Its leaders were visible throughout the convention, participating in discussions on biopharma innovation, precision medicine, artificial intelligence, investment, genomics and policy. Partnership announcements emerged throughout the week. Delegations moved between panel discussions and private meetings with investors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and industry leaders. The message was clear. Abu Dhabi is making a strategic effort to become a notable player in biotechnology and the life sciences.

The timing is not accidental.

Around the world, governments increasingly view biotechnology as a strategic investment industry. Scientific innovation drives economic growth. Advanced therapeutics create new manufacturing opportunities. Genomics and precision medicine are reshaping approaches to disease prevention and treatment. Nations that attract talent, investment and scientific expertise position themselves at the forefront of one of the century’s most consequential industries and life-sustaining movements.

Abu Dhabi is determined to be among those countries.

Building the Innovation Foundation

Substantial investments and partnerships in infrastructure, research, education and health innovation support the Emirate’s ambitions.

In April 2025, Abu Dhabi launched the Health, Endurance, Longevity and Medicine (HELM) Cluster, an initiative designed to establish a globally competitive ecosystem spanning biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical technology, genomics, digital health, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

Officials project the initiative will contribute AED 94 billion to the economy by 2045, attract more than AED 42 billion in investment and create approximately 30,000 jobs.

Those figures reflect more than economic development goals. They signal a growing recognition that biotechnology is a cornerstone of future growth and global competitiveness.

The Emirate is not starting from scratch. Organizations including M42, PureHealth, Mubadala Bio, Khalifa University, and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence have established a foundation that combines research, clinical capabilities, advanced analytics and investment resources. The UAE Genome Program has surpassed 900,000 sequenced genomes, making it one of the world’s largest population genomics initiatives and providing a valuable resource for scientific research and precision medicine.

These investments provide the ingredients necessary to compete. Partnerships provide the opportunity to accelerate progress.

Building Through Collaboration

Biotechnology has long been a collaborative enterprise among private equity and entrepreneurs, academic medicine and corporations, and, now, nations working side by side with other countries’ governments.

Scientific discovery depends on the exchange of knowledge among researchers, entrepreneurs, clinicians, manufacturers, regulators, and investors. No single country possesses every advantage. Successful ecosystems learn how to connect their strengths with those of others.

Abu Dhabi’s recent actions suggest its leaders understand this reality more than anyone else. They act on it.

During the BIO International Convention, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi announced a strategic collaboration with Sanofi focused on vaccine development and life sciences innovation. The previous year at BIO in Boston, the Department established a partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim that expanded access to the company’s OpnME research platform, creating new opportunities for translational research and scientific discovery.

An additional 2025 agreement was signed with Abbott, focused on pharmaceutical innovation, manufacturing capabilities, and emerging technologies.

These were not isolated announcements. They represented a broader effort to connect Abu Dhabi with leaders across the global life sciences community. That strategy continued at BIO 2026.

On June 23, 2026, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi announced a strategic partnership with Biocom California, one of the world’s largest life sciences associations representing more than 1,800 biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical technology organizations. The agreement creates a formal gateway between the California innovation ecosystem and Abu Dhabi’s growing life sciences sector, strengthening opportunities for collaboration among researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators across both markets.

The significance of the announcement extends beyond California. It reflects Abu Dhabi’s effort to connect itself to some of the world’s most influential innovation networks and to participate in the exchange of scientific knowledge, talent, and investment that increasingly defines biotechnology leadership.

Moving Up the Biotech Value Chain

If the Biocom agreement demonstrated Abu Dhabi’s commitment to global collaboration, a second announcement made the Emirate’s ambitions even clearer.

On June 24, 2026, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, M42, and Mammoth Biosciences announced a partnership to advance gene-editing therapies, clinical research, and advanced therapy manufacturing in Abu Dhabi. The agreement seeks to leverage insights generated through the Emirati Genome Program while supporting the development of next-generation treatments for inherited diseases.

This announcement stands out because it moves beyond ecosystem building and into the development of future therapies.

Mammoth Biosciences was co-founded by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jennifer Doudna, whose pioneering work helped bring CRISPR gene-editing technology into medicine. Under the agreement, Mammoth will contribute its proprietary gene-editing platform, M42 will provide genomics, health, and clinical research infrastructure, and the Department of Health will support the regulatory and research environment needed to advance development.

The collaboration includes plans to introduce Mammoth’s lead clinical candidate, MB-111, into Abu Dhabi’s research ecosystem, support advanced gene-editing clinical trials, establish advanced therapy manufacturing capabilities, and develop local expertise through workforce training programs.

Perhaps most significantly, the partnership highlights how Abu Dhabi is leveraging its genomics investments. The Emirati Genome Program has created one of the world’s most comprehensive population genomics initiatives. The Mammoth agreement represents an effort to translate those insights into therapies targeting inherited diseases.

As H.E. Dr. Noura Al Ghaithi noted when announcing the partnership, Abu Dhabi is focused on translating genomic insights into therapies to address some of the most complex inherited diseases affecting populations in the region and worldwide.

Leadership Matters

The prominence of Abu Dhabi at BIO 2026 reflects sustained engagement from senior leaders. H.E. Dr. Noura Khamis Al Ghaithi, Undersecretary of the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, and Dr. Mohamed Al Ameri, Division Director of Genome and Biobank at DoH, are among the officials representing the Emirate’s vision throughout the convention.

Their participation reflects a broader commitment. During Abu Dhabi’s 2025 strategic mission to the United States, approximately 40 representatives from 12 organizations attended more than 20 strategic meetings, conducted 16 institutional visits, participated in 9 BIO-related panels, and established 7 new partnerships and agreements.

Such activity underscores an important point. Building a biotechnology ecosystem requires more than investment capital. It requires leadership, patience, and a willingness to build relationships across borders and disciplines.

A Must-Watch Innovation Hub

For decades, discussions about biotechnology leadership have focused on a familiar collection of cities and regions. Boston, San Diego, Basel, London, and Singapore earned their positions through scientific excellence, entrepreneurial activity, and investment.

Abu Dhabi is pursuing a different path.

The Emirate is leveraging capital, scientific infrastructure, genomics, artificial intelligence, policy support, and international partnerships to establish a presence in the global biotechnology landscape. Its strategy recognizes that modern biotechnology advances through collaboration and that scientific leadership increasingly depends upon connecting talent, expertise, and resources across borders.

BIO 2026 demonstrated that Abu Dhabi is no longer simply expressing an ambition to participate in the life sciences sector. Through initiatives such as the HELM Cluster, partnerships with organizations including Sanofi, Boehringer Ingelheim, Abbott, Biocom California, and Mammoth Biosciences, and investments spanning genomics, research, and advanced therapies, the Emirate is laying the foundations for a biotechnology ecosystem with global aspirations.

Whether Abu Dhabi joins the ranks of the world’s leading life sciences hubs remains to be seen – but it should be watched closely. What is increasingly difficult to overlook is the depth of its commitment and the speed with which effort is being translated into action.

The post Abu Dhabi’s Biotechnology Ambition Comes into Focus at BIO 2026 appeared first on Medika Life.

The Exhibition Floor as a Market Signal

However, after several days walking the exhibition floor and listening to discussions across multiple stages, another story emerged. The most interesting development at HLTH Europe was not the continued rise of AI. It was the growing number of companies applying artificial intelligence to solve very specific challenges faced by researchers, physicians, health systems and patients.

What appears on the stages and exhibition floor at HLTH often reflects where the market sees opportunity. Conferences do not create trends. They reveal them. HLTH Europe brought together more than 400 speakers, some 350 sponsors and approximately 5,000 participants from across the global health ecosystem. Artificial intelligence was not simply one topic among many. The conference featured a dedicated AI @ HLTH Zone, AI-focused exhibitors and numerous sessions exploring implementation, governance, clinical applications and operational adoption.

The prominence of AI across both the agenda and exhibition hall was revealing. Conference organizers dedicate space and programming to topics that matter to attendees, investors and sponsors. The visibility of AI at HLTH Europe suggested that health-specific applications of artificial intelligence have moved beyond emerging interest and are now a significant market focus.

That shift matters because health has always demanded more than technological capability. New tools must operate within environments where privacy, safety, accountability and trust are essential. Researchers are looking for ways to accelerate discovery. Physicians want to reduce administrative burdens that consume valuable time. Health systems seek efficiencies that improve operations without compromising quality. Increasingly, innovators are designing AI solutions around those specific needs.

That reality helps explain why many of the most compelling AI companies at HLTH Europe are building solutions specifically for health rather than adapting tools designed for other industries.

As Sophie Taylor-Roberts, managing partner and FINN Partners UK Health Group Lead, shared: “A mistake in healthcare carries a human cost: it can literally mean life or death. That’s why healthcare needs bespoke AI models, tools and solutions that allow for diverse patient populations, differing clinical guidelines, funding and regulatory structures.”

She added, “As with all aspects of health, one size doesn’t fit all. AI must be treated like a highly specialized medical instrument, built to respect national sovereignty, multilingual patient care, and absolute data privacy.”

Health-Specific AI Moves from Possibility to Practice

The trend was visible throughout the exhibition hall, where companies focused on clinical research, physician workflow, diagnostics, patient engagement, digital safety and operational efficiency demonstrated how specialized AI is rapidly becoming a category of its own.

The trend was visible throughout the exhibition hall, where companies focused on clinical research, physician workflow, diagnostics, patient engagement, digital safety and operational efficiency demonstrated how specialized AI is rapidly becoming a category of its own. Their growth reflects a broader shift occurring across the health sector as organizations seek tools designed for specific scientific, clinical and operational challenges.

Gabriele Ricci, Chief Data & Technology Officer at Takeda, captured that evolution when discussing AI’s growing role across the research and development continuum. “AI is transforming the future of healthcare by accelerating every stage of the R&D value chain through purpose-built capabilities tailored to specific scientific and clinical challenges,” he said.

His emphasis on purpose-built capabilities mirrors what was visible throughout HLTH Europe. The conversation is no longer centered exclusively on artificial intelligence as a technology platform. Increasingly, attention is turning toward how specialized applications can address distinct needs across research, clinical care and health operations.

Among the companies reflecting this shift was Briya, whose AI-powered platform helps researchers interact with complex data through conversational interfaces. Rather than requiring users to navigate multiple databases, coding environments and analytical tools, the platform seeks to simplify the path from question to insight.

David Lazerson, Briya’s co-founder and chief executive officer, believes many organizations misunderstand where the greatest challenge in AI adoption resides.

“Many people assume AI adoption is about choosing the right model,” he said. “In reality, the model is only a small part of the solution. The hard part is everything around it: security, governance, data harmonization, domain expertise, and the methodology required to produce trustworthy outcomes.”

His observation reflects a reality becoming increasingly evident throughout the health sector. Access to powerful AI models is expanding rapidly, shifting competitive advantage toward organizations that can generate reliable outcomes within specific health environments. That reality helps explain the growing number of exhibitors focused on narrowly defined use cases rather than general-purpose AI.

A similar perspective emerged from conversations with Keith Grimes, MD, Chief Innovation Officer at Curistica. A physician who spent 24 years in primary care, Grimes approaches artificial intelligence through the lens of risk management, governance and patient safety.

“Physicians have always governed risk,” he explained. “We do it instinctively for doctors, drugs and devices. Digital is just the fourth D, and the discipline is much the same, but it is the one we were never trained for, so the commitment to ‘do no harm’ runs ahead of the know-how.”

His comments address one of the most significant challenges facing health organizations today. Many leaders recognize the promise of AI, yet remain uncertain about implementation, oversight and accountability, particularly in smaller physician practices and community-based care settings.

Dr. Grimes emphasizes that smaller organizations should not view those limitations as barriers.

“Small practices are the cornerstone of primary care, but they cannot out-resource a hospital trust, and it does not need to,” he said. “Good governance scales down, and the same standards that protect a large organization can be borrowed rather than rebuilt.”

“We give whoever is responsible for AI and digital safety both the platform and the people,” Dr. Grimes said. “Power tools that guide them, whatever their experience, with clinical safety experts behind the software.”

Taken together, the perspectives of Dr. Grimes and Lazerson point to the emergence of a new category of innovation. The most promising health AI companies are not focused exclusively on algorithms. They are creating environments that combine technology, expertise and governance to solve specific high-friction problems.

The Future Belongs to Reliable Outcomes

For smaller organizations, this evolution may prove particularly significant. Historically, adopting advanced technology often required substantial investment, specialized technical talent and complex integration efforts. Many health organizations lacked the resources to pursue those initiatives.

Lazerson believes that model is changing. “That’s why we’re seeing the emergence of a new layer of domain-specific AI,” he said. “Instead of every organization hiring AI engineers and building custom infrastructure, they can access a complete, purpose-built environment as a service.”

The implications extend far beyond research organizations. Physician practices, community health providers, home health agencies and emerging life science companies increasingly have access to capabilities that previously required significant internal resources.

“For smaller organizations in particular, it’s a no-brainer,” Lazerson added. “They can start generating value immediately without complex integrations, dedicated AI teams, or having to solve privacy, security, and compliance challenges on their own.”

Throughout HLTH Europe, companies focused on clinical research, workflow automation, diagnostics, care coordination and patient engagement demonstrated how artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly specialized. Rather than attempting to transform every aspect of health simultaneously, they are concentrating on areas where measurable value can be achieved quickly and responsibly.

That focus on practical outcomes may ultimately become the defining characteristic of the next generation of health innovation.

Dr. Grimes summarized the principle succinctly. “Safety is not a box-ticking exercise; it works when everyone knows the part they play,” he said. “The advantage is not scale, it is fit.”

Walking through HLTH Europe, I was reminded that innovation rarely advances through a single breakthrough. More often, progress emerges through focused efforts to solve meaningful problems. The companies attracting attention were helping researchers move faster, supporting clinicians facing administrative burdens and enabling organizations to adopt new capabilities with greater confidence.

Perhaps among the more important lessons from HLTH Europe. The future of AI in health will not be defined solely by the largest platforms. It will be shaped by innovators who combine technology, expertise, and specificity to deliver reliable outcomes. As Lazerson observed, “The future won’t belong to organizations with the biggest models. It will belong to those who can turn AI into reliable outcomes.”

Judging by what appeared across the stages and exhibition floor in Amsterdam, that future is taking shape.

The post At HLTH Europe, the Most Important AI Story Was Happening Beyond the Headlines appeared first on Medika Life.

Despite living longer than men, women spend approximately 25 percent more of their lives in poor health, according to research from the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute. Across reproduction, brain health, autoimmune conditions, cardiovascular disease, and mental health, the gaps in research, funding, and care are persistent.

That reality provided important context for the launch of The Shift, a new mini documentary series from BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions, unveiled at HLTH Europe. The series explores issues ranging from reproductive health and cardiovascular disease to autoimmune disorders, menopause, mental health and healthy aging. Through storytelling, the documentary project elevates the experiences of women while highlighting the challenges that persist and the opportunities for progress.

The HLTH EU panel discussion was timed for the opening of The Shift and featured Shahnoor Abbas, Senior Series Developer and Research Development Lead for The Shift at BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions; Elena Bonfiglioli, General Manager, Global Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft, and Priya Agrawal, MD, Vice President, Global Health Equity and Partnerships at MSD. Their conversation, moderated by Jody Tropeano Greene, Head of Content for HLTH, explored why women’s health remains one of the most significant opportunities for innovation, investment and system improvement.

A Conversation Decades in the Making

The panelists approached the topic from different perspectives, yet a common theme emerged. Women’s health has received increasing attention for more than a decade, but many of the barriers women encounter remain rooted in the design of health systems.

For BBC StoryWorks, The Shift represents an effort to sustain attention on issues that too often receive episodic interest. The series combines personal stories with broader insights into the realities women face across different countries, cultures and stages of life.

The BBC initiative and the HLTH EU mainstage conversation arrive at a time when women’s health is attracting growing attention from investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers and health industry leaders. New companies are emerging. New technologies are being developed. More organizations are recognizing both the societal and economic importance of addressing longstanding gaps in care.

The timing of The Shift is notable. Women’s health innovation is receiving growing attention from investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers and health leaders. Industry analysts estimate that approximately $2 billion was invested in venture-backed women’s health companies across the United States and Europe in 2025, reflecting increased interest in addressing challenges that extend beyond reproductive health to include cardiovascular disease, menopause, mental health, oncology and healthy aging.

The trend signals growing recognition that improving women’s health is a societal imperative and a significant economic opportunity. Yet as the discussion at HLTH Europe made clear, investment and innovation alone will not be enough if women continue to face fragmented systems that are difficult to navigate.

When Access Exists but Navigation Fails

Dr. Agrawal, an obstetrician-gynecologist by training, whose work has included clinical practice in the UK NHS, global pharma brand stewardship in emerging middle-income nations, maternal health awareness initiatives, and the creation of sustainable health markets, described a reality familiar to many women. Access to care may exist on paper; however, reaching that care, understanding available options and navigating fragmented systems remains a challenge.

“We’ve built systems like mazes with different entry points, different providers and different messages,” said Dr. Agrawal. “Women are often left navigating all of this themselves at the moments where they are most vulnerable.”

Her observation echoed the comments by fellow panelists, which touched on an issue that extends beyond women’s health. Across many countries, patients frequently encounter disconnected providers, inconsistent communication and care journeys that require them to coordinate appointments, referrals and information on their own. The burden of connecting those pieces often falls on the individual seeking care rather than the system intended to support them.

For women, that complexity can be especially challenging. Responsibilities related to caregiving, work, family and personal health often intersect at the very moment care is needed. Understanding what symptoms are normal, knowing when to seek help, determining where to go and finding trusted sources of information become added obstacles.

That reality led to one of the discussion’s compelling observations. “This is not an access problem. It’s a design problem.”

The distinction matters. Discussions about women’s health often focus on whether services exist. Design asks a different question: can people realistically find, understand and benefit from those services when they need them most?

The Power of Stories to Sustain Change

The panel also explored the role technology may play in addressing those challenges. Rather than adding new layers of complexity, emerging digital tools and artificial intelligence applications are increasingly being developed to simplify navigation, improve continuity and support people between clinical encounters.

“What excites me is that technology is finally starting to reduce friction instead of adding layers of complexity,” Dr. Agrawal observed.

That perspective aligned with comments from Bonfiglioli, whose work at Microsoft focuses on helping health systems leverage data, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence to improve outcomes. Technology, however, was not presented as a solution on its own. The discussion repeatedly returned to the importance of human connection.

Those themes are central to the documentary series itself. BBC StoryWorks has built a reputation for transforming complex issues into compelling narratives that audiences can understand and relate to. Through The Shift, the goal is not merely to document challenges but to foster greater understanding of the experiences women face and the opportunities that exist to improve care.

Abbas emphasized the power of storytelling to connect data and lived experience. Statistics can identify a problem. Research can explain it. Stories help people understand why it matters and why action is necessary.

That may be the enduring value of The Shift. The series does not introduce a new conversation. Instead, it brings fresh perspectives to longstanding challenges. Through stories from around the world, the films remind viewers that behind every statistic is a person navigating the complexities of health and care. By fostering greater understanding and empathy, the series encourages health leaders, innovators and policymakers to view women’s health not as a periodic topic of interest, but as an ongoing priority deserving sustained attention and action.

The women featured throughout the series deserve more. The discussion at HLTH Europe reinforces that improving women’s health is more than developing new technologies and expanding services. It is also about creating systems that are easier to navigate, more responsive to people’s medical priorities and ultimately more human in their design.

The post At HLTH Europe, BBC StoryWorks Shines a Light on Women’s Health and the Challenge of Navigating Care appeared first on Medika Life.

Health care is not short on ideas. It is not short on innovation, intelligence, technology or ambition. What it risks losing is focus on why those ideas matter and who they are meant to serve.

That concern shaped a fireside conversation with Tom Lawry at the Digital Health & AI Innovation (DHAI) Summit. Tom and I came to the stage from parallel and connected bodies of work. He is a best-selling author, the author of Health Care Nation: The Future Is Calling and It’s Better Than You Think, Hacking Healthcare and his classic, AI in Health: A Leader’s Guide to Winning in the New Age of Intelligent Health Systems.

Tom is one of the most respected voices on artificial intelligence and health information. My own book, Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, another bestseller, looks at health care through the lives of patients, families and clinicians navigating a system that can be brilliant in moments and bewildering in motion.

Two Books, One Shared Concern

Our books were already in conversation before we arrived at the Summit. Tom wrote the Foreword to Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, and I wrote the back-of-book review for Health Care Nation. We had each recognized the connection between the two. Readers, however, often encounter books separately. One may see Tom’s as a system-level call to redesign health care and mine as a people-first call to restore humanity to care. On stage, with an audience ready for the discussion, the relationship became easier to feel and internalize.

One book shares why the system must change. The other asks who that change must serve. Together, they return health innovation to the question that should guide every decision: whose life is made better because we invent?

That question was at the heart of Amir Lahav’s DHAI Summit. Curated by Amir Lahav, PhD, the Summit brings together people across artificial intelligence, digital health, health systems, research, investment and care delivery, from industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services, represented at the Summit by its Global Chief Medical Officer, Rowland Illing, MD, to trade groups like the Decentralized Trials Research Alliance championed by Craig Lipset, co-chair, and companies such as MassiveBio, an AI-powered platform to match patients to 19,000+ oncology and hematology trials worldwide, represented by Arturo Loaiza Bonilla, MD MSEd, are harnessing information to advance science and save lives.

Lahav’s achievement is far more than assembling experts. He has created a setting where different parts of the health community can bench-test their thinking against one another.  The action on the mainstage spills over to the hallways and receptions. That matters because AI in health cannot mature within a single discipline. Data scientists need clinicians. Clinicians need workflow support. Innovators need patient insight. Investors need to understand adoption. Health system leaders need to know when technology solves a problem and when it adds another layer of friction to an already complex ecosystem.

The audience brought energy to the room because the topic was more than technical. People wanted to talk about what AI makes possible. They wanted to talk about what health care cannot afford to forget. Health has become transactional. The operational aspects of care carry more friction than compassion. Patients are asked to coordinate their care across portals, referrals, insurance prior authorizations, clinical handoffs, and delayed communication. Clinicians are asked to heal while absorbing new layers of documentation, digital alerts, measurement and workflow pressure.

That is the context in which AI enters health care.

AI is curated knowledge and amplified pattern recognition. It can search for information no person could hold alone. It can surface signals, compare data, support decisions and make complexity more manageable. Used well, it can help clinicians, researchers, health systems and patients see what might otherwise remain hidden.

Harvey Castro, MD, MBA, a physician futurist and AI health-care innovator, understood that connection. He shared that he was heading to Portugal to speak on AI and health care, and that he would be reading Healing the Sick Care System during this flight. His encouragement reflected what made the Summit meaningful. The conversation was not ending with our fireside chat. It was traveling with people who are carrying the future of health AI into new rooms, new audiences and new decisions.

Insight, however, is different from wisdom. A pattern is different from a person. A recommendation is different from a relationship. AI can help reveal possibilities. People must decide how those possibilities impact the realities of illness, fear, family, access, culture and care.

That is where Tom’s work and mine meet. Health Care Nation asks why a country with extraordinary science, clinical talent, and technology continues to struggle with fragmentation, costs, incentives, and uneven access. Tom challenges the habit of waiting for someone else to fix what is broken. Policymakers, executives, payers, providers, employers, innovators and citizens all shape health care through choices, incentives, habits and expectations.

Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter starts from the same concern through the experience of a person seeking and delivering care. It asks what happens when a system with remarkable capabilities becomes so difficult to navigate that professional burnout leads to abdication, shifting more of the confusion, delay and uncertainty onto the very people seeking care. It looks at what care feels like when people seek treatment yet still feel lost, when they meet skilled professionals yet leave without understanding the next step, and when they are surrounded by technology yet feel lost and alone.

When Innovation Forgets the Person

Health care does not lack brilliance. It has extraordinary science, dedicated professionals, ambitious innovators and vast resources. Yet brilliance loses force and investment loses meaning when the system becomes more focused on transactions than on the people seeking care.

Soner Haci, CEO of PONS, captured that spirit after the session, writing that the story Tom and I shared was exactly why PONS was founded. His response mattered because it connected the fireside conversation to entrepreneurial purpose. Strong health companies often begin with the recognition that a problem people have learned to work around should no longer continue.

That is also why Lahav’s careful curation mattered. The Summit gave innovators a place to discuss more than what can be built. It invited people to consider whether what is being built is useful, human and ready for the realities of care. In health, possibility is never enough. The measure is whether the possibility improves the experience of the person seeking care and the person trying to provide it.

Tom is especially conscious of how many health professionals experience new technology. AI may be introduced as an aid, yet it can feel like another responsibility added to an already strained workflow. When a tool requires more clicks, more documentation, more review or more mental switching, it becomes one more demand on the people it was meant to support.

That concern should be central to the AI conversation. Implementation matters as much as innovation. AI earns trust when it reduces burden, fits the rhythm of care and gives clinicians back time for judgment, conversation and healing. A tool that adds work, noise or uncertainty to care has missed the purpose of health innovation.

Leanne West, innovation catalyst, patient advocate, connector, Chief Engineer of Pediatric Technology at Georgia Tech, and President of the International Children’s Advisory Network, reflected on LinkedIn that the fireside discussion was “speaking my language.” She highlighted a line from Healing the Sick Care System, that doctors should be people first and doctors second. Her reaction captured why the discussion resonated. The audience heard an AI conversation that kept returning to people.

That return to people is not sentimental. It is central to the challenge. People navigating illness often understand system failure with painful precision. They know where the instructions were confusing, where the portal failed, where follow-up disappeared, where a handoff became a gap and where no one seemed accountable for the whole experience.

Communication belongs in the same conversation. In health care, silence changes the experience. Confusing instructions, disconnected portals, delayed follow-up, fragmented records and unanswered questions become part of how people remember care. AI and digital health can help by making communication more useful, timely, and understandable. The goal is better understanding, not more automated volume.

Prevention also belongs in the same conversation. Health Care Nation argues that the health of people and the nation are inseparable. A country cannot continue spending enormous resources on illness while underinvesting in what helps people stay well. Healing the Sick Care System reaches that point through the patient’s experience. People should be seen, supported and guided before their physical and mental health reaches the snapping point.

This is the power of DHAI. Amir Lahav created a space where AI was discussed in the context of health’s larger obligation. Lahav even hosted a panel on pediatrics, where adults and children as young as six sat together on the mainstage, offering counsel. The conversation was not limited to algorithms, platforms or market opportunity. It asked whether innovation can reduce friction, protect health professionals, support patients, strengthen communication and make care more human.

Those are the questions that move AI from novelty to value. Can it help identify risk earlier? Can it make information easier to understand? Can it reduce administrative burden? Can it help match people to appropriate care? Can it support better conversations? Can it give clinicians back time to listen, think and guide? Can it help people feel less alone, less confused and more supported?

Together, Tom’s book and mine point toward priorities that health leaders should keep close: build around people, invest in prevention, reduce friction, protect clinicians, align incentives, listen to patients, measure outcomes and use technology wisely.

AI as Insight, Not Replacement

AI will not repair a fragmented system on its own. If incentives remain misaligned, AI may optimize the wrong outcomes. If patients remain peripheral, AI may scale impersonal care. If communication remains broken, AI may create more messages without creating more meaning. If trust is treated as an assumption, people will resist new tools for understandable reasons. This is why people absolutely matter.

The future worth building is hopeful. AI can help us see patterns earlier, connect knowledge faster and support better decisions. It can help researchers, clinicians and health systems work with greater insight. It can help people move through care with less confusion and more support. Its value grows when insight is joined with human judgment.

That was the heart of our fireside conversation, and that was why the audience response was powerful. We are not lacking ideas. We are not lacking innovation. We risk allowing health care to become ever more transactional at the very moment when technology should help us make it more connected, understandable and humane.

In Health Care Nation, Tom Lawry reminds us that we must stop waiting for someone else to fix the system. Healing the Sick Care System reminds us that every improvement must be judged by the lives of the people seeking care and the people providing it. These are companion calls to action.

“The future is calling,” as Tom writes. It may indeed be better than we think. It will become better when insight is joined with empathy, when innovation is guided by purpose and when the people touched by health-care systems shape what comes next.

AI can help us see more. People must decide what to do with what they see.

The next chapter belongs to us.

The post Health AI Faces a Human Test appeared first on Medika Life.

Despite this extraordinary pace of innovation, something fundamental remains broken. Patients still struggle to navigate care. Physicians continue to wrestle with fragmented systems, administrative overload and technologies that often add work rather than reduce it. Health innovators repeatedly introduce sophisticated tools into environments overwhelmed by operational complexity, lack of governance, cybersecurity concerns, workflow disruption and communication gaps.

The issue is no longer whether innovation benefits care. The issue is friction.

Consumers compare health care experiences to every interaction in daily life. They compare health care to Apple, where design simplifies complexity, to Amazon, where communication is continuous and immediate, and to banking and travel platforms providing real-time updates and seamless transactions. Some may even compare it to Domino’s Pizza, which promises delivery within 15 minutes or the pie is free. Expectations surrounding responsiveness and convenience have fundamentally changed.

Then they enter health care environments where forms are repeated, portals fail to communicate, prior authorizations delay treatment and updates disappear into silence. Patients are left to navigate disconnected systems during moments of vulnerability. The expectation gap between consumer and health care experiences continues to widen and increasingly shapes reputation.

In Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, the observation is made that “Health care isn’t failing because we lack innovation. It’s failing because the system around that innovation has calcified.” The statement remains painfully real because innovation alone does not create confidence. Experience does.

Patients Remember the Journey, Not the Molecule

The patient and physician experience is shaped less by what a product promises and more by what happens after that promise enters real life. A medicine may be clinically meaningful, yet the experience surrounding it can still become exhausting if coverage is difficult to secure, prior authorization is confounding, specialty pharmacy coordination is slow, follow-up instructions are unclear or support programs require patients to become navigators of their own care.

In those moments, people are not judging science on its own merits. They are judging the total experience of trying to make that medicine or care available and understandable.

Physicians face their own administrative version of friction. A therapy may be medically appropriate, yet before treatment can begin, office staff must determine coverage, complete documentation, respond to payer step-through requirements, manage rejection appeals and explain delays that were never created in the exam room. Every additional administrative step consumes time, stretches staff and places additional strain on the physician-patient relationship. Even non-medical formulary changes can force physicians to restart conversations, explain unexpected medication switches and reestablish patient confidence in treatment decisions already made.

Patients remember counting the hours as they waited for answers. Physicians remember losing uncompensated time navigating systems and approvals. Nurses remember caring for patients through computer screens while typing notes into laptops on rolling carts in crowded hallways. Office managers remember the relentless cycle of paperwork, rejected claims, disconnected portals and endless callbacks trying to move care forward.

The therapy may eventually do its job, yet the pathway becomes inseparable from the memory associated with the brand, the company and the broader health care system. Every new process, technology and treatment promises improvement. For patients and health professionals, however, if the path to care feels uphill, the friction surrounding the experience can overshadow the value of the benefit.

For many patients, repeated uncertainty, delays and administrative obstacles contribute to a form of medical PTSD, where anxiety surrounding the system becomes inseparable from the treatment experience. For health professionals, the constant burden of navigating fragmented systems, managing approvals and compensating for communication gaps has become a leading contributor to burnout.

Friction is rarely remembered as an operational issue inside organizations. Patients and physicians experience it personally. This is why communication must be elevated operationally within health care. Communication is not marketing layered onto innovation after development is complete.

Health care organizations often think they are going through the process of delivering a product, therapy or platform. Patients and physicians experience something more personal: time invested in every interaction surrounding the innovation is time lost forever.

Health Technology Cannot Create More Work

The same reality applies to health technology startups and digital health innovators. Technological advancement alone does not guarantee adoption within health care environments already burdened by operational complexity and workforce fatigue.

Health care organizations do not merely evaluate whether technology works. They evaluate whether it integrates with existing workflows, whether cybersecurity standards are state-of-the-art, whether onboarding is manageable, whether interoperability gaps create additional burdens, and whether the institution can trust the accuracy of data.

Every additional step is a friction point, while every unresolved operational issue becomes part of the patient and physician experience surrounding the journey.

A sophisticated AI platform that requires clinicians to validate outputs continuously adds cognitive burden. A monitoring platform generating clinically important alerts contributes to fatigue. A system that requires extensive retraining or manual workarounds may succeed in demonstration but stumble in real-world conditions.

Innovation may arrive elegantly designed; however, it enters health care environments already strained by workflow complexity, disconnected systems, cybersecurity demands and administrative fatigue. The operational realities surrounding implementation often become as important as the innovation itself.

That reality does not diminish the importance of continuous invention. It reinforces the importance of implementation, communication and operational design within real-world clinical environments.

This shift is increasingly visible across the global health innovation marketplace itself. At HLTH Europe 2026, conversations are moving well beyond excitement surrounding artificial intelligence, digital therapeutics and next-generation platforms. The agenda sessions focus on interoperability, workflow integration, governance, patient engagement and operational implementation. Conference themes repeatedly emphasize connected systems, coordinated experiences and technologies that reduce fragmentation rather than add to a growing list of patches.

One of the more revealing themes from HLTH Europe focuses directly on interoperability and the longstanding frustration surrounding disconnected systems. The conference site notes that clinicians continue spending enormous energy managing platforms that fail to communicate effectively with one another. At the same time, artificial intelligence is increasingly viewed not as a replacement for care, but as a bridge helping systems “finally speak the same language.”

Another major focus involves provider realities. HLTH Europe speakers highlight workforce fatigue, cyber risks, operational strain and workflow challenges facing clinicians and health systems across Europe and beyond. These agenda themes reinforce a growing recognition throughout the industry that innovation cannot succeed if it increases the burden for the people expected to use it every day.

Health professionals increasingly describe a workplace dominated by more screens, more alerts, more documentation and less time with patients. Technology interrupting workflow rather than integrating into it creates resistance, regardless of how advanced the platform may appear. The hidden work behind implementation often becomes the defining experience for the people expected to use the system every day.

Cybersecurity provides another important example. Health professionals and patients may never fully understand the technical architecture protecting health information, yet they absolutely understand the emotional consequence of uncertainty surrounding data privacy, reliability and trust. Confidence in health technology is not built solely through functionality. It is reinforced through consistency, service, transparency and confidence that information is accurate, protected and responsibly governed.

Communication plays an equally important role here. If clinicians are left uncertain about updates, system changes or data governance responsibilities, confidence weakens. If patients do not understand how information is protected, trust erodes, regardless of how advanced the technology.

Communication remains inseparable from the care experience.

The organizations most likely to lead the future of health care will not distinguish themselves solely through technological achievement. They will reduce friction around the user interface, workflows and data accuracy.

The Companies That Win Will Simplify Complexity

This reality explains why access organizations such as Hims & Hers Health and Cost Plus Drugs deserve careful study from across the health care sector, regardless of whether industry leaders agree with every aspect of their business models. These organizations are built around reducing friction in how people access and experience care.

Their importance extends beyond convenience or pricing. These companies recognize that many traditional health institutions have underestimated: people increasingly expect health care experiences to reduce anxiety, simplify decision-making and provide continuity throughout the care journey.  They are “Amazon-like,” offering a “Buy It Now” simple click medical oversight option.

The rise of concierge medicine, direct-to-consumer health platforms and walk-in clinics with reduced wait times reflects a broader market signal the health sector cannot ignore. Patients are increasingly gravitating toward experiences where communication is clearer and access is more immediate.

For those able to afford concierge care, the attraction often extends beyond physician access itself. Patients value responsiveness, shorter wait times, easier scheduling, follow-up communication and the sense that someone is helping coordinate their journey through the system. Walk-in clinics and urgent care centers appeal for similar reasons. People are searching for environments where care is readily accessible, understandable and administratively manageable. The downside of loss of care continuity is offset by immediacy, which is what the consumer values most.

This migration reflects frustration with friction embedded throughout the trending health care experience. Long hold times, delayed callbacks, countless portals, disconnected records, repeated paperwork on clipboards and uncertainty surrounding next steps all shape how people perceive quality of care.

Communication once again sits at the center of the experience. Patients rarely separate operational snafus from expert care. They experience the entire journey as one connected reality – positive or negative.

The lesson is not that health care should behave exactly like retail commerce. Medicine carries ethical, scientific and regulatory responsibilities far beyond consumer transactions. Nevertheless, the operational expectations consumers now bring into the setting have changed.

People increasingly expect health care to be as responsive as the communication they experience elsewhere in life. Is that expectation reasonable?

The pharmaceutical industry, payers, providers, and health technology innovators must recognize that they no longer own just the patents on therapies, platforms or services. They also own the surrounding user experience.

Patients experience health as a continuous journey, not a “build your own adventure” exercise in navigating fragmented systems. Most people enter the system anxious and seeking reassurance from their health professionals. A delayed approval, clinically sterile information delivered through a diagnostic portal or a physician struggling to navigate complexity alongside them deepens that burden. These experiences shape how health care is remembered more powerfully than advertising campaigns or corporate positioning statements.

Those experiences ultimately shape reputations.

The future winners in health care will not simply develop innovative products. They will reduce friction around the human experience surrounding those products. They will recognize that communication, workflow design and responsiveness are not secondary considerations attached to innovation. They are part of the experience.

Patients and physicians rarely remember the elegance of molecular or system architecture behind a therapy or platform. They remember whether the experience made care delivery easier and more humane during moments that mattered.

The post Health Innovation Has a Friction Problem appeared first on Medika Life.

This white paper was researched and written with the assistance of Claude Sonnet, an AI system developed by Anthropic. AI assistance was used to accelerate literature retrieval, improve the quality of writing, and support editing and formatting. The intellectual framework, argument structure, source selection, and all substantive claims reflect the author’s own thinking and direction. All citations have been identified and verified by the author. The author assumes full responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of all content presented in this paper.

Executive Summary

Artificial intelligence is arriving in American healthcare at scale. Health systems are investing in AI-powered diagnostics, clinical decision support, predictive analytics, and administrative automation. The promise is real. So is the risk. Machine learning models learn from data. In healthcare, that data is generated by the systems deploying the AI. And if those organizations have not been designed to produce clean, reliable, clinically meaningful data, then the AI built on top of them will automate and amplify the dysfunction already present in the system, not correct it.

This is the argument this paper makes. It is not primarily an argument about technology. It is an argument about organizational design.

The concept of the Learning Health System, formally defined by the Institute of Medicine in 2007, describes a system in which knowledge generation is so deeply embedded in the delivery of care that improvement becomes continuous and self-reinforcing rather than episodic and externally driven. Nearly two decades after that definition was published, widespread adoption remains limited. The gap is not one of awareness. It is one of operationalization. And in an era of AI-driven healthcare, the cost of that gap is no longer just missed improvement opportunities. It is corrupted training data, biased models, and clinical decisions shaped by intelligence that learned the wrong things from a system that was never designed to learn at all.

This paper examines why the Learning Health System has not been built at scale, using the organizational thinking design framework of Vision, Mission, Capacity, and Learning developed by Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera, and the wicked problem literature in strategic management. It identifies three conditions most visible in clinical, policy, and public discourse as illustrations of the organizational design problem: physician burnout, electronic health record burden, and payer interference through prior authorization. These three are not presented as an exhaustive explanation. They are presented as a coherent causal chain that leads directly to the data quality crisis sitting underneath every AI deployment in American healthcare today.

The paper concludes not with a prescriptive framework but with an invitation to think differently about how health systems are designed, led, and held accountable, before the next wave of AI investment locks in the mistakes of the current one.

I: A Conversation That Sparked a Question

American healthcare is in the middle of an AI gold rush. Health systems, technology companies, and investors are moving fast, betting that machine learning, predictive analytics, and AI-powered clinical tools will transform how care is delivered and how outcomes are measured. The enthusiasm is understandable. The technology is genuinely powerful. But a question is not being asked loudly enough: what kind of system is this AI learning from?

In early 2026, Gil Bashe, Chair of Global Health and Purpose at FINN Partners, published Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, arguing that American healthcare is not failing because it lacks innovation, investment, or talented people.[2] It is failing because it has lost sight of the people it exists to serve. That argument sparked a different but related question for the author: what kind of system do we actually have?

We call them healthcare systems. We build teaching hospitals. We invest in teaching rounds and residency programs and the careful, structured transmission of clinical knowledge from one generation to the next. Teaching is a word we use with confidence and pride in medicine. But when do we talk about the system itself learning? Not individuals acquiring competency, but the institution changing what it does based on what it discovers. Teaching and learning are not the same thing, and that distinction, hiding in plain sight, may be one of the most consequential unexplored ideas in American healthcare today, especially at a moment when AI is being asked to learn from systems that were never designed to learn themselves.

This question led to an examination of a concept that has existed in formal academic and policy literature since 2007 but has not entered the broader conversation about healthcare reform in any meaningful way: the Learning Health System.

II: What Is a Learning Health System, and Why Has It Not Been Built?

Understanding why AI in healthcare is sitting on a compromised foundation requires understanding what a Learning Health System actually is, and why one has never been fully built. The Learning Health System is not simply a framework for improving data quality. It is the only organizational model in which clean, clinically meaningful data is a natural and continuous byproduct of how care is delivered. Every other approach to the data quality problem in healthcare AI is essentially trying to fix the output without changing the system that produces it. The Learning Health System changes the system. That is why it matters now, and that is why AI in healthcare makes it urgent.

The term Learning Health System entered the formal vocabulary of American medicine in 2007 when the Institute of Medicine convened a roundtable on value and science-driven health care. The definition it produced has held up well: a Learning Health System is one in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.[1] Knowledge generation in this vision is not adjacent to practice. It is not a research department down the hall or a quality improvement initiative launched when funding permits. It is embedded in practice itself, and it leads to continual, self-reinforcing improvement in which care creates evidence and evidence improves care.

Nearly two decades later, widespread adoption remains limited. Not because the concept has been ignored. It has attracted sustained attention from the National Academy of Medicine, federal agencies including Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), major academic health centers, and research networks such as National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) and the NIH’s National COVID Cohort Collaborative. What has proven difficult is operationalization at scale: figuring out what a genuine commitment to learning actually means in terms of changed practice, realigned infrastructure, new staffing, revised policy, and real shifts in organizational culture. The IOM’s deliberately broad definition, intended to maximize applicability, had an unintended consequence. It left every institution to solve the operationalization problem largely on its own, without a shared language for the organizational design work that learning at scale actually requires.[16]

The cycle the Learning Health System literature describes is straightforward in concept. Knowledge is identified and synthesized to address clinical challenges through evidence reviews and clinical practice guidelines. That knowledge gets applied in care delivery through clinical decision support and care pathways. Care delivery generates data, captured in patient registries and EHRs, assessed for performance, and fed back into the knowledge generation process. The loop closes. Patients are at the center throughout, not as passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere, but as active contributors to the knowledge the system generates.[11]

It is also worth being clear about what a Learning Health System is not. It is not a teaching hospital. A teaching hospital organizes itself to transfer knowledge from experienced clinicians to trainees. Knowledge flows in one direction, and the institution learns incidentally if at all. A Learning Health System organizes itself to change based on what it discovers in the course of delivering care. The institution itself is the learner. American medicine has invested heavily in building teaching capacity. The investment in learning capacity, the organizational infrastructure that allows a health system to discover, synthesize, and act on what its own practice is telling it, has been far more limited and far less systematic.

The concept operates at two levels that are easy to conflate. At the macro level, it describes what American healthcare as a sector could become. At the micro level, it is an organizational design challenge that has to be solved institution by institution through specific decisions about how care is delivered, how data is captured, how knowledge is synthesized, and how evidence actually changes what clinicians do on any given day. The macro vision only becomes real through micro organizational choices. The research literature suggests those choices have not yet been made in ways that support learning at meaningful scale.

III: A Wicked Problem and a Strategic Dilemma

Before examining why the Learning Health System has been so difficult to build, it is worth being precise about the nature of the problem itself. Not all hard problems are the same kind of hard. Some are difficult because resources are insufficient. Some are difficult because the right solution has not yet been found. The failure to operationalize the Learning Health System at scale is neither of these. It is something more structurally challenging, and naming it correctly matters because the type of problem determines what kind of thinking is adequate to address it.

In strategic management and organizational theory, a distinction is drawn between problems that are complicated and problems that are wicked. A complicated problem, however technically demanding, has a definable solution. Building an aircraft is complicated. The right answer exists, the variables can be enumerated, and expertise applied systematically will eventually produce the result. A wicked problem is different in kind, not just in degree. The concept was introduced by Rittel and Webber in their foundational 1973 paper “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,”[5] which argued that problems of social policy cannot be solved using scientific-engineering approaches because they lack a clear problem definition and involve stakeholders with genuinely differing and legitimate perspectives. Wicked problems are not merely unsolved. They resist definitive formulation. Every attempt to solve them reveals new dimensions of the problem. Solutions cannot be tested in advance and cannot be undone cleanly once implemented. There is no single right answer, and the people working on the problem do not agree on what success would look like.

The challenge of building a Learning Health System is a wicked problem in precisely this sense. It is not a technology problem, though technology is implicated. It is not a regulatory problem, though regulation shapes the environment. It is not a funding problem, though funding matters. It is a problem that cuts across all of these domains simultaneously, involves stakeholders whose legitimate interests are in genuine tension with one another, and resists any solution that addresses only one of its dimensions. Researchers working in this space have noted that strategy scholars who attempt to address wicked problems using conventional approaches tend to build causal models that seek to optimize organizational success, an approach that ironically divorces the analysis from the very complexity that makes the problem wicked in the first place.[6]

Within this wicked problem, however, there is a more specific structure worth naming. The Learning Health System presents what might be called a strategic dilemma: a situation in which legitimate goods are in genuine tension with each other, and in which choosing to prioritize one value necessarily creates pressure on another. Patient safety and the imperatives of research require different things from a consent framework. The need for standardization conflicts with the need for clinical judgment. The value of data utility for population-level learning conflicts with individual privacy rights. The urgency of improvement conflicts with the rigor that improvement based on evidence requires. These are not tensions that can be dissolved by finding a smarter solution. They are structural features of the problem that any serious approach must hold in view simultaneously rather than resolving prematurely in favor of one side.

This distinction between a wicked problem and a strategic dilemma is not merely academic. It has direct implications for how we think about leadership and organizational design in this space. Wicked problems cannot be assigned to a committee and solved on a timeline. They require what the Cabreras would describe as thinking design rather than framework imposition: the cultivation of a quality of thinking in leaders and institutions that is capable of holding complexity, adapting continuously, and learning from the system rather than simply managing it. The Learning Health System is not waiting for the right policy. It is waiting for a different quality of organizational thinking. And that is a problem that systems thinking, properly understood, is specifically designed to address.

IV: Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems — The Cabrera Lens

Understanding why the Learning Health System has been so difficult to operationalize requires more than a catalogue of obstacles. It requires a way of thinking about organizations that is adequate to their actual nature. Most health systems have been designed and managed as if they were complicated machines: hierarchical, controllable, and optimizable through the right combination of process improvement, technology, and incentive alignment. The persistent failure of that approach to produce genuine organizational learning suggests that the underlying model of what a health system is may itself be the problem.

Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera at Cabrera Research Lab have spent decades developing and empirically grounding a different model. Their work, elaborated in Flock Not Clock and in an extensive body of peer-reviewed research,[3] begins from a foundational premise: all organizations, regardless of their formal structure, are complex adaptive systems. A complex adaptive system, or CAS, is composed of autonomous agents whose individual behaviors interact to produce collective, emergent outcomes that cannot be predicted or controlled by managing the agents individually.[13] The agents are not cogs in a machine executing instructions from above. They are people making decisions, moment by moment, in response to the conditions and incentives around them. The organization does not produce its outcomes by command. It produces them by emergence, as the aggregate result of countless individual decisions made at every level of the system every day.

This changes how we think about organizational design. If a health system is a complex adaptive system, then the question of how to build a learning culture inside it is not primarily a question of policy, technology, or incentive structure, though all of these matter at the capacity level. It is a question of what conditions and orientations the autonomous agents in the system are operating under, and whether those conditions make learning a natural emergent outcome of their daily work or an additional burden layered on top of everything else they are already asked to do.

The Cabreras developed a thinking design structure called VMCL, standing for Vision, Mission, Capacity, and Learning, to help leaders understand and shape the four functions that any organization must perform in order to move purposefully toward its goals.[4] VMCL is not a framework to be implemented as a checklist or adopted as a rebranding exercise. It is a thinking design lens, a way of seeing clearly what an organization is actually doing across its four essential functions, and whether those functions are genuinely aligned with each other and with the organization’s deepest purpose. The value is in the quality of thinking it cultivates in leaders, not in the mechanical application of its categories. Of the organizational design frameworks the author has encountered across three decades of operational leadership, the Cabrera VMCL structure is the most useful for making visible what is actually happening inside a complex organization and why.

Vision is a destination, not an action. It is a picture of a specific future state, clear enough to be genuinely directional and distant enough to be genuinely aspirational. Vision is not a description of what the organization does or how it operates. It is the answer to the question: if everything this organization is trying to accomplish were fully realized, what would the world look like? Most organizational vision statements fail this test entirely. They are the product of committee processes in which boards, executives, communications professionals, and legal reviewers each add words until the original impulse toward meaning has been buried under qualifications and compromises. The result is statements that are long, passive, and forgettable, that could belong to any organization and therefore belong to none, and that no frontline worker could honestly say lives in their hearts and minds while doing their job. Genuine vision is short enough to remember, true enough to feel, and clear enough to orient behavior without requiring a footnote.

Mission is the mechanism by which vision becomes real. In the VMCL structure, mission is not a values statement or a description of organizational purpose. Mission is the simple rules: the small number of repeatable, measurable actions that, when enacted consistently by autonomous agents throughout the organization, produce movement toward the vision as an emergent outcome.[12] The Cabreras draw on complex adaptive systems science to make a counterintuitive but empirically grounded argument: large-scale coordinated behavior in complex systems does not require elaborate instructions or top-down control. It requires simple rules, followed by many agents, repeatedly. Consider the wave at a stadium. No policy memo was issued. No training was conducted. The behavior that ripples across tens of thousands of people in a single coordinated arc emerges from a small number of simple rules enacted by each individual: watch your neighbor, rise when they rise, sit when they sit, raise your hands. The wave is not managed into existence. It emerges. Mission, properly conceived, functions the same way inside organizations. If the simple rules of mission are well designed, genuinely understood, and authentically shared, coordinated movement toward vision emerges from the collective behavior of autonomous agents without requiring command and control of every decision. The parallel failure mode matters equally: if mission consists of a lengthy statement written for external audiences rather than a small number of actionable rules that people can actually carry in their heads, then the organization’s agents have nothing simple to enact, and the coordinated movement that vision requires cannot emerge.

Capacity is the infrastructure, systems, tools, skills, and resources that enable the mission to be carried out. It is what the organization has built, or inherited, or been forced to adopt, to allow its agents to do the work that produces the vision. Capacity includes technology, physical infrastructure, trained personnel, financial resources, data systems, and organizational structures. The critical insight in the VMCL framework is that capacity must be aligned with mission. Capacity built for a different mission, however large, sophisticated, or expensive, does not support the mission it was not designed to serve. It actively competes with it, consuming the time, attention, and energy of the autonomous agents who are supposed to be carrying out the simple rules that produce the vision. The question of whether a health system has the capacity to be a Learning Health System is therefore not simply a question of whether it has electronic health records, data analytics capabilities, or quality improvement staff. It is a question of whether those investments were designed and are being used in service of a learning mission, or whether they were designed for other purposes entirely and are now being asked to serve a mission they were never built to support.

Learning is the function that makes the other three adaptive rather than static. In the VMCL framework, learning is the organization’s capacity to gather honest feedback from its own behavior and from its environment, assess that feedback against its vision and mission, and actually change what it is doing as a result.[4] In the specific context of the Learning Health System, this has a precise meaning that goes beyond general organizational learning or individual professional development. Learning in the LHS sense is the cycle of gathering clinical and operational data generated within the health system itself, subjecting it to rigorous analysis, producing knowledge about what is actually working for actual patients in this actual system, and feeding that knowledge back into changed clinical practice in ways that improve patient outcomes. The unit of learning is the system. The measure of learning is not the number of insights generated or reports published. It is whether practice changes and whether patients do better as a result. Quality dashboards that nobody acts on, annual reports that circulate among administrators without altering clinical behavior, and research findings that never make it from the journal to the bedside are all symptoms of an organization that has the appearance of learning without the substance of it.

These four functions are not sequential steps. They are simultaneous and mutually dependent. Vision without mission produces inspiring rhetoric that changes nothing. Mission without vision produces activity without direction. Capacity without aligned mission and vision produces expensive infrastructure that serves the wrong ends. And Learning without the other three produces insight that has no home in the organization’s structure and no pathway to changing behavior. The question the VMCL lens asks of any health system is not whether these four functions exist in some form, because they all do in every organization. The question is whether they are genuinely aligned with each other, whether they are all oriented toward the same destination, and whether that destination is honestly about learning and patient outcomes or about something else dressed in that language.

V: Three Conditions Hostile to Learning

The VMCL lens developed by the Cabreras does not merely describe what a well-functioning organization looks like. It also provides a diagnostic structure for understanding where and why organizational function breaks down. When a complex adaptive system is failing to move toward its vision, the failure can almost always be located in one or more of the four functions: the vision is unclear or not genuinely shared, the mission lacks simple rules that agents can actually carry and enact, the capacity is misaligned with the mission, or the learning function is absent, performative, or structurally disconnected from the decisions that govern practice.

Applied to the challenge of building Learning Health Systems in the United States, this diagnostic structure surfaces something important. The barriers most frequently discussed in clinical, policy, and public discourse cluster with particular intensity around the Capacity and Learning functions. Three conditions in particular have emerged with enough consistency across enough professional, policy, and clinical circles to warrant focused examination here. They are not presented as the only barriers. The published literature names others, including interoperability failures, governance gaps, funding misalignment, and cultural resistance to change.[15] They are presented because each is vivid, well-documented, and together they do something more important than illustrate three separate problems. They form a causal chain.

That chain runs as follows. Electronic health record systems were designed for billing, documentation, and regulatory compliance rather than for clinical care or learning. They impose structural friction on the daily work of every physician in the country. Payer interference through prior authorization requirements compounds that friction, consuming hours of clinical time every week, systematically overriding clinical judgment, and producing a persistent experience of professional constraint that no amount of individual resilience can fully absorb. Together these two systemic forces create the organizational conditions that produce physician burnout at scale. Burnout is not an independent variable sitting alongside EHR burden and payer interference. It is the human output of a system that has been designed at the capacity level for the wrong mission. And a system whose agents are burned out cannot learn, because learning requires the cognitive availability, the reflective capacity, and the institutional trust that survival mode structurally forecloses.

This is what the Cabreras mean when they say that the system is what the system does. If the system consistently produces burned-out physicians, demoralized care teams, and a clinical workforce increasingly oriented toward self-preservation rather than adaptive engagement, that is not a failure of individual character or professional commitment. It is the system performing as it was designed to perform, optimizing for throughput, administrative control, and reimbursement rather than for learning and patient outcomes. Understanding the three conditions in sequence, rather than as a parallel list, is essential to understanding why the organizational design problem is as deep as it is.

Electronic Health Records: Capacity Built for the Wrong Mission, Sitting on the Right Data

The widespread adoption of electronic health records in the United States was accelerated by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 [23]. As of 2021, 96 percent of nonfederal acute-care hospitals and 78 percent of office-based physicians used an EHR, making these systems integral to routine clinical practice.[10] On its face, this represents exactly the kind of data infrastructure that a Learning Health System requires. A system that captures clinical data at scale, across encounters, patients, and populations, is precisely what the knowledge generation and data functions of the LHS cycle depend on. In this narrow sense, American healthcare has already built something the Learning Health System needs. The data is there. Decades of patient encounters, clinical decisions, treatment courses, and outcomes are sitting in these systems at a scale that would have been unimaginable to the architects of the NAM’s 2007 vision.

The problem is not the existence of the data. The problem is everything surrounding it.

EHRs were not primarily designed for learning. They were designed for billing, documentation, and regulatory compliance. The gap between the data infrastructure a learning mission requires and the data infrastructure that exists is not a gap in hardware or software capability. It is a gap in design intent, and that gap has consequences that run in two directions simultaneously. The first is the burden the systems impose on the clinicians who must feed them. A recent scoping review published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice found that clinicians now spend an estimated one-third to one-half of their working day interacting with EHR systems, translating to over $140 billion in lost care capacity annually.[10] The same review found that clinicians frequently experience significant workflow disruptions caused by poorly designed interfaces, leading to task-switching, excessive screen navigation, and fragmented critical information that necessitates workarounds and increases the risk of documentation errors. Research published in JAMA found that physicians spend approximately 36.2 minutes documenting in the EHR for every 30-minute office visit [24], meaning the administrative burden of capturing an encounter now routinely exceeds the clinical time of the encounter itself.

The second consequence is less frequently discussed but equally important for the Learning Health System argument. The data that EHRs generate is not clean learning data. It is documentation data, structured around billing codes, shaped by prior authorization requirements, and produced through documentation processes that clinicians have adapted, often through workarounds, to minimize burden rather than to maximize clinical accuracy. The result is a paradox at the heart of the LHS challenge: American healthcare is sitting on an extraordinary volume of clinical data that a learning system would need, and simultaneously that data is less useful for learning than its volume suggests, because the processes that generated it were optimized for reimbursement rather than for clinical fidelity.

Mining that data for genuine learning insights would require significant investment in data science, informatics, and clinical expertise working in close collaboration. It would require clinicians who have the time, the cognitive availability, and the institutional support to participate in that work. It would require organizations that have aligned their capacity with a learning mission rather than a billing mission. And it would require a workforce that has not been burned out by the very systems that are generating the data in the first place. The EHR is not an obstacle to the Learning Health System in spite of the data it holds. It is an obstacle in part because of the conditions it has created around that data. The data exists. The capacity to act on it does not, because the system has consumed that capacity in the process of generating the data.

In VMCL terms this is a Capacity problem of a specific and frustrating kind. The investment has been made. The infrastructure is in place. But it was built for the wrong mission, and the friction it generates spills directly into the clinical encounter itself, into the relationship between physician and patient, and into the professional experience of every clinician who ends the day staring at a screen long after the last patient has gone home.

Payer Interference: External Rules Overriding Internal Mission

If EHR burden creates structural friction in the tools physicians use, payer interference through prior authorization creates structural friction in the decisions physicians are permitted to make. Together they constitute a double compression of clinical capacity that is difficult to fully appreciate from outside the daily experience of practicing medicine in the United States today.

The American Medical Association conducts an annual nationwide survey of 1,000 practicing physicians on the burden of prior authorization. The 2024 findings are both consistent with prior years and striking in their severity.[9] Physicians reported completing an average of 39 prior authorization requests per physician per week, consuming an average of 13 hours of physician and staff time. Ninety-three percent of physicians reported that prior authorization delays access to necessary care. Eighty-nine percent reported that it contributes to burnout. Ninety-four percent said it has a negative impact on patient clinical outcomes. More than one in four reported that prior authorization caused a serious adverse event for a patient in their care. Seventy-eight percent reported that it often or sometimes results in patients abandoning a recommended course of treatment entirely. Forty percent of practices have hired staff whose exclusive function is managing prior authorization requests.

In the language of complex adaptive systems, prior authorization represents external agents, payers and insurers, injecting rules into the system that redirect the behavior of internal agents, physicians and care teams, away from what their clinical training, judgment, and the available evidence would support, and toward what the external agent will reimburse. The internal simple rules of the care delivery mission are being overridden at the point of care by administrative requirements that serve a different set of goals entirely. This is not a marginal disruption. At 39 prior authorization requests per physician per week, it is a structural feature of the environment in which clinical work now happens.

The implications for the Learning Health System extend beyond the administrative burden. The LHS cycle depends on clinical practice generating data that reflects actual clinical judgment applied to actual patient needs. When a substantial proportion of clinical decisions are being shaped not by evidence and judgment but by prior authorization requirements, the data that clinical practice generates no longer cleanly reflects what works. It reflects what gets approved. The knowledge that a learning system could generate from that data is therefore systematically biased before it is ever analyzed. The learning loop is not merely slowed by payer interference. In important respects it is compromised at the source.

And when a physician has spent 13 hours in a week on prior authorization paperwork, on top of the hours already consumed by EHR documentation, the cumulative weight of that friction does not remain a professional inconvenience. It becomes a clinical emergency of a different kind entirely. It becomes burnout.

Physician Burnout: The Human Output of a Broken System

Physician burnout is not the beginning of the problem. It is the end of a chain that starts with organizational design decisions made far from the bedside. It is what happens when the agents of a complex adaptive system are placed inside a capacity structure so misaligned with the mission of care that adaptive engagement becomes unsustainable. The EHR consumes time and cognitive energy. Prior authorization consumes professional agency and clinical judgment. Together they produce a working environment in which the question a physician must increasingly ask is not what does this patient need but what will I be permitted to do, and how long will the paperwork take.

The data on physician burnout in the United States is not ambiguous. According to the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation, 76 percent of healthcare workers reported burnout in 2020, and during the COVID-19 pandemic 69 percent of physicians experienced depression, with 13 percent reporting thoughts of suicide.[7] Physicians in the United States are more likely to die by suicide than physicians in other nations. The Physicians Foundation’s 2022 Survey of America’s Physicians found that burnout rates remain at 62 percent, significantly higher than the pre-pandemic figure of 40 percent in 2018, with no meaningful improvement in the intervening years.[8] Nearly 400 physicians die by suicide annually in the United States, a figure the research literature connects directly to stigma, fear of licensing repercussions, and untreated depression in a profession that has historically treated the need for mental health support as a professional liability.[7]

The Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation, established by the family of an emergency physician who died by suicide in April 2020 after treating patients during the early COVID-19 surge, has been explicit about the systemic nature of the problem. Individual support alone, the foundation states, does not address the causes of burnout. The underlying processes and systems within healthcare operations must be confronted.[7] That is a systems thinking argument made in plain language by people who lived the consequences. It points directly at the Capacity layer of the VMCL structure and asks why the system was designed this way and whether the people responsible for that design have fully reckoned with what it produces.

For the Learning Health System, burnout represents the final compression of capacity. Learning requires clinicians who can observe, reflect, contribute to knowledge generation, and adapt their practice in response to what the evidence is telling them. It requires agents who are present, engaged, and operating with enough cognitive and professional reserve to participate in something beyond the immediate transaction of care. Burnout forecloses that participation systematically, across specialties, settings, and the full arc of a clinical career. A system that is burning out its physicians at the rate American healthcare currently does is not a system that can learn. It is a system that is consuming its own capacity to improve.

The three conditions examined in this section are not a complete explanation of why Learning Health Systems have been so difficult to build. But they are a coherent one. They describe a system that has built the wrong capacity, allowed that capacity to be further distorted by external rule-making, and in doing so created the organizational conditions that make the human beings at the center of care less and less able to participate in the continuous learning that better care requires. The system is, in the most precise sense, doing exactly what it was designed to do. The question this paper is asking is whether it could be designed to do something different.

VI: Thinking Design, Not Framework Prescription

If the argument of this paper has been constructed carefully, the reader has arrived here with a specific kind of discomfort. The problem is real, well-documented, and serious. The VMCL lens has provided a coherent way of seeing why the Learning Health System has not been built at scale. The three conditions examined in Section V have illustrated, in concrete and citable terms, how the capacity layer of American healthcare has been so comprehensively misaligned with a learning mission that the human beings at the center of care are being systematically consumed by the friction of a system that was designed for other ends. The natural next question is: so what do we do about it?

This section is going to resist the impulse to answer that question with a prescription. That resistance is not evasion. It is the most honest and useful response available, and the reasons for it are worth stating plainly.

The wicked problem literature is clear that conventional problem-solving approaches are structurally inadequate to problems of the kind this paper has been examining. The Learning Health System is not waiting for the right policy intervention or the right technology platform or the right reimbursement model, though all of these matter and deserve serious attention. It is waiting for a different quality of organizational thinking in the people and institutions responsible for designing, leading, and reforming American healthcare.

The Cabreras make a distinction that is useful here. They differentiate between organizations that impose frameworks and organizations that develop genuine thinking capacity, the internal ability to see clearly, reason carefully, and adapt continuously in response to what the system is actually doing.[3] A framework can be adopted without changing the underlying quality of thought. A new software platform can be installed without changing the organizational culture that will use it. A new policy can be passed without changing the incentive structures that will determine whether it is followed in spirit or circumvented in practice. What cannot be faked, and what the Learning Health System actually requires, is the organizational capacity to ask honest questions about what the system is producing, to follow the answers wherever they lead, and to change course based on what is discovered.

Before any of that can happen, the system must be mapped. Not fixed. Not optimized. Mapped. This is a critical distinction. The problems do not precede the mapping. They emerge from it. A system cannot be improved by agents who cannot see it clearly, and seeing it clearly requires a specific and disciplined quality of thinking. The Cabreras offer exactly that through a cognitive framework called DSRP, standing for Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives.[19][21] DSRP describes four universal patterns of thinking that, when applied deliberately, allow a leader or organization to see a system as it actually is rather than as habit, assumption, or organizational mythology would have it appear. To understand what the system does, you must first understand what the system is. DSRP is the toolkit for that work.

Before reaching for solutions, the Cabreras ask leaders at every level to sit with a set of honest diagnostic questions:

Does your organization have a vision that is genuinely and specifically about the future it is trying to create, stated clearly enough that every person in the system, from the bedside nurse to the chief executive, could carry it in their hearts and minds while doing their job on any given day? Or does it have a statement written for a board presentation, long, passive, and laden with qualifications, that could belong to any organization and therefore belongs to none?

Does your organization have a mission in the specific sense of simple rules, repeatable actions that autonomous agents at every level of the system can enact without a manual, that would make learning a natural outgrowth of daily clinical practice? Or does it have a strategic plan, full of initiatives and objectives and key results, that bears no relationship to what a nurse or a physician or a data analyst actually does on a Tuesday morning?

Has your organization built capacity that is aligned with a learning mission, or has it built capacity for billing, documentation, and regulatory compliance and then asked that infrastructure to support learning as a secondary function while simultaneously burning out the people who are supposed to use it?

And does your organization have genuine learning mechanisms, honest feedback that actually changes clinical practice, that actually improves patient outcomes, that actually closes the loop between what the system discovers and what the system does? Or does it have quality dashboards and compliance reports and annual reviews that circulate among administrators without ever altering what happens in an exam room?

These are diagnostic questions, not rhetorical ones. They are the questions that thinking design asks of any organization that claims the Learning Health System as an aspiration. They are uncomfortable because for most health systems, across most of these dimensions, the honest answer is not encouraging. And they are important precisely because the discomfort they produce, if it is held rather than resolved prematurely, is the beginning of genuine organizational learning.

The four DSRP patterns work as follows.

Distinctions are the act of identifying what something is and what it is not, drawing a boundary between a thing and everything that is not that thing. In the context of the Learning Health System, making clear distinctions means being honest about what a learning system actually is, and separating it clearly from what merely resembles it. A teaching hospital is not a learning health system. A quality dashboard is not a learning mechanism. An EHR is not a learning infrastructure simply because it generates data. Without the discipline of making clean distinctions, organizations substitute the appearance of learning for the substance of it and never notice the difference.

Systems, in the DSRP sense, is the recognition that any phenomenon of interest is simultaneously a part of larger wholes and a whole composed of smaller parts, and that understanding it requires attending to both levels at once.[20] In the healthcare context, physician burnout is a part of a larger system of capacity failures, and it is itself a whole composed of contributing conditions including EHR burden, prior authorization load, professional isolation, and the erosion of clinical agency. Understanding both the part and the whole simultaneously is what prevents the mistake of treating burnout as an individual problem rather than a systemic one.

Relationships are the causal and dynamic connections between elements of a system, the action and reaction that link one condition to another and produce the emergent outcomes the system generates.[20] The causal chain this paper has traced, from EHR misdesign through payer interference to burnout to the collapse of learning capacity, is a relationships argument. These three conditions are not parallel and independent. They are sequentially and causally connected, and intervening in one without attending to the others will produce incomplete and temporary relief at best.

Perspectives are the recognition that every observation of a system is made from a point of view, and that changing the perspective from which a system is examined reveals different features, different problems, and different possibilities.[20] The Learning Health System has been examined primarily from the perspectives of bioethicists, health policy scholars, and informatics researchers. Those are valuable perspectives. But they are not the perspective of the burned-out emergency physician at the end of a 13-hour shift, or the primary care doctor who spent two of those hours on prior authorization paperwork, or the patient whose recommended treatment was abandoned because the approval process took too long. Bringing multiple genuine perspectives into the analysis is not a concession to inclusivity. It is an epistemic requirement for seeing the system accurately.

Together these four patterns constitute the cognitive foundation for systems mapping, the act of making the system visible in a form that allows its parts, relationships, boundaries, and embedded perspectives to be examined honestly and collectively.[17] Making the system visible before reaching for a solution is not a preliminary step on the way to the real work. It is the real work.[17][18] This paper is, in one sense, a partial map of a system. It does not resolve the wicked problem of the Learning Health System. It attempts to make that problem more visible, more precisely named, and more honestly held, in the conviction that a system cannot be improved by agents who cannot see it clearly.

VII: Building the Ecosystem

This paper has traced a specific arc. It began with a conversation, with the recognition that a system described as healthcare has organized itself primarily around sick care, and that a system capable of learning from its own practice toward the goal of genuine health remains largely unbuilt. It named that gap as a wicked problem, structurally resistant to the kinds of solutions that work on complicated problems. It introduced a thinking design lens, VMCL, that reveals where and why the organizational design of American healthcare has been misaligned with a learning mission. It examined three conditions, EHR burden, payer interference, and physician burnout, not as a comprehensive catalogue of everything wrong but as a coherent illustration of a system doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is the wrong thing. And it argued that before solutions can be designed, the system must be mapped, using the cognitive tools of Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives, so that what is actually happening can be seen clearly by the people responsible for changing it.

What comes next is not a conclusion in the conventional sense, because wicked problems do not conclude. They develop. They yield to sustained, cross-disciplinary, honest engagement over time, or they do not yield at all. And that engagement, to be genuine, cannot be organized as a committee or delegated to a working group. It has to function as an ecosystem.

An ecosystem, in the organizational sense, is not simply a collection of stakeholders. It is a community of interdependent actors whose collective behavior produces outcomes that no single actor could generate alone, and whose health depends on the health of every part. The Learning Health System cannot be built by clinicians alone, or technologists alone, or policymakers alone, or systems thinkers alone, because each of those communities has a partial view of the system, and partial views applied with confidence have contributed to the problem as much as to any solution. What the Learning Health System requires is an ecosystem response, one in which diverse and genuinely interdependent actors develop a shared sense of responsibility for the knowledge the system is capable of generating and for the patients whose outcomes depend on whether that knowledge is actually used.

Several conditions define what a functional ecosystem for this work looks like.

Patients must be active contributors, not symbolic participants. The Stanford course materials that informed this paper make a point worth stating directly: in the Learning Health System, every patient is also a research participant, and their data represent an opportunity to learn.[11] The ethical framework developed by Ruth Faden, Nancy Kass, and their colleagues[25] argues that patients have not only rights but obligations within a learning health system, specifically an obligation to contribute to the knowledge that the system generates for their benefit and for the benefit of others, particularly when the risk to them is minimal. Designing health systems that honor that relationship, rather than treating patients as subjects to be protected from the learning process, is one of the most important organizational design challenges the field faces.

Health system leaders must be willing to ask honest questions about what their organizations are actually producing. The wicked problem of the Learning Health System will not be solved by a consultant engagement, a technology platform, or a strategic planning cycle. It will be addressed, partially and incrementally, by leaders who are willing to hold the discomfort of answers that do not reflect well on past choices and design differently in response to what they discover. That requires vision that is genuinely about learning and patient outcomes. It requires mission in the form of simple rules that every agent in the organization can carry and enact. It requires capacity built and aligned for the right purpose. And it requires learning mechanisms that are honest, structural, and actually connected to changed practice.

The ecosystem must also have a convening architecture. Calling for cross-disciplinary engagement on a wicked problem is easy. Designing the conditions under which that engagement can actually happen is considerably harder. In June 2020, the author designed and led SparkJam 2020, a statewide initiative convened through The Rocket Factory in partnership with Activation Capital, the VCU da Vinci Center for Innovation, and other Virginia-based organizations.[22] The initiative brought together entrepreneurs, technology visionaries, business strategists, and community leaders to collaborate in real time on solutions to challenges facing small businesses during the pandemic. The methodology that made it work rested on a specific structural logic: a small group of influential leaders set the agenda, identified the most consequential problems, and recruited a broader population of participants whose direct knowledge and diverse perspectives were needed to work those problems in depth. Structured sessions generated insights that no individual perspective could have produced alone. The broader group returned its work to the leadership tier for synthesis and prioritization, and working groups carried specific initiatives forward. That architecture, a credible leadership tier, broad and diverse participation, structured synthesis, and sustained working group commitment, is precisely what ecosystem convening for the Learning Health System requires.

This paper is itself a beginning and not an answer. It is a partial map of a system far larger and more complex than any single document can represent. What it hopes to contribute is a quality of framing adequate to the problem’s actual complexity. The ecosystem that the Learning Health System requires is waiting to be convened. The methodology exists. The will to build it is what remains to be found.

VIII: AI Implications — When Upstream Conditions Corrupt Downstream Intelligence

The organizational design argument this paper has been making has urgent implications that extend beyond health system walls and into the ambitions of every health technology company, AI developer, and investor currently betting that data-driven tools will transform American healthcare. The case for cross-disciplinary convening made in Section VII is not merely about improving care delivery. It is also about creating the organizational conditions under which technology can actually function as promised. Because the technology being deployed into American healthcare today is only as trustworthy as the data it learns from. And that data was produced by the system this paper has been describing.

Any health technology company seeking to leverage healthcare data to improve patient outcomes must first understand and reckon with what is happening upstream of that data. The organizational conditions under which data is generated determine what that data actually contains. This is not a theoretical concern. It is an engineering one, with direct consequences for patient safety.

Machine learning models learn from the data they are given. They do not evaluate the conditions under which that data was produced. They do not know whether the physician who entered a clinical note was on hour eleven of a shift, copying and pasting from a prior visit to manage an impossible documentation burden, or making a fully considered clinical judgment after a thorough examination. They do not know whether a treatment decision reflected the best available evidence or the path of least resistance through a prior authorization process. They do not know whether a diagnostic code was selected because it most accurately described the patient’s condition or because it was the code most likely to be reimbursed. The model sees the data. It cannot see the system that produced it. That is the job of the humans who build and deploy these tools. And it is a job that is not yet being done with sufficient rigor or honesty in the current wave of enthusiasm for AI in healthcare.

A well-known illustration in machine learning circles, included in the Stanford AI for Healthcare coursework that is part of this author’s ongoing study,[31] captures the failure mode precisely. During the Cold War, the US military hired computer scientists to develop a model that could identify Russian tanks in photographs. The model performed perfectly on the test set. In a live field test it failed completely, performing worse than random guessing. The reason: Russian tank photographs had been taken in winter conditions and American tank photographs in summer conditions. The model had not learned to identify tanks. It had learned to identify weather. It was, in the precise technical sense, a weather classifier dressed as a tank detector.[31]

The same failure mode has been documented in clinical settings. A machine learning model developed to detect pneumonia from chest X-rays outperformed human radiologists in controlled testing. In a small clinical deployment it failed. The model had learned to use the L marker, a physical positioning marker visible in the X-ray images, as a signal to distinguish between the two hospital systems in its training data. One hospital had a one percent prevalence of pneumonia. The other had a 34 percent prevalence. The model did not need to read the X-ray clinically. It learned to read the marker institutionally, and used that artifact rather than any clinical feature to predict pneumonia.[31] It was not learning medicine. It was learning to tell the hospitals apart.

These failures share a common structure. In each case the model learned the wrong signal because the training data encoded something other than the clinical reality the model was supposed to capture. The model was not broken. The data was. And the data was compromised not by random noise but by systematic, directional bias baked into the conditions under which it was produced. This is precisely what the three conditions examined in Section V create for any AI or machine learning system trained on American healthcare data at scale.

It is worth noting that the organizational conditions examined in this paper represent one category of the data bias problem in healthcare AI, and not the only one. The research literature identifies additional sources of bias that compound what has been described here, including the dynamic nature of medical practice over time, which causes historical EHR data to accumulate outdated correlations and effectively expire as a reliable training source as clinical practices evolve, and the demographic non-representativeness of many health system datasets, in which race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status are inconsistently captured or reported across studies, raising serious questions about whether AI models trained on such data can perform equitably across the full diversity of patients they will ultimately serve.[31]

When 90 percent of clinicians report using copy-paste functionality to manage documentation burden, and when by one estimate 50 percent of the text in a given clinical note is duplicated from prior notes,[27][28][29] the clinical notes that constitute training data for natural language processing models are not accurate records of clinical reasoning. They are records of documentation behavior under pressure. When prior authorization requirements shape which treatments are administered and which are abandoned, the treatment decisions that feed outcome models do not reflect clinical judgment applied to patient need. They reflect what the payer approved. When burned-out physicians experiencing cognitive fatigue make more documentation errors, a connection the research literature supports directly,[30] the signal in the data degrades in direct proportion to the degradation of the workforce producing it.

The research on EHR data quality confirms that these are not marginal concerns. A systematized review published in 2025 examining EHR data quality in critical care settings found that missing data rates exceeded 80 percent for some variables, that EHR-related medication errors comprised 34 percent of all medication errors in ICUs with one-third having life-threatening potential, and that copy-paste prevalence reached 82 percent in residents’ progress notes.[26] The same review found direct and measurable consequences for machine learning: sepsis detection models that achieved strong performance in internal validation dropped significantly in external validation under real-world conditions, a degradation the authors attributed directly to data quality issues pervasive in the underlying EHR data.[26]

The Stanford coursework poses the right question directly: the issue is not whether the data exists. Medical data now doubles every eight to twelve months and there is more of it than ever before. The better question is whether that data is actually usable for the intended purpose.[31] In the current organizational state of American healthcare, the honest answer is not exactly.

This does not mean AI has no role in healthcare. It means the role AI can play is constrained and shaped by the organizational conditions that produced the data it learns from. A 2025 perspective published in npj Health Systems argues precisely this point, noting that while the LHS ecosystem has been well described and its potential widely endorsed, operationalizing the LHS in the era of artificial intelligence requires deliberate attention to data governance, workforce development, and institutional design, the same organizational prerequisites this paper has been examining.[14] The organizational design work this paper has been describing, building genuine Learning Health Systems with aligned vision, mission, capacity, and learning functions, is not merely a clinical improvement agenda. It is the prerequisite for trustworthy AI deployment in healthcare. A health system that has not addressed the upstream conditions producing biased data cannot deploy AI safely or effectively. It will automate the distortions already present in its data and present the result as intelligence. Health technology companies that build on that foundation without looking upstream are not just taking a technical risk. They are taking a patient safety risk. And they are building businesses on data they do not fully understand.

IX: Strategic Implications — The Cost of Not Learning

This paper has operated at two levels simultaneously, and it is worth naming that distinction clearly before drawing it to a close. At the macro level, the Learning Health System is a vision for what American healthcare as a sector could become: a system in which knowledge generation is so embedded in the delivery of care that improvement becomes continuous, self-reinforcing, and oriented genuinely toward the people the system exists to serve. At the micro level, it is an organizational design challenge that must be addressed institution by institution, health system by health system, through specific and deliberate choices about vision, mission, capacity, and learning. The wicked problem lives at the macro level. The work of addressing it happens at the micro level. And the cost of not doing that work accumulates at both levels simultaneously, in individual clinical encounters that produce biased data, in technology deployments built on compromised foundations, in physicians who leave the profession, and in patients who do not receive the care the system was capable of providing if it had been designed to learn.

Gil Bashe argued that American healthcare is not failing for lack of innovation, investment, or talent. It is failing because it has lost sight of the people it exists to serve.[2] This paper has tried to show that losing sight of people and losing the organizational capacity to learn are not two separate failures. They are the same failure, expressed differently depending on where you are standing in the system. The burned-out physician who copies and pastes a clinical note at the end of an impossible shift has not lost sight of their patients. The system that created those conditions has. The EHR that generates data optimized for billing rather than clinical fidelity has not lost sight of patients. The design decisions that produced it have. The AI model that learns the wrong signal from compromised training data has not failed its patients. The upstream conditions that corrupted the data before it ever reached the model have.

The cost of not learning is not abstract. It is clinical. It is financial. It is technological. And it is human. At the macro level it is a sector that has spent nearly two decades describing a vision of continuous learning and improvement while building the organizational conditions that make that vision structurally unreachable. At the micro level it is every health system that has adopted the label of a Learning Health System without asking honestly whether its vision is felt, its mission is enacted, its capacity is aligned, and its learning loops actually close. The gap between those two things, between what is said and what is designed, is where patients fall through.

This paper has not proposed a solution. It has drawn a map. The map shows a system doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is the wrong thing, and it names the organizational thinking, the VMCL lens, the DSRP cognitive tools, the systems mapping discipline, that would allow leaders at every level to see that clearly and begin designing differently. It has also named what is at stake for those who choose not to look. For health system leaders the cost of not learning is an organization that optimizes toward the wrong destination and calls it excellence. For policymakers the cost is interventions that address symptoms without touching causes. For health technology companies the cost is products built on data they do not understand, deployed into systems they have not mapped, producing outcomes they cannot fully explain or defend. And for patients the cost is a system that was capable of learning how to serve them better and chose, through a thousand organizational design decisions made without that possibility in mind, not to.

The Learning Health System is not an idea whose time has not yet come. It is an idea whose organizational prerequisites have not yet been built. Building them is the work. It is hard, sustained, cross-disciplinary, and uncomfortable. It requires the kind of thinking this paper has been describing: honest, structural, willing to see the system as it is rather than as its mission statements describe it. It requires leaders at the macro level of American healthcare policy and at the micro level of every individual health system who are willing to ask whether they are designing for learning or designing for something else and calling it learning.

The conversation is open. The map is incomplete. The cost of not continuing it is borne by patients. That is reason enough to begin.

Citations

[1] Olsen, L.A., Aisner, D., and McGinnis, J.M., editors. Institute of Medicine (US) Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine. The Learning Healthcare System: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007. PMID: 21452449. DOI: 10.17226/11903. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21452449/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53494/

[2] Bashe, Gil. Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter. Thought Leader Press, February 1, 2026. https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Sick-Care-System-People/dp/1613431805

[3] Cabrera, Derek and Laura Cabrera. Flock Not Clock: Design, Align, and Lead to Achieve Your Vision. Plectica LLC, 2018. ISBN: 978-1948486019. https://www.amazon.com/FLOCK-NOT-CLOCK-DESIGN-ACHIEVE-ebook/dp/B07DFPWTDS

[4] Cabrera Research Lab. VMCL Overview. Cabrera Research Lab Blog. https://www.cabreralab.science/blog/categories/vmcl

[5] Rittel, Horst W.J. and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences, vol. 4, 1973, pp. 155-169.

[6] Grewatsch, Sylvia, Steve Kennedy, and Pratima Bansal. “Tackling Wicked Problems in Strategic Management with Systems Thinking.” Strategic Organization, 2023. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14761270211038635

[7] Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation. “Burnout.” https://drlornabreen.org/burnout/

[8] The Physicians Foundation. “2022 Survey of America’s Physicians.” https://physiciansfoundation.org/press-releases/npsa-day-2022/

[9] American Medical Association. “2024 AMA Prior Authorization Physician Survey.” https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/prior-authorization-survey.pdf

[10] “Usability Challenges in Electronic Health Records: Impact on Documentation Burden and Clinical Workflow: A Scoping Review.” Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 2025. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jep.70189

[11] Stanford University School of Medicine. Course materials on Learning Health Systems and research ethics. Materials on file with author.

[12] Cabrera Research Lab. “Simple Rules.” Cabrera Research Lab Glossary. https://help.cabreraresearch.org/simple-rules

[13] Cabrera Research Lab. “Complex Adaptive System (CAS).” Cabrera Research Lab Glossary. https://help.cabreraresearch.org/complex-adaptive-system-cas

[14] Steel, Peter A.D., Gabriel Wardi, Robert A. Harrington, and Christopher A. Longhurst et al. “Learning health system strategies in the AI era.” npj Health Systems, vol. 2, article 21, June 17, 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44401-025-00029-0

[15] Tenenbaum, J.D. et al. “Accelerating a learning public health system: Opportunities, obstacles, and a call to action.” Learning Health Systems, 2024. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lrh2.10449

[16] “Implementing the learning health system paradigm within academic health centers.” Learning Health Systems, 2023. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10797573/

[17] Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. “Why You Should Map: The Science Behind Visual Mapping.” White paper. Cabrera Research Lab, New York, 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349868707_Why_You_Should_Map_the_science_behind_visual_mapping

[18] Cabrera, L. and Cabrera, D. “Adaptive Leadership for Agile Organizations.” In Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. and Midgley, G. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking. Routledge, London, UK, 2021. Draft preprint on file with author.

[19] Cabrera, Derek. “Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives (DSRP): A Theory of Thinking and of Things.” Evaluation and Program Planning, vol. 31, no. 3, 2008, pp. 311-317. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18554716/

[20] Cabrera, Derek and Laura Cabrera. “DSRP Theory: A Primer.” Systems, vol. 10, no. 2, 2022. https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/10/2/26

[21] Cabrera Research Lab. “The Four Simple Rules of Systems Thinking: The Distinction Rule.” Cabrera Research Lab Blog, cabreralab.science. Available at: https://www.cabreralab.science/post/the-four-simple-rules-of-systems-thinking-the-distinction-rule

[22] The Rocket Factory. “The Rocket Factory Presents SparkJam 2020 to Benefit the Virginia 30 Day Fund.” PR.com, June 2020. https://www.pr.com/press-release/814285

[23] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “HITECH Act Enforcement Interim Final Rule.” Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Public Law 111-5. Available at: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/hitech-act-enforcement-interim-final-rule/index.html

[24] Rotenstein, L.S. et al. “System-Level Factors and Time Spent on Electronic Health Records by Primary Care Physicians.” JAMA Network Open, 2023. PMC: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10665969/

[25] Faden, Ruth R., Nancy E. Kass, Steven N. Goodman, Peter Pronovost, Sean Tunis, and Tom L. Beauchamp. “An Ethics Framework for a Learning Health Care System: A Departure from Traditional Research Ethics and Clinical Ethics.” Hastings Center Report, Special Issue, January-February 2013, pp. S16-S27. DOI: 10.1002/hast.134. PubMed PMID: 23315888. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23315888/

[26] “Discovery of data quality issues in electronic health records: profound consequences for critical care medicine applications — a systematized review.” PMC, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12784561/

[27] Tsou, A.Y. et al. “Safe Practices for Copy and Paste in the EHR: Systematic Review, Recommendations, and Novel Model for Health IT Collaboration.” Applied Clinical Informatics, 2017. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28830856/

[28] Urology Times. “Why is copying and pasting in the EHR such a problem?” February 2026. https://www.urologytimes.com/view/why-is-copying-and-pasting-in-the-ehr-such-a-problem-

[29] AMA Journal of Ethics. “How to Teach Good EHR Documentation and Deflate Bloated Chart Notes.” November 2025. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-teach-good-ehr-documentation-and-deflate-bloated-chart-notes/2025-11

[30] “Burnout Related to Electronic Health Record Use in Primary Care.” PMC, 2023. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10134123/ [31] Stanford University School of Medicine. Course materials: Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Healthcare. Lecture transcripts on data bias, the Russian tank problem, clinical machine learning applications, medical data shelf life, and demographic representativeness in EHR-based AI research. Part of the AI for

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That is what makes the Digital Health & AI Innovation Summit (DHAI), taking place June 8-9 in Boston, distinctive within an increasingly competitive field of AI and innovation conferences. The Summit certainly offers a high-caliber program and noted speakers. However, its real value proposition beyond the agenda lies in the conversations and takeaways.

The carefully curated forum, organized by Amir Lahav, PhD, and World BI, is intentionally designed for a smaller community of roughly 500 attendees and more than 150 speakers and innovators. The result is that the connections become as valuable as the presentations.

That distinction matters more than many realize.

Artificial intelligence and digital health are moving at extraordinary speed. Health systems, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, investors and technology innovators are all trying to answer the same questions: How do we apply innovation responsibly while improving outcomes for patients and clinicians? How do we integrate AI into the R&D process? How can we leverage information technologies to accelerate the recruitment of the right people for clinical trials? The challenge is no longer simply technological capability. The challenge is implementation, governance and integration into the realities of care delivery.

Those questions are difficult to answer from the back row of a ballroom.

They are more likely to be explored over coffee between sessions, during a shared meal, or in quieter moments when people can challenge assumptions, exchange experiences and discuss what is actually working in health systems, research environments, and patient care settings.

That is where DHAI distinguishes itself.

The Power of Curated Expertise

What gives a conference enduring value is not only the quality of its speakers, but whether those speakers remain accessible enough to challenge assumptions, answer difficult questions and engage in unscripted dialogue. That is increasingly uncommon in modern health conferences, where influence often feels managed from a distance.

At DHAI, the proximity to the experience of 150 presenters is intentional.

The next era of health won’t be built in silos and it certainly won’t be forged by focusing on the hype. It requires leaders willing to share their failures alongside their successes, and their fears alongside their visions,” shares Amir Lahav, PhD, curator and DHAI organizer. “The DHAI Summit provides an exclusive, trusted space for these unfiltered conversations that rarely happen on public stages. This is an exclusive invitation to join the health AI  pioneers who are moving the needle and step into the room where the real trajectory of medicine is being shaped,” he adds.

For attendees seeking to understand how artificial intelligence is moving from experimentation to clinical reality, few conversations may prove more valuable than those surrounding the work of Dr. Dennis Wall at Stanford University. His groundbreaking efforts to apply AI to accelerate diagnostics, particularly in neurological and developmental conditions, reflect the growing intersection of machine learning and patient-centered medicine. In most settings, hearing someone like Wall speak might last 20 minutes. Here, the opportunity to continue the discussion between sessions may be equally important as the presentation itself.

The same can be said for leaders shaping the future of pharmaceutical innovation through AI. Thomas Fuchs, Chief AI Officer at Eli Lilly and Company, operates at the center of one of the most significant transformations underway in life sciences. His work integrating AI, pathology and drug discovery reflects how computational science is redefining therapeutic development. With pharmaceutical companies investing billions into AI-enabled research ecosystems, the ability to exchange perspectives directly with someone navigating those realities daily carries extraordinary value.

Precision medicine also takes on a more practical dimension through leaders such as John Axerio-Cilies, Chief Data and Technology Officer at Tempus AI. Tempus has become emblematic of how data science, oncology and artificial intelligence are beginning to reshape personalized medicine and diagnostics. Yet the real insight often comes not from keynote slides but from candid reflections on implementation challenges, physician adoption, workflow integration, and trust in AI-driven systems.

What also distinguishes the program is its recognition that health innovation no longer lives within traditional boundaries. Biology, computational science, organizational leadership and entrepreneurship are rapidly converging, creating entirely new expectations for how innovation enters the health ecosystem.

That reality becomes especially clear when considering trusted voices such as Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare and one of the most respected global advisors on AI strategy in health. For years, Lawry has argued that artificial intelligence alone cannot transform the delivery of care. Institutions themselves must evolve alongside technology. Leadership structures, workflow, culture and decision-making all become part of the innovation equation. His perspective reinforces an increasingly important truth: AI implementation is not fundamentally a technology challenge. It is a human challenge.

That same intersection between innovation and execution is reflected in the participation of Sally Ann Frank, Global Lead for Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft for Startups. Her work focuses on helping emerging companies move beyond promising ideas toward scalable and commercially viable solutions. Through strategy development, technical enablement and go-to-market support, she works directly with startups navigating the increasingly complex realities of AI, digital health and life sciences innovation. At a time when thousands of companies are entering the AI marketplace, Frank brings an unusually practical understanding of what separates experimentation from sustainable impact across the global health ecosystem.

The scientific and technical dimensions of the Summit are equally compelling. Arturo Loaiza-Bonilla, MD, MSEd, Co-Founder and Chief Medical AI Officer of Massive Bio, Network Chief of Hematology and Oncology at St. Luke’s University Health Network, whom I met recently during HITLAB Health Innovation Week in New York, champions an important evolution in medicine, where clinical leadership, oncology, data science and AI innovation are interconnected. His work sits at the intersection of precision medicine, clinical trials and responsible AI application, demonstrating how technology can expand access and support informed care decisions while keeping physicians and patients at the center of the experience.

The program also grounds innovation in the realities of patient care and health system operations. Through her leadership at NYC Health + Hospitals, Dr. Komal Bajaj has focused extensively on quality, equity and implementation within one of the nation’s largest public health systems. Her perspective introduces an important layer of realism into discussions that can sometimes become overly theoretical. AI may promise efficiency, but health systems must still ensure that innovation improves care delivery rather than complicates it.

That balance between aspiration and practicality is also reflected in leaders such as Lauren Li of Novartis, whose work in AI and innovation strategy demonstrates how global life sciences companies are integrating AI responsibly across research, development, and commercialization. The questions facing companies like Novartis are no longer whether AI will shape health innovation, but how to apply it responsibly while preserving scientific rigor and public trust.

Equally important to the DHAI agenda is the presence of Jeremy Walsh, Chief AI Officer at the Food and Drug Administration. At a moment when AI is moving rapidly into research, clinical decision support, diagnostics and operational health systems, regulatory leadership must provide oversight. FDA voice addresses a growing concern that innovation and governance cannot operate on separate tracks. The future of AI in health will depend not only on technological capability, but on transparency, accountability and safety. His perspective brings a policy and regulatory dimension to a conversation too often dominated by technology.

Taken together, these leaders represent more than expertise. They reflect the convergence of medicine, data science, biotechnology, health systems, patient engagement and policy. The global health ecosystem is entering a period in which barriers between disciplines are dissolving. Clinicians must understand data science. Technologists must better appreciate patient experience and the realities of workflow. Pharmaceutical leaders must think beyond molecules toward digital ecosystems and longitudinal patient engagement.

Why Human Connection Still Matters in the AI Era

That convergence changes the value of gatherings like this one. Large conferences often showcase these worlds side by side. Smaller curated forums create the possibility for those worlds to interact.

That dynamic is particularly important in digital health, where enthusiasm can sometimes outpace evidence. AI is neither a miracle nor a menace. It is a tool shaped by human intention, data quality and leadership. The most important conversations in AI and health today are not only about capability. They are about judgment.

How do we reduce physician burnout without depersonalizing medicine? How do we use predictive analytics responsibly? How do we ensure that innovation improves access rather than deepens disparities? How do we maintain trust while integrating increasingly autonomous technologies into patient care?

Those are conversations that require candor and mutual learning.

As someone attending and stepping to the stage during DHAI, I believe that may ultimately become its greatest differentiator. In health, relationships still matter. Communication still matters. Shared perspective still matters. Technology may accelerate insight, but human interaction remains essential to wisdom.

Health innovation does not advance through presentations alone. It advances through collaboration, challenge and conversation. Those exchanges between sessions often become the catalyst for strategies and unexpected ideas that continue long after this event comes to a close.

In a global health environment often defined by complexity, there is growing value in spaces where innovation feels ambitious and human. The DHAI appears designed to deliver that ROI.

The post The Value of Health AI Conferences Is No Longer the Stage. It’s the Hallway Conversation appeared first on Medika Life.

Over time, it becomes evident that the decisions made in boardrooms carry their greatest weight in those very moments. It would take years to understand it fully, but these moments were not isolated. They were the foundation for something I would later try to give voice to.

The Day the Ordinary Disappeared

In January 1975, I was traveling through Paris on my way to the United States. What should have been a routine journey became something else entirely. Terrorists fired two RPG shells at our plane. They missed us but struck a Yugoslav Airlines JAT aircraft on the tarmac nearby.

The randomness of it all was almost impossible to process. One moment, you are a traveler moving through the world, the next, you are told to hug the floor of the aircraft, confronted with how easily that world can be altered or taken away. I did not have the language for it then; however, I carried the feeling forward. Life is not guaranteed. It is a gift given to us to deploy.

In 1978, I was leading the first Think Tank Peace Mission to Egypt and Israel. There were no direct flights between the two countries. From Cairo, we flew to Cyprus, then to Tel Aviv.

An Air Cyprus flight had landed just before ours. It was overtaken by terrorists. An Egyptian Entebbe-like rescue was attempted. It failed. When we landed hours later, the aftermath was still there — the remains of the Egyptian military C-130 sat on the tarmac, destroyed and covered. It reinforces the adage, “that timing is everything.”

You do not process it fully in the moment. You carry it. An appreciation for what lies beyond our control. A respect for those who act with purpose, regardless of outcome. An understanding that we plan for the future, yet we live in the moment.

Years later, during my military service as a paratrooper and combat medic, that lesson was no longer abstract. It was immediate, urgent and often unfolding before me. I served six frontline combat tours in Lebanon, in places where the noise of conflict was constant and the margin between survival and loss was measured in inches.

I tended to friends and foes under fire. In those moments, there was no room for theory. Care was not a matter of courage or a concept; it was an instinctive action. Communication was not a strategy; it was survival. A word, a look, a clear instruction could steady someone, guide them and save them.

Where Care Is Action, Not Theory

War has a way of stripping away everything except what matters most. You see clearly how dependent we are on one another. You understand that courage is not the absence of fear; it is the determination to act despite it. You learn that presence, simply being there for another person in their most vulnerable moment, is one of the most powerful forms of care.

I thought I understood risk. I thought I had come to terms with uncertainty. Then life reminded me again.

On a flight to visit my parents in the United States, the Tower Air jet I was on caught fire over the Atlantic. Two engines on the left side were burning. We needed to find a place to land quickly or hit the ocean. There is a particular kind of silence that fills a plane in that moment. It is not panic. It is something deeper, more introspective. You feel time stretch. You think about the people you love. You consider what has mattered and what has not.

As we made our emergency landing in Gander, Canada, I remember not relief first, but reflection. Once again, life had placed me in a moment where its fragility was undeniable.

These experiences did not turn me away from the world. They pulled me closer to it. They shaped how I see people, how I listen and how I respond. They taught me that every interaction carries weight, that every conversation can matter more than we realize.

In recent years, I have traveled to Ukraine annually before and during COVID and now during the war, supporting friends and spending time in a small community facing circumstances most of us can only imagine from afar. There, I saw the same truths I had encountered earlier in life. Community becomes everything. Information becomes lifeblood. People look to one another not only for physical support, but for clarity, reassurance and meaning. Even in the darkest conditions, communication is not secondary to care. It is part of care.

Most in the business world know me through my work at FINN Partners as a health communicator, through my writing, speaking and advocacy as a champion of health innovation and a more human-centered health system. They see my professional journey. What they do not always see is the foundation beneath it. Decades of lived experience that have reinforced, time and again, that life is precious, that it can change in an instant and that how we show up for one another in those moments defines us.

At FINN Partners, I have found a community of colleagues who reflect these same values. There is an understanding that our work carries responsibility, and that we are capable of more when we challenge ourselves to rise to it. It is a culture that encourages each of us to think beyond the immediate and contribute to something more enduring.

That understanding became even more personal through my family. My wife and I have walked alongside our child as she navigates the complexities of a rare disease. There are highs and there are lows. There are moments of hope and moments of uncertainty. In those experiences, I have seen health care from another vantage point, not as a cohesive system, but as a series of human interactions that can either comfort or compound the challenge.

When you are a parent in those moments, you listen differently. You look for clarity in every word. You hold on to empathy when it is offered and you feel its absence when it is not. You come to appreciate that communication in health is not an accessory. It is essential. It shapes understanding, trust and the ability to move forward.

The Human Thread Through Every Moment

All of these experiences converge into a single, enduring belief. Communication is not separate from care. It is how care travels along its continuum. There are moments when that truth reveals itself outside the settings we expect.

On a transatlantic flight in 2001, turbulence turned severe. At one point, a call came over the intercom: “Are there any doctors aboard?” No one responded. Minutes later, the request broadened to “any health professionals.”

My wife looked at me and quietly suggested I press the call button.

I was escorted to a passenger, pale and wrapped in a blanket. He had lost and regained consciousness. I introduced myself warmly and began with simple questions to assess his awareness. His name. The President of the United States. The day we had taken off. He answered each one without hesitation. His vitals were stable.

I explained that I was not a physician, but a former military EMT. Given the turbulence and the length of the flight, dehydration and stress were likely contributors. I reassured him and suggested that he follow up with his physician upon landing and, if he needed me, not to hesitate to hit his call button.

As I returned to my seat, a man two rows behind called out, “I’m a neurologist. I would have handled that exactly as you did.”

It was meant as an affirmation. I received it that way. Yet it lingers differently. In that moment, the instinct to act had been replaced by the comfort of waiting. The systems we build, even when grounded in expertise, can condition us to hesitate when action is needed most.

In moments like these, care is not a title or a credential. It is the willingness to engage, communicate, and act.

Across the health ecosystem and in responsible business settings, success is often measured by growth, scale and financial performance. These are necessary markers of progress. They enable innovation, access and reach. However, there is a deeper measure that often goes unspoken. When we understand our role within the continuum of care and recognize the connection between balance-sheet decisions made in boardrooms and people’s experiences felt at the bedside, our work takes on greater meaning. It moves beyond what can be counted to what ultimately counts.

Over time, I came to understand that moments are not separate. They are connected. Each one revealing, in its own way, what happens when people are seen, heard and cared for, and what happens when they are not.

That understanding became Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter.

A life of observing, listening, engaging and caring was the kindling. The moments themselves were the spark. Together, they revealed a simple truth: when we lose sight of people, the system falters. When we honor them, it begins to heal.

That truth asks something of us.

It is not simply about words. It is about presence. It is about accountability. It is about the choice to act when action is needed. This is how humanity shows up in systems, and how those systems, in turn, earn the trust of the people they are meant to serve.

The post The Moments That Shape Us: Why Life and People Matter Most appeared first on Medika Life.

Early in the book, Nosta writes, “The solved can never touch the whole.”  That line lingers. It captures the essence of his argument. AI can solve, generate, synthesize, and accelerate. Yet something about the human experience of thinking, the struggle, the friction, the meaning-making, exists beyond resolution.

This tension defines the book. It is not anti-technology. Nosta is deeply engaged with AI and candid about its value. He describes large language models as tools that “move faster and connect more disparate concepts than our minds could ever manage on their own.”  He is equally clear that this capability introduces a subtle risk. We may begin to outsource not just tasks, but thought itself.

That distinction matters more than many may be willing to admit.

From Tools to Thought

One of the most compelling contributions of The Borrowed Mind is its framing of AI not as the next step in computing, but as a turning point in cognition. Nosta traces a clear arc. Gutenberg unlocked words. Google unlocked facts. AI, he argues, is unlocking thought. 

That progression is elegant, yet also unsettling. Words and facts could be externalized without fundamentally altering the structure of human reasoning. Thought is different. It is intimate. It is identity. It is how we become.

Nosta reminds us that thinking once required effort, a type of natural friction that created sparks of innovation. “The distance between question and answer created space for our discernment.”  Within that space, judgment formed, curiosity deepened, and understanding took root.

AI compresses that distance. It removes friction. It delivers coherence with remarkable speed.  One of the book’s most important insights emerges here. Coherence is not the same as understanding.

Nosta introduces the concept of “anti-intelligence,” describing it as “fluency without understanding. Coherence without experience.”  AI does not think. It mirrors the structure of thinking. It produces language that resembles reasoning without sharing its origin.

In health, where evidence, interpretation, and judgment must coexist, this distinction is not academic. It is operational. It shapes how clinicians trust tools, how leaders deploy them, and how patients ultimately experience care.

The Seduction of the Socratic Mirror

One of the most original sections of the book is Nosta’s description of the “Socratic Mirror.” He draws a parallel between classical dialogue and modern AI interaction. Socrates asked questions to surface the truth. AI, in a different way, reflects our thinking back to us, reframed, extended and sometimes clarified.

Nosta writes that the model “…does not tell me what to think but creates the conditions under which my own thinking could deepen.” This is where the book moves beyond critique and into possibility.

Used well, AI becomes a cognitive partner. It expands perspective, accelerates exploration, and invites iteration. In clinical research, patient engagement, and system design, this capacity holds enormous promise.

Nosta does not romanticize the relationship. He recognizes its asymmetry. The model has no interior life. It does not ponder. It does not carry consequence. It does not bear responsibility. That responsibility remains human.

Rethinking the Fear of Displacement

A persistent anxiety runs beneath every conversation about AI. Many fear it will become a job slayer, a force that displaces rather than elevates human contribution. That concern is understandable, yet not new.

Every meaningful advance in technology has reshaped how people work. The wheel did not eliminate labor. It redefined movement. The stethoscope did not replace physicians. It extended their ability to listen and interpret. The tollbooth transponder did not end transportation roles. It changed the flow and focus of human involvement. Each innovation shifted roles, demanded new skills, and expanded what people could do.  AI belongs in that lineage.

What distinguishes this moment is not the elimination of work, but the redistribution of cognitive effort. The real risk is not that machines will think for us, but that people may become less inclined to think for themselves. Nosta’s warning is subtle yet profound. Surrendering curiosity, judgment, and reflection to systems that generate answers with ease risks dulling the very faculties that define human intelligence.

This is why The Borrowed Mind is such an important read at this moment. It does not dismiss concerns around job displacement. It reframes it. The central challenge is not protecting roles as they exist today, but strengthening the uniquely human capacities no system can replicate. Creativity, discernment, ethical reasoning, and the ability to navigate ambiguity are not diminished by AI. They become more essential.

The book offers reassurance without complacency. The future of work will favor those who sharpen their thinking, engage deeply with ideas, and remain active participants in their own intellectual development. The machine is not the adversary. Neglecting the development of one’s own mind is a danger.

Composite Intelligence and the Limits of the Machine

Nosta introduces “composite intelligence” to describe the interaction between human and machine cognition. Composite does not mean blended into sameness. It means distinct contributions working in concert. The model brings speed and breadth. The human brings depth.

This triad becomes one of the most useful frameworks in this book. AI excels in velocity and scale. Depth, the slow transformation of understanding, remains human. As Nosta writes, “Models do not ponder.” 

In health, this distinction is profound. Data can inform. Algorithms can suggest. The act of deciding, especially in moments of uncertainty, requires something more. It requires what Nosta elevates as the defining human contribution. Virtue.

Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom, Nosta reminds us that judgment is forged through experience, consequence, and accountability. A model can generate options. It cannot live with outcomes.

This is where the book resonates most deeply for those working in health. Intelligence is becoming abundant. Discernment is becoming scarce and, therefore, more valuable.

The Risk of the Borrowed Mind

The book’s title is not metaphorical. It is a warning. Nosta argues that as engagement with AI deepens, internal dialogue begins to change. The model becomes a cognitive tuning fork, subtly shaping how questions are framed, how ideas are explored, and how answers are anticipated. This dynamic is not inherently negative. It can elevate thinking, accelerate learning, and make complex domains more accessible. Dependency remains the concern.

Reliance on generated thought risks weakening the muscle of original thinking. Access can be mistaken for understanding. Individuals may become, in Nosta’s words, “cognitive clones.” 

This concern is particularly relevant in health ecosystems already strained by time, complexity, and administrative burden. The temptation to offload cognitive work will be strong. The discipline to remain intellectually engaged will be essential.

A Book About AI That Is Not About AI

What makes The Borrowed Mind stand apart is that it is not ultimately about technology. It is about humanity. Nosta writes, “This book is not really about technology. It is about you.”  That idea anchors this work.

Readers are challenged to consider what it means to remain “the authors of our own minds.”  Not passive recipients of generated insight, but active participants in meaning-making.

This question sits at the center of the health ecosystem’s future. As AI becomes embedded in clinical workflows, research, and patient engagement, the issue is not whether it will improve efficiency. It will.

The deeper question is whether it will deepen humanity or dilute it. Will it create space for clinicians to think more deeply, connect more meaningfully, and act more wisely? Or will it create a system that values speed over reflection, output over understanding, and coherence over truth?

Nosta offers no simple answers. He offers a framework for asking better questions.

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Health systems are not stepping into artificial intelligence from a place of calm or control. In the United States, spending now exceeds $4.5 trillion, with a significant share tied up in administrative work that adds complexity more than clarity. Clinicians are caring for more patients, navigating more data and making more decisions under pressure than ever before. The system is stretched. Artificial intelligence is entering at a moment when change is no longer a choice.

The discussion drew on the experience of three leaders who are not observing this shift. They are guiding it. Hal Wolf leads HIMSS, influencing digital health policy and implementation across more than 100 countries. Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, Chair of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, has spent four decades defining how data informs clinical care. Ran Balicer, MD, Chief Innovation Officer at Clalit Health Services, operates within one of the world’s most integrated health systems, where data and care are aligned across generations.

These are not just star panelists. They are system-wide architects.  What emerged from the hour-long conversation was not what artificial intelligence can do. It was a recognition that it is already doing more than most systems are prepared to guide and govern.

Dr. Kohane captured the tension immediately. “I think that we have to worry about the fact that we’re going both too slow and too fast.”

That statement reflects a reality many leaders feel but rarely express. Governance takes time because it must. Patient safety, validation and accountability require structure. Practice moves in real time. Clinicians do not have the luxury of waiting for perfect systems.

“They’re so desperate to do right by their patients to use other resources,” Dr. Kohane adds.

That instinct is not a weakness. It reflects a commitment to doing what is right for the patient. When clinicians turn to external AI tools, they are seeking clarity, speed, and confidence in their decisions. Artificial intelligence is already present at the point of care, shaping how physicians assess information, validate thinking, and move forward. The system is not adopting AI. The system is catching up.

This creates a condition that is difficult to measure and even harder to manage. Different clinicians use different ChatGPT platforms. Those tools produce different answers. Different assumptions shape those answers. Over time, consistency erodes. The system begins to operate with multiple definitions of truth (and the risk of varied outcomes).

Dr. Kohane’s warning is not about misuse. It is about misguided permanence. “The worst outcome will be if the worst parts of medicine get concrete poured over it, by AI.”

Artificial intelligence does not fix a system; without leadership, it accelerates the integration of incorrect assumptions. If workflows are inefficient, they become more efficiently inefficient. If bias exists in data, it becomes more precise. If fragmentation defines care, it scales.

This is not a failure of technology. It is a mirror held up to system-wide leadership.

Hal Wolf, among the health sector’s leading policy and operational voices, grounded this moment in proven experience. Health care has seen this pattern before. When internet connectivity entered hospitals, clinicians moved faster than governance. They created access where it was needed. Systems responded later. Risks were discovered after adoption.

Artificial intelligence now follows that same trajectory, though at far greater speed and with far greater consequences. Web connectivity gave quick access to information. Artificial intelligence influences how that information is interpreted and acted upon.

“We have to go faster,” Mr. Wolf said. “But there needs to be structure around it.”

That is the leadership challenge of this moment. Speed without structure creates exposure. Structure without speed creates irrelevance. The tension between the two is not something to resolve. It is something to manage continuously.

The industry has predictably responded to artificial intelligence. It has started where risk is lowest and return is clearest. Documentation, scheduling and revenue cycle optimization have become the entry points. These applications reduce burden and improve efficiency. They are necessary. However, they are not transformational.

The shift occurs when artificial intelligence moves into clinical decision-making. At that point, the question is no longer whether the system works. The question becomes whether it should be trusted.

Who owns a decision informed by an algorithm? How is accuracy validated? What happens when a clinician disagrees with a recommendation? These are not technical questions. They are questions of accountability. Artificial intelligence does not assume responsibility. It does not carry consequence. That remains with leadership.

Dr. Balicer reframed the conversation, shifting how the room thought about artificial intelligence. “There’s no such thing as AI neutrality. Algorithms are just opinions embedded in code.”

That insight is easy to acknowledge and difficult to operationalize. Every model reflects choices. What data is included? What outcomes are prioritized? What trade-offs are accepted? Those decisions are embedded in the system, shaping how it interprets information.

When a health system adopts an AI tool, it is not simply implementing technology. It is adopting a perspective.

At Clalit Health Services, alignment across payer and provider creates a system where priorities are consistent. Even there, external AI models introduce new assumptions. Those assumptions may not align with the system’s goals. If leadership does not define its own values, it inherits someone else’s.

This becomes real in proactive care. Artificial intelligence enables systems to identify patients at risk before they present. It allows for earlier intervention, often improving outcomes.

It also creates a new kind of pressure. “The toughest choice is what not to do,” Dr. Balicer said.

That statement deserves more attention than it receives. Health care has been built around responding to need. Artificial intelligence introduces the ability to anticipate it. When every patient can be flagged, every risk predicted and every intervention suggested, the system is no longer constrained by insight. It is constrained by capacity.

Artificial intelligence expands what can be done. It does not expand who can do it. Leadership becomes the act of choosing who does what based on validated data.

There is a moment that captures this shift. Imagine a primary care physician starting the day not with a schedule of patients who have called for appointments, but with a list generated by AI identifying individuals who are likely to experience clinical complications in the next six months. Some will develop chronic conditions. Some will require hospitalization. Some can be helped now – preventively.

The physician cannot see them all. Artificial intelligence expands what is possible. Leadership decides what is essential and permissible.

The industry often responds to complexity with activity. Organizations pilot, test and explore. They engage broadly without committing deeply. This creates motion. It rarely creates progress. Pilots are nothing more than experiments. At some point, leadership must decide what to scale, what to stop and what defines value.

Hal Wolf grounded the conversation in discipline. Without a defined, shared objective, effort becomes noise. Pilots create learning, though they often avoid decision-making. Leadership requires clarity. What problem are we solving? What outcome defines success? What are we willing to prioritize? Without those answers, artificial intelligence adds another layer of complexity to an already complex system.

Dr. Kohane brought the conversation back to the discipline of leadership. It cannot remain abstract. It must be informed by experience.

“Go and pay a few bucks and use three or four of the models… get a feel for what this does,” Dr. Kohane advised.

That is not a call for technical fluency. It is a call for leadership proximity. Leaders cannot guide what they do not understand. Artificial intelligence does not behave consistently across models. It produces different answers, shaped by different assumptions. Without direct engagement, those differences remain hidden, and leadership becomes removed from the very decisions it is responsible for guiding.

This is where many organizations hesitate. Artificial intelligence feels complex and complexity invites delegation. At this moment, delegation creates distance. Leadership is required to move closer, not further away.

Artificial intelligence is not reducing the role of leadership. It is redefining it.

This is not a gradual transition. It is already underway. Artificial intelligence is embedded in workflows, shaping decisions and influencing behavior in real time. The system is adapting whether leadership is ready or not.

The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will shape the future of health. It will. The question is whether leadership will shape how it is applied.

Artificial intelligence will not fix health. It will scale whatever we allow it to touch. The question is whether it will scale what is best in health or what we have yet to fix.

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