Future ready: How AI is transforming healthcare for patients + clinicians

TOGETHER WITH

Next-level care. Providing quality, innovative healthcare starts with evidence-based AI. Wolters Kluwer Health builds expert AI tools clinicians can trust to help make informed decisions + improve patient outcomes. Check out the Future Ready Healthcare Survey Report findings to learn how doctors, nurses, and patients feel about AI in the care setting.

Across industries, AI has transformed every aspect of our lives. Now it’s reshaping healthcare experiences for patients and clinicians alike.

That doesn’t mean that patients are relying on AI physicians, or that clinicians can only speak with patients who have been through an extensive AI onboarding process. Instead, AI is helping streamline the process for both parties, increasing access to quality care.

We teamed up with Wolters Kluwer Health to learn how healthcare organizations are using AI to create positive change, how they’re driving responsible adoption, and what patients and clinicians can expect moving forward. Let’s get started.

In the clinic and beyond

Seeking and providing care is not a simple process—but there’s a better way. With the right AI tools, healthcare organizations can reshape the experience for both clinicians and patients.

AI is reshaping how information enters and influences care decisions, with AI-generated insights now flowing to patients from clinicians and to clinicians from patients. Patients are increasingly bringing their own research into clinical consults, putting clinicians in an interpreter and validator role to varying degrees of acceptance and success. Knowing this, healthcare organizations will have to close the gap between AI readiness and adoption to help create change.

Gaps between adoption and readiness will widen as AI starts to scale. If your practice has already deployed AI tools, you may have experienced those growing pains as the new processes scaled. Wolters Kluwer’s 2026 Future Ready Healthcare Survey Report found that while 90% of clinicians expect AI to significantly impact their organization over the next three years, preparedness to make it happen remains uneven. Only 65% of clinicians believe their organizations are prepared to develop skills that ensure their staff is capable of leveraging the technology, signaling a growing disconnect between vision and execution.

Here’s the good news: That gap is closable. And it starts with managing expectations for both sides of the care process.

Managing expectations

AI can’t replace the parts of healthcare that are purely human. Connecting with patients, learning their stories, and building relationships are still key parts of the experience for clinicians and patients alike. Think of AI as an assistant helping to enrich discussions and deliver precise care.

AI also helps put the patient in charge of their own care. They’re increasingly using AI to answer questions and prepare for visits before ever entering the clinical setting, creating a parallel layer of care navigation.

Wolters Kluwer’s report found that the primary benefit of AI in healthcare for nearly 1 in 3 patients (28%) was that AI explains medical information more clearly than traditional websites. Another 19% reported that it’s faster than waiting for a clinician’s response.

AI is also shifting how care decisions are initiated and informed. Patients reported acting on AI-generated information to decide whether to seek care sooner (26%), delay or avoid care (10%), or bring their findings into clinical encounters (34%).

These changes aren’t happening overnight, but they are becoming the new standard for many patients. For clinicians and healthcare organizations, building trust and adopting AI tools looks a little different.

Let’s talk business

For healthcare organizations, the benefits of AI may show up unevenly. AI is being deployed to help relieve the burdens on clinicians, but expectations for the results differ by role. For example, 84% of clinical respondents identified workflow optimization as a top priority, and 79% cited reducing burnout as an important goal. However, doctors were more likely to believe that AI can reduce burnout (74%), with just 64% of nurses agreeing.

Let’s put those expectations into context. AI in healthcare can look like the basic automation that makes headlines, but it can also be used to improve the UX and UI of the tools clinicians use all day, every day. It can be used to embed new tools in healthcare ecosystems and so much more. As cheesy as it sounds, the possibilities are endless—if organizations are prepared.

The gap between adoption and readiness can slow the benefits of AI for healthcare organizations. For C-suite folks, that means that the ROI for high-impact use cases may take longer to manifest. Like any new tool, preparedness is the key to success.

The report found that AI readiness is concentrated in lower-risk, operational use cases. Until confidence increases, the most transformative applications of AI in care delivery could slow. Let’s talk numbers.

Wolters Kluwer found that AI preparedness was strongest in operational areas, with just under two-thirds of clinicians reporting that their organizations are ready to use AI to improve productivity.

Confidence dropped for patient-facing applications, with just 64% of nurses and 56% of doctors reporting preparedness to improve patient experience. The lowest confidence lies with clinical decision support, where 60% of nurses and 56% of doctors said their organizations are prepared to use AI to support diagnosis or treatment.

Similarly, while patients believe AI has the potential to improve healthcare, they express concern in how their data is being used, with 71% saying they worry about the sale or leak of their protected health information.

Though confidence is low, there is a way forward. Building trust with clinicians is key to smoothing the adoption process. That’s where good governance policies come in.

Maintaining good governance

It’s no secret that AI is growing faster than legislators can regulate. Governance frameworks are still lagging behind the realities of daily use, and this will only become more problematic as consumer-focused AI tools blend with enterprise systems.

Awareness of formal AI policies remains limited among clinicians, rising from 21% in 2025 to just 27% in 2026. Both doctors and nurses report continuing uncertainty around how AI should be used in practice, while patients continue to call for clearer accountability and transparency.

The uncertainty is rooted in unclear expectations on both sides of the care process. Clinicians don’t always know when it’s appropriate to use AI tools in the care process, and patients don’t know how their private health information is interacting with LLMs. Until clear policies are put into place, trust in AI (and adoption) could grind to a halt.

The duty of care falls to healthcare organizations. By establishing transparent AI policies, clinicians and patients alike can trust that they’re getting the best guidance.

The future starts now

The healthcare system of yesterday is gone. With AI, healthcare organizations can create a new standard of care benefitting both clinicians and patients.

But for that level of change to stick, organizations need to understand what their biggest stakeholders are thinking. Learn how patients, doctors, and nurses are approaching AI in healthcare in the 2026 Future Ready Healthcare Report.

Learn more about Wolters Kluwer Health.