Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving beyond the experimental phase, and its applications are certainly no longer reserved for very large enterprises. In healthcare, applying AI to improve workflows and outcomes has evolved to be a strategic imperative, especially for health plans. From managing claims to supporting care teams and engaging members, AI is reshaping how health plans operate. To unlock the potential of AI, health plans must embrace AI as a core capability that changes how work gets done rather than just a bolt-on tool.
The Imperative for AI in Healthcare
Administrative complexity, workforce constraints, and rising expectations for access and personalization are straining health plan operations. These pressures are quantifiable and increasingly urgent. Nearly 30% of healthcare spending in the U.S. is tied to administrative activities. Meanwhile, staffing shortages and evolving compliance requirements limit health plans’ ability to scale support without significantly raising costs.
Artificial intelligence offers a practical response to this challenge. By targeting redundant tasks, enhancing decision-making, and enabling more precise interventions, AI can deliver operational benefits where traditional methods fall short.
According to a McKinsey analysis, AI solutions could save health insurers between $150 million and $300 million in administrative costs for every $10 billion in revenue. These tools also offer the potential to reduce medical costs and improve profitability by accelerating interventions and promoting consistency in how services are delivered.
The Path to AI Transformation
The integration of AI into healthcare operations is a progressive evolution, not a single event. AI is a foundational technology with many applications and various degrees of complexity. Advancing AI adoption requires a deliberate approach that aligns technology with each organization’s readiness and strategy. Each phase of AI maturity delivers greater value and, as adoption progresses, there are greater demands on data infrastructure, governance, and change management.
As organizations move from basic predictive capabilities to fully orchestrated, intelligent workflows, the level of operational transformation increases—and the potential value grows in tandem.
As health plans advance AI adoption, more transformational capabilities unlock greater opportunities for impact. Predictive analytics, for example, offers early wins with minimal rework of common processes. More advanced AI capabilities, such as agentic AI assistants or multi-agent orchestration, can significantly reduce administrative burden, enhance coordination, and augment human situational assessments. These innovations allow health plan staff to minimize manual work, focus on higher-value work, and improve outcomes across the enterprise.
The following five areas represent key opportunities where AI can deliver measurable impact across core health plan operations:
1. Predictive Insights
Predictive insights represent an established and widely adopted AI pattern in healthcare. These capabilities enhance visibility into future risks, utilization patterns, and member needs. Traditional machine learning models help health plans synthesize historical and real-time data to forecast trends, identify high-risk individuals, and anticipate operational bottlenecks.
Example use cases: AI can be used for risk and member scoring to prioritize care management efforts and to analyze claims and payment trends to detect outliers and optimize financial performance.
2. Workflow Automation
Workflow automation is an immediate and practical application of AI for health plans. With AI embedded into routine processes, organizations can streamline repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and accelerate operational throughput. These capabilities are especially valuable in areas where data exchange and administrative review slow taking action and increase overhead.
Example use cases: Health plans can embed AI into claims workflows, such as intake, validation, adjudication, and denial management, to streamline repetitive, rule-based processes. This reduces manual effort, improves accuracy, helps ensure compliance, and accelerates end-to-end processing. Additionally, some plans are using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) to auto-map prior authorization forms from providers and patients into care management workflows to ease administrative overhead and improve throughput.
3. Embedded Generative AI
Generative AI expands user efficiency and decision-making by introducing models that can summarize, synthesize and generate content based on unstructured or semi-structured data inputs. When embedded into health plan workflows, generative AI can reduce staff cognitive burden, support faster documentation, and improve access to vast amounts of critical information during time-sensitive moments such as member interactions.
Example use cases: Generative AI can quickly summarize care notes, complex multi-line claims, clinical histories, and multi-page faxes to help care managers surface essential details and determine next steps without manual review. It can also extract structured data from scanned documents, enabling faster intake and configuration processes across clinical and operational workflows.
4. Copilots and Assistants
AI-powered “copilots” act as intelligent, user-friendly assistants that respond to natural language input, surface relevant information, and guide staff through complex tasks. These copilots offer immediate efficiency gains by reducing the need to switch between systems and lowering cognitive load. They also improve accuracy and responsiveness in member and provider interactions. This functionality reflects applications of agentic AI, in which the system acts with some degree of autonomy to interpret requests, retrieve relevant data, and guide users through workflows.
Example use cases: Plans use AI-powered assistants to enable natural-language member self-service experiences in chat and to support call center representatives with real-time responses to eligibility and benefit inquiries.
Health plans are also deploying chat-based copilots integrated with core workflows to help staff and members interact with plan data, explain adjudication logic in plain language, and surface insights from complex documents like provider contracts. These copilots can extract key details to populate core administrative processing or provider data management systems, easing administrative burden and accelerating resolution times.
5. Multi-Agent Orchestration
Multi-agent orchestration represents an advanced application of AI in health plan operations. Unlike automation that handles discrete tasks, multi-agent systems enable AI to coordinate multiple actions, systems, and decisions without requiring manual triggers. These AI agents complete complex, multi-step, yet clearly defined, tasks across different systems using logic that is pre-programmed or guided by rules and workflows defined by domain experts and engineers. The goal is not just automation but orchestration of the processes that are most complex and expensive in terms of time, energy or accuracy so that the right task is completed by the right system, in the right order, with minimal human intervention.
This approach is especially powerful in areas where workflows span multiple applications or departments, and where delays or handoffs are common. Multi-agent orchestration supports real-time decision-making, enables personalized member journeys, and can help close the loop on tasks that traditionally stall due to complexity or fragmentation.
Example use cases: In claims processing, an orchestrated system of AI agents can automatically gather data from member records, validate information across systems, apply plan-specific rules, and adjudicate the claim. This can occur without requiring manual re-entry or oversight. This reduces cycle time, minimizes errors and improves consistency in outcomes.
The Solutions That Support AI Transformation
To support the delivery of AI capabilities across products and customers, HealthEdge has developed a unified enterprise AI strategy. Our strategy is designed to scale and evolve with customer needs and emerging opportunities across HealthRules® Payer, HealthEdge Source™, HealthEdge® Provider Data Management, GuidingCare®, and Wellframe™.
AI-enabled solutions are generating measurable impact today for HealthEdge customers. For example, summarization capabilities embedded in care management workflows help surface relevant member history in seconds, reducing cognitive load and enabling faster, more informed choices.
Responsible AI Innovation
HealthEdge is committed to responsible AI development that ensures transparency, security, fairness, and enhanced compliance while proactively mitigating risks associated with new technology adoption. Our approach balances innovation with accountability, helping health plans confidently implement AI-enabled features that enhance efficiency and improve outcomes without compromising trust within their organizations or with their partner or member communities.
To support this, HealthEdge has established a robust framework that ensures AI is deployed ethically, securely, and in alignment with industry best practices:
- AI Principles: Alignment with emerging healthcare industry AI standards and frameworks, including the Healthcare AI Commitments and the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI™).
- Responsible AI: A dedicated enterprise risk governance model that addresses regulatory compliance, safety, security, bias, privacy, transparency, and fairness. This includes adherence to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0).
- Collaboration & Partnership: Active engagement with customers, end users, and industry stakeholders to co-develop AI-enabled capabilities that reflect evolving real-world needs.
- Operational Value: A focus on AI innovations that deliver tangible improvements in care delivery, operational efficiency, and the member experience.
Responsible AI requires more than technical capability. Health plans need solutions they can trust. These solutions must deliver value while meeting the highest standards of security, fairness, and transparency. Health plans deserve AI solutions that are not only powerful, but also principled, safe, and trusted.
Transform how your health plan operates with AI
AI adoption is accelerating across the healthcare landscape. However, realizing measurable impact requires more than experimentation. It takes a clear strategy, scalable technology, and a partner that understands how to embed AI into health plan operations.
HealthEdge supports health plans at every stage of their AI journey. Whether building new capabilities or scaling proven ones, we can help you move forward with focus, speed, and measurable results.
Connect with HealthEdge to explore how our enterprise AI approach and capabilities can help you accelerate impact and innovate responsibly.