Two major health systems say their most valuable data-related investments this year are already making an impact — one through a custom AI-powered tool for clinical workflows, the other through a modernized enterprise data foundation.
Becker’s asked two health systems: What has been your most valuable data-related investment so far this year, and how is it moving the needle for your organization?
At Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care Nigam Shah, MD, PhD, chief data scientist, pointed to chatEHR as their most impactful tool.
“I’d say for us it is chatEHR, a set of capabilities developed at Stanford Medicine for using Large Language Models (LLMs) with a single patient’s longitudinal medical chart in context,” Dr. Shah told Becker’s.
According to Dr. Shah, the tool supports various clinical decisions, such as determining transfer eligibility, generating hospital stay summaries and facilitating service referrals. It is embedded in Epic Hyperspace, allowing clinicians, nurses and pharmacists to query a patient’s medical record using natural language.
Meanwhile, Phoenix-based Banner Health is concentrating on infrastructure. The organization expanded its enterprise data platform in 2025.
“Our most valuable data-related investment this year has been the development and expansion of our Banner Data Platform, which integrates three key technologies: AWS cloud infrastructure, Databricks for analytics and processing, and Anthropic’s AI capabilities,” Sean Turner, chief data officer of information technology at Banner Health, told Becker’s.
Mr. Turner said the platform has created a reliable and AI-ready foundation to support the system’s strategic growth.
“This essential infrastructure work ensures we have the capacity to support our growth agenda while delivering superior clinical and business outcomes,” he said.
Both Stanford and Banner say their investments this year have laid the groundwork for continued innovation in care delivery and systemwide performance.
