Every day, millions of patients use generative AI tools to research symptoms, interpret diagnoses, understand lab results and navigate insurance questions.
OpenAI reported in January that more than 40 million people ask ChatGPT health-related questions every day, and that 1 in 4 regular users submit a health-related prompt each week. Microsoft, in a recent analysis of more than 500,000 health-related Copilot conversations, found that around 40% focused on symptoms, medical conditions and potential treatments, while nearly 11% involved interpretation or lab and imaging results.
Other data suggest this shift is changing the clinical encounter itself. In a February 2026 Tebra survey, 37% of providers said patients had consulted ChatGPT before their scheduled office visit. And a whopping 1 in 5 patients have followed a chatbot’s health advice instead of their doctor’s recommendations.
GenAI Can’t Change Healthcare On Its Own
This weekend, at Your Health’s Ninth Annual Healthcare Conference in South Carolina (March 13 to 15), I presented on the theme “How AI-Empowered Patients and Doctors Can Take Control in Primary Care.” Your Health is a mission-driven organization that has built its model around value-based, team-based care for seniors across South Carolina and Georgia.
In front of an audience of hundreds of clinicians, innovators and healthcare leaders, I spoke about the problems and potential of healthcare today.
On one hand, our nation faces severe healthcare challenges. Half of all Americans can’t afford their out-of-pocket deductibles if they experience a major medical problem. Life-expectancy has stagnated for more than a decade and is little different than 15 years ago. Every year, 400,000 patients die from medical error.
On the other hand, we now have a technology in generative AI that can save tens of thousands of lives, reduce medical costs and decrease burnout. Whether it fulfills its promise will not be limited by the technology itself. Instead, success will be defined by the willingness of clinicians to embrace the tools and transform how they provide medical care.
Great Potential & Great Limitations
Across the country, doctors provide medical care on an episodic basis, not a continuous one. But patient problems today are largely chronic, not acute. Moreover, care remains office-based, rather than focused on where patients live, work and spend their days. The result is that chronic diseases are poorly controlled.
As an example, hypertension (leading cause of stroke) is effectively controlled only half of the time and diabetes (major contributor to heart attacks and kidney failures) even less often. Based on CDC data, successful management and control of chronic disease could diminish these expensive and life-threatening problems by as much as half. That would save tens of thousands of lives annually and reduce medical costs by hundreds of billions of dollars.
But to gain the full benefit, medical groups nationwide will need to muster the courage to break longstanding rules, roles and assumptions.
Human Clinicians Must Update Their Systems
For those organizations that embrace generative AI and achieve operational excellence in care delivery, the technology will reduce clinical demands on clinicians and help diminish clinician burnout. This will allow primary care physicians to spend more time with their most complex and medically fragile patients.
In addition, the added time will allow primary care doctors to manage a large number of patients who they currently send to specialists, not because they couldn’t complete the diagnostic workup and provide the long-term treatment required, but because they are overwhelmed. And this will elevate their status and income. In turn, specialists will have more time to focus on patients who require procedures, joining together to create high-performing centers of excellence with superior clinical outcomes at lower costs the result.
For organizations like Your Health, this moment presents a major opportunity. The medical group’s mission-driven culture and its commitment to value-based care position it to lead the way.
The next step will be to pair that philosophy with generative AI in ways that improve access, strengthen the doctor-patient relationship and produce better clinical outcomes at lower cost.
I’m grateful to Scott Middleton, founder of Your Health, and the dedicated team at Your Health for the invitation and warm welcome.
The future of medicine will not be shaped by technology alone, but by a partnership among dedicated clinicians, empowered patients and generative AI. That trio will achieve exponentially better clinical outcomes than any of the three alone.
I look forward to learning from Your Health as it translates technological potential into day-to-day practice.
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Dr. Robert Pearl is the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, the nation’s largest physician group. He’s a Forbes contributor, bestselling author, Stanford University professor, and host of two healthcare podcasts. Check out Pearl’s newest book, ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine.
