New Orleans-based Ochsner Health is taking a pragmatic view of return on investment as it expands artificial intelligence enterprisewide, focusing first on productivity gains, administrative efficiency and clinician sustainability.
Amy Trainor, CIO of Ochsner Health, said the health system is deliberate about how and where it expects AI to deliver value, recognizing that not all returns show up immediately on a balance sheet. But recent rollouts of ambient document technology have garnered positive feedback.
“While not a hard ROI, the, work-life balance, or work-life harmony as I like to call it, is really amazing, and the doctors really do love it,” Ms. Trainor said during an episode of the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.”
Ambient technology is one of Ochsner’s most widely adopted tools and the system is currently in a “spread and scale” phase, prioritizing physician adoption and time savings over short-term financial metrics. The investment in ambient technology is foundational, supporting retention and long-term workforce stability.
Beyond clinician-facing tools, Ochsner is seeing clearer financial returns in administrative and revenue cycle use cases, where the risk profile is lower and speed to value is higher. One example with measurable impact is pharmacy-related automation.
“We are doing some really great revenue cycle pharmacy authorization automation that’s saving our pharmacists a ton of time,” Ms. Trainor said. While pharmacy is a clinical domain, the work being automated is largely administrative, allowing staff to focus on higher-value tasks and accelerating patient access to medications.
Ochsner also continues to use AI-driven models to support quality and operational performance. Looking ahead, Ms. Trainor expects the pace and scale of AI-driven ROI to increase, particularly on the back-office side of the organization.
“I can only imagine if I was saying this next year what that would look like,” she said. “We would probably double the things that we’re using AI for.”
Ms. Trainor and her team are focused on disciplined expansion rather than rapid, unchecked deployment. Ochsner separates clinical and patient-facing AI from administrative use cases, applying stricter evaluation standards where patient care is directly affected.
“In the clinical patient-facing, physician-facing and nurse-facing work, we want to make sure AI is following all of our principles,” Ms. Trainor said. “We’re QA-ing it. We want to understand how good the AI is.”
That risk-based approach allows Ochsner to pursue faster ROI in revenue cycle, authorization and administrative burden reduction while maintaining trust with clinicians. Strategic prioritization also reflects Ochsner’s market realities, taking patient demographics, clinician availability, regional economics and payer mix into account.
“How do we make sure we’re spending our dollars that give our physicians, clinicians, and our patients the best use of healthcare and technology?” Ms. Trainor said.
Long term, Ms. Trainor said sustainable ROI will depend on adoption and operational ownership as much as technology selection.
“Adoption is the key to success, in AI deployment for sure,” she said.
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