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Artificial Optimism, Influencer Economics, and Chatbot Psychosis
By Jason Barry and Virginia Hunt
October 12, 2026
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Together with
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“It’s wartime, and the biggest winners are the companies building fast, eating into adjacent workflows, and compounding trust with their enterprise partners.”
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BVP new AI Scorecard from Sofia Guerra and Steve Kraus.
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Here’s a healthy dose of optimism to start your week: Bessemer says AI’s back-office returns have gotten here faster and higher than expected, and clinical AI is up next. Big if true!
– Jason Barry, Managing Editor
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Healthcare’s AI returns are already knocking on back office doors, and Bessemer’s new ROI Scorecard says it’s only a matter of time before they get to clinical workflows.
ROI arrived twice as fast as expected. According to the survey of 226 healthcare execs, AI returns are typically showing up within 12 months, averaging 3.5x and beating expectations in 40% of use cases.
- That’s especially big news since most buyers underwrote 24-month paybacks, meaning that orgs still modeling that assumption are underinvesting against their own results.
The back office leads the pack. Revenue cycle management topped every measure, with 4x ROI and two-thirds of provider execs actively running semi- or fully autonomous agents.
Here’s the ROI breakdown by use case:
- Provider revenue cycle: 4.0x
- Payer claims: 3.4x
- Payer provider network: 3.3x
- Member engagement: 3.2x
- Provider front office returns: 3.1x
- Provider clinical: 2.9x
Automation leads straight to attrition. One of the most surprising stats was that half of orgs have already reduced headcount as a direct result of AI, or plan to within six months.
- Reductions currently average 8% to 13% of the affected functions, which are a mirror image of the AI returns.
- Among providers reporting cuts, 73% named revenue cycle and medical billing, which posted both the highest AI return and AI autonomy.
The three-year forecast is already here. Last year, 84% of execs expected AI to transform clinical treatment decisions within 3 to 5 years. A year later, 71% say it already has.
- As always, trust is the biggest barrier for clinical AI. Nearly half of respondents (46%) trust AI to support clinical decision-making, yet 77% override the AI’s suggestions more than half the time.
Most of the value still lies ahead. Execs expect “materially more” AI returns to be realized over the next 12 months, and the leading indicators can apparently already be seen in empty back office cubicles.
- Over half of next year’s incremental AI investment will go toward deployment: 35% to scaling proven use cases and 20% to integrating them into existing workflows, versus 13% for infrastructure and 11% for foundation model licensing.
The Takeaway
While most of these surveys hint at where the AI puck is heading, BVP just showed where the return already is. Turns out it’s the exact same places that provider orgs are already cutting staff.
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Making the Case for AI
Healthcare organizations have a lot to gain from implementing AI that can enhance coding accuracy and quality metrics, but securing buy-in from leadership is a crucial first step. Check out Navina’s new guide by Dr. Michael S. Barr to see exactly how to demonstrate clear financial benefits, ROI potential, and alignment with organizational priorities to help ensure AI projects are successful.
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Telehealth Has a Ceiling. Here’s How MetroHealth Broke It
For too many patients, traditional telehealth visits often lead to a dead end. To reach its full potential, virtual care needs a reboot. The MetroHealth System partnered with Ovatient to do just that with a new virtual-first care model built on the EHR and connected to patients’ ongoing care journeys. A study of 50k patient encounters shows the results: 100% of patients were able to have a new appointment within 3 days, 35% of virtual primary care patients were net new or re-engaged, and virtual urgent care achieved 17% lower 72-hour ED use than in-person visits. Read the report to learn more about MetroHealth’s approach.
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- AKASA Goes Autonomous: AKASA just debuted what it’s calling the first autonomous solution for inpatient medical coding and clinical documentation integrity. An inpatient stay averages 60 documents and 50k words that a coder spends 30-60 minutes converting into codes, and AKASA says its AI does it in 90 seconds. In a third-party evaluation, AKASA backed that up in a bakeoff with expert coders that coded the same inpatient encounters across multiple categories. Blinded reviewers found AKASA matched or exceeded the coders on “key accuracy measures,” and Cleveland Clinic is now the first in line to see for itself.
- Influencer Economics: A report from Pew Research Center reached the unsurprising conclusion that social media influencers are spamming their feeds with health and wellness products. The analysis of 535k posts from 6,334 influencers found that 38% regularly pitch a product or service, 92% do it at least occasionally, and a third do it in most of their posts. The hard sell is heaviest in posts about OTC meds and supplements (66%), men’s health (56%), and nutrition (52%), while just 9% of posts cite an outside source. Only a third touch medical topics at all.
- Healthleap Hauls In $38M: Healthleap raised $38M across its seed and Series A to continuously screen patients for conditions that get missed, starting with malnutrition. The clinical AI platform has gone from three hospital partners to 50+ in a year (Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, and Intermountain among them), and Penn credited the malnutrition program with $23.8M in annualized impact across reimbursement and shorter stays. Delirium, aspiration pneumonia, pressure injuries, and CHF readmission risk are next, with 40+ conditions as the eventual goal.
- Medicare-for-All Support Hits New High: Two-thirds of U.S. adults now favor Medicare-for-All per KFF’s latest poll. That’s a new record, up from just 53% in 2020. The party split looks about right, with 84% of Democrats and 72% of independents in favor, then 66% of Republicans opposed. The support swings with the framing: 76% oppose MfA if it means delayed care, 76% favor it if coverage becomes a right, and 52% favor it if private payers disappear. The approval ratings are only expected to keep moving in lockstep with the number of voters worried about affording care.
- Relatient Behavioral Health: Relatient expanded its Dash self-scheduling and call center platform to behavioral health providers, bringing waitlist management and cancellation fill to a specialty where operational bottlenecks still prevent practices from running at capacity despite skyrocketing visit volume. Early customer BlueSky Telepsych (68+ providers across 13 states) saw 60% of self-scheduled appointments come from new patients within two months, with 47% seen within three days. Another nice solution for patients who’d rather not explain a mental health concern to a human that isn’t their doctor.
- Chatbot Psychosis: A study in JAMA Psychiatry suggests that chatbots could be worsening psychosis, and we’d guess it’s a two way street. Vanderbilt researchers analyzed data from 73 patients with a psychotic disorder and AI keywords in their record, identifying 28 cases of the psychosis worsening with chatbot use. In 17 of those cases, it was a patient’s first psychotic episode. They note that many of the cases were found after the release of GPT-4o, which was widely criticized for being a “Yes Model.”
- Welldoc Closes the Care Loop: Eleven FDA clearances and 69 patents later, Welldoc is automating start-to-finish health cycles with its new AI-powered care loop platform. The system will unite Welldoc’s suite of SLMs designed to help patients with diabetes, heart failure, and dementia. The platform’s captain is the Simon agent, which will coordinate communication and share insights between patients and clinicians while integrating data from wearables and at-home monitoring systems – Welldoc’s bread and butter.
- Parakeet Lands $10M: Parakeet Health raised $10M of Series A funding for its conversational AI platform, which handles inbound calls, outreach, and scheduling for provider groups. The startup already works with 2,800+ providers, six of the 10 largest dermatology groups in the U.S., and says its phone agent resolved 2.3x more inquiries than legacy healthcare voice vendors in head-to-head pilots. The funding reportedly follows 10x ARR growth in the past year, and will bring the platform beyond dermatology into primary care, behavioral health, women’s health, and beyond.
- Duke’s Digital Twins: Digital twins could soon be rolling out at scale with the launch of Duke’s Digital Twin Initiative. The program will use Duke’s PRISM AI-enabled modeling platform alongside imaging, wearables, EHR data, and physiological mapping to kick off an initial pilot focused on predicting heart failure deterioration before hospitalization. Researchers also plan on expanding the scope to more cardiovascular conditions, neurological diseases, and even optimizing sports performance.
- Cigna Introduces Health Sense: Cigna unveiled Health Sense, a customer experience and clinical support model that connects a member’s health, benefits, costs, and past interactions so care teams can step in sooner. Health Sense isn’t a standalone app or chatbot, but embeds reasoning tech from Cigna’s collaboration with OpenAI into existing experiences like myCigna, care management ,and clinical support. A phased rollout starts in early 2027 with oncology and cardiometabolic members.
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Inside the GLP-1 Patient Journey
Withings just showed what 2,500+ patients reveal about the care gaps in weight-loss treatment. The survey of connected-scale users on GLP-1s – current, former, and prospective – mapped their treatment journey, where care breaks down, and where remote monitoring fits in. Get the full report.
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Making Healthcare Feel More Human
Abridge has always believed that the best healthcare technology should make healthcare feel more human. That means focusing on the most human signal we have: the conversation. Head over to CEO Shiv Rao’s latest blog to see Abridge’s vision for bringing the broader healthcare ecosystem into the picture, so clinicians can focus more on the practice of medicine and less on the process of medicine.
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The Distance Between an Idea and Reality
Almost every good idea in healthcare already exists. The hard part is building it. Bunkerhill Health CEO Nishith Khandwala believes shortening the distance between ideas and solutions will be the defining feature of healthcare’s next chapter, and his new essay lays out how agentic AI is making it happen – not by being the hero, but by giving heroes the tools they need.
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- State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing: Over half of provider orgs are losing revenue due to credentialing delays – with many missing out on over $1M annually. Medallion’s new report unpacks the forces quietly undermining operational and financial performance, and how leaders across the industry are addressing them. Head over to the full report to get insights tailored to your role and org type.
- The AI Hardware Built for Clinical Work: Phones were never meant to be propped on a desk for a 12-hour clinical day. Heidi Remote transcribes patient sessions offline, stores them securely on-device, and syncs to Heidi whenever you’re in range. Just clip on and get to work with the Heidi Remote.
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