Matthew Blosl is the CEO at DexCare, a leading digital platform for orchestrating patient demand and care access.
Andrew Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, once warned that “only the paranoid survive.” He was describing what he called a strategic inflection point, the moment when the rules of business change overnight and hesitation becomes the greatest risk. Grove wrote those words in 1999. They resonate even more today.
Artificial intelligence is the inflection point of our time. Worth nearly $400 billion today, analysts expect AI to add over $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030. The scale is staggering, but what matters is how it will ultimately reshape our lives. Jobs will be created and displaced. Scientific breakthroughs, once thought out of reach, are now possible. And for the first time, technology may give us back the most finite resource of all: time.
Healthcare is not on the sidelines watching this unfold.
Early applications of AI are taking shape, including early-stage disease detection, the transcription of doctor visits and surfacing evidence-based answers to clinical questions. And more than 110 U.S. health systems have stood up formal innovation centers.
The pressure to act is intensifying as healthcare faces challenges that few other industries endure. It carries an oath to do no harm, yet the market beneath it is on shaky ground.
In 2023, there were 79 healthcare bankruptcies, nearly double the average of the four years prior. Labor costs continue to outpace revenues. Rural hospitals are at risk of closing, creating even larger access deserts for millions of Americans. Meanwhile, the demand for care grows—as 11,000 people age into Medicare every day—while the pool of physicians shrinks.
Together, these pressures define healthcare’s trilemma: more patients, fewer clinicians and razor-thin margins.
In that climate, innovation must prove its worth as a discipline that turns industry pressures into progress for patients, physicians and health systems. Co-innovation does that by aligning the people who deliver care with those building the tools to improve it. It’s a process built on trust and shared risk. In fact, Forrester found that nearly half of leaders cite trust as the most crucial factor when choosing a partner. Tools designed with clinicians, rather than handed to them, are far more likely to be adopted.
In most industries, high-growth companies are taught to design once to deploy everywhere. That kind of one-size-fits-all model breaks down in healthcare, where no two systems operate the same way. Organizations have their own governance, data complexity and unique provider-patient mix. In that setting, progress depends on partners who can flex their technology to align with each system’s workflows and priorities. It’s customization at scale, powered by technology that improves with every partnership.
Co-innovation brings out the best on both sides. Health systems bring data and clinical expertise. And technology partners offer the freedom to move fast and test ideas that might never leave the walls of a large enterprise, capturing opportunities before they pass.
Speed and velocity mean little unless aimed at the right problems. A century ago, electricity changed how the world worked. Twenty-five years ago, it was the internet. Now it’s AI, reshaping how every industry operates.
In healthcare, the stakes show up every day in missed appointments, patients sent to the wrong place and systems that bend under pressure. The noise around AI is deafening, and every organization is being asked to separate what’s hype, what’s real and what’s ready to install. That is where partnerships earn their place by applying technology to the root causes—not the surface fixes—that prevent care from moving forward.
Consider what happens when a patient tries to make an appointment. Calls get transferred, availability is hard to find online and doctors’ schedules fill unevenly. At face value, the work is about fixing the systems that guide every scheduling decision—the logic trees that determine where a patient goes, which provider they see and account for every edge case. Each branch represents a decision point, yet too often those pathways sit in silos managed by separate groups, and governed by rules that age faster than they’re updated. Mapping and improving them is painstaking, but that’s what makes the difference between a system where appointments flow in and one that stalls.
If patients can be routed to the right place, at the right time, matched to the right capacity, health systems can care for more people with the resources they already have. At scale, that relieves staff pressure and improves margins. Co-innovation makes this possible by joining a health system’s expertise—their people, policies and processes—with technology that turns that knowledge into real-time intelligence. And what may seem like operational work is, in fact, how the trilemma gets solved by turning constraint into newfound capacity.
In essence, Grove urged us to stay vigilant. For him, paranoia meant staying alert to moments when industries turn and fortunes change. Healthcare is in that moment. Those who wait for certainty will be left behind. And those who build with their partners will define what comes next.
Stay paranoid.
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