The AI Innovators: Health Care
The State of Play
Artificial intelligence is turbocharging health care into the future. The technology is transforming the way the sector conducts several functions, including developing drugs, diagnosing diseases and enhancing the way providers interact with patients.
More than 80% of health executives say AI will be invaluable this year across different operations in the industry, according to Deloitte’s 2026 U.S. Health Care Outlook.
“I believe AI already has and will continue to have a hugely positive effect in the health care sector, everything from the mundane to the extraordinary,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who is co-chair of the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy.
Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said there’s “a lot of potential” for the use of AI in drug development, and his panel will be examining the use of the technology in health care.
I believe AI already has and will continue to have a hugely positive effect in the health care sector, everything from the mundane to the extraordinary.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.)
Efficiency: With the continued shortage of doctors, nurses and other providers, health care professionals are always pressed for time. That means the sector is continually mulling ways to increase efficiency so providers can dedicate more attention to their patients.
AI is already helping health care providers with routine functions, such as documenting treatment notes and analyzing patients’ medical history to figure out how to best help them, speeding up what can often be laborious tasks.
AI is also helping health care providers move faster in making complicated diagnoses. Medical institutions are, for instance, exploring the use of the technology to improve the accuracy of liquid biopsies when testing for ailments like lung cancer or brain tumors.
Using AI, doctors don’t have to dig through tons of imaging to make a diagnosis. Instead, the technology can analyze the data in a fraction of the time to detect the presence of cancer cells.
AI has also proven to be useful in speeding up MRI diagnoses, reducing false alarms and predicting the risk of developing disease.
There’s no doubt AI is quickly becoming an integral part of health care, and policymakers in Congress and the federal government are embracing its promises. Yet there still remain concerns that lawmakers hope to address.
We explore how regulators and the industry are approaching the issue in the following segment on the legislative considerations shaping AI use.
The Legislative Landscape
The health sector is finding smarter ways to adopt AI, even as policymakers still wrestle with the best way to regulate its applications.
Lawmakers acknowledge that the ever-evolving technology is a complicated issue. They want to ensure the policies they write include the proper boundaries without standing in the way of innovation or giving up patient protections.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, compared regulating AI to the oath medical professionals take.
“I think just like doctors take the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm…we have to make sure that that is the place we start with AI,” Baldwin said. “It’s hugely complex.”
Baldwin is also the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subpanel that funds the Department of Health and Human Services.
Privacy considerations: Members of Congress have, over the last few years, made efforts to learn more about the promises and risks associated with AI as they consider appropriate legislation.
Lawmakers are particularly concerned about patient privacy and the potential for biological data breaches as AI is increasingly integrated into medical treatment, research, clinical trials, drug development and doctor-patient interactions.
“I don’t think we have even begun to scratch the surface of protecting patient safety yet,” Baldwin said.
Training AI technology requires large amounts of data, which can include intimate details about patients and research subjects. A data breach of AI-driven health care systems would have far-reaching repercussions.
Cassidy, a medical doctor, said even with the technology’s potential, “you also have to be careful that AI does not sacrifice someone’s privacy.”
Cassidy’s HELP committee has held hearings to examine AI integration in health care, including on how the technology can “support patients.”
Mitigating bias: Lawmakers and academics have repeatedly cautioned about the potential for unethical and biased decision-making by AI-driven health care systems. Research has found that AI models often carry or worsen biases on different grounds, such as race and gender, based on the data used to train them. That can result in harmful outcomes for patients of underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds.
Companion bills in the House and Senate, reintroduced in January by Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), respectively, seek to mitigate the risk of such biases in AI across several fields, including health care. On a state level, a group of California state legislators is pushing a similar effort.
The Outlook
AI is here to stay, and medical researchers, drug makers, health care professionals and insurers will continue to find innovative ways to use it.
However, AI technology is evolving in a legislative gray area. Several guidelines, executive actions and congressional moves will shape how the health sector integrates the technology into its operations.
The Trump administration, for its part, has fully thrown its weight behind AI adaptation. The White House has taken several steps to support the health care industry through bolstering funding, providing guidelines for the sector and embracing AI across the Department of Health and Human Services.
In December, HHS released an “Artificial Intelligence Strategy” for accelerating AI use within all of the agency’s operations.
Federal support: In guidelines released in January, the Food and Drug Administration laid out recommendations for the industry as uses of AI in the drug development process continue to increase.
Some of the recommendations include ensuring that AI technologies “adhere to relevant legal, ethical, technical, scientific, cybersecurity, and regulatory standards.”
The administration said the guidelines will “help cultivate future growth in this rapidly progressing field.”
President Donald Trump also signed an executive order in September that dedicates funds to ramping up AI innovation in the fight against pediatric cancer. The order focuses on using AI to research prevention strategies and cures for the disease.
It is notable because it is more difficult for AI to assist with pediatric cancer imaging due to the diverse anatomies of growing children and the shortage of childhood cancer data, according to Stanford University.
From the Hill: One bill to watch is the HEALTH AI Act that Lieu introduced in August. The measure would require HHS to establish a grant program to help pay for research on the use of generative AI in health care.
Lieu told us the legislation would “incentivize research” for discovering solutions to lower the administrative burden in health care so doctors and nurses can focus on delivering patient care instead of spending more time filling out paperwork.
The bill hasn’t received a vote, but it was referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee in August.
Another measure that the sector has welcomed is the Health Tech Investment Act that Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), a member of the health subpanel on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, introduced in November. The bill would encourage the use of AI-enabled health devices by creating a pathway for reimbursement through Medicare.
The health tech industry praised the bill for seeking to make such crucial devices more accessible to people who need them.
While Congress has not made much progress on AI legislation in general and most of the guidance has come from the executive branch, lawmakers still recognize the need to act. Lawmakers are, overall, seeking to provide a regulatory framework within which industry can adopt AI responsibly while protecting consumers’ interests.
I think just like doctors take the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm…we have to make sure that that is the place we start with AI.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.)
And members of Congress agree that any regulations must not become a roadblock to innovation.
“I do think it’s appropriate to have a balance, but half of that balance means having appropriate guardrails to protect the public and human beings from being harmed,” Lieu said.