### Health Tech Industry in Vegas: From AI Hype to Practical Solutions

At the HLTH conference in Las Vegas this year, the once fervent discussions surrounding generative AI have taken a more pragmatic turn. Previously celebrated for their potential to revolutionize healthcare—from remote diagnoses to groundbreaking disease cures—the conversation around AI has shifted towards more immediate, practical applications.

Two central themes emerged from the Venetian Expo where HLTH was hosted. First, there's a focus on using AI to automate mundane tasks to mitigate a "crisis level" of burnout among healthcare professionals. The second theme revolves around optimizing the response time of AI and its foundational large language models (LLMs), a concept referred to as "the reasoning phase." As Sequoia Capital recently emphasized, "It's not enough for language models to simply know things - they need to pause, evaluate and reason through decisions in real time."

Gary Lynch, Verizon’s global practice leader for healthcare and life sciences, highlighted the importance of addressing operational inefficiencies. "When you walk the conference floor, you see all these new and interesting clinical applications," said Lynch. "But we really have to help our hospital partners with operational efficiencies, or we're never going to get to remote surgeries."

Companies like Verizon and Nvidia are providing the essential infrastructure for these advancements, while tech giants such as Google and Microsoft are offering cloud computing services and AI tools crucial for developing transformative healthcare solutions. Umesh Rustogi, general manager at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences Data Platform, remarked on the rapid technological advancements over the past year and a half, noting that many current capabilities simply didn't exist before.

One prominent example of this shift is the introduction of AI-powered ambient scribes by companies like Microsoft and Amazon. These tools listen to and transcribe patient visits, alerting doctors to pertinent information to be added to electronic health records. John Couris, CEO of Tampa General Hospital, attested to the effectiveness of these scribes in improving patient visit quality and reducing after-hours work for physicians. "They're working at 7, 8 o'clock at night or at their kids' baseball games. That’s not sustainable; it’s not right," said Couris.

Verizon's Lynch suggested practical solutions like asset tracking as another way AI can enhance operational efficiency. "A nurse spends an hour of his or her day just looking for stuff. We’re building a solution where a nurse can grab their phone and say, 'Where's the nearest wheelchair? Where's the nearest IV pump?'"

The consensus among industry experts underscores the need for integrated solutions rather than isolated, point-specific technologies. Greg Corrado, senior research director at Google AI, stressed the importance of collaboration between tech companies and healthcare institutions. "What matters most is that we don’t work in this sector like 7-year-olds playing soccer... [where] everybody's on the ball, and they're missing the bigger opportunity," noted Corrado.

Despite the tempered enthusiasm, AI continues to be a major buzzword at the conference. However, as Corrado pointed out, integrating AI into healthcare will require more than just adding it to existing medical practices. "I don't think that it's going to work very well to just imagine that we can do everything the way that we’ve been doing it in medicine the last 50 years, and we're just going to add AI."

As the health tech industry marches forward, the emphasis is now on developing practical, collaborative solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into current healthcare systems.