But a dinner earlier this week—that Fortune and Philips cohosted in New York with leaders of the country’s major health systems—revealed a sharper question: Will those gains flow back into care, or disappear the way telehealth’s efficiencies did into lower reimbursements and thinner margins? After all, rising costs, reduced coverage, and labor shortages, along with regulatory challenges and a fragmented market, have put pressure on the industry to gain efficiencies while creating barriers to achieve them. Some participants expressed concern that AI gains could go the way of telehealth, where increased efficiency leads to less compensation from insurers for those delivering care.
And yet there was palpable excitement at what AI can do. “It’s truly changing the way we care for people, with better outcomes at a lower cost,” Kevin Mahoney, CEO of University of Pennsylvania Health System, told me. While it can’t fix everything, he added, “we’re in a moment where America can’t afford its health care, and we need to use every tool we can.”
