Health systems have spent two years debating which AI tools to buy. The executives running them are starting to question how often they need to revisit that decision.
Richard Mulry, president and CEO of Northwell Holdings in New Hyde Park, N.Y., sees the cycle speeding up as the cost structure around AI changes.
“The most dangerous trend in healthcare right now is borrowed conviction: letting someone else’s roadmap, or someone else’s press release, stand in for your own operating strategy,” Mr. Mulry said. “AI has created a kind of gravitational pull where the fear of being late is doing more to pressure capital allocation than the actual problems in front of us.”
The pressure produces two failure modes that look like opposites. One is premature commitment — investing early in solutions that will eventually be absorbed into core platforms, leaving organizations managing technical debt with no lasting strategic value. The other is waiting for platform vendors to deliver while nothing changes in the workforce, the workflows, or the cost structure.
“Participation driven by optics and paralysis look like opposites, but we’ve come to see them as the same failure: outsourcing judgment to the market’s clock instead of your own operating priorities,” Mr. Mulry said.
Northwell Holdings’ response has been to move first where risk is lowest and enterprise impact is highest — which, today, means business process automation. As health systems are rationalizing their application portfolios and stepping back from pilot-heavy approaches, Northwell Holdings has concentrated on bounded, measurable projects that produce evidence before clinical commitments are made.
“That work is bounded and measurable, and it earns us the room to explore clinical solutions without betting the enterprise on them,” Mr. Mulry said.
The most visible change at Northwell Holdings is not which tools it has chosen but how often it revisits those choices. Health systems that are prioritizing workflow integration are finding the same logic applies — AI investments that don’t disrupt existing operations are easier to evaluate, easier to scale and easier to walk back when needed.
“What has changed most for us is the tempo — the horizon on a strategy in this space has gotten much shorter, so we check in with each other far more often than we used to, and we’ve gotten more comfortable revisiting a decision we made two quarters ago,” Mr. Mulry said.
At Becker's 4th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, taking place November 2–5 in Chicago, more than 1,500 hospital and health system executives tackle decisions that determine whether organizations thrive or merely survive: protecting margins under cost pressure, choosing where to grow, renegotiating payer relationships, stabilizing the workforce and proving real ROI on technology. This is where leaders work through them together, face-to-face. Apply for complimentary registration now.
