Jun 17, 2026
The real AI advantage in healthcare
8 min read
Summary
- Healthcare organizations are struggling to show measurable ROI on their AI investments. The barrier isn’t technology. It’s what we’re pointing it at.
- Healthcare runs on episodes, and the silence between them is where avoidable cost builds. That’s the gap AI can finally close.
- The biggest cost opportunity isn’t back-office efficiency. It’s the hospitalization, the ER visit, the condition that worsened because no one reached the person in time.
- The organizations pulling ahead have stopped optimizing the old model and started building a new one that’s proactive, always-on, and built around the consumer.
Last year, an MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots delivered no measurable financial return.1 Healthcare is no exception to this trend. A 2026 survey of health system CIOs found they tripled their AI spending last year to $1.4 billion, yet only about 4% have been able to scale it with measurable outcomes.2
Technology isn’t the problem. AI keeps getting better. So why are healthcare organizations struggling to scale and deliver impact?
I’ve had conversations with healthcare leaders across the world. AI pilots are multiplying, spending is increasing, and boards want to see ROI. Then I ask one question: what has AI changed for the person you’re trying to serve?
Most of them don’t have a clear answer.
Earlier this year at League Connect, I had a conversation with Sol Rashidi, the world’s first Chief AI Officer. Sol is a former AWS and Fortune 100 executive who helped launch IBM Watson in 2011 and has run more than 200 AI deployments. She was blunt about why AI transformation stalls:
“We still treat AI as a technology problem and not a human problem. It’s a technology transformation and not a human transformation. It’s a technology opportunity and not a human opportunity.”
This line has stuck with me, because it’s as true for the consumer experience as it is for the workforce.
The barrier to AI adoption in healthcare is strategy, not technology
Almost every health organization has AI initiatives. Very few have AI that is changing outcomes for the consumer.
The instinct is to treat it as a purely technological decision. Which model, which vendor, which use case. Sol put a number on where that leads: in the average project plan she reviews, roughly 70% of the time goes to infrastructure and model selection. The work that actually drives adoption, governance, and the human change around it gets whatever is left.
In healthcare, AI is mostly aimed at internal operations, administrative processes, and clinical efficiency. All useful and important work, but it doesn’t touch the relationship with the consumer, which stays as broken as ever. A recent survey League did with Healthcare Dive revealed that only 27% of leaders say their digital initiatives are fully aligned to CX outcomes.3 As a result, people still don’t know how to effectively manage their health, clinical teams are overloaded with preventable encounters, and ultimately, cost-to-serve continues to rise.
Where should your AI actually be pointed?
The organizations pulling ahead are using AI to rebuild care around the consumer. Our white paper, The End of Reactive Healthcare, breaks down what it takes to get there.
The organizations tapping into the real AI advantage in healthcare are asking a different question. Not “what AI should we buy?” but “how do we want to improve outcomes for the people we serve, and what would it take to get there?”
The real AI advantage is driving better health outcomes
Healthcare has always been built around episodes. Care starts when someone shows up with a problem and ends when that problem is resolved. Everything in between is mostly silence, and people are left to manage their health on their own. In a 2026 Abbott survey of 4,000 adults, only 1 in 4 feel very confident in knowing how to care for their health.4
That gap is expensive. Roughly a quarter of U.S. health spending is waste—between $760 billion and $935 billion a year—and a large share of it is avoidable: failures of care delivery, poor coordination, and low-value care.5 It’s the prescription that never gets filled, the ER visit that could’ve been a primary care appointment, and the chronic condition that gets worse because the patient isn’t supported between visits.
That silence between episodes is where costs build uncontrollably. It’s also where healthcare should be pointing its AI investments.
The healthcare system already has the data to do it. A typical hospital produces about 50 petabytes of data a year, and 97% of it goes unused.6 The signal you’d need to see a care gap forming already lives in claims, encounters, and patient history. Put it to work and proactive care stops being a slogan. It looks like:
- A benefits recommendation that surfaces the week a life event makes it relevant: a new baby, a new diagnosis, a plan switch.
- Outreach to someone whose engagement pattern shows they’re falling off track with their care plan.
- A care navigator who reaches a member ahead of a crisis instead of after.
- An AI triage step that points people to the right care setting before they land in the wrong one.
Timely, continuous, and personalized support is the real AI advantage in healthcare. More people stay engaged with their care, and that is what brings cost down over time. Deloitte research shows that proactive care could save the U.S. health care system up to $2.2 trillion a year by 2040.7 Left unchanged, CMS projects health care costs will continue increasing by an average of 5.8% annually through 2033.8
A one-time efficiency play or round of layoffs saves money once. Keeping people engaged in their care bends the cost curve for years.
How much is proactive care actually worth?
Our white paper, The End of Reactive Healthcare, puts real numbers on the savings and shows what the organizations already capturing it are doing differently.
It takes a business transformation to get there
Proactive care can’t be bolted onto a reactive system. Reaching people before they need you calls for structural changes to how your organization operates: redefining how success is measured, who owns what happens next for the consumer, and which legacy workflows have to go. This is a business transformation more than a technology one, and that’s the harder work that today’s best healthcare organizations are already doing.
They hold themselves accountable for outcomes, treat consumer experience as a way to move those outcomes, and organize their data and teams around the consumer. Do that, and the model flips: the consumer stops chasing the system, and the system starts reaching the consumer first.
Baptist Health is one of them. It operates in Arkansas, which has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.9 To improve maternal care, they built a digital experience that stayed with mothers between visits, with guidance and reminders. Well-baby visits rose 42% and missed prenatal visits fell 11%—outcomes that improved by staying accountable for what happened outside the walls of the health system.10
What comes next
The organizations using AI to reach the consumer and drive better outcomes are laying the foundation for a different kind of healthcare experience. At League, we call that destination the infinite care team: always-on, AI-powered support that knows every consumer’s history, anticipates their needs, and guides them to the next best action for their health.
The real advantage of AI adoption in healthcare is ultimately a human one: how we reach people, support them, and help them live healthier, fuller lives.
So it’s worth asking: how much of your AI is aimed at back-office efficiency or the moment of care, and how much of it reaches people before a crisis, in the stretch where outcomes are really determined? That’s the question that separates the organizations optimizing the old model from the ones building the next.
Sources
- Fortune, MIT Report: 95% of Generative AI Pilots at Companies Are Failing, August 2025.
- Qventus, CIO Research Report 2026, 2026.
- League & Healthcare Dive, The 2026 Benchmark for High-Impact Healthcare, 2026.
- Abbott, New Survey Finds Most Americans Believe Chronic Diseases Are Preventable, But Only 1 in 4 Feel Confident in How to Care for Their Health, April 2026.
- Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Almost 25% of Healthcare Spending Is Considered Wasteful. Here’s Why., 2023.
- World Economic Forum, How to Harness Health Data to Improve Patient Outcomes, January 2024.
- Deloitte Insights, Proactive Care: Medicare Savings, September 2025.
- CMS, National Health Expenditure Fact Sheet, 2026.
- CDC/NCHS, Maternal Mortality by State, 2018–2022.
- League customer data, Baptist Health. Approved for external use.
REPORT
The organizations building the next model share 5 traits
Reactive care is getting more expensive every year. Our white paper breaks down the five traits that separate the peak performers building proactive, always-on care from everyone still optimizing the old model.