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Health execs say AI boosts patient outreach, but investment lags

Despite nearly all healthcare executives saying AI can enhance patient outreach, adoption of tools to automate communication falls short.

Sara Heath
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Published: 05 Dec 2025

Nearly every healthcare executive can see the potential AI has to automate patient outreach and communications, yet only about a third have invested in the tools to do so, according to a survey from Sage Growth Partners commissioned by Lirio.

This illustrates a mismatch in AI investment and priorities, the survey authors said.

These findings, based on in-depth surveys of 79 healthcare executives, come as the industry remains laser-focused on AI's ability to enhance clinical workflows. Indeed, 83% of respondents said their organization has invested in AI for automated documentation, more than twice the number of executives who said they've invested in AI-powered patient outreach.

This represents a missed opportunity, the researchers suggested, especially given organizations' need for better patient communication strategies.

Health systems struggle with patient outreach

More than half of organization leaders said they struggle with some aspect of patient communication. This includes 62% who reported challenges with automated outreach to reduce staff burden, 56% who flagged issues with personalized patient engagement content and 52% who said they struggle to drive patient engagement with current outreach or reminders.

More specifically, organization leaders are focused on streamlining processes that are currently manual or are high drivers of administrative burden. According to the survey, the top three drivers of administrative burden include the following patient touchpoints:

Other key sources of administrative burden include outreach for appointment scheduling, tracking and closing of care gaps and patient education, the survey revealed.

Most hospital and health system leaders acknowledge the role AI can play in addressing those administrative roadblocks. A whopping 96% said AI could be powerful in reducing the administrative burden specifically linked to patient engagement and outreach, and another 43% said their organization is beginning to prioritize AI solutions for automating patient outreach.

To that end, hospitals and health systems need to assess the market for AI solutions that meet their patient outreach needs.

What do execs want in patient outreach AI?

Most healthcare leaders agree that AI needs to have a strong ROI for its use case, meaning most are foremost targeting the technology for high-cost areas like chronic disease management, healthy behavior or lifestyle change and preventive care.

According to the survey, executives are looking for AI-powered patient outreach tools that can nudge individuals into desired health behaviors. Those functions include the following:

  • Medication adherence messaging (96%).
  • Personalized digital outreach (95%).
  • Chronic care management support (94%).
  • Automated care gap notifications (91%).
  • Analytics/reporting on engagement, activation and outreach ROI (89%).
  • Machine learning that tailors nudge timing and content based on patient behavior patterns (89%).

The throughline in each of those functions is the capability to personalize content based on specific patient characteristics. For example, executives said they wanted medication adherence messaging to be tailored to patient-specific barriers, like cost or pharmacy transportation issues.

Citing behavioral scientists, the survey authors said personalized healthcare should adjust engagement based on patient demographic, preferences, health history and behavioral patterns. Additionally, tools need to refine nudges based on patient engagement patterns. Importantly, tools should be able to customize messaging to include patient name, provider name and specific diagnoses, the report authors concluded.

Sara Heath has reported news related to patient engagement and health equity since 2015.

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