"You're moving fast, and honestly, it makes me nervous."
A benefits leader at one of the country's largest public healthcare purchasers told us this recently, after a few days of presentations about how AI would reshape care. He wasn't an AI skeptic; he was sold on the destination. He just wanted more detail on how to get there: the timing, the guardrails, and some assurance that implementing AI wouldn't break the services his members rely on today.
As leaders at a company with an AI solution in the market, we've heard some version of this question dozens of times. His concern speaks to a common misconception among healthcare buyers. The main risk with healthcare AI isn't the speed of adoption. It's the direction.
Consumers are increasingly turning to general-purpose AI for everyday health concerns, while 75% of U.S. health systems are already running at least one AI application. But what are we racing toward? Consumers are following the path of least resistance. Providers, payers, and the operators supplying them are gravitating toward use cases where the financial pull is strongest and the ROI is fastest, not necessarily where patients and purchasers stand to gain the most.
Will this create efficiency? How quickly will this pay off? These aren't the most important questions. The question that matters most is: What's the net impact of this AI within the payment model, workflow, and population where it's deployed?
We've been on both sides of this question. One of us (Nupur) is an engineer and executive who has spent the last decade building and shipping clinical AI. The other (Akin) is a gastroenterologist who spent years at the bedside before advising health systems and carriers on strategy, and now sits across the table from the employers and health plans deciding where to allocate budget.
This vantage point has taught us that everyone at the table, buyer or builder, needs to get sharper on how we evaluate AI solutions. As a buyer, you need a framework to separate tools that genuinely move outcomes from tools that just move money around. As a builder, you need to know which questions the serious buyers will ask before they sign, and make sure you can answer them for yourself first.
In either case, we've found the same four principles apply.
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