Rohit Chandra, PhD, didn’t come up through healthcare.
He’s an engineer by training who joined Cleveland Clinic four years ago from outside the industry, and he’ll tell you that’s part of the point. The same is true of the chief AI officer Cleveland Clinic hired 18 months ago. When one of the most storied health systems in the world decides it needs to rethink how it applies technology to medicine, it goes looking for people who think differently and then gives them a very specific mandate.
That mandate, as Dr. Chandra describes it, isn’t completely about technology. It’s about relationships.
“How do we build deep relationships and partnerships with clinical and operational leaders at the Clinic so that we can bring a technology-first mindset to many of the important areas within healthcare?” he said. “That’s the opportunity that I think is ahead of us.”
As chief digital officer, Dr. Chandra oversees Cleveland Clinic’s full technology footprint: traditional IT, health records, data analytics and a rapidly expanding AI portfolio. But the through-line of his strategy is less about any particular tool and more about how an organization learns to use tools well and building the team that makes that possible.
The results of that approach showed up clearly in 2025. Cleveland Clinic’s most significant AI initiative of the year was the AI scribe — a technology that listens to provider-patient conversations, transcribes them and auto-generates draft clinical notes. The math it addresses is straightforward and punishing: a 20- or 30-minute outpatient visit typically requires another 10 to 15 minutes of post-encounter documentation, which means a primary care physician can spend anywhere from one and a half to three hours every day just writing up notes.
“This documentation is a good thing from every aspect,” Dr. Chandra says. “It’s just that it’s very time consuming.”
More than 4,000 Cleveland Clinic physicians adopted the scribe in 2025, and millions of encounters have now been documented with AI assistance rather than manual entry. The technology changed not just efficiency but the character of the encounter itself: with ambient documentation handling the notes, physicians can give their full attention to the patient in front of them and the documentation happens “almost magically,” Dr. Chandra said
But the scribe story is really a story about organizational readiness as much as it is about technology. Getting 4,000 physicians to change how they document care doesn’t happen because a tool is good. It happens because a health system has done the slower, harder work of earning clinical trust and creating conditions where experimentation is safe. Chandra is candid about how much weight that carries.
“The change management is essential to do carefully and responsibly,” he said. “That is actually as big a lift as the technology.”
Looking ahead to scaling AI beyond the two or three flagship initiatives — into 10 or more different efforts across the organization — he sees the same challenge at a larger magnitude.
“We need to expand our ability to mobilize ourselves as an organization and to pick and choose the right problems,” Dr. Chandra said. “Mobilize the technology teams, both the clinical and operational leaders to say, ‘What are the problems that we want to go after? How do we work with our technology partners to thoughtfully build the right solutions?'”
Over a multi-year horizon, Dr. Chandra is building toward a system where AI makes the whole enterprise work better — where 30,000 patient encounters a day are coordinated with less friction, where caregivers spend less time on documentation and more time on care, and where clinical risk tools focus attention on the patients who need it most.
“If I step back over time, if I look at the macro landscape, I am a deep believer that AI can help us make healthcare safer, cheaper and more scalable,” he said.
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