Bridging the healthcare AI ROI gap

Despite significant investment in AI across the healthcare sector, a substantial proportion of AI initiatives remain confined to pilot programs, failing to deliver measurable return on investment at scale. Sathiyan Kutty, chief AI officer at Emids, examines the structural and operational factors that have widened this ‘ROI gap’, explores where genuine value creation is beginning to emerge, and sets out the conditions required for healthcare organisations to move from fragmented early wins to repeatable, enterprise-wide outcomes.

The healthcare sector has been pouring money into AI for years now and, if anything, that spending is accelerating. However, if we look at how many of those investments have delivered real, measurable value at scale, the picture is considerably less impressive. According to a recent study by MIT, 80 per cent or more of healthcare AI projects never move beyond pilot phase, with some analyses finding that 95 per cent of enterprise AI pilots fail to show any meaningful ROI.

Healthcare is a harder environment for AI than most sectors because the space is more regulated, more fragmented, and deeply dependent on institutional knowledge that has been built up over decades and is rarely documented in structured form. Other sectors like retail and financial services have had an easier run of it than healthcare organisations, and that reality deserves more honest conversation than it typically gets.