Seeing clinical value from AI requires practical, real-world results

A grounded approach to AI innovations

It’s important to level-set on what AI currently brings to the table. According to the most recent study by Wolters Kluwer in the 2025 Future Ready Healthcare Survey Report, healthcare organizations are primarily focused on using Gen AI to achieve administrative efficiencies to tackle immediate pressures on their financial and clinical sustainability. We’re already seeing advancements in documentation, revenue capture, interactions with payers, case summarizations, and image interpretation. But also, much of the buzz around AI is just that—buzz. The transformative potential is not to be ignored, but we also must be practical about what AI can reliably achieve, understand associated business models, have reasonable expectations on the pace of adoption, and clarify how it can be used responsibly.

AI applications are enabling tools that can facilitate capabilities not previously possible, but they still have to be in the service of delivering enterprise value. At Wolters Kluwer, we see it as another tool for our customers to do their jobs better and more efficiently, mainly within familiar workflows. The tools must be grounded in the work that clinicians and healthcare professionals do every day. And, above all, for clinical applications, they must be developed to reliably help clinicians provide safe and effective care.

For point-of-care solutions such as clinical decision support, the stakes are especially high. UpToDate^® clinical decision support is used by over 3 million clinicians around the world, and searches are happening about 28 times per second. AI can help clinicians find evidence-based care answers more quickly and more naturally, help chip away at seconds within each care visit, and offer new capabilities around clinical reasoning. With anything that has potential patient-facing implications, we have a responsibility to apply generative AI that is transparent and supports clinicians in providing safe and effective care.

Considering the greater healthcare ecosystem

The organizational ecosystem is also a key component for any enterprise solution. How does it fit within the workflow? What is the experience of the clinicians who use it? What are practical approaches to AI governance?

Security, especially with any solution that could touch patient data, is also important. A McKinsey article flags that global cyberattacks on providers have reached an all-time high, and data breaches in healthcare incur the highest cost for any industry at $9.8 million per incident. They argue that organizations should consider the entire patient journey and clinician workflow when reviewing applications or making infrastructure changes.

With thousands of applications on the market and more coming every day, who can you trust? Lots of small companies are popping up following the introduction of the frontier LLMs. But have they been carefully vetted and are they considering the everyday stakeholders? In a survey, Wolters Kluwer found 91% of physicians wanted to know materials the GenAI was trained on were created by doctors and medical experts. And, 76% would be more comfortable using GenAI from established vendors. There’s value in long-standing partners who emphasize responsible approaches to AI and ask for stakeholder and clinician input before launching features.

Differentiating in a crowded, emerging market

Ultimately, the core value for healthcare business models is the intersection of practicality, trust, and value. This requires tangible results that produce better financial, operational, and health outcomes. At Wolters Kluwer, we’ve been enhancing and building out UpToDate Enterprise Edition that goes beyond just the familiar, trusted clinical decision support solution. It’s empowering faster answers with AI-enhanced search functionality, integrating an expanded patient education library for Epic customers, providing leaders with analytics and health trends, and integrating alongside leading partners for greater functionality. And we have more initiatives in the pipeline.

Clinicians have trusted UpToDate for 30 years and we’re innovating for the next 30 and beyond, and are committed to bringing responsible innovations that can bring value to the whole health industry.

Learn more about our commitment to a responsible, collaborative process with AI in healthcare workflows and explore a HIMSS whitepaper on responsibly integrating GenAI at the point of care.