For New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health, the future of innovation isn’t just about adopting new technology — it’s about using it to unlock the full potential of its people.

By investing in automation and AI through its venture arm, Northwell Holdings, the health system is reimagining how clinicians, case managers, and staff spend their time, shifting energy away from repetitive administrative tasks and toward direct patient care. The result: stronger retention, greater efficiency, and a workforce operating at the top of its skillsets. Richard Mulry, president and CEO of Northwell Holdings, sees these investments as essential to both system growth and patient experience.

“The next opportunities we’re looking at through a strategic lens is, knowing that the system has to continue to grow and explore market share growth, but also knowing we have to continually focus on building the best experience for patients and consumers,” he said during an interview on the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “When we think about where we want to grow, we want to continue to support the new companies we’ve launched.”

Ascertain is a strong example. Northwell Holdings partnered with Aegis Ventures to launch Ascertain, an agentic AI company creation platform. Northwell leveraged Ascertain to create AI agents to take discharge planning from 150 clicks to six clicks. In another use case, Northwell leveraged AI agents to shorten the time it takes to generate prior authorization for patient transfers to skilled nursing facilities from two hours to 6 seconds.
https://www.northwell.edu/news/the-latest/northwell-health-aegis-ventures-launch-ascertain-company-creation-platform

“The agents ingest the rules from payers. The work for an all-payer portal to submit the claims on behalf of the care manager,” said Mr. Mulry. “That’s one example of where we took a lot of repeatable administrative tasks and put them in the hands of the AI agents. That ends up being very efficient for the workforce so we can do our work more efficiently, and also lets the case managers focus more time and attention on the patients and their families.”

It’s easy to identify the soft return-on-investment for technologies reducing administrative burden or designing a better patient experience. But how does Northwell know its efforts are creating the right savings and financial impact?

“The introduction of new technology and developing those key performance indicators is an ongoing process because certainly you want to look at it from a couple of different dimensions. When you define what success looks like, it’s a moving target,” said Mr. Mulry. “As you launch an agentic framework, for example, how do you want to measure that? Do you want to measure patient or employee satisfaction? Which has an important value? Has it done anything to impact the patient experience? In this case, probably not; it’s been behind the scenes. But it’s something we want to consider, direct ROI, and whether there’s an advantage for us to scale on an enterprise level without hiring a linear number of FTEs by using the agentic framework.”

Northwell is still exploring how to use an agent for more subjective interpretation of the rules to help lower payer denials and create less re-work for the health systems and insurance companies. More broadly, the next vintage of agents will need a more interoperable framework for seamless, and safe, information flow.

“How much incremental effort and change, and cost, is there to modify an AI use case or extend one use case to 20 use cases across the enterprise. What is the cost impact of that?” said Mr. Mulry. “What should that pricing be? Then what’s the ROI on a broader enterprise scale? Those are all questions we’re actively asking ourselves right now and working through those use cases.”

Northwell is in the early stages of processing new codes to grow the technology, which is evolving fast. With how quickly technology evolves, many systems are scrambling to ensure they have the right related safety, security, governance, efficiency and ethics in place to launch new products.

“We are concurrently trying to build a governance structure and an infrastructure that supports that work going forward,” said Mr. Mulry. “The examination of our data assets is also very compelling. We’re able to utilize structured surgical video data, streaming data, omics data, and we believe that all lies the foundation for new collaborations and partnerships within the industry. It also supports research and working with peer organizations, and it could also be the foundation for possibly launching some new commercial ventures and partnerships.”

Northwell is also laying the groundwork to explore taking some technologies to market. Mr. Mulry said the system has projects in “stealth” mode as they work through several early use cases.

The big challenges facing Northwell will evolve as well. Like many health systems, Northwell is seeing the aging population balloon and a portion of commercially insured patients will age into Medicare-sponsored plans. Those patients are also more likely to develop chronic conditions needing intervention.

“Neurological care is going to explode,” said Mr. Mulry. “Certain surgical services, unique behavioral health issues, and coordination of care with home activities. Where do people live most of their lives? It’s not in the doctor’s office or the hospital. How are we going to be able to benefit by leveraging this technology that gets us the information to the right person at the right time so we can have the most impactful intervention or response throughout everybody’s different care journeys.”

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