In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on building patient and doctor trust in AI.
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Good morning. From diagnosing illness to reducing paperwork, AI is already reshaping health care. But only 48% of U.S. patients surveyed in the 2025 Philips Future Health Index (FHI) believe AI will improve outcomes, vs. 63% of clinicians. That trust gap is hardly surprising in a country where many of us experience delays, unforeseen expenses, denials and general frustration in accessing the health care system. As Philips chief innovation officer Shez Partovi has noted, it’s an issue we need to address to realize the potential gains of AI adoption.
As we discussed at a recent Fortune dinner with Partovi and a dozen leaders of major health care systems around the country, closing the gap is a multipronged challenge. Public trust in the U.S. health care system fell from 71.5% in 2020 to 40.1% in 2024, in part due to COVID, and more than a third of Americans say they’ve skipped or postponed care because of the cost. Add in concerns about discrimination, as well as how personal health data may be used, and it’s understandable why patients may not welcome AI.
My colleague Jason Del Rey spoke about that challenge at the dinner with Partovi; Northwell Health chief medical officer Jill Kalman; and David Reich, chief clinical officer of the Mount Sinai Medical System. Kalman and Reich agreed that the first step for them was to build trust with professionals.
“When you obsessively build AI into workflows in ways that make people’s jobs better, then you develop that trust,” Reich said. “To give an example, when we developed an algorithm that predicted severe malnutrition in the hospital, dietitians at first were a little skeptical, but they were involved in the process, and they are now three times more likely to diagnose and treat severe malnutrition than before.”
Kalman added that there’s a generational element to trust in technology—indeed the study found one third of patients over 45 are optimistic that AI can improve health care vs. two thirds of those aged between 18 and 44—and argued that transparency is key. “You have a health system that has all of these huge reams of data,” she noted. “Who owns it? Who monetizes it? Who wants it?”
On the plus side, she says Northwell now uses AI to streamline prior authorization: “There’s no risk to the patient and the operational value is incredible.”
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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
