From ViVE to HIMSS, AI Governance Gains Steam

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By Eric Wicklund

Healthcare execs say the hype around AI is justified, but amid all the grand proclamations and catchy metaphors, they’re still trying to figure out where the technology will fit into the clinical workflow.

“We’ve seen the hype but not a lot of substance,” said Nasim Eftekhari, Executive Director of Applied AI & Data Science at City of Hope, who attended the recent ViVE 2025 event and took part in a panel on AI innovation.

Indeed, one of the bigger takeaways from ViVE was that AI is still all the rage, but for all the pilot programs and early use cases, value is still hard to find in clinical care. While rev cycle and financial departments are seeing wins in reduced administrative tasks and better number crunching, clinical leaders are still trying to figure out how to integrate AI into care pathways.

And for every health system and hospital finding success in ambient AI for doctors or in-basket messaging, someone else isn’t seeing the value. If you’ve seen one successful use case, the old saying goes, you’ve seen one successful use case.

“There’s a lot of AI in everything,” said Simon Nazarian, City of Hope’s System EVP and Chief Digital and Technology Officer, who also spoke at ViVE. “But a lot of it is just good old-fashioned automation.”

So where is that next step? And do we really need an a-ha moment to push things forward?

Technology and clinical care have a complicated history, as veterans of the EMR era and “meaningful use” will attest. With those memories to draw from, executives are tentative in fully embracing AI and really want to see what it can do before making a commitment.

That’s nothing new, and it isn’t scaring execs away from using AI. The agenda for this week’s HIMSS 25 conference and exhibition in sunny (hopefully) Las Vegas is filled with discussions about AI and examples of health systems putting the technology to the test.

For many, the catchword now is governance. It’s understood that AI, particularly the generative and predictive models, evolves as it gathers more data. That means healthcare leaders have to monitor not only how they gather and feed data into the machine, but keep an eye on what comes out the other end.

For John Halamka, MD, MS, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, AI “will be in everything we do.” Speaking at ViVE, he said Mayo is testing several generative AI models, all designed to augment clinical care rather than replace the clinician.

“You can move fast and break things as long as you understand the risks of breaking things,” he noted.

That said, Halamka knows AI is transformational. The best endoscopist on the planet will still miss 15% of small polyps, he pointed out, while an AI tool developed at Mayo only misses 3%. And there will come a time, he added, when AI is part of the standard of care, and hospitals could be sued for malpractice for not using it.

It’s just that getting from here to there will take time. And mistakes will be made.

At City of Hope, Eftekhari said AI will save lives. Predictive tools will help clinicians spot health concerns earlier and help them identify the best care pathway.

“With responsible use of AI, we will have the ability to move upstream,” added Nazarian, noting the potential for AI in research to eventually identify and even prevent cancer. “We want to be able to go from bench to bed as quickly as possible.”

So amid all the conversations at HIMSS this week about how AI is being tested or used, executives should understand that whatever they see and hear about won’t necessarily work for them. The stories they hear from one conference to the next will likely be the same. They need to mold the technology to their particular goals.

“Next year we talk about what’s real,” he said.

Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.