Health system leaders have a long agenda: Meet rising consumer expectations, revitalize clinician relationships, and redesign care for an AI-native world. Focusing on four strategic priorities can help them gain ground:

1. Own the consumer journey and selectively deploy AI

Patients still report fragmented care experiences. Portals, apps, and cross-channel care tools are just infrastructure. For those tech investments to pay off in improved clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, retention, share of wallet, and lower costs, leading systems will need to own the end-to-end patient experience.

Meaningful integration occurs when every handoff is seamless, so patients never have to coordinate their own care. In practice, that means a primary care provider’s referral is booked and confirmed by text before the patient leaves, the specialist has the patient’s history and notes on screen at the appointment, results arrive with plain-language explanations and next steps already scheduled, and billing questions reach someone who can see the patient’s account and resolve issues on the spot. And when something goes wrong, one clear owner catches it, instead of five departments pointing at each other.

Owning the journey is challenging but not impossible, and AI can help systems achieve this at scale. Referral tools can score and route patients so those with the highest acuity are given priority. Summarization models can pull a patient’s full history into a single view before a clinician ever opens their chart. Agents can review notes after visits and catch what was missed, including follow-up care that should be scheduled or results that need to be turned into next steps. AI tools can move scheduling tasks back into the workflow before a care gap opens and a patient has to close it themselves.

Not all moments along the consumer journey benefit equally from AI. Leading health system­s will be deliberate about which moments they prioritize to become AI-led and which they protect as human-first.

The clearest opportunities for AI enablement are frequent, routine, and low-emotion touchpoints along the care journey, such as scheduling, intake, documentation, routine follow-ups, and clinical support such as flagging anomalies in imaging for a radiologist’s review. In these use cases, AI can absorb volume and increase speed and accuracy without patients or clinicians feeling as if an essential experience was lost.

More complex, high-stakes, and emotionally charged moments deserve more caution, such as delivering a difficult diagnosis, navigating a hard care decision, or working through a stressful billing dispute. These moments deserve trust, judgment, and human attention, and both patients and clinicians still expect a human to take the lead.

Getting this sequencing right will determine whether AI elevates the experience or creates additional pain points and frustration for consumers and clinicians instead.

2. Instill an owner’s mindset and lean into clinician recognition

One reason physician-led organizations achieve higher satisfaction scores and stronger retention is that their physicians are owners or act as if they are, which is something largely absent in management-led settings. More than half of physicians who feel excluded from decision making are considering switching employers, vs. just 15% of those who feel as if they have a seat at the table. Cultivating an owner’s mindset among physicians represents an untapped opportunity for most health systems today.

Leading health systems don’t just seek physician buy-in after decisions are made, they seek physician input before making them. Most physicians won’t hold formal leadership titles, but they should still have a voice in decisions that shape their work, one that is respected and reflected in outcomes, not just solicited and set aside.

At the same time, leadership and governance bodies benefit from real physician representation, so that their perspectives can help shape organizational strategy. Leading health systems will involve physicians not only in clinical discussions, where their leadership is unquestioned, but also in strategic and transformative ones, for example, seeking physician input on which technologies to adopt, how workflows are redesigned, or where the system invests. 

In practice, physician inclusion requires revisiting the full operating model: shaping compensation and incentive structures to reward engagement and ownership; defining physician accountability for results; and providing clinicians the autonomy, capacity, and support required to act as invested stakeholders, rather than staff executing decisions made for them.

Executives can play a critical role in this shift by acknowledging the value of physicians’ input, consistently seeking clinicians’ opinions, and closing the loop on outstanding items as a sign of respect.  

3. Redesign workflows and who executes them 

Most organizations are bolting AI onto existing workflows, making processes look modernized while leaving underlying handoffs, approvals, and inefficiencies intact. Leading health systems approach AI differently. Instead of wrestling with where to deploy AI, they focus on how work should be done in an AI-native environment.

Meaningful redesign starts with mapping core processes end-to-end and stripping out redundant work. At every stage, leaders ask: How should this work be done, and by whom: humans or agents? Three categories of work will emerge: tasks requiring human judgment, tasks requiring human-AI collaboration, and tasks that can be completed autonomously by AI. In healthcare, the answer will likely differ across patient populations, care settings, and acuity levels, even for similar workflows.

Bain’s cross-industry data shows that task-level AI pilots typically deliver 5%–15% savings, whereas end-to-end process redesigns save up to 25% and completely redefining work yields up to 50% savings. Still, most organizations are stuck in the bottom tier, funding small pilots that produce micro-wins and never scale. This aligns with our survey findings: Only a small fraction of healthcare provider organizations are redesigning workflows end-to-end, and just approximately 15% of those have captured cost savings greater than 10%.

With a clear picture of what should be human-led, AI-assisted, or fully automated, leading healthcare systems will redesign the workforce in parallel with workflow redesign, redrawing roles, decision rights, and team structures.

4. Navigate AI-driven change transparently

There’s no way around it: Redesigning with AI requires significant change. Some jobs will be reshaped, some people will be reassigned, and some roles may no longer be required. Provider organizations that handle this transition transparently and empathetically will be more likely to sustain their workforce’s trust through the change, which is vital for the redesign to be successful.

AI transformations require a fundamentally different approach to change management than many provider organizations have used before. This is a moment for leaders to “walk the walk,” gaining their own hands-on experience with AI as they guide others through this transition. Successful health systems will retrain teams to work alongside AI effectively in modified roles and workflows, redeploy capacity that AI frees up toward higher-value work that agents cannot complete, and expand communication to an ongoing two-way dialogue. 

Together, these efforts will enable organizations to surface adoption barriers early, address job-security fears directly, and reset expectations for ongoing capability building. Moving forward, processes will continue being redesigned, models will keep improving, and the human-AI balance will keep shifting. Organizations that build change management around AI into a permanent capability, rather than a one-time project, will be able to successfully scale and capture meaningful returns.

Four frontline priorities, one strategic agenda

Progress made on any one of these priorities makes the others easier, while neglecting one undercuts the rest. Health systems that pursue these priorities together will elevate the frontline experience for both consumers and physicians, opening a lead that’s difficult for competitors to close.

US Front Line of Healthcare 2026

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