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AI in Healthcare: A Conversation with Elevance Health’s Chief Digital Information Officer

A Digitally Enabled Healthcare Story
October 16, 2025

Key Highlights: 

  • Elevance Health’s Chief Digital Information Officer Ratnakar Lavu addresses how AI enables more personalized, predictive, and efficient experiences in healthcare.
  • We apply AI to enhance the member experience, streamline administrative processes, and support associates with productivity tools that give them more time to spend with members.
  • Our AI Guiding Principles serve as the lens through which our AI solutions are designed, developed, and used.

Elevance Health’s Chief Digital Information Officer Ratnakar Lavu discusses the potential and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and shares how Elevance Health and its companies are responsibly moving the technology forward to better serve consumers and clients.

What opportunities does AI create in healthcare?

AI can personalize the consumer experience in healthcare and may help achieve better health outcomes. It can generate holistic, predictive, and actionable insights, and it can simplify healthcare management and increase affordability.

In what ways is AI already used in healthcare, specifically at Elevance Health companies?

We view AI as a key component of our relentless commitment to innovate and implement technology solutions that support our efforts to achieve our purpose of improving the health of humanity. We are committed to the responsible and ethical use of artificial intelligence to facilitate the development and use of solutions that reflect our company’s mission, values, and ethics.

Elevance Health works to harness the power of trusted AI solutions, in alignment with relevant laws and regulations governing our industry, to help improve health outcomes for those we serve and ultimately transform healthcare. We use AI to enhance experiences, simplify processes, and discover insights.

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As a digital-first company, we use data, technology, and artificial intelligence, where appropriate, to generate holistic and actionable insights – and to personalize the consumer experience and help achieve better health outcomes. We aim to deliver new tools and capabilities that redefine how we help people manage their health journey.”

Ratnakar Lavu

Chief Digital Information Officer, Elevance Health

We believe AI benefits individuals, including Elevance Health associates, care providers, and employers.

  • Individual consumers will have more personalized, intuitive healthcare experiences, such as receiving prompts to consider health-improving actions or by using the Sydney Health app to find high quality care.
  • The ability to spend more time with patients and less time with administrative tasks may allow care providers to deliver higher-quality care, and faster and more accurate diagnoses.
  • Employers and government-sponsored plans can benefit as data-driven insights help improve the appropriate use of health services.
  • AI-powered workplace tools will help to improve the experience and productivity of Elevance Health associates, giving them more time to spend with consumers.

How does AI help associates spend more time with consumers?

AI helps associates better serve consumers in a number of ways, including drafting call notes for customer service calls that associates can review to ensure accuracy. This saves the associate the time it would normally take to write call notes – time that the associate can now use to interact directly, and more empathetically, with the person who called to provide a more enhanced, person-centered healthcare experience.

Elevance Health also is investing in training and learning opportunities to promote AI literacy among its associates. More than 60,000 associates already use AI productivity tools to reduce repetitive tasks, uncover trends, and identify opportunities for quality improvement.
 

What is Elevance Health doing to address the unique challenges and opportunities associated with AI?

Our Responsible AI (RAI) program, informed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework, is designed to mitigate bias and promote accuracy, security, and transparency. We use a risk-based management framework and perform monitoring and oversight activities to ensure alignment with our AI Guiding Principles: 

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Accountable: We design our process to provide accountability for our AI solutions. We will responsibly and ethically develop, deploy, and manage our AI solutions throughout their entire life cycle. We will draw upon industry standard practices and scientific methods of excellence to build, maintain, and use AI solutions.

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Explainable and Transparent: We will maintain documentation that explains how our solutions were designed, so that we provide transparency on how the AI arrived at its outcome.

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Fair: We will evaluate our AI solutions for fairness and equity, with the goal that individuals have a fair and just opportunity to be healthy by identifying and mitigating undesired outcomes.

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Private and Secure: We will respectfully and diligently strive to protect and secure data in our AI solutions throughout their lifecycle to maintain high levels of trust among our consumers and support compliance with state and federal regulations.

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Robust: We will focus on testing, training, and validating our AI solutions for integrity, reliability, and resilience, prior to deployment. We will monitor solutions after deployment to ensure the solution continues to operate as intended.

Our AI Guiding Principles serve as the lens through which our AI solutions are designed, developed, and used. We review these principles on a regular basis as we – and this technology – evolve, to ensure we remain aligned to our mission and values.

AI fundamentally transforms healthcare delivery. It helps care providers work more efficiently and makes the consumer experience more personalized. Through the responsible use of AI, we are technologically equipped to ensure better care for the people we serve.

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