AI ‘nihilism’ is a barrier to better health care, CMS lead says

LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the delivery of healthcare services across the U.S., but patient distrust of the technology’s capabilities needs to be met with a greater response by clinicians on how it can maximize medical care, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said on Thursday. 

During a keynote session at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said new tools like AI can radically improve the delivery of care from rural communities to large cities, but that “our biggest — and your biggest — challenge is nihilism.”

He said internal data collected from querying Medicare patients found that they still do not trust AI — a barrier to greater adoption and deployment of these tools, since “no one has gotten to them with the use case of why it will transform their life for the better.”

To help overcome this continuing hesitancy, he said healthcare professionals “need to embrace the reality that both in health and in medical, we need to reach the people who are using these tools and compel an idea to come up, which is, ‘If we use this right, it will save lives, transform your ability to get access to care, allow us to manage a $1.8 trillion business, and we'll all be better off.”

CMS is itself already looking at how it can further deploy AI to enhance services for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.

Oz said the agency has had internal discussions about introducing agentic AI “for every beneficiary” by the end of the year, but added that “by [the] time we're done in this administration, for sure, it should be out there.”

Agentic AI systems are able to operate largely autonomously and can take steps to meet a specific goal, rather than just simply responding to user prompts for information. 

“If you can buy a mortgage with agentic AI giving you advice, you should be able to use that same technology to help you pick … your [Medicare] Advantage plan, or which doctor to go to,” Oz said.

Private companies and some federal agencies have encouraged their workforces to experiment with using AI tools, such as chatbots like ChatGPT. Oz said healthcare professionals attending the conference should also begin to incrementally use the technology for mundane tasks to build up their familiarity with its capabilities. 

It’s an approach that Oz said CMS has incorporated into its operations.

For internal meetings, agency personnel will split off into groups of two or three to have more engaging discussions about a specific problem they are hoping to address. Those small groups then share their best ideas with the rest of their meeting colleagues, with those presentations recorded and then uploaded to an AI system.

That output, Oz said, provides “more sophisticated, deeper thoughts about what we should do about that problem, and this has been incredibly effective, transformative in making their meetings more efficient.”

He added that he wants the approach to be used “by everybody at all levels of the administration.”

Under the Trump administration, CMS has also doubled-down on the use of AI to help address waste, fraud and abuse across its network. But Kim Brandt — deputy administrator and chief operating officer at CMS, who also spoke during Thursday’s keynote session — said AI used in this context can also provide broader benefits.

“One of our big things is we want to use AI to be able to find the bad actors, but we also want to help it to be able to determine where we have policies that are confusing or that need change, and educate providers to help them so that they can better understand and get it right,” she said. “So for us, it's a graduated approach: We wanted to use AI to really help us be able to find out where the problems are.”