When AI Heals: Rethinking the Role of Support Industries in the Age of Generative Healthcare
When Bain & Company, in collaboration with Bessemer Venture Partners and AWS, released The Healthcare AI Adoption Index, the message was clear: the healthcare sector is rapidly transitioning from AI aspiration to AI integration. Within just two and a half years of generative AI’s mainstream emergence, 95% of healthcare executives now believe the technology will fundamentally transform the industry.
But belief, as the report makes clear, is not yet matched by capability. Fewer than one-third of proof-of-concept AI initiatives reach full-scale deployment, and just over half of respondents report meaningful ROI within the first year. Despite widespread enthusiasm, real-world operationalization remains elusive.
To bridge this gap, Bain recommends a triad of imperatives: fostering an AI-ready culture, investing in infrastructure and talent, and building co-development partnerships that align with healthcare’s unique complexities. These are not just priorities for providers, payers, and Pharma companies—they serve as a blueprint for every player in healthcare’s vast support ecosystem.
If AI is poised to reshape the core of healthcare delivery, the periphery—the support industries that sustain healthcare at scale—must also evolve.
From Back Office to Bedside
Call Centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms have long been the unseen scaffolding supporting patient experience. From handling claims to scheduling appointments, refilling prescriptions to clarifying member benefits, these interactions form the connective tissue between patients and the system.
Invariably, support industries have been relegated to the back office—seen as transactional, necessary, but rarely strategic. However, this scaffolding becomes integral to the care experience in an AI-native healthcare future. Call Centers and business process outsourcing firms are no longer peripheral; they are the new front line of care.
As ambient scribes and clinical copilots lighten the load on physicians, and as generative models become integrated into decision pathways, healthcare support functions must align with the speed, nuance, and intelligence of the systems they now interact with. This shift requires more than AI experimentation; it demands a cohesive, AI-infused strategy.
Support organizations must move beyond experimenting with chatbots or scripted agent responses. To remain relevant, they must integrate AI into the core of their business models, workflows, and organizational culture, treating it not as an add-on but as a fundamental operating principle.
Operationalizing Healthcare CX in an AI World
This transformation begins with the agent, not as a human replacement but as an evolution of role and capability. Future call centre’s won’t just answer billing questions; they will triage symptoms, navigate insurance complexities, and guide patients through AI-informed care pathways.
Central to this transformation is the patient experience (CX)—now reframed as a strategic lever, not just a satisfaction score. In an AI-driven environment, operationalizing CX means orchestrating human and machine intelligence to deliver care that is fast and accurate, but also empathetic, inclusive, and personalized. This will require more than tooling; it calls for an overhaul of people, processes, and platforms.
Therefore, support organizations must design for a world where emotion-aware AI manages initial triage, voice agents foster multilingual accessibility, and human agents are supported—rather than replaced—by decision-support copilots. The goal isn’t to eliminate the human touch; it’s to elevate it, directing human effort toward areas where nuance, judgment, and empathy are irreplaceable.
Agents evolve into care enablers—no longer just operational buffers, but essential participants in delivering intelligent, empathetic care. They play an active role in outcomes rather than simply in experiences.
The Next-Gen MSP Mandate
Ironically, the very challenge that many healthcare organizations face—the inability to scale AI from proof-of-concept to production—presents a unique opportunity for support providers.
Call Centers and BPOs that reposition themselves as AI adoption partners—not just service vendors—can unlock entirely new value pools. Developing “AI Implementation-as-a-Service” models can assist healthcare clients in bridging the gap from experimentation to execution, overseeing everything from data readiness and model integration to training and governance.
Support industries must become the translation layer—bridging the gap between advanced AI capabilities and the complex, often messy, operational realities of healthcare delivery. However, most organizations will require assistance to realize this vision. They lack AI capabilities, and the speed of transformation alongside the complexity of implementation will exceed what traditional service delivery models can accommodate.
This is where a new class of next-generation Managed Service Providers (MSPs) comes into play. These firms aren’t just outsourcers; they are strategic partners that assist organizations.
- Define their vision for AI,
- Operationalize CX in complex environments, and
- Drive interventions across technology (including AI), people, and process.
Strategy alone is insufficient—execution, enablement, and adaptability will decide who leads and who lags.
Scaling Empathy and Outcomes
The most profound opportunity AI offers is the ability to scale empathy. When fine-tuned on the right data and constraints, generative models can mirror tone, adjust for cognitive and cultural needs, and bridge linguistic gaps. Emotion-aware voice AI and multilingual large language models (LLMs) will enable agents to serve a broader and more diverse population with contextual sensitivity and consistency.
In this model, CX becomes a measurable intervention, not just a metric. The call centre—once a cost centre—transforms into a driver of health outcomes. Organizations that recognize this shift will lead the next wave of digital disruption. The rest will struggle to meet the rising expectations of their healthcare clients and the patients they ultimately serve.
Beyond Reactive: Toward Proactive Transformation
If Bain’s guidance signals a reset for core healthcare institutions, it also serves as a wake-up call for their ecosystem partners. The future is not one in which support industries react to healthcare’s evolution. The future demands that they transform in parallel, develop their own AI strategies, invest in talent, and build flexible architectures that can scale as healthcare’s needs evolve.
In the era of AI-native healthcare, the boundary between core and periphery is dissolving. The organizations that act now—partnering strategically, investing boldly, and building with foresight—will define what healing looks like in a digitized, distributed, and intelligent healthcare system.
The next frontier in healthcare is not just smarter hospitals or digitized diagnoses—it’s about creating an intelligent ecosystem where support functions are indistinguishable from care delivery. For support industries, this is the moment to act—not as followers of innovation, but as co-architects of the AI-native future of health.