AI In Healthcare | What Comes Next Ep. 6

“The biggest insurance companies have intentionally made this industry opaque. The number one rule of healthcare contracts is that you can’t talk about healthcare contracts. Until now.”  Mark Cuban

YTD Performance as of April 24, 2026

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Clinicians, a free version for verified U.S. physicians, NPs, PAs, and pharmacists, as physician AI use hit an all-time high with 72% of doctors now using AI in practice, up from 48% last year. The tool’s underlying model scored 59.0 on HealthBench Professional, outperforming human doctors who scored 43.7 even with unlimited time and web access. It includes reusable workflow skills, clinical search across peer-reviewed sources, and optional HIPAA compliance via a BAA. For health system CMIOs, a free frontier model now sits directly in the hands of every credentialed clinician, bypassing enterprise procurement entirely. OpenAI

Hartford HealthCare launched Patient GPT, built by K Health, while Sutter Health and Reid Health rolled out Emmie, an Epic-integrated chatbot that pulls from patients’ EHR records and operates inside MyChart under HIPAA protections. About 25% of Americans have already used an AI tool for health advice, and patients in underserved rural communities send nearly 600,000 healthcare messages a week through AI tools. Stanford’s Nigam Shah calls the trend a net positive, while Johns Hopkins’ Suchi Saria warns patient-facing AI must be held to the same bar as any clinical tool. For health system CMOs, deployment is moving faster than governance frameworks. Newsweek

City of Hope’s Hope LLM synthesizes years of fragmented cancer records, including PDFs, scanned notes, and radiology reports, into point-of-care summaries in minutes. The model has materially reduced after-hours documentation work and now matches patients to active clinical trials in real time. Chief AI Officer Nasim Eftekhari notes the governance challenge has flipped: clinicians now pull AI toward them, requiring guardrails to prevent over-reliance rather than campaigns to drive adoption. CDO Magazine

Mayo Clinic’s MedEduChat pairs a large language model with each patient’s EHR to deliver personalized, conversational prostate cancer education between clinical visits. In a published study, patient health confidence scores rose from 9.9 to 13.9 on a 16-point scale, with clinicians rating responses highly accurate and safe. Mayo plans to expand the tool across all three campuses and into additional cancer specialties, pointing toward AI-assisted patient education as a standard part of oncology care. Mayo Clinic Press

UnitedHealth posted Q1 adjusted earnings of $7.23 per share, beating estimates by 66 cents, and raised its full-year outlook to greater than $18.25 per share. The medical care ratio improved to 83.9%, down from a peak of 89.9% in Q3 2025. Elevance Health also beat, posting adjusted EPS of $12.58 and raising full-year guidance to at least $26.75. For provider leaders, stabilizing payer margins signal that cost discipline and repricing are working, making aggressive contract negotiations in 2026 the baseline, not the exception. Reuters  Fierce Healthcare

UnitedHealth is spending $1.5 billion on AI in 2026, with one-third going into Optum Insight software products and two-thirds deployed across core operations, with a projected 2-to-1 return within 12 to 18 months. Its pharmacy tool PreCheck cut prescription approval time from 8 hours to under 30 seconds, reduced denials by 68%, and cut appeals by 88%. The company aims to cut total prior authorizations by 30% by year-end, and its AI care navigation assistant Avery will reach 20 million members. For provider leaders, UnitedHealth’s AI investment is being deployed directly against the friction points that drive the most administrative cost on both sides of the contract. Becker’s Hospital Review

Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Wellness now publishes direct contracts between self-insured employers and providers, with no intermediaries, no prior auth, and mandatory 30-day payment terms. The platform lists 27 contracts covering 9,200+ providers and 193 facilities, starting in Dallas-Fort Worth, with Baylor Scott & White as the first major health system to sign on. With 67% of covered workers in self-funded plans, Cuban’s pitch to health system CFOs is blunt: your biggest commercial payer relationships may be your least profitable. Becker’s Hospital Review

Amazon One Medical launched a GLP-1 Management Program combining primary care, virtual visits, and Amazon Pharmacy delivery into a single obesity treatment experience. Cash-pay pricing starts at $149/month for oral and $299/month for injectable medications, with same-day delivery now available in nearly 3,000 cities. For payers and health systems, Amazon is assembling a vertically integrated chronic disease platform that bypasses traditional care navigation entirely. Becker’s Hospital Review

Yelp has integrated Zocdoc directly into its platform, letting users book doctor appointments through AI-powered search without leaving the app. The Yelp Assistant now answers care-related questions, surfaces provider reviews, and completes bookings in one flow. With 65% of Americans already using AI search tools for local decisions, the patient access front door is moving fast toward general-purpose consumer platforms and away from health system websites and payer portals. Fast Company

Amazon is investing $5 billion in Anthropic now, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones, on top of the $8 billion already committed. In return, Anthropic will spend more than $100 billion on AWS over the next decade and secure up to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity using Amazon’s custom Trainium chips. For health system CIOs, the AWS-Anthropic relationship is hardening into a dominant infrastructure stack. Vendor neutrality decisions made now will carry real pricing leverage implications within two years. About Amazon

OpenAI released GPT-5.5, codenamed “Spud,” describing it as a new class of intelligence built for agentic computing. It handles multi-step workflows more autonomously with less user input, at the same response speed as GPT-5.4. The release comes just six weeks after GPT-5.4. ChatGPT now has 900 million weekly active users and 50 million subscribers. The model meets OpenAI’s internal “High” risk classification for cybersecurity and underwent extensive third-party red teaming before release. For health system technology leaders, the gap between enterprise AI capability and internal IT capacity to govern it is widening with every new release. OpenAI

Honor’s humanoid robot “Lightning” finished a Beijing half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human world record by more than six minutes. Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, has been building humanoid robots for only one year. Nearly half of the 300 robots entered ran autonomously, while others used remote control. For healthcare leaders, the labor shortage implications are no longer theoretical: physical AI is advancing faster than most workforce planning cycles. KTLA