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If the future of patient care lies in expanding health IT innovations that improve patient access, care quality, workforce experiences and costs across the care continuum, then expanding technology beyond acute care settings requires leaders to look closely at promising artificial intelligence, data science and other technologies.
Not just “how,” but “if.”
To answer that question, tech leaders should first focus "on the business problem they're trying to solve" when evaluating a potential technology, advised Julie Luengas, chief nursing informatics officer at Stony Brook Medicine in New York state.
At the upcoming 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exposition, a scheduled panel will discuss different advanced technologies available aimed at improving care delivery and what attendees should focus on when planning tech implementations.
During the session, “Expanding Technology Beyond Acute Care Settings,” Luengas; Lisa Lyon, electronic health record product manager with the Indian Health Service's EHR modernization project; and Penni Kyte, Ballad Health's digital care strategy officer, will also dive into tech strategies to drive tangible results for individual organizations.
Value is location-specific
"What technology is going to deliver the most value to the organization, and what are we going to get back from it?" is not an easy question to answer, according to Luengas, a leader in nursing and clinical informatics.
The answer is not always going to be AI, she told Healthcare IT News.
ROI is often value-based, found in preventing uncompensated readmissions or better patient monitoring, she noted.
Forays into AI-based patient engagement platforms that target access and care quality improvements should begin with understanding how patients want to communicate, she said.
With automated patient follow-up technology, for example, providers must also consider whether their patient populations will tolerate AI-driven communications and understand which patients respond to a human touch to remain engaged with their care.
"If you reached out to my mother via a text message, she would never respond," Luengas said. "My father, he would respond, but he would also say, 'I don't want a text message, I want a phone call.'"
For smaller or rural hospitals, technology shouldn't always be "high-end AI," she added.
Luengas focuses on electronic health record governance, clinical transformation and workforce education for Stony Brook Medicine, a health system that includes the 628-bed Stony Brook University Hospital, the 120-bed Southampton Hospital, the rural 70-bed Eastern Long Island Hospital and more than 200 community-based healthcare clinics throughout New York's Suffolk County.
To maximize efficiency with tight budgets, she advises choosing technologies that address the biggest bottlenecks at specific points of care.
For some facilities, an automated calling and scheduling system, such as the one used at Stony Brook University Hospital, will be more valuable than AI clinical tools – if it gets nurse managers out of the office and back onto the floor to support their staff, she said.
"When you look at the ROI, it may not be there to support it," said Luengas. "It really takes a lot of partnership between the departments – whether it's nursing, physicians, finance or technology – and really do your homework to see if it's going to help you."
In Eastern Long Island, telehealth investments have proved more essential, so patient scheduling has stayed a manual task, she noted.
"We've had telehealth at our clinics and hospital out east, so our patients don't have to drive an hour and a half to get to the university campus."
Quantifying workforce challenges
AI might be a force multiplier for some time-strapped care teams handling the "mounds" of data that individual clinicians often don’t have time to sift through manually, Luengas said.
"Oftentimes, our vendor may have predictions, but we need to do a little research as well," she explained. "And with any new solution, part of the budgeting is identifying what is going to be the [full-time equivalent]."
Alert fatigue generated by algorithms requires "being judicious," she said, and may require redirecting what tasks staff juggle.
"It's absolutely going to bring work, and how do we shift some of the models with some of the processes we can do to streamline items?"
By predicting the FTE value, organizations can better understand if a new technology or application is going to increase ROI, she said. "And then we need to monitor to see, 'Are we really getting the value that we predicted?'"
Budgeting often underestimates the support needed to implement a new technology, so Luengas advises factoring in technical resources from day one. Running a pilot for six to 12 months can also help adjust workflows – three-month trials often provide insufficient data on long-term value, she said.
Where AI can be a powerful tool for increasing patient engagement, its success also depends on behavior modeling and consistent auditing, she added.
Since new AI tools can increase data-review tasks, leadership should identify exactly what tasks should be removed to balance the load and account for an FTE workload shift or increase.
Bedside technology is an example where nurturing workflow adjustments became necessary to realize ROI.
"I worked at one organization, and we wanted to have a bedside report with the computer," Luengas explained. "What it took was three months of consistency between the manager, the nurse manager and my team being there during shift change, and then the managers and the assistant manager would do random audits.
"Without that consistent follow-up and redirection, you teach everyone in a week – it'll be gone."
Habit comes from understanding value, she said.
"It is valuable to me when the patient says, 'Wait a minute, that's not right.'"
The panel session "Expanding Technology Beyond Acute Care Settings" is scheduled for Monday, March 9, from 3:05 p.m.-3:45 p.m., in Palazzo M/Level 5 at the Venetian at HIMSS26 in Las Vegas.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
