Cleveland Clinic’s AI strategy includes building the tools from the ground up

While some hospitals are strategically buying AI products from health techs, Cleveland Clinic is taking a different approach: working with startups and established tech companies from the beginning.

This year alone, the health system has teamed up with Ambience Healthcare for an AI scribe, Akasa for coding and revenue cycle management, and Bayesian Health for sepsis detection. It’s also been partnering with IBM to create a quantum computing system for clinical research since 2023.

AI is a quickly growing sector in the healthcare industry, valued at $39.3 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $504.2 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. Tools are used for everything from clinical documentation to call intake to diagnosis insights.

Venture fund Rock Health reported in July that AI made up the majority (62%, or nearly $4 billion) of venture capital (VC) dollars for the digital health sector in the first half of 2025.

Other major providers have also joined forces with AI tech companies—like Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and telehealth platform hellocare.ai as well as Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine and pathology diagnostics platform PathAI—creating a level of shared knowledge across health systems on which tools are the most beneficial.

Why this approach?

Rohit Chandra, chief digital officer at Cleveland Clinic, outlined three reasons why the Clinic took the partnership approach to AI.

First, he said, “we’re a healthcare company, not a technology company” that benefits from sharing the expertise and potential to expand products in the long term.

Second, he said, AI is still in its “early stages.” Cleveland Clinic wants to use “transformative” technology, but knows it could take years for a finished product to show up on the market.

“We’re willing to learn how to use these technologies, learn how to bend them to our environment,” Chandra said.

Last, he said the healthcare industry is “ripe for AI power transformation,” and therefore Cleveland Clinic wants to “take a big swing” at defining the future of the industry.

What does the partnership look like?

Chandra said Cleveland Clinic looks for companies with a similar ambition and those that are a good “cultural” fit.

Ambience, for example, wanted to be more than just an AI scribe from the beginning, and that stood out to the Cclinic, Chandra said. Ambience is one of the leading players in the AI scribe market, according to an October report from VC firm Menlo Ventures, and has other partners including Houston Methodist, Idaho-based St. Luke’s Health System, and UCSF Health.

More than 4,000 clinicians at Cleveland Clinic participated in the pilot rollout of Ambience, which was used in 1 million patient encounters and reduced clinicians’ time writing and reviewing electronic medical records by 14 minutes each day, according to internal research.

Functionally, the partnership includes identifying a problem, like how to improve clinical outcomes or implement automation. Then the codevelopment and codesign kicks off, Chandra said.

With Ambience, people from both organizations sat down together and planned out which physicians would test out the technology first to get feedback before sending the tech out to the wider staff.

It isn’t just about how the tech works, Chandra added, because you need to get clinicians to adopt and use it at scale.

“Which means you need to be very thoughtful about change management because if you’re going to change the behavior of 20,000 nurses, you need to design the heck out of it,” he said.

Business benefits

Megan Zweig, president and CEO of the Rock Health Advisory consulting group, told Healthcare Brew via email “durable change in healthcare requires partnership between innovators and incumbents,” adding that health systems and tech companies are “increasingly partnering” to contribute expertise to the process.

“Recently we are seeing more of an appetite for early-stage codevelopment, especially around AI, as providers seek to de-risk their efforts and investment,” she said.

In a survey earlier this year, Deloitte found nearly 40% of 121 healthcare executives believe AI pays off in a business sense.

While Cleveland Clinic declined to share how much money it invested into the four companies, spokesperson Andrea Pacetti confirmed the health system has financially contributed to these partnerships.

“If we built it ourselves, the problem would be that we would just do it for ourselves,” Chandra said. “We have an ambition to not just change the way the Clinic functions, but to do it in a way that can influence the rest of the industry.”

Ultimately, he said healthcare is in need of a technological and “transformation.”

“That can make healthcare safer, more scalable, and more affordable,” Chandra said. “We are at a point in time where if people like us can strike the right partnerships, then we can accomplish those goals.”

Groups like the public-private Coalition for Health AI are also working toward creating more rules and understanding around safety and benefits of new technology in healthcare.

“Partnerships like these can be a smart way to accelerate the real-world impact of AI, ensuring there’s just as much focus on the implementation ‘science’—of change management, governance, trust-building, and training—as on the data science of the algorithms,” Zweig said.