Tom Lawry’s AI in Health Asks the Question Leaders Need to Answer

Tom Lawry’s second edition of AI in Health arrives at precisely the moment health leaders need it. Artificial intelligence is moving from promising demonstration to operating reality, and Lawry asks the question that matters most: Are health organizations prepared to lead what comes next?

That question makes AI in Health: A Guide to Winning in the New Age of Intelligent Health more than a book about technology. It is a leadership guide designed to make people think long and hard about using AI in ways that improve care, support caregivers and remain accountable to the people health systems exist to serve. Lawry understands the technology, yet throughout the book he brings readers back to something more consequential: what these increasingly powerful tools mean for people.

A former Microsoft leader in health and life sciences, health-system executive, founder of health technology companies and now principal consulting firm Second Century Tech, Tom Lawry helped chart this field before health AI became a fixture of every conference agenda. That experience gives this second edition unusual authority. He understands how quickly the technology is changing while keeping his attention on the people who must live with its consequences.

Lawry Combines Leadership with Caring

In an endorsement appearing on the book’s back cover, I wrote: “Tom Lawry understands that AI has no purpose apart from humanity, making this book an indispensable roadmap for leaders who want innovation to amplify compassion, judgment and the human experience of care.” Having reviewed this new edition, I continue to believe that assessment is essential and belongs on the desk of anyone involved in health AI or seeking a state-of-the-art perspective.

Lawry is, without doubt, a fan of AI applications.  He recognizes the risks and responsibilities.  He also reflects on the struggle of the nation’s sick care system and sees that “AI has the ability to save health care from itself.”

Early in AI in Health, Lawry asks readers to consider two photographs of the same New York intersection, twenty years apart. In 1905, horses filled the streets around the Flatiron Building. By 1925, automobiles had replaced them. The buildings remain; the world around them has changed.

Lawry’s point is not simply that technology advances. Transformative technologies change how people prioritize workflow, how organizations operate and what society comes to expect, often before those living through the change fully recognize what is happening. Health care, he suggests, is standing at this intersection now.

That makes leadership the book’s essential subject. AI is no longer something health leaders can simply observe or delegate to the technology team. Lawry asks them to decide what problems it should solve, what values should guide its use, how the workforce should be engaged and who remains accountable when intelligent systems influence care.

From a Promising Pilot to Better Care

One of the edition’s strongest chapters concerns responsible AI. Lawry presents a hospital scenario in which an adverse-event prediction model yields an impressive overall improvement. However, a closer look reveals it performs far better for one patient population than another. The average result looks successful. Beneath it lies a more consequential question: Who benefits, who may be left behind and who is accountable for the difference? That is the kind of question every health leader should be prepared to ask before celebrating a successful pilot.

Lawry carries the point into governance: What is a tool designed to do, and for whom? What evidence supports its effectiveness? How does it perform across populations? What happens when it is wrong? Who owns the strategy, risk, monitoring and response? These are operational decisions with moral weight. A model can meet a technical target and still fail the people who need it most.

Separately, Hal Wolf, President and CEO of HIMSS, the world’s largest health technology professional society and a center for global conversation on technology and health, has repeatedly emphasized that realizing AI’s promise requires leadership and governance. It is fitting that Lawry’s book will once again find itself on the shelves of the HIMSS Global Health Conference bookstore.

The book also earns its place as a working guide. Lawry moves from the principles of leadership and governance to practical exercises for building an AI leadership charter, setting a vision, engaging the workforce, selecting use cases and assessing vendors. These sections give teams a way to turn an ambitious conversation into decisions they can revisit and measure. The chapter on why promising AI projects fail to scale is especially useful for organizations surrounded by pilots but unsure which efforts deserve lasting support.

Readers who already know the technical vocabulary may find the AI primer familiar. They should keep reading. Its value lies in connecting that vocabulary to leadership choices, including when to automate a task, when to support professional judgment and when to leave a decision firmly with a person. Those distinctions matter greatly in health, where a confident answer can be mistaken for a correct one and a convenient workflow can conceal an inequitable result.

Kathleen McGrow, DNP, MS, RN, PMP, FHIMSS, FAAN, Global Chief Nursing Innovation Officer at Microsoft Health & Life Sciences, calls this edition “…both a strategic guide and a leadership manifesto for a healthcare system at a critical inflection point.” Her back cover assessment fits a book that treats workforce experience as central to AI strategy. Lawry asks leaders to involve the people delivering care in deciding where intelligent tools can genuinely help.

From Applications to Expectations

Lawry’s scope is broad, reaching from consumer expectations and clinical applications to workforce development and the future of medicine. The breadth makes the book relevant beyond hospital leadership. Developers, researchers, payers, communicators and policymakers all shape the conditions under which AI reaches people. Each has reason to ask whether a claimed improvement is visible in a patient’s life or a caregiver’s day.

AI technologies will continue to change at extraordinary speed. Lawry wisely builds this edition around leadership questions that should outlast any individual tool or product announcement. What problem are we solving? What evidence will tell us whether people benefit? Whose experience is missing from the design? How will we respond when the evidence changes? A leader who can answer those questions is better equipped for both the next generation of tools and the current one.

That is why this second edition belongs on the desk of anyone helping shape health AI. Lawry writes as a pathfinder who understands the technology while never losing sight of the people expected to benefit from it. His perspective draws not only from his years inside health systems and technology but also from his continuing work as a global advisor and, perhaps most importantly, as a constant observer.

He listens, questions and learns from the people confronting these changes in real time, bringing to AI in Health a perspective shaped by experience, curiosity and an enduring desire to understand what comes next. At a moment when intelligent tools can move faster than health systems can absorb them, AI in Health makes the essential case that greater intelligence becomes better care only when people are prepared to lead.

Available Now on Amazon

AI in Health is now available for pre-order on Amazon.