“I need help!” said Kate (name changed) as she sat down at the roundtable discussion at the Emids Healthcare Summit ‘26. In an instant, she had everyone’s attention. Kate explained that her organization, a large outpatient care provider, was losing roughly half of its potential patients before they ever booked a first visit. Marketing and referrals were working but scheduling, benefits’ verification, and prior authorization weren’t. Patients who wanted care were finding physiotherapy elsewhere simply because getting an appointment took too many steps.
Healthcare has never had more technology at its disposal. Digital front doors, virtual care, intelligent automation, and artificial intelligence are reshaping how organizations engage patients and members. Yet despite this progress, healthcare often remains difficult to navigate.
When it comes to patient experience, the sophistication of technology is secondary to how easy it is to use. Frictionless experience is what matters, especially now, with shrinking attention spans and the bar set by intuitive retail and content experiences. Patients and members carry those expectations with them. Amazon, Netflix, and similar platforms understand what you want and deliver it at the tap of a button. Healthcare is now expected to match that.
That challenge sat at the heart of the Member and Patient Experience roundtable I moderated at the Summit. Leaders, representing payers, providers, life sciences, and healthcare technology companies, explored how AI can improve healthcare experiences. The discussion covered AI, data, and modernization, but one conclusion emerged repeatedly: better experiences are what enables AI to create meaningful value.
Insight 1: Experience Has Become a Business Strategy
Healthcare organizations have traditionally differentiated themselves through clinical quality, provider networks, and operational excellence. Those priorities remain unchanged. But there’s a growing recognition that behavior change only happens with an engaged patient or member, which makes experience a driver of business performance, not just a satisfaction metric.
Patients compare every healthcare interaction against the best digital experience they have elsewhere. They expect transparency, convenience, and simplicity. Instead, they often navigate multiple disconnected systems, repeat the same information, and manage administrative complexity before they ever receive care.
Kate’s practice is the clearest version of this problem. It wasn’t struggling to attract patients. It was losing them in the gap between interest and their first appointment. Organizations that close that gap, wherever it occurs in the journey, will see the difference in access, operations, and growth simultaneously.
Insight 2: AI Amplifies the Journey It Inherits
As AI adoption accelerates, it’s tempting to treat technology as the fix for fragmented healthcare experiences. The roundtable pushed back on that assumption.
AI doesn’t automatically create better experiences; it amplifies whatever environment it’s placed in. If workflows stay disconnected, information stays inaccessible, and processes stay unnecessarily complex, AI just makes those problems move faster.
Healthcare organizations hold enormous amounts of information, but very little of it is in usable form. Employees spend valuable time searching for information instead of acting on it. The organizations getting the most value are the ones connecting data, simplifying workflows, and making information easier and safer to access across the patient journey. That’s where AI becomes an orchestrator of patient and member experience, rather than another layer of complexity.
AI doesn’t replace the need for better design. It makes better design more important.
Insight 3: Fix the Journey Before You Automate It
Patients don’t distinguish between departments, vendors, or technology platforms. To them, scheduling, care coordination, eligibility, and benefits are one continuous journey, not separate systems each doing their part.
Most organizations, understandably, optimize individual touchpoints rather than the journey, and budget, ownership, and org charts all push in that direction. But the biggest opportunity is a holistic view of the journey by mapping where patients and employees experience friction, and where they drop off entirely.
That reframes the starting question. Instead of “where can we apply AI,” leaders should first ask where the friction is. Removing unnecessary steps and connecting disconnected workflows builds a stronger foundation for whatever technology gets layered next, AI included.
Insight 4: Adoption Is the Ultimate Measure of Innovation
The most important insight from the discussion had little to do with technology at all: Innovation only creates value when people use it.
Healthcare doesn’t lack digital tools. It’s common to see nurses charting on clipboards next to a fully deployed EHR, or patients filling out paper forms at check-in feet away from a patient portal that could do the same thing in seconds. The tools exist; they just don’t fit naturally into how people already work, so people route around them.
That’s a design, not a training failure. Instead of better change-management memos, the fix requires asking, before anything ships, whether it reduces effort for patients, simplifies work for care teams, and removes decisions rather than adding them. A scheduling tool that still requires a call to confirm insurance isn’t adoption-ready, no matter how good its interface is. When the answer to those questions is genuinely yes, adoption follows and the operational and financial return organizations, expected from AI, shows up.
Insight 5: The Simplest Experience Wins
Healthcare needs better-connected digital experiences. The organizations that lead the next generation of healthcare won’t necessarily have the largest AI investments or the most advanced models. They’ll be the ones that make healthcare easier to navigate by connecting people, processes, and technology around the moments that matter most.
AI will play a transformative role in the future, but its greatest contribution would not be replacing human interaction. It will be removing friction, improving decisions, and making the experience feel simpler for everyone involved.
Kate didn’t come to the roundtable looking for an AI strategy. She came looking for a way to stop losing patients between “interested” and “scheduled.” That’s the reframe worth sitting with. The fix that her business needs isn’t a smarter model; it’s a simpler path, and AI’s job is to help build that path, not replace it. Patients won’t remember the AI behind their experience. They’ll remember whether healthcare felt connected, responsive, and easy to navigate.
This article was inspired by the perspectives shared during the Member and Patient Experience executive roundtable at the Emids Healthcare Summit ‘26. My sincere thanks to the healthcare leaders whose candid experiences and practical insights helped shape the ideas captured here.
