CFOs see AI innovation officer as key role in healthcare leadership

Emerging challenges and opportunities will drive shifts in the C-suites of hospitals and health systems, according to a recent HFMA survey of healthcare CFOs.

A leading change among the leadership of these organizations is developing the ability to integrate AI capabilities into various aspects of healthcare, according to the survey of 125 healthcare CFOs.

The emerging role that CFOs saw as having the single greatest importance to the healthcare C-suit in the coming three years was chief AI innovation or implementation officer.  Thirty percent of CFOs named that role, while smaller shares of respondents named chief transformation officers (15%) and chief growth officers (13%).

Despite the primacy of the need for AI expertise among executives, CFOs had a somewhat nuanced view of its direct impact on them. 

For instance, CFOs’ own relationship with such a chief AI innovation or implementation officer was identified by respondents as their fourth most important relationship in the C-suite, behind the CEO, COO and chief digital officer.

Additionally, the survey results indicated that CFOs saw the best way to harness the potential of AI was through an AI-focused executive, as opposed to all executives developing deep understanding of emerging technology. AI competency ranked fifth out of six areas of “must have” skills that C-suites, overall, should have.

The results indicate CFOs have no bandwidth to become experts in AI but want a colleague with such expertise, who can identify the capabilities and limitations of it as a tool for the organization.

The desire for executive-level expertise in AI comes amid expanding healthcare use of the technology across a range of areas and the potential for much greater future benefit. For instance, the healthcare industry could reduce healthcare spending by $1 trillion over the next decade by reducing fragmentation and emphasizing a digital-first, proactive, personalized system of care, including through the use of AI and automated tools, according to a recent PwC study.

The emerging role of AI

Use cases for AI have proliferated across healthcare in a growing number of organizations, even as healthcare has lagged other sectors in its adoption.

CFOs highlighted areas of healthcare ripe for expanded AI utilization, which included:

• Adding clinical efficiency/driving clinical decision support
• Improving revenue cycle
• Countering payer AI driving denials
• Reducing FTEs
• Improving diagnostics and patient engagement
• Transcribing patient interactions/documentation
• Reducing staff burnout through automation
• Generating reports and dashboard
• Reading images

But CFOs are wary of the hype around AI and cautious about exposing their vulnerable customers to its unintended consequences.

Some CFOs sounded cautionary notes about jumping on the AI bandwagon, which included needing to develop rigorous KPIs; providing correct training on its use; accounting for the rapid changes in AI capabilities; ensuring it doesn’t create new cybersecurity vulnerabilities; ensuring ROI from it; understanding its shortcomings; and understanding the clinical risk to privacy and security.

Those concerns came as CFOs named AI deployment as the area (among eight options) where they felt the least prepared. The areas where CFOs expressed the greatest amount of preparation were cost containment and cybersecurity.

Looking ahead

Although AI presents new opportunities, its emergence comes as the healthcare industry is facing a range of challenges, including looming federal funding cuts, inflationary pressures, commercial payer administrative hurdles and workforce shortages.

Such challenges led CFOs surveyed to name their leading budgeting priority as “strengthening operational efficiency.” The second leading budgeting priority was “new or expanded technologies or systems.”

The leading approach that CFOs said their own organization was taking to protect financial performance amid growing concerns about financial stability was ramping up cost containment controls. AI deployment may play a role in cost containment, but it is clearly seen as tool and not an end strategy.

An overall challenge for hospitals and health systems will be figuring out how their results from AI deployment are different from their experience with digitizing their patient health records and billing systems. Healthcare is notorious as the only industry where broad digitization through electronic health records became an expense driver, instead of a way to cut costs.