Health systems have lately been managing token-based AI costs across their broader vendor stack largely through access tiering and governance.
What emerged at this year’s Epic Users Group Meeting is a narrower problem: The vendor’s own AI suite, now woven directly into the EHR nearly every clinician and biller touches daily, runs on a hybrid pricing model that CIOs say is uniquely hard to isolate, forecast or govern the way they can with standalone AI tools.
Several CIOs used the same word for it: tokenomics.
“The other piece that I think is interesting right now is all the consumption-based AI costs with Epic and others, and how we in healthcare figure out how to plan for that,” Amy Trainor, BSN, RN, vice president and CIO of New Orleans-based Ochsner Health, told Becker’s at Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wis. “It’s so variable that we’ve got to really sit down [and] make sure we have accountable people to understand: Are we getting the ROI and benefit from each of these pieces of AI? … That’s a whole new function of accountability and job function that just doesn’t exist today.