Dr. ChatGPT has replaced Dr. Google.
Patients now often show up to medical visits armed with potential diagnoses and treatments generated by AI on their phones.
As commercial chatbots are typically more powerful than what health systems offer inside their own walls, leaders will need to respond before that trust gap widens. But CIOs told Becker’s this tech disparity isn’t necessarily a negative, nor is it unexpected.
“Health systems still have an advantage that consumer tools don’t,” said Muhammad Siddiqui, CIO of Richmond, Ind.-based Reid Health. “We know the patient’s history, medications, diagnoses, care team, and local care options. But if we don’t turn that into a better digital experience, that advantage won’t mean much to the patient.”
But there are good reasons healthcare doesn’t move as quickly as the tech industry in general. A big one? Patient safety.
“Health systems will not and cannot move as fast as consumer AI as long as we stay committed to ‘first, do no harm’ as our guiding principle rather than ‘move fast and break things,'” said Curtis Cole, MD, chief global information officer of Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University. “Some systems are moving faster than others, and that is not going to help them in the long run. … The technology is somewhat a commodity already so any early use case can be imitated, and your high-risk rapid adoption mostly just serves to help the slower adopters reduce risk.”
The issue is not that patients will find better health information outside the health system but that the answers will look better, Dr. Cole said, because AI chatbots tend to exude certainty whether they’re right or not. Researchers from Beth Israel Lahey Health, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, all based in Cambridge, recently designed a framework to produce more “humble” healthcare AI.
“With patient safety as our nonnegotiable north star, it is followed by a complex web of concerns around data privacy, cybersecurity, data governance, workflow disruption, and operational risk,” said Jim Feen, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer of New Bedford, Mass.-based Southcoast Health. “This is making C‑suites eager for AI to solve longstanding efficiency challenges, CISOs nauseous, and the masses eager for more AI to streamline the most complex industry on the planet.”
Healthcare also has inherent regulatory — not to mention financial — hurdles. “Health system finance departments typically require a clear ROI for new initiatives,” said Raza Fayyaz, CIO of Canton, Ohio-based Aultman Health System. “AI’s primary ROI often lies in its ability to be an ‘output multiplier,’ enhancing efficiency and quality rather than just cutting direct costs. This intangible value can sometimes make it more difficult to secure traditional investment compared to other capital projects.”
But the competition is only heating up. Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic have all introduced healthcare-specific chatbot capabilities. Epic, the nation’s most popular EHR vendor, could solve this problem for health systems, however, after releasing Emmie, a conversational AI for patients directly integrated with their medical records.
Some IT leaders see the increasing availability of easy-to-use AI tools as an opportunity for healthcare. “On average, a physician has less than 18 minutes to assess a patient, review records, enter data, and determine a course of action,” Mr. Fayyaz said. “Patients who chat with AI have the luxury of time to think through and document their conditions more thoroughly.”
He noted that his health system encourages clinicians to view the AI-generated information that patients bring as a “supplemental tool,” uncovering things that might not have come up in the time crunch that is the modern medical appointment.
“That said, some of the slowdown is self-imposed,” Mr. Siddiqui said. “Health systems can get stuck in long review cycles, fragmented ownership, and a mindset that every tool has to be perfect before it can be useful. Meanwhile, patients aren’t waiting.”
To move faster, health systems need “stronger governance, clearer decision rights, better vendor evaluation, tighter workflow integration, and leadership teams that treat AI as an operational priority rather than a side conversation,” he added.
If their accuracy improves, AI chatbots could increase access to care and prevent unnecessary visits among the “worried well,” Dr. Cole said. At the same time, physicians will need to become fluent in the technology to avoid obsolescence.
“But AI is not going to take a biopsy, do a physical exam, or perform complicated procedures any time soon,” he said. “So doctors are not going away just yet.”
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