AI in Healthcare: The New Key to Industry Growth
Verified
For healthcare CEOs, CFOs, and COOs, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer an experimental “innovation project.” It is becoming a board-level lever to protect margins, diversify revenue, and remain competitive in an environment shaped by value-based care, workforce shortages, and mounting regulatory pressures.
Healthcare leaders face compounding organizational pressures, striving to improve quality while containing rising costs. Against this backdrop, AI is often presented as an ideal and even transformative solution. Its “breaking news” articles no longer surprise. Yet there is no guarantee of lasting adoption.
As I argued recently in a Basil Strategies blog article, the paradox of too much innovation, yet not enough adoption, is precisely why a practical playbook is so valuable.
One of the most recent contributions is Consultport’s AI in Healthcare: Executive Transformation Playbook. It consolidates insights from Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, and McKinsey, together with Consultport’s own expertise. More importantly, it moves beyond the familiar efficiency narrative by showing how AI can drive growth, both through diversification and organically.
AI will only be transformative if executives treat it as a core growth strategy, not just as a cost-cutting tool.
The Roadmap for AI in Healthcare: From Idea to Scaled Impact
The Playbook provides a four-step roadmap designed to help healthcare businesses move from pilots to scalable impact.
- Identify High-Impact Areas. Target opportunities where AI aligns with core business goals and addresses workflow bottlenecks. Secure sponsorship from both clinical and operational leadership.
- Assess AI Readiness. Six pillars matter: data, technology, talent, culture, business alignment, and governance. Many organizations discover gaps across all six — awareness is step one.
- Pilot with Intent. Minimum viable products must be designed with scalability in mind. Define clear success metrics and involve frontline end users early to avoid adoption failure.
- Scale with Intention. Enterprise rollouts require infrastructure, governance, risk management, and talent development simultaneously. Few succeed without disciplined integration of data accessibility, compliance, and accountability.
This roadmap gives executives a disciplined playbook for building the future of AI in Healthcare: prioritize, structure, and pace AI adoption realistically, avoiding the trap of perpetual pilots.
New Opportunities with AI in Healthcare
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) MedTech’s investments in surgical robotics and cardiovascular innovation highlight how AI is reshaping the growth agenda for large healthcare players. Its collaboration with NVIDIA demonstrates how cross-industry partnerships can accelerate both clinical precision and operating performance. NVIDIA’s Holoscan and IGX platforms are already enabling J&J to bring real-time AI insights directly into the operating room, a signal of how fast advanced analytics are moving from concept to bedside.
In 2025, J&J extended this strategy by launching the Polyphonic AI Fund with NVIDIA and AWS, channeling capital, mentorship, and technology access into startups and academic teams.
Even industry giants with scale, resources, and global reach cannot embed AI alone. Growth now depends on building ecosystems that reach beyond traditional boundaries, partnerships that open new revenue streams, accelerate innovation, and reduce the cost and risk of going it alone.
New Business Models Enabled by AI
Diversification can involve rethinking how revenue is generated and sustained. The Playbook highlights Philips’ pivot to a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model as a clear signal of where medtech is heading. Traditionally, companies sold capital equipment like imaging machines, supplemented by maintenance fees. Relationships remained transactional.
Today, Philips is bundling hardware, AI-enabled imaging, and digital services into a subscription-based platform. For customers, this means continuous updates, support, and AI-driven services, fostering deeper relationships. For Philips, it means predictable recurring revenues and peaks and valleys of capital procurement cycles.
This shift reflects a broader industry move toward platform-centric strategies and integrated digital ecosystems. For healthcare executives, the strategic value is the ability to aggregate and analyze data across devices, deliver AI-driven insights at scale, and ensure interoperability across the care continuum.
The challenge lies in execution. Transitioning to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) requires rethinking procurement processes still rooted in capital purchases, building robust interoperability in fragmented healthcare environments, and leading both sales teams and customers through a mindset shift. Going from asset ownership to ongoing subscription-based value.
PaaS is not a product strategy; it is a full-scale revenue model diversification. This shift is critical in the MedTech sector, where SG&A costs grew 12.8% in 2023, consuming 22% of revenues, while top-line growth slowed to 3.8%, the lowest since 2017. Subscription models create predictable revenue streams and buffer against these margin pressures.
Outcome-Based Models and Diversification
Outcome-based pricing and value-based care are becoming transformative shifts in how healthcare businesses generate revenue. Both models tie payment not to services delivered, but to results achieved: improved patient health, fewer complications, and lower readmission rates.
Medtronic offers a clear example. Its AI-enabled devices, such as cardiac monitors, are now linked to measurable outcomes. Under value-based agreements, the company is compensated only when providers and payers achieve real health improvements. This approach reframes the relationship, making the device part of a performance-based contract.
AI makes this model possible. Continuous monitoring tools, predictive analytics, and connected diagnostics allow outcomes to be tracked with precision that fee-for-service models cannot provide. Wearables and AI-driven diagnostics identify issues earlier, preventing costly hospitalizations and directly aligning financial reward with patient benefit.
As reimbursement structures move away from fee-for-service, medtech and pharmaceutical companies are adapting by embedding AI into offerings, from companion diagnostics to adherence and compliance platforms.
Yet execution remains complex. Robust data integration, clear reimbursement pathways, and trusted measurement frameworks are prerequisites. Aligning incentives between payers, providers, and manufacturers can take years, and value-based contracts are still the exception rather than the rule.
Still, for healthcare businesses seeking to diversify, outcome-based pricing and value-based care are not optional experiments. They represent a structural reconfiguration of health delivery.
Other Levers for Diversification
The Playbook also points to additional diversification levers. Robotic platform automation models that lower costs, and data monetization strategies that unlock value from aggregated AI-driven insights. These approaches reflect the same shift in thinking, from one-time transactions to recurring, data-driven, outcome-oriented business models.
Can AI Be Truly Transformational?
The examples of J&J, Philips, and Medtronic prove AI can reinvent healthcare businesses. Shifting to platform models or outcome-based contracts can bring in a new dynamism. Yet, as the Playbook underscores, the foundations, data quality, governance, talent, and culture are prerequisites.
If the industry’s largest players succeed, they will not only generate growth for themselves but also lay the groundwork for the broader industry, developing the tools and processes on which others can build.
For healthcare executives, the message is clear. The transformation starts now, but diversification and organic growth through AI are long-term strategies. Those that succeed will help reinvent the business of healthcare itself, creating the conditions for AI’s transformation to scale.
Article by Denise Silber, CEO Basil Strategies
Looking to move from AI pilots to enterprise-scale impact? Consultport connects you with top-tier healthcare and AI consultants to help you bridge the gap between proof-of-concept and profitability, ensuring AI delivers measurable ROI, margin resilience, and long-term diversification.
VerifiedDenise Silber, a digital health pioneer, is the founder and CEO of Basil Strategies communications agency, creator of the groundbreaking Doctors 2.0 & You conference and editor of VRforHealth.com. An avid conference and podcast host, she is passionate about interviewing health innovators, both professional and patient. A Harvard MBA, Denise Silber is an alumni board member. She was awarded France’s highest civilian distinction, the Legion of Honor.
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