In today’s rapidly evolving health care landscape, true transformation calls for leaders to understand consumer demands, identify key areas of friction and frustration, and design solutions that meaningfully improve consumer experience.
At Health Evolution’s 2025 Connect, cross-industry executives convened to evaluate some of the most pressing challenges—and opportunities—to advance consumer-centric care. These bold conversations featured insights from noteworthy industry leaders:
- Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, Co-Founder, Highlander Health
- Brian Anderson, MD, CEO, Coalition for Health AI (CHAI)
- Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, President & CEO, Vanderbilt Health, and Dean, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University (VU)
- Ricky Bloomfield, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Oura Ring
- Adam Boehler, Founder & Managing Partner, Rubicon Founders
- Chris Chen, MD, CEO, ChenMed
- Brent Davis, EVP and CEO, AdventHealth, Primary Health Division
- Eric Evans, CEO, Surgery Partners
- Jackie Gerhart, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Epic
- Jennifer C. Goldsack, Founder and CEO, Digital Medicine Society (DiMe)
- Dawn Maroney, President, Alignment Health; CEO, Alignment Health Plan
- Pippa Shulman, DO, Chief Medical Officer, DispatchHealth
Read on to learn how executives are deploying bold solutions to transform consumer experience.
Reimagining Care Delivery: Deploying AI Against Our Hardest Clinical Challenges
AI is reshaping care delivery—from operations to clinical decision-making to consumer experience. In a conversation moderated by Goldsack, Shulman, Davis, and Anderson explored the challenges and opportunities of leveraging AI to support clinicians, meet consumer demands, and shape a better care delivery experience.
Leveraging AI to transform care delivery and meet consumer demands
The discussion leaders underscored the value of deploying AI in clinical settings to meet evolving consumer demands and drive meaningful, sustainable transformation.
Anderson noted that there is a supply-demand problem in care delivery that is continually trending in the wrong direction, straining providers and negatively impacting patient experience. “This is not sustainable,” Anderson said. “The future we’re beginning to see crystallize is the use of agentic AI to deliver care in collaboration and partnership with providers.”
The discussion leaders acknowledged that some patients and providers are apprehensive about using AI in clinical care, but they emphasized the imperative to embrace AI as a tool to help improve care delivery and enhance patient experience. For example, Anderson said “AI should help clinicians reach patients earlier, remove friction from care, and improve the delivery of high-quality care.”
“Right patient, right treatment, right time,’ is something we’ve said for decades in medicine,” Goldsack echoed. “Those principles haven’t changed; we just have new tools,” she added.
Building pathways for lasting transformation
Successful, sustainable AI implementation hinges on leaders’ ability to address key challenges—both in clinical and consumer AI adoption—and to create accessible tools that facilitate a streamlined experience for both consumers and providers. “Tools that are simple to use and easy to access are hallmarks of a well-designed system,” Davis said.
As health care leaders deploy AI tools, they must adopt a forward-thinking mindset with clear goals. “Beginning with the end in mind is key with any innovation,” Shulman said. “We can create a new kind of ecosystem that fundamentally functions differently—and these tools can help us do that.”
The discussion leaders noted that AI could help health care organizations build more consumer-centric experiences. But to do so, leaders must empower clinical teams to leverage AI tools to deliver care that aligns with a patient’s individual needs and preferences.
“The notion of building care around the patient allows us—maybe even drives us—to think differently about what good health care looks like,” Goldsack said. “We have an enormous opportunity to drive care upstream and deliver a better patient experience, which should ultimately lower costs and improve outcomes.”
Further, as consumers increasingly use AI tools to help them monitor and navigate their health, health care leaders must empower and educate both patients and providers to leverage those tools for shared decision-making during clinical encounters.
For instance, Davis said, “There are real operational elements that need to go into designing asynchronous interactions that extend beyond visits and take a longitudinal view. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for us to do that for patients.”
The discussion leaders also underscored that health care executives and policymakers will need to advocate for and establish payment mechanisms that enable these shifts. “As health care shifts toward value, delivery and payment models must evolve as well,” Anderson said. “That includes creating infrastructure that safely supports evidence-based AI implementation in clinical workflows to improve health outcomes.”
Delivering Better Care: Scaling Effective Models to Meet Consumer Demands
In a separate conversation, Boehler, Chen, Evans, and Maroney further explored the opportunities—and challenges—of realigning incentives to prioritize patients over profits by embracing new technologies to improve care and advancing value-based payment structures.
The discussion leaders noted that ongoing challenges in transitioning to, and achieving success in, value-based payment arrangements has driven skepticism about whether widespread VBC adoption is feasible.
“We’re not seeing behaviors move away from FFS under existing incentives,” Chen acknowledged. Instead, he said, “we’re seeing behaviors become even more FFS oriented, fueling greater consolidation and higher prices.”
However, the discussion leaders emphasized the need to create models that engage stakeholders in VBC and incentivize patients receiving the right care, in the right setting, at the right time.
“I think if you define VBC as something that makes the system more efficient and incentivizes patients and providers to make smarter, sustainable decisions, this work absolutely has to continue,” Evans said. But “to thrive, we clearly have to change incentives,” he added.
“The path to VBC isn’t about whether it works, it’s about whether we’re willing to align incentives and systems in a way that allows it to succeed,” Boehler noted.
To effectively shift incentives and improve care delivery, the discussion leaders called for policy changes that enable health care organizations to share data more freely and leverage technology to guide patients to the right care in the right place.
“I’m optimistic on technology because it empowers information sharing and gives us the ability to meet patients in more convenient, cost-effective settings—reinforcing the principle of right care, right place, right time, right provider,” Evans said.
But Chen stressed that changing incentives to encourage improved care navigation and delivery is necessary to harness the promise of new technologies. “If you have the wrong incentives, technology will just continue enabling the wrong incentives,” he explained. “So ultimately, I’m very excited about technology if it is aligned with the right incentives.”
The discussion leaders noted that meaningful progress requires policies that support competition and consumer choice, payment parity across care settings, and payment models that incentivize downside risk for care providers.
“I think if health care executives work with policymakers in the right way, we can all align on creating a program that properly incentivizes all aspects of health care,” Maroney said. “We need to determine how to directly involve the government—whether it’s through policy or communication—while demonstrating measurable results that matter specifically for each consumer.”
New Rules of Discovery and Innovation: Advancing Evidence-Based Solutions
Achieving results that matter to each consumer is more possible than ever due to recent innovations in scientific discovery, access to decentralized data, real-world evidence, and AI-driven analytics, as well as the proliferation of wearables, sensors, and other devices that could unleash a trove of patient-generated data, Abernethy, Balser, Bloomfield, and Gerhart contended in a separate discussion, where they explored avenues to leverage data to advance evidence-based personalization and wellness.
According to the discussion leaders, discovery and innovation historically relied on traditional research and clinical evidence. However, recent innovations are reshaping the landscape and opening new avenues to generate insights that advance personalized care and consumer-driven solutions.
“Discovery and innovation, consumerism, wellness, and personalization are all part of the same stream—and they’re converging,” Abernethy said.
The discussion leaders said the industry has an important opportunity to collect data and distill insights from various resources to better support research and help clinicians personalize care in ways that align with what consumers value most. For example, they noted patient data that primarily has consisted of information collected at the site of care—such as standard clinical notes, lab results, and vital signs found in electronic health records—now also could include longitudinal health data collected outside of traditional clinical settings, such as patient-generated data gathered from consumer health technologies.
Bloomfield said these advances will help researchers and clinicians see beyond the traditional, clinically collected patient data that is “really powerful but represents less than 1% of someone’s life.”
Gerhart agreed. “We have always had data, but we now have an opportunity to accelerate and advance how data is turned into insights and how quickly that knowledge is disseminated,” she said. “It really allows us the opportunity to change and enhance how we research.”
However, the discussion leaders stressed that stakeholders will need to integrate disparate data across sources and close gaps in understanding in areas such as patient-reported outcomes and adherence to truly unlock meaningful change.
“We need to work together to bring all this data together because we’re going to have a much better understanding of health on the whole if we can incorporate this 24/7 data with the point data we get within health systems,” Bloomfield said.
Balser concurred, adding, “If I could use one word to describe the emerging data we have in health care, I would call it ‘fragmented.’ What we need is massive integration and interoperability.”
Abernethy emphasized that stakeholders also must focus on generating actionable insights from the data they collect. “Figuring out what to do with all of this information now becomes the critical issue, because gathering data for the sake of gathering data is not helpful,” she said.
The discussion leaders underscored the need for stakeholders to integrate and funnel data to providers in streamlined, actionable ways.
“I think the excitement many of us have around the potential of the advances in AI is it actually gives us a way to start rationalizing these massive data sets toward clinical decision making,” Balser said.
Achieving Consumer-Centric Care Experiences
Health care leaders have an immense opportunity to harness these emerging innovations and transform health care into a more seamless, affordable, and consumer-centered system that ensures patients receive the right care at the right time and empowers patients to manage their health more effectively.
Health Evolution is committed to driving this positive change, including through our Forum Roundtable on Achieving Consumer-Centric Care Experiences. Through the Roundtable, influential executives in Health Evolution’s unmatched cross-industry community gather year round to collaborate on strategies for redesigning health care experiences with consumers at the center of the ecosystem. Access these resources to learn more about our community, their efforts, and how you can join in:
