.jpg)
Healthcare has no shortage of information. The challenge is getting the right information to the right people, at the right time.
Every day, providers, health plans and patients navigate systems that span multiple organizations, systems and teams. Important information often exists somewhere within the healthcare ecosystem, but finding it, sharing it, and acting on it can still require significant administrative effort.
That reality helps explain why healthcare leaders are increasingly shifting their focus away from AI experimentation and toward a more practical question: How can AI help healthcare work better?
Across the industry, health systems, payers and healthcare organizations are actively testing and deploying AI-enabled capabilities. The next opportunity is turning those investments into measurable improvements that simplify operations, improve experiences and help reduce unnecessary costs across the healthcare system.
That requires looking beyond individual tools and focusing on how work gets done.
The real opportunity is workflow transformation
Many healthcare challenges are not caused by a lack of information. They are caused by disconnected processes.
Providers spend valuable time managing administrative requirements, tracking down information and navigating systems that were not designed to work together. Patients experience those same challenges differently. Delays, repeated requests for information and uncertainty about next steps can all stem from disconnected workflows happening behind the scenes.
Many healthcare processes remain complex, manual and difficult to navigate. Workflows often require multiple reviews, administrative steps and handoffs that create friction for providers, health plans and patients alike. The opportunity is not simply to digitize those processes. It is to redesign them.
Artificial intelligence, when used responsibly, has the potential to help address those issues, but only when it is applied to real systems rather than isolated tasks.
Traditional AI can identify patterns, generate insights and surface recommendations. Newer AI capabilities can help coordinate actions across workflows, bringing together information and activities that historically required multiple systems, teams and manual handoffs.
The goal is not simply automating work. The goal is helping healthcare work more seamlessly.
Moving beyond experimentation
Healthcare organizations have moved quickly from AI exploration to practical implementation. Today, healthcare leaders are increasingly focused on where AI can create measurable value:
- Can AI help reduce administrative burden?
- Can it improve information sharing?
- Can it assist in eliminating unnecessary delays?
- Can it support better experiences for both providers and patients?
Those questions are driving a new phase of AI adoption centered on operational value.
Early AI efforts often focused on individual use cases. Today's challenge is scaling those capabilities across healthcare operations in ways that improve experiences, reduce friction and produce measurable outcomes.
At Elevance Health, AI supports a broader strategy focused on making healthcare simpler, more connected and easier to navigate. In fact, the company has invested more than $1 billion in digital and AI-enabled capabilities that support those goals.
Reducing friction across the healthcare ecosystem
One of healthcare's most persistent challenges is the amount of administrative effort required to move information between organizations.
Across the industry, organizations are looking for ways to reduce work that does not directly contribute to patient care while improving the speed and accuracy of information sharing and eliminating unnecessary administrative costs.
Providers, payers and patients often experience the same problem from different perspectives. Providers spend time gathering information and completing administrative tasks. Patients experience delays and uncertainty. Health plans work to coordinate information across multiple stakeholders.
When systems are more connected, those experiences improve for everyone. For example, through Health OS, Elevance Health is working to improve data sharing and reduce administrative burden across the healthcare ecosystem. In major health systems, those capabilities have reduced lack-of-information denials by about 68% and eliminated the need for peer-to-peer reviews. Each avoided delay, duplicate task, or unnecessary review helps create a healthcare system that is more efficient, less costly and better able to focus resources where they matter most – patient care.
Prior authorization is another area where healthcare organizations are exploring how digital tools can improve speed and predictability. Across Elevance Health-affiliated health plans, the majority of prior authorization requests submitted through digital portals are approved in near real time, and most are approved within 72 hours when clinically appropriate.
And internally, automation has helped reduce administrative burdens in areas such as chart requests by up to 43%, allowing teams to focus more time on supporting providers and patients.
Technology alone is not the answer
Healthcare's future will not be defined by AI alone.
It will be defined by how effectively organizations use technology to improve coordination, reduce complexity and support better outcomes.
That requires strong governance, clear accountability and continued human oversight.
Clinical decisions must remain the responsibility of healthcare professionals. AI works best when it supports people by simplifying routine tasks, surfacing relevant information and helping teams coordinate more effectively.
The organizations creating the greatest value from AI are not necessarily deploying the most tools. They are finding ways to make healthcare more connected.
The next chapter of AI
Healthcare has largely moved beyond asking whether AI can create value.
The more important question is how to scale that value across the healthcare system. The next chapter of AI in healthcare will be less about experimentation and more about integration. Less about individual technologies and more about connected workflows that help patients, providers and health plans work together more effectively.
