STAT+: Health insurers’ rapid adoption of AI tools is outpacing regulators’ ability to keep watch
Health insurers are using more AI but a lack of transparency makes it difficult to understand the impact on patients
Inside the nation’s largest health insurance companies, artificial intelligence is taking off like a rocket.
Elevance, which covers about 110 million people, has rolled out a generative AI model to 50,000 employees. Centene Corp, which serves more than 28 million people, is using it to manage contracts with medical groups and measure their performance. At UnitedHealth Group, employees are using the technology to write millions of lines of software code and to vastly speed up decisions about which patients get access to costly medicines.
“It’s completely exponential,” UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said during a recent meeting with investors, adding the company is using AI in 500 different tasks. “Every use case is delivering at least double-digit percentage rates of efficiency.”
