The human equation
If there’s one fear that surfaces in every conversation about AI and healthcare, it’s this: that the empathy, the connection, the human moment that makes patient support meaningful could get engineered away in the pursuit of efficiency.
The leaders in this report don’t share that fear, but they do take it seriously. They know the question of where people belong in an AI-augmented system isn’t rhetorical. The starting point, for most of them, is a reframe.
"I'm most excited about AI's ability to help remove the friction points in the patient journey while elevating, but not eliminating, the human experience."
That distinction – elevating, not eliminating – positions AI not as a threat to the human element but as the thing that protects it by clearing the path to the moments that actually require a person.
"[AI is] going to allow us to be more human – to let us become better at humaning."
That’s the aspiration. But what does it look like in practice? Who gets the human interaction, and who gets the automated one? The answer, per our conversations, depends on who the patient is.
"If we can, through AI, get things done faster that don't necessarily benefit from a human interaction, then it allows greater opportunity for that rapport-building and empathy to be demonstrated in one-on-one interactions between the healthcare team member and the patient. And nothing could be more valuable than that."
"The people within my organization are the heart of our organization. They have empathy and compassion. And no matter what time of day it is, they know that at the end of the day, that patient is looking for access to their medicine – and they are doing everything in their human power to help."
The fear that AI will push humans out of the loop has, in many organizations, given way to a more nuanced question: what kind of loop should humans be in? Santiago Abraham of Optum Rx offers one of the clearest frameworks for thinking about this.
"There's a difference between human in the loop – where AI is assisting a human who's doing the work – and human on the loop, where a human is supervising a team of agents working in parallel. That shift changes everything about how you design the system and how you think about accountability."
In a world of agentic AI and automated workflows, people aren’t being relieved of accountability, but they are being asked to exercise it at a higher level. Judgment. Context. Empathy. The things that can’t be prompted.
"Having that judgment, that context, that accountability are really important. And while technology is increasingly good at personalizing things and can even show some empathy in some cases, there's still that human empathy, that connection with the patient or the member, that's really important."
The human equation isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a design principle to be honored. But honoring it requires something that doesn’t happen automatically: bringing your people along.
