HCA Healthcare’s Chief AI Officer: What responsible AI requires in healthcare – HCA Healthcare Today

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Mangesh Patil, HCA Healthcare’s chief AI officer, shares why realizing the potential of artificial intelligence depends on rigorous safeguards, human judgment and solving challenges that matter to patients and clinicians.
Artificial intelligence is creating new possibilities across healthcare — from reducing administrative burden to helping care teams make sense of increasingly complex information.
But Mangesh Patil, HCA Healthcare’s chief AI officer, believes the most important questions aren’t about what AI can do. They’re about where it can make a meaningful difference, what safeguards should accompany it and how healthcare organizations can introduce new technology in ways that support the people providing and receiving care.
Mangesh has spent much of his career applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics to complex, large-scale environments. Today, he helps lead HCA Healthcare’s AI strategy and its work to responsibly develop and deploy AI across the organization.
Below, read our conversation with Mangesh about what responsible AI means at HCA Healthcare.
Mangesh: Healthcare demands a high standard.
AI can do remarkable things, but technical capability alone doesn’t tell us whether something belongs in a clinical environment. We have to consider the challenge we’re trying to solve, the people who will interact with the technology and the potential risks if it doesn’t perform as intended.
That means patient safety, privacy, security, fairness, transparency and accountability have to be considered from the beginning.
At HCA Healthcare, our Responsible AI governance program brings together clinical, operational, technical and risk management expertise to evaluate AI solutions. The safeguards we apply are based on the specific use case and its level of risk, with additional review and monitoring for higher-risk applications. I don’t see that rigor as being in tension with innovation. It’s what allows us to move forward with greater confidence.
Mangesh: I like to start with the challenge rather than the technology.
Healthcare already has plenty of challenges worth solving. Clinicians spend significant time on documentation. Care teams have to find and synthesize large amounts of information. Nurses communicate important details during transitions in care. Leaders make workforce decisions in an environment where patient needs can change quickly.
AI gives us new tools for addressing some of those challenges, but using AI isn’t the objective.
The better questions are: Did we make someone’s work easier? Did we make important information more accessible? Did we improve a process? Did we give a clinician more time or capacity to focus on the patient?
That keeps us focused on outcomes rather than the novelty of the technology.
Related article: HCA Healthcare’s strategic approach to scaling artificial intelligence
Mangesh: I think the opportunity is to be thoughtful about where technology can be useful while recognizing what makes healthcare fundamentally human. Clinical judgment, experience, accountability, empathy and relationships are central to care. AI can complement those capabilities by helping reduce administrative burden and supporting some of the work surrounding care that takes time and attention.
Ambient clinical documentation is one example. Generative AI can help prepare a draft note based on the conversation between a physician and patient. The physician reviews, edits and approves that documentation. In a 2025 HCA Healthcare North Texas Division case study, providers using ambient AI gained one to two hours per shift, while reducing documentation time by five minutes per patient for history and physical notes.
That’s the kind of opportunity we’re looking for — using technology to help reduce administrative burden while keeping the clinician at the center of the process.
We see a similar opportunity in nursing workflows. AI can help organize information for a shift change, giving nurses a useful starting point for an important clinical conversation. The nurse brings the context, observations, experience and judgment that are essential to caring for the patient.
AI in healthcare is another tool we can thoughtfully apply to support clinicians and help them focus more of their time and attention on patients.
Mangesh: A significant one. Our clinicians and engineers are co-developers. The people closest to the work understand things that aren’t always apparent from the data or a process map — where friction occurs, which information matters at a particular moment and how decisions are actually made in a clinical environment.
That’s why we involve clinicians throughout the process, from identifying a problem and evaluating potential solutions to testing and refining tools before they’re deployed more broadly.
Our work around the Nurse Handoff tool is a good example. A handoff isn’t simply an exchange of data. It’s an important clinical conversation in which responsibility for a patient’s care transitions from one nurse to another.
We saw an opportunity to help organize information from the electronic health record and make that process more efficient and consistent. The technology was beta tested at eight hospitals, where nurses rated it 99.87% accurate and 99.85% helpful. The helpfulness score reflected nurses’ preference for the new AI-based solution over the existing EHR workflow. Their input helped us understand what information was useful and how the technology should fit into the workflow.
The people who will use a tool should have a meaningful voice in shaping it.
Mangesh: It depends on what the technology is doing and the level of risk involved.
Not every application of AI has the same implications. Using AI to assist with an administrative process is different from using it in a context that could influence clinical decision-making. That’s why responsible governance has to be risk-based rather than one-size-fits-all.
For any application, we should be clear about the role the technology plays, where human review occurs and who remains accountable. As risk increases, so should the level of scrutiny, safeguards and monitoring. And that responsibility doesn’t end when a tool is deployed.
Sometimes that process also tells us a technology isn’t ready.
There is a lot of excitement around AI, and naturally there’s a desire to move quickly. But in healthcare, “not yet” can be an important decision. We need sufficient confidence in the technology, the safeguards around it and the value it provides before putting it into practice.
Mangesh: We’re exploring AI in areas where we believe it can address practical needs for patients, clinicians and care teams.
As of September 2026, ambient clinical documentation is being used by 4,950 physicians across 116 HCA Healthcare hospitals and 575 ambulatory sites of care, generating more than 360,000 AI-assisted clinical notes in September 2026 alone. Physicians remain responsible for reviewing, editing and approving the documentation.
We’re also applying AI to support Nurse Handoffs by helping organize information that nurses need as responsibility for patient care transitions between shifts.
Another example is Timpani, our AI-enabled workforce scheduling platform. Now live at more than 125 hospitals and supporting more than 2,250 nursing and nursing support departments, Timpani uses machine learning to help anticipate staffing needs and optimize schedules. The platform has reduced the time required to build a schedule from eight to 15 hours to approximately two to three hours per scheduling cycle.
We’re also working with GE HealthCare on CareIntellect for Perinatal, which is designed to bring actionable insights into the workflows of clinicians caring for mothers and babies.
These are a few examples of how we’re reimagining workflows across the company to make them more efficient and effective with AI. Solutions like these require AI to be seamlessly and safely integrated into custom digital products developed by DT&I, supported by highly skilled AI engineers and data scientists working within our product teams.
At the same time, we want AI to be accessible to colleagues with different levels of technical experience. Our AI Enablement programs include an enterprise version of ChatGPT as a “no-code” option, allowing colleagues to use AI to support appropriate everyday tasks without needing programming skills. We also offer a “low-code” program for business needs that require a more tailored AI solution, but not a full-scale custom product. Through this program, teams work with DT&I AI engineers to co-develop lower-risk, lower-complexity solutions for specific needs and workflows. Today, more than 30 use cases have been deployed across the company through this approach, from analyzing patient experience feedback to making policies and organizational knowledge easier to find.
Related article: MIS Quarterly Executive: Insights from Leading AI Transformation at HCA Healthcare
Mangesh: Scale gives us an opportunity to learn from many different perspectives.
HCA Healthcare has approximately 47 million patient encounters each year across 189 hospitals and more than 2,600 other sites of care. A trauma surgeon, labor and delivery nurse and case manager may have very different workflows and needs, and those perspectives help us understand where technology may — or may not — be useful.
Scale also changes what it takes to deploy technology responsibly. Something that works well in a small pilot doesn’t automatically translate across specialties, facilities or clinical environments. Moving from a promising idea to a reliable production system requires rigorous engineering, trusted data, workflow integration, governance, change management and monitoring.
One thing my career has taught me is that deploying technology at scale is ultimately a systems challenge. The technology, data, processes and people all have to work together.
Healthcare adds an important dimension: The value of scale ultimately comes down to whether we can improve the experience of an individual patient or the person caring for them.
Mangesh: First, the relationship between patients and their caregivers remains central to healthcare. AI should support that relationship and help clinicians focus their time and attention where it matters most.
Patients should also expect healthcare organizations to hold these technologies to a high standard, with appropriate safeguards for patient information, human oversight and clear accountability for how AI is used.
Transparency about the capabilities and limitations of AI is important, too. Using these technologies responsibly means understanding both and applying the right level of oversight for each use case.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t to put more AI into healthcare. It’s to use technology thoughtfully where it can help patients and caregivers.
Mangesh: We’re continuing to learn where AI can make a practical difference.
For years, much of the conversation around artificial intelligence focused on what might someday be possible. Now we have the opportunity to apply these technologies to real problems, evaluate their impact and learn from the people doing the work.
Some applications will demonstrate meaningful value. Others will need further refinement, and some may not be appropriate for a particular setting or use case. That’s part of responsible innovation — combining curiosity about what’s possible with the discipline to determine where and how a technology should be used.
For me, the measure of progress isn’t how much AI we deploy. It’s whether the technology helps people deliver better care.
Related article: The Exec: HCA Healthcare Elevates Innovation Leader to Chief Clinical Officer | HealthLeaders Media
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HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare services, is comprised of 189 hospitals and more than 2,600 ambulatory sites of care, including surgery centers, freestanding emergency rooms, urgent care centers and physician clinics, in 19 states and the United Kingdom. Our approximately 320,000 colleagues are connected by a single purpose — to give patients healthier tomorrows.
As an enterprise, we recognize the significant responsibility we have as a leading healthcare provider within each of the communities we serve, as well as the opportunity we have to improve the lives of the patients for whom we are entrusted to care. Through the compassion, knowledge and skill of our caregivers, and our ability to leverage our scale and innovative capabilities, HCA Healthcare is in a unique position to play a leading role in the transformation of care.
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