Healthcare CIO Warns: AI Without Direction Just Automates Dysfunction
Dr. Ash Goel, senior vice president of information technology at Bronson Healthcare, says the industry is deploying artificial intelligence in the wrong places. While the technology has solved technical barriers that seemed insurmountable years ago, healthcare is using it primarily to squeeze margins from a system already broken by throughput-focused design.
"If the most powerful technology of our era becomes another engine for squeezing margin from a system that already prioritizes throughput over healing, then we haven't innovated, we've just automated our dysfunction," Goel said. "We've put a turbocharger on a car that's driving in circles."
Bronson Healthcare operates five hospitals and 70 ambulatory locations across 12 counties in Southwest Michigan. The system's leadership sees AI as genuinely capable of transforming care delivery - but only if the industry stops chasing revenue cycle optimization and denial management as its primary use cases.
The Preparation Gap
Clinicians and workflows weren't built for AI tools. Medical schools and training programs are still debating whether these systems are appropriate while the technology has already moved forward. That gap between what AI can do and what humans are prepared to do represents the single biggest risk in health IT today, Goel said.
Staff didn't grow up with these tools. Academic institutions haven't updated curricula. The ground has shifted beneath the industry faster than it can adapt.
Where Money Should Flow
The loudest boardroom conversations focus on revenue and cost extraction. These aren't wrong pursuits, Goel said, but they're table stakes dressed up as transformation. Real leadership means aiming AI at harder problems: access to care, restoring the clinician-patient relationship, and closing quality gaps for populations the current system has quietly failed for decades.
Bronson Healthcare is testing AI for Healthcare applications that address these gaps - reducing wait times for appointments, lifting documentation burdens from physicians, and freeing clinicians to think instead of entering data.
The Governance Problem
The bigger concern at Bronson is what Goel calls "building a city without a map." AI systems are multiplying across departments. Vendors are proliferating. The portfolio of AI applications in flight is growing faster than the organization can see across it.
That's not innovation. That's entropy.
When systems make autonomous decisions, variability becomes a clinical risk, not a minor inconvenience. Goel is pushing for a unified platform approach - a single pane of glass showing what's running, what's working, where gaps exist, and how AI Agents & Automation might behave in actual operations.
Breaking the Implementation Cycle
Health IT has been stuck on a treadmill for decades. Each new system brings a new vendor, a new implementation team, exhausting change management cycles, and then the consultants leave. Staff are left holding keys to houses they didn't build.
"We need to stop buying houses and start building neighborhoods," Goel said. A platform approach lets organizations deploy, measure, iterate, and govern AI as continuous operational capability rather than a series of one-time vendor engagements.
The technology is ready. The question is whether the industry has the courage to use it differently.
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