What does UnitedHealth Group’s massive AI push mean for patients?
From a scan of its job openings, it would be easy to mistake UnitedHealth Group for Silicon Valley’s latest artificial intelligence juggernaut.
Hundreds of postings seek applicants with expertise in data science and artificial intelligence, part of a sweeping campaign to embed AI in the company’s core business operations. Already, UnitedHealth employs 22,000 software engineers worldwide, with more than 80 percent using AI to write code or build new agents, a sharp uptick from a few years ago, executives said.
“Since the advent of generative AI, we’ve really doubled down on training, on investments, on driving meaningful use cases,” Sandeep Dadlani, the chief executive of Optum Insight, the company’s technology division, told STAT. He said the company’s goal is to use AI to speed up decision-making and streamline health insurance’s notoriously time-consuming bureaucracy.
UnitedHealth Group is far from alone in the quest for AI transformation. But its rapid scale up portends major changes in the machinery of American health care, swapping manual processes for ones driven by a multitude of AI products. While that may increase speed and efficiency, it will also pose new risks to patients who don’t always know whose interests an AI agent is serving, or even when and how the technology is being used to make decisions about their care.
A STAT examination sought to gauge those risks, along with potential benefits, by tracing how UnitedHealth Group is incorporating AI into operations that touch tens of millions of Americans. The effort involves building up engineering teams to reinvent how billions of medical claims are processed and audited, automating everything from fraud detection, to clinical documentation, to the selection of billing codes that determine how much a given medical encounter costs — and who pays.
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