The healthcare AI world will probably bear one other yr of fast transformation in 2026, coloured by fast-moving experimentation and adoption, in accordance with a report revealed this week by Bessemer Enterprise Companions.
“This has been, since ‘21, one of the vital thrilling instances in our business. There’s an reinvigorated curiosity and pleasure concerning the function that expertise can play in healthcare. Earlier than, we had been very restricted by way of what we had been able to with expertise, and due to this fact we wanted to make use of individuals — which made quite a lot of these fashions actually onerous to scale. And I’m hoping that in 2026, we are able to actually begin to see the influence of expertise for higher engagement and think about of a affected person,” mentioned Sofia Guerra, companion at Bessemer, throughout an interview on Thursday.
Under are 4 of the boldest predictions from the enterprise capital agency’s report.
Payers will play AI catch-up
Suppliers’ fast adoption of AI may push payers to speed up their very own use of administrative AI instruments.
To date, most profitable healthcare AI firms have targeted on suppliers, particularly on administrative layers like income cycle and funds, Guerra identified.
Suppliers have been extra keen to check and undertake these applied sciences, whereas payers have confronted headwinds, comparable to escalating compliance necessities, and are solely now starting to rethink partnerships with startups somewhat than constructing options fully in-house, she acknowledged.
In Guerra’s view, 2026 may very well be a turning level in how payers deploy AI instruments and have interaction with AI startups.
Medical AI adoption will develop
Bessemer’s report predicted an increase in medical AI purposes, primarily for triage and evaluation, and with human clinicians within the loop. The agency additionally thinks that CMS will launch new applications to ascertain billing codes for medical AI.
Guerra famous that CMS has been vocal about its efforts to leverage AI to broaden entry and enhance care. She highlighted the potential for AI-driven analysis, distant affected person monitoring and longitudinal care, however emphasised the necessity to navigate regulation and reimbursement fashions like CPT codes and CMS experiments.
The report additionally identified that cash-paying sufferers will speed up the adoption of medical AI sooner than any reimbursement code, as these shoppers are sometimes motivated by comfort, sooner entry and the promise of extra correct or customized care.
This medical AI adopting amongst cash-pay shoppers can take the type of AI-powered major care visits, second opinions on imaging or subscription-based well being AI coaches that monitor wearable metrics and flag dangers.
Well being AI information infrastructure will turn out to be a brand new class
Well being AI information infrastructure may emerge as a nascent class within the digital well being world, in accordance with Bessemer’s buyers.
“For a very long time, we’ve seen many makes an attempt to construct interoperability startups or horizontal healthcare-specific infrastructure firms on this house. They struggled to actually attain scale or seize worth as a result of they’ve restricted kinds of patrons,” Guerra defined.
However at the moment, demand is rising for instruments that may entry and remodel healthcare information in a HIPAA-compliant approach, each from healthcare organizations and exterior AI labs in search of distinctive datasets, she acknowledged.
She thinks the important thing questions for 2026 are whether or not this demand is sustainable and whether or not unbiased healthcare-focused firms can seize significant market share, or if massive horizontal gamers like AWS, Snowflake and Anthropic will dominate the house.
There shall be a brand new class of AI-powered value-based care firms
A wave of AI-first value-based care firms is poised to emerge and develop, Guerra argued.
She sees two kinds of firms: established tech-enabled or value-based care companies utilizing AI as a device, and fully new AI-first firms constructed from the bottom up.
The AI-first mannequin focuses on partaking sufferers by way of digital instruments, triaging their wants and offering a holistic view of care at scale — somewhat than counting on human coordinators, she defined. Guerra mentioned that launching such firms would require a brand new sort of entrepreneur with deep healthcare experience, as this method differs from merely including AI to present, scaled operations.
Photograph: Yana Iskayeva, Getty Photographs
