Clinicians and other workers in the healthcare delivery chain are always looking for ways to improve workflow. Similarly, hospital and health system leadership always desire new ways to develop their workforce – the same people hunting for better workflow.
And all of these executives, caregivers and workers want to ensure their organizations are operating at the very peak for patient safety. Nothing is more important.
And it’s these three areas of healthcare that Stacey Caywood, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, sees artificial intelligence boosting in 2025. She says these three areas – workflow, workforce development and patient safety – will benefit most this year from the application of various AI technologies.
At Wolters Kluwer Health, Caywood has had responsibility for leading a global company that offers clinical technology and evidence-based systems that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students.
We spoke with Caywood to get a deeper understanding of her thoughts on AI in 2025.
Q. What will AI be doing for workflow in healthcare in 2025?
A. In 2024, we saw the health tech sector really start to focus 2023’s AI excitement into tangible systems that make clinicians’ workdays easier and more productive. Tackling the clinician burnout epidemic has sharpened the focus of strategies behind many health AI technologies coming to market in 2025.
According to the AMA, nearly half of U.S. doctors report suffering from burnout.
While the burnout epidemic seems like a monolithic and systemic challenge, what has been remarkable to see is it is being addressed from a wide array of angles.
Take, for example, transformative tech like a genAI ambient listening scribe that dramatically reduces administrative burdens, including sometimes onerous documentation in the EHR and following up on high volumes of email messages.
In 2025, look for more synergies and partnerships emerging between AI and complementary technologies that serve as a force multiplier for the potential of AI to drive efficiency in the clinical workflow, provide relief from burnout and deliver value for health systems.
AI is bringing new levels of dynamic scale and speed to target many tasks and processes. This can introduce wholly different ways of thinking about how we use trusted clinical resources.
For example, over three million clinicians around the world turn to our clinical decision support tool, UpToDate. What if we “unbox” that evidence-based knowledge store and inject it more seamlessly into the workflow?
AI can help to serve the right content at the right time, at key points in the clinical workflow, so clinicians never lose their stride while tapping into trusted knowledge and recommendations to treat patients. There is so much potential for novel synergies like this across resources, across the continuum.
2025 will be about building on the foundations of 2024 to really begin to unlock AI’s capabilities, reimagining how healthcare teams work and collaborate. We’re excited about collaborations like this that help reframe our thinking about how to solve challenges at the point of care and in the background, in administrative processes.
And if we have happier, more satisfied clinicians and patients, better staff retention, and improved outcomes, I call that a win.
Q. How will AI help with workforce development this year?
A. Amid staffing shortages, 2025 will see AI helping future clinicians get on a fast track to practice-readiness. Nursing education tools are being completely reimagined to leverage the capabilities of AI.
For example, AI has the potential to boost nurses’ licensure prep so students learn from mistakes with smarter, more personalized reinforcement.
Look for AI chatbots to transform virtual reality training by providing lifelike conversations with virtual patients. AI also will accelerate the development and adoption of clinical practice changes as hospital nursing leaders turn to AI to power the often-cumbersome process of updating nursing practice protocols.
In 2025, pairing AI and virtual reality will dramatically change the way students, residents and researchers develop essential skills. This also applies to healthcare professionals who are just starting out in practice.
These immersive learning environments can mirror what life will be like when they’re caring for patients. Not only are they building clinical skills and developing clinical judgment, they can work on interpersonal “soft” skills that are vital to high-quality care. This can help new nurses ramp up by easing some of the growing pains new employees can face.
Q. And finally, you cite patient safety as a big area for AI to boost in 2025. How so?
A. AI health tech is largely focused on helping clinicians. I’d expect to see that scope broaden with AI playing a bigger part in patient safety.
In 2025, look for AI technologies that go deeper into live health data streams to identify disconnects in care that often are overlooked and can impact patient safety. Imagine an AI “helper app” that works 24/7 in the background to identify instances where healthcare providers may miss a potential test or therapy for a patient or – worse – illicitly divert medications from patients, potentially doing harm.
One of the most compelling applications of AI in patient safety lies in its potential to combat medication errors and drug diversion. Consider an AI-powered application that operates continuously in the background, monitoring for anomalies in prescribing or dispensing patterns.
This tool could identify suspicious activities, such as unusual prescribing habits or discrepancies in medication inventories, and alert administrators to potential diversion. Stopping drug diversion with AI is just one example of AI scaling system-wide to comprehensively improve patient safety.
AI also can give health systems the ability to zoom out and scan analytics on safety measures across their sites. Look for predictive analytics powered by AI that can show how an organization is performing against care benchmarks and identify emerging trends or anomalies in order for organizations to plan interventions and improvements.
Altogether, these systemic improvements in patient safety reflect a broader trend: AI is moving from a reactive force in healthcare to a proactive one. In the year ahead, AI will start to help play a novel role in efforts to improve safety for patients and clinicians.
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