ABSTRACT:
Technology is no longer peripheral to healthcare. From patient flow to clinical decision support, the technological systems we have designed have become a dependency for modern medicine. What’s different now is the pace at which technology is accelerating, while our understanding of them decline. Keeping these systems safe, sustainable, and truly useful remains one of healthcare’s greatest challenges. Through real-world examples that we have lived through, this session will illustrate three critical enablers of sustainable digital care: workflow redesign, continuous training, and real-time evaluation. We have learned that reengineering workflows around digital capabilities, rather than fitting new tech into old habits drives efficiency, improves data quality, and enhances patient care. Creative, ongoing training builds the digital confidence clinicians need to adapt and excel. Continuous evaluation, grounded in high-reliability principles, ensures technology fulfills its promise while managing emerging risks. This session explores how to modernize safely, sustainably, and with purpose. To tie these learnings back to the age of artificial intelligence we will examine how these practices remain critical when integrating AI systems into the delivery of healthcare. AI may pass medical exams, but its confidence can be deceptively, and sometimes dangerously, human-like. Without understanding how to measure this nuance, we risk introducing new patient safety and ethical risks into an industry that cannot tolerate them. Token-level probabilities, already generated by most APIs, offer a simple, scalable proxy for an AI system’s “inner doubt”, often outperforming self- reported confidence. Sustaining digital health requires more than technology, it’s a socio-technical endeavor. True progress depends on aligning people, processes, and technology within the broader systems and policies that shape care. By modernizing the mechanisms of care with sustainability and equity in mind, we can move beyond shiny tools to build digital health systems that are safe, resilient, and built to last.