“The most important thing for AI in health care is what’s most important in health care–which is better patient outcomes,” Saturn Business Systems CTO Mike St. Amour said.
Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots revolutionizing patient portals. Voice-interactive AI agents that help prevent hospital readmissions. And ambient listening technology that allows clinicians to better focus on care.
Solution providers are at the center of standing up cutting-edge tools that promise to usher hospitals, clinics, insurance companies and other end users in the health care space into the AI era.
And as these partners tell CRN, they are well-positioned to help these customers overcome obstacles that could otherwise prevent them from participating in the AI wave, from navigating data access regulations, surmounting siloed data systems and implementing strategies to prepare for adopting the AI technology of today and preparing for AI’s future.
“The most important thing for AI in health care is what’s most important in health care–which is better patient outcomes,” Mike St. Amour, chief technology officer at New York-based Saturn Business Systems–No. 444 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview. “People in hospitals want to save lives.”
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Health Care AI
The health care AI market should exceed $120 billion by 2028, according to an April report by agentic automation vendor SS&C Blue Prism.
And 61 percent of health care leaders say their primary strategy for generative AI (GenAI) is to partner with third-parties to develop customized solutions compared to 20 percent who primarily intend to build GenAI capabilities in house, and 19 percent who primarily intend to buy off the shelf, according to a survey published in March by McKinsey & Co.
The solution providers who spoke with CRN said that so far, investments in AI by health care customers continue in the face of cost uncertainty as countries negotiate global tariffs. The partners say they explore a variety of pricing models with customers based on their needs, from capital projects to a recurring revenue software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to, in Saturn’s case, even connecting customers with grant writers that fund technology projects.
“The macroeconomic challenges are driving the need for speed,” Trent Sanders, vice president for U.S. health care and life sciences at New York-based Kyndryl–No. 11 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview. “It’s all about time-to-value.”
Solution providers said their early expertise in health care AI is not only leading to deeper relationships with existing customers but opening the door to new ones. And these health care AI solutions have potential applications in other industries such as schools and retail–with MSPs, system integrators (SIs) and other partner types a necessity in making sure customers have the right measurables in place for assessing AI’s return on investment (ROI).
“There’s going to be a need for people to go out and teach those folks who don’t fully comprehend what’s possible here,” Bill Tennant, chief revenue officer of Tampa, Fla.-based BlueCloud–No. 484 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview. That also goes for “the folks that don’t trust it, don’t know how to trust it,” he said.
Multiple solution providers who talked to CRN for this article said vendors need to work together to keep their AI tools open and interoperable for the best AI-powered results and to maintain guardrails to prevent unauthorized access. Customers fear lock-in in the AI era and use systems from multiple vendors that need to communicate for more accurate, more insightful information generated by AI.
And even once AI solutions are in production, they offer repeat work for solution providers in scaling the solution throughout an enterprise and tuning solutions as technology evolves and the customer amasses more data.
Saturn’s Patient Portal Chatbots
The health care AI revolution has reached Saturn’s St. Amour in his personal life. For a friend who survived a brainstem stroke and could no longer speak clearly, he trained an AI model on a laptop to recognize her speech and translate her words into preset phrases.
“It recognizes when she’s saying, ‘Thank you, honey. I love you,’” St. Amour said. “It can come back and say that in a more easy-to-understand voice.”
In its work with customers, Saturn has transformed portals used by patients, clinicians, insurance firms and facilities with chatbots that deliver a new level of interaction and insight.
That means more effective appointment scheduling, managing multiple healthcare providers for a single patient, tracking a patient’s care history and test results–all while limiting access and control based on regulations and policies.
Chatbots represent an AI interface that can be easier to digest for customers than a massive multi-year AI platform rollout that, given the pace of innovation in the field, could be outdated by launch, St. Amour said. AI agents, as that technology is adopted, will have the ability to pull in data from a variety of sources to improve answers and analysis.
“Technology needs will all change,” he said. “Patients will not have good outcomes while we wait.”
Part of the customer engagement for St. Amour and the team at Saturn–which ranks as a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Platinum Partner and IBM Gold Partner among other vendor relationships–is assessing a health care customer’s data landscape and vulnerabilities, looking into the risks of AI adoption, putting in governance to meet rules around personally identifiable information (PII) and other data.
Saturn has also been investing in computer vision solutions so that health care facilities can leverage cameras for everything from identifying when a patient has fallen to detecting if someone is trying to bring a weapon onto a campus, he said.
BlueCloud’s AI Agents, Accelerators
BlueCloud’s Tennant said he and his team are ready for whatever form solution providers take in the AI era–he could even see partners becoming orchestrators of a series of AI agents and AI tools that make decisions for customers, giving them productivity gains.
Still, Tennant doesn’t see BlueCloud becoming an independent software vendor (ISV) and licensing technology. Internally, BlueCloud executives joked that by the time they’d get a patent, the technology would likely be outdated. Solution providers have the benefit–and responsibility–of assessing AI’s upcoming advancements for customer fit.
“This is a truly fundamental shift in the entire nature of how we do business and how other firms like us need to think about doing business,” he said.
The solution provider has leveraged its close partnerships with data-focused Snowflake and Google Cloud to consolidate data and securely share it with whoever needs access to execute an AI project. BlueCloud also partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.
In an example of AI solutions BlueCloud is bringing to customers, Tennant described a talent management accelerator that takes into account nurses’ levels of experience with various types of patients and types of machinery. A health care customer can see if employees are already certified on a medical device it would like to acquire.
An AI agent BlueCloud has the capacity to deliver aims to decrease patient readmissions with voice interaction and guidance that goes beyond legacy monitoring technology, he said.
“No matter what I say is the most interesting (AI use case) today, by tomorrow, it’s outdated,” he said. “That’s the most beautiful part of what we’re doing right now.”
Kyndryl, an early launch partner for the Microsoft Dragon Copilot, has worked with health care customers to take the tool beyond simple note summarization for clinicians to automate pharmacy orders, schedule future appointments and check the accuracy of codes used in insurance claims.
“That’s why partnerships are so important,” Kyndryl’s Sanders said. “How do we help you maximize this technology? … We can improve the caregiver experience, which is bringing joy back into the care setting.”
Kyndryl is also investing in bringing health care customers “digital front door” technology that can give patients holistic recommendations based on medications they already take, their preferred pharmacy, their insurance and other signals.
Sanders and his team have a variety of frameworks and strategies for targeting customers’ AI experimentation to see results early before investing further. One piece of advice–go with the use case that checks off a variety of desired outcomes, including improved productivity, improved patient safety, cost reduction and revenue capture.
He also advises customers to focus on staying in the AI game, winning the game, then changing the game. Customers can stay in the game by leveraging AI for operational efficiencies–Kyndryl has introduced its own Bridge AIOps platform for customers, for example.
Customers win the game by leaning on the native AI capabilities getting baked into systems they already know–electronic health record (EHR) providers like Epic, business integration engines like ServiceNow, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from the likes of Workday, and collaboration software from Microsoft and others. This can be especially important for health care customers that decide on platforms to use for many years.
And finally, customers will change the game when they invest in cutting-edge new AI tools such as ambient and digital front doors.
“That, to me, is how you filter through the noise of everything that’s out there,” he said. “If you’re solely focused on the big bets, you’re missing the fact that there’s a lot of foundational work that we need to do.”
