolution of critical care for the most vulnerable patients and have seen firsthand how advanced technologies both support and complicate the critical care journey. There are major hurdles associated with implementing and using advanced tools like AI within health care. These include difficulties integrating new technologies into existing systems and workflows, and concerns over a reduced human touch or presence within health care.
Many of these challenges can be avoided by involving clinicians early in the development and implementation of new technologies. While other industries move to adopt advanced technologies that best fit their workflows and needs, health care must take a more critical approach to evaluate these tools through a clinical lens from the start. Only then can these tools actually make a meaningful impact within health care workflows.
Clinicians know what problems need solving.
When it comes to developing advanced health care technological tools, the input and feedback of clinicians and health care team members who are at the front lines is critical to ensure their effectiveness. When tech and software are developed within a vacuum, by developers who have never experienced clinical issues firsthand, their interpretation of the problem and how to solve it can diverge greatly from what clinicians actually see on a day-to-day basis. For example, specialty EHRs for wound care changed the way clinicians worked when they were introduced, tailoring workflows, improving clinical decision support, and enhancing patient care and outcomes overall. Yet in rural hospitals with little to no internet service, wound care nurses struggled to use these tools. By communicating that insight to EHR companies, clinicians helped drive updates to better suit their needs, allowing them to continue providing quality care for all patients. For this reason, we need more clinical and health care innovators to get involved in the developmental process of these advanced tools and software to apply their expertise and build solutions that address key problems.
Health care innovators with firsthand experience are uniquely positioned to address the industry’s longstanding and complex challenges. Their deep understanding of the problems allows them to develop more effective solutions—and to critically evaluate those solutions through a clinical lens, ensuring they ease the burden on care teams rather than add to it.
Clinicians know what tools will help or hinder workflows.
Implementation challenges, such as interoperability, regulatory compliance, scalability, sustainability, and evaluating true cost and return on investment, can serve as complications for health systems and organizations looking to adopt new technologies. Therefore, clinical staff or leadership should be consulted when health care organizations are looking to implement new solutions. If these tools are meant to support care teams, then their input should be included in the decision-making process before leadership invests in new technology. This ensures that solutions enhance care team efficiency and effectiveness, rather than overwhelming them with more technology and software that increases administrative burden.
Clinician feedback is critical to health tech vendors.
According to the Business Research Company, the health tech market is experiencing significant growth, with a projected market size of $592 billion in 2025, a leap from $507 billion in 2024. As more health tech companies enter the market each year with solutions for clinical challenges, it’s increasingly important that these technologies accurately address real needs with efficient and effective solutions.
Vendors are essential to the health care ecosystem, providing strong partnerships and tools to address vital problems within the health care system. Their focus should be on accurately building solutions that help their customers, and consequently patients, navigate a complicated care journey. This starts by making the clinician’s perspective central to their mission and products. Whether organizations have clinicians on staff, in leadership positions, or as part of an advisory board to provide the checks and balances of a clinical lens to each product and solution, having a strong clinical voice within the company is critical when developing health care technology and software tools.
Companies should also prioritize two-way conversations with partners, seeking input from the clinicians who use the products themselves to improve designs and make necessary enhancements. They are better able to articulate what aspects of technology and software will solve clinical issues and can point developers and innovators in the right direction, providing insight into what needs to be improved upon to make each product and solution more effective.
The development and deployment of advanced technologies and software should not exist in a vacuum, especially in an industry with critical points and care journeys. Whether we incorporate accurate and reliable clinical perspectives within the innovation and development stage, the adoption and implementation of advanced tools within health systems and practices, or on the vendor side, the input of these clinicians is invaluable to propelling the industry forward and solving the real issues clinicians face every day. Software and health tech tools should be designed by clinicians or developed in close collaboration with them to ensure they are effective and truly enhance day-to-day quality care.
Kimberly Smith is a health care executive.
