Healthcare has weathered tech-driven capital waves before, like the dot-com boom or the dawn of DNA sequencing — but this one is different, according to a panel of four investors. During a session Thursday at MedCity News’ Bullseye event in Chicago, these investors laid out why AI is the first healthcare tech wave that is succeeding at actually generating new revenue instead of just cutting costs.
Shubra Jain — who left her position as head of healthcare at Tarsadia Investments last year to become Hippocratic AI’s chief business officer — offered a real-world example.
A health system used Hippocratic’s AI platform to call 1,700 patients who had a lung nodule flagged on an X-ray but never returned for follow-up scans, which resulted in 250 patients coming back. This generated enough downstream revenue that the health system’s $10,000 investment returned roughly 100 times over, Jain said.
“When we got started, we thought that we were replacing existing, unfulfilled labor requirements, and so we were helping [providers] avoid some of that cost. You’re paying AI $10 an hour versus what you would be paying a nurse, anywhere from $60 to $90 an hour. But it has actually proven out much more than that — we’ve been able to help our customers bring net new revenue,” she explained.
Jo Natauri, founder and managing partner at Invidia Capital Management, said that shift marks a break from prior healthcare tech cycles. Over the past two decades, digitization and technology were sold to healthcare almost entirely on the promise of cost reduction, she explained.
“This is the first time you’re seeing that kind of revenue opportunity — and margin” Natauri declared.
For an industry that’s spent over 20 years squeezing savings out of the same handful of levers, that is a meaningfully different pitch to providers and payers, she added.
Amy Raimundo, managing director at Kaiser Permanente Ventures, said this kind of ROI potential is exactly what is speeding up AI adoption across the industry.
“I think the bigger the ROI, the faster people move,” she remarked. “If it is more subtle, it becomes a long-term cycle.”
Raimundo also pointed out that this dynamic is reshaping what health systems are even willing to pursue in the first place. Projects that once weren’t worth the investment now sometimes are.
“There’s a bunch of stuff that we just did not do because the marginal cost of pursuing it was too high,” she said — but this is a calculation she thinks that AI is actively rewriting.
Another panelist — Carter Prince, a partner at CVS Health Ventures — agreed, noting that AI’s relative accessibility is opening up entirely new customer segments. Because AI tools are typically easier to adopt than past generations of health IT tools, smaller practices that never previously invested in these solutions are now buying in, he stated.
Prince pointed to his brother-in-law, an orthopedic surgeon in a small private practice in Cincinnati, who recently began piloting one of CVS Health Ventures’ portfolio companies.
“It’s so easy for them to bring it on board,” Prince said, noting that this ease of adoption expands the addressable market for healthcare AI companies beyond large health systems.
For an industry long defined by tight margins and incremental savings, investors are clocking a notable shift — one all four panelists expect to accelerate as more providers chase revenue, not just efficiency, from their AI investments. As Natauri put it, this time, the upside isn’t just cost reduction — it’s also growth.
Photo: Walter Lim, Breaking Media
