UnitedHealth CTO says AI investments can support health systems that need to be revised
Approximately $5 trillion is spent on US healthcare each year. I rate it poorlyand as annual costs continue to rise and population age and clinical labor shortages continue, there are still more challenges to face in the coming years.
Benefit managers at pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems, insurance companies and pharmacies operate in complex industries that have gained a reputation for silosing data and severely slowing down other sectors such as banking and telecommunications as they deploy new technological advances. Larger investments in artificial intelligence have been praised as a key treatment of the healthcare system’s most serious problems, but most industry reports say Lack of sufficient resources and planning AI and other digital investments.
Sandeep Dadlani, Chief Digital and Technology Officer of Insurance Titans UnitedHealth Groupsays you understand that your system is broken. “I relate to everyone who is unhappy with healthcare,” says Dadrani. “The system has to be fixed not only by us, but by many players.”
UnitedHealth, 4th place The Fortune 500 says it has already seen significant productivity gains and adoption from the company’s 1,000 AI use cases during production. These applications are a combination of generative and traditional forms of AI, including over 60 million AI writing software codes already accepted by around 20,000 engineers, 65 million customer calls first answered by AI chatbots in 2024, and 18 million AI-enabled searches to help you find physicians who were conducted in the first quarter of 2025 alone.
Another generation AI tool expected to be released at UnitedHealthCare later this year and The Subsidiary App is a consumer-oriented conversation bot that helps customers find doctors, schedule appointments, and see lab results. The tool was first tested with United Health employees before its external debut.
“It’s a labyrinth,” says Dadlani, the labyrinth that customers face when dealing with healthcare providers, insurance companies and lab services. “So something that helps navigate it and provide great end-to-end access, that’s the dream.”
Dadlani spoke luck Before the surprising announcement held by CEO Andrew Witty in early May Resignation. Dadlani’s efforts to oversee the evolution of the company’s AI come as UnitedHealth, serving more than 52 million consumers, and have been experiencing difficult periods. In December, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson did. Murdered in Manhattan And in April, UnitedHealth reported its revenues, the first financial results since the company’s murder. I missed Wall Street expectations And cut down on the final goals for the year. The same goes for the company It is reportedly Possible criminal job fraud facing a Department of Justice investigation.
There are also teacher lawsuits in the courts. Appeal UnitedHealth uses AI to illegally deny claims. Dadlani refutes this. “AI is not used to deny the claim,” he says. “If a claim is not entitled to be approved, it reaches a human agent,” he says.
According to Dadlani, approximately 90% of bills are automatically determined, and the process by which the software can manually check the bill. Of the 10% of claims taking extra steps in reviews, most issues are administrative, meaning that details are missing or information was not properly entered into the system. After that manual review, Dadlani has 98% of the claims approved, and for the remaining 2%, the rejection tends to be attributable to either an ineligible benefit or due to clinical or medical safety decisions.
Later this year, Dadlani says it intends to launch a new AI product that will further increase automatic billing approval. “We already see in early experiments that AI can help meet some of the missing information in these claims,” he says.
UnitedHealth’s vast AI portfolio is reviewed monthly by all business units. Each quarter, the Chief Information Officer meets to monitor how AI is used across the enterprise. The company also established internal and external technicians, clinicians, legal experts and other responsible AI committees that review hundreds of AI use cases each month before allowing what can be produced.
According to Dadlani, UnitedHealth monitors AI use cases for safety, bias, equity and legal compliance. He emphasizes that AI is not being used to implement clinical diagnosis. “We don’t see AI replace doctors and clinicians,” he says. “I want AI to become a tool.”
To implement the workforce, UnitedHealth launched an advanced AI learning course in early March, with over 10,000 enrollees being seen. The company has also set up a dedicated platform called United AI Studios that allows employees to securely access to the large language models offered by large AI hyperscalers, similar to small language models that employees have developed independently based on their own datasets.
The company also had about half a dozen use cases in agent AI-based production. It is designed to complete more autonomous and complex tasks. Most agent AI use cases are for repetitive management tasks. This technology needs to become more mature before it can expand to other parts of the business.
“We’re very cautious when we get into more clinical use cases and use of agents,” says Dadlani.
John’s needs
Send your thoughts and suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.
This story was originally introduced Fortune.com