Mountain View, Calif.-based El Camino Health implemented several AI applications that have revolutionized operations and clinical care in the last year. One of the most productive has been revolutionizing OR block utilization to fill the open spaces and help surgeons identify open spots for their surgeries.
“That has actually brought tremendous revenue into our organization,” said Deb Muro, CIO of El Camino Health. “Then we brought in some technology to help us personalize the appointment scheduling process so that the patient can see many options for them. They can see the option to see a physician and they can see the option for urgent care. They can also see virtual care opportunities.”
The technology for patients to self-triage ensures facilitates a better experience for them and improves efficiencies within the organization. It has become a strong example of what the health system can do with the right technology and now El Camino Health is searching for more opportunities to bring similar results.
“We are really thinking of ourselves as AI-powered,” Ms. Muro said. “We are trying to make sure that in every scenario, every nook and cranny of our organization that our employees, patients and physicians have access to technology such as AI that’s going to make them more efficient, more effective and make their day better.”
The health system also implemented an AI tool to flag lung nodules in chest X-rays as a way to improve clinical care. The team didn’t realize the impact it would have. Over three months, the AI tool identified 700 lung nodules that the original order wasn’t looking for and helped patients find treatment.
That is the version of AI value Ms. Muro is trying to document and replicate across the organization.
“We all know that it has made life easier. We all know that it’s improved and saved time, but it’s been hard to measure and really determine the true value,” she said. “AI is expensive, and so as we’re thinking about bringing AI in, on the flip side, we have to think about how does it save dollars and save costs so that we can fund it.”
The pressure to answer that question is not unique to El Camino Health at a moment when health systems across the country are being asked to make the business case for expensive AI investments. El Camino’s position in Silicon Valley, ranked among the top 100 hospitals in the country and holding Most Wired Level 10 status, gives Ms. Muro’s push particular institutional grounding. Then the outcomes speak for themselves.
“Fulfilling our ORs using AI technology to be predictive and know when we’re going to have an opening and fill it has brought in a couple million dollars this past year using that AI,” Ms. Muro said.
The radiology AI program has also produced a clear hard-dollar return so far. When patients arrive for imaging, AI tools scan simultaneously for findings beyond the original clinical issue.
“If a patient has a chest X-ray and we’re looking for pneumonia, and the AI identifies a lung nodule, then we are able to treat that patient, and that not only benefits the patient so that they’re treated faster, but it brings revenue into our organization,” she said.
Ambient listening has produced a different kind of return. Freed from documentation during patient encounters, physicians at El Camino Health are closing charts faster, sometimes within minutes of a visit and consistently within 24 hours. Ms. Muro draws a direct line from that speed to revenue cycle performance: compress the documentation lag, and reimbursement follows sooner.
El Camino Health is also scaling AI broadly across the organization. The health system has increased its use of AI within its EHR by 500% in recent months, deploying tools across clinical use cases. On the administrative side, the organization has rolled out Microsoft Copilot and Claude, and is training employees to identify where AI can change their specific workflows.
Looking ahead, Ms. Muro envisions generative AI eventually replacing static analytics dashboards with a real-time query model in which staff, clinicians and patients can ask questions directly and get answers without waiting on reports.
Ms. Muro, who trained as a registered nurse before moving into healthcare IT, said the value discipline not as a finance exercise but as a prerequisite for growth. AI that can demonstrate return can be funded and AI that cannot will face more scrutiny.
“It’s really something that we’re all going to be focusing on because AI is expensive,” she said.
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