The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - AI for Leaders: The Data Advantage in Healthcare Strategy

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

AI is no longer just an operational tool. It’s becoming one of the most important strategic lenses healthcare leaders can use. In this episode, Kevin explains how AI can sharpen decision-making, strengthen business cases, highlight opportunities you can’t see from the boardroom, and help leaders measure progress with smarter, predictive metrics.You’ll hear how executives can use AI to guide portfolio decisions, forecast ROI, identify gaps across the system, and build KPIs that actually show future impact. Kevin also shares how governance and a focused analytics team can turn AI into a leadership advantage rather than a scattered set of tech projects.If you want to bring more clarity to complex decisions and lead with greater purpose, this episode is for you.

Artificial intelligence or AIs, most of us know it today. It's not here to replace your team. It's here to sharpen your decisions. The leaders who understand that are already pulling ahead. Welcome back to People Process Progress, where we talk about real leadership in real life and how you can build clarity, confidence, and momentum in your career and your teams. I'm Kevin Pinell, author of the People Process and Progress of Project Management

and the Stability Equation, Seven Pillars for a More balanced life. Today, we're going to step into a space that every healthcare leader is thinking about, some are experimenting with, and very few are actually using strategically, and that's artificial intelligence or AI. Not AI as a bunch of cool tools or automations, but AI is something that helps you steer the ship, something that strengthens your decisions, sharpens your portfolio, and gives you a clearer picture of where your organization should go to next. If you're a senior health care leader or someone working in strategy, portfolio management,

or program leadership, this conversation is designed for you. So let's shift our minds to look at from tools to strategy for AI, right? We're seeing a shift across the industry, and a lot of leaders are still asking how do we use AI. But the better question, or I think so, the strategic question is, how does AI inform our strategy? That shifts to everything, because organizations that treat AI as a set of tools will fall behind the ones that use AI to guide decisions. To see risk earlier, to spot opportunities faster, and to get a deeper understanding of the

trends shaping their whole system. A.A. isn't replacing leaders, right? It's giving leaders a better lens. So how can we use AI to build smarter business cases, for example? If you ever had to justify a major investment, which all of us have had to, you know how heavy those conversations can be, right? You try to bring data and clarity and enough confidence to move the room. AI can change that dynamic for you. With predictive return of investment or RRI modeling, right, AI can simulate outcomes based on your actual historical data. That's hugely powerful and time saving. Right, it can show risk scenarios, adoption curves,

staffing impacts, productivity swings. Instead of here's what we believe will happen, it becomes here's what the data shows is most likely. So whether you're pitching an electronic medical record upgrade or a new service line or a system-wide transformation, AI turns the conversation from a proposal into a projection and executives respond to clarity. So how can we find these high impact opportunities

that maybe we can't see yet? So we've all lived this reality, right? There are always more ideas than resources. And choosing what to do first is really one of the hardest parts for us as leaders. So AI can scan operations, workflows, access gaps, distribution, claims data, variance patterns, right, to surface bottlenecks and opportunities

that maybe you wouldn't see from the boardroom or wherever you're sitting because there's just so much information out there in our systems and our operations. It becomes a portfolio insight engine. It tells you where the highest value opportunities sit before you even ask the question. Then when you walk into strategic planning with that level of clarity, imagine the progress is sped up. So let's think about AI for key performance indicators or KPIs, right? These are great tools. KPI's in healthcare focus on what already happened a lot, right? Throughput volume, productivity, even financial metrics. They're useful, but they're backwards looking. So what if we had more forward-looking metrics? And if you're not

in healthcare, you can extrapolate this perhaps to your industry where we can anticipate maybe not react, like let's have predicted patient wellness scores or provider burnout risk or financial exposure curves or clinical variance probabilities or enterprise agility metrics. These metrics can point us and our leadership toward what's coming, not just what occurred already. They give executives a full or more accurate dashboard to guide decisions, but we can't just throw AI tools out to everybody, right? We need the right governance and teams in place. For AI to operate at a functional level, we need a structure around it, right? That starts with governance, strong air governance. It keeps initiatives aligned, right? And the ethics, enterprise strategy. Without that, AI becomes fragmented

and fragmentation kills progress. And let's be honest, AI is awesome. And I've used it many times for books and podcasts and just doing work and whatever. But sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it compiles things that don't just seem quite right. So alongside governance, small organizations, we're going to stand up some tight strategic analytics teams, right? Not an empire. There's a few people who know how to turn AI into executive insight.

They can build business cases, spot opportunities, design better KPIs, and help the leaders make smarter decisions. When those teams are in place or the people in your teams are trained to use AI in this way, everything becomes clearer. So I've touched on a lot. So let's bring that all together. As you think about artificial intelligence in your organization, remember, start with strategy, not the tools, right?

Use AI to strengthen your business cases. Let AI surface opportunities maybe you haven't seen or even thought of yet. Measure what matters. and measure it forward and build a governance model, right, an analytic structure that keeps work aligned. Because again, as I said in the beginning, AI is not going to replace leaders. It's going to give leaders better signals,

better timing, better clarity. And if you know how to use those signals, you bring a level of value that stands out in any room. If today's conversation helped you shift how you think about AI and healthcare strategy or whatever organization or industry you're in, share it with somebody that you work with, right? Talk about it,

It's on Apple Podcasts. And if you want more episodes on AI Governance, Propheaval and Strategy Leadership, let me know. Let me know if this was exciting, if it was helpful. Thank you for being here. You can go to People Processprogress.com

for more information to reach out to me to learn more about me. There's links there to my books, to the podcast, to the YouTube channel or do fitness 60 seconds at a time. Larggy, talking about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, cold plunges. That's the other side of my leadership

is leading myself, right, physically and mentally, just like all of you can. Thank you so much for listening to the people process progress podcasts where I share what I've learned and what's worked and what's not worked so we can apply leadership for real life. Thank you so much, everyone. Keep those people first. Keep your processes aligned and we will all make progress together. Godspeed, y'all.