{"slug": "how-a-bay-area-healthcare-system-is-navigating-ai-by-balancing-tech-upgrades-and", "title": "How a Bay Area healthcare system is navigating AI by balancing tech upgrades and patient trust", "summary": "Sutter Health, a Sacramento-based not-for-profit healthcare system serving more than 3.5 million patients across Northern and Central California, has expanded its clinical use of artificial intelligence through partnerships with Aidoc and OpenEvidence and a planned AI-focused medical school with Santa Clara University, according to its inaugural Chief AI Officer, Ashley Beecy. Sutter Health launched its San Francisco innovation center in 2024, became the West Coast hub for clinical AI innovation for Aidoc, and in January expanded that partnership to radiology to flag imaging scans and draft preliminary radiology reports; in February it partnered with OpenEvidence to help physicians find evidence-based clinical answers. Beecy said the health system's Center for Applied AI deploys chart summarization, ambient scribes, and a newly rolled-out patient-facing chatbot that connects patients to their electronic health record at any time of day.", "body_md": "**Getting your**\n\n[Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...\nAs artificial intelligence begins to transform the workforce and reshape industries, one Bay Area healthcare system is using the technology to support doctors and streamline care.\n\nSutter Health, a not-for-profit healthcare system based in Sacramento, serves more than 3.5 million patients throughout Northern and Central California and has significantly expanded its use of artificial intelligence in clinical care in recent years.\n\nIn 2024, the healthcare giant launched its San Francisco “innovation center” to work with AI and tech firms on digital health apps, remote monitoring programs and other emerging technologies.\n\nSutter Health serves as the West Coast hub for clinical AI innovation for the medical technology company Aidoc. The healthcare system partnered with Aidoc last year to use its AI operating system to more quickly detect disease and provide patients with care.\n\nIn January, Sutter Health expanded the partnership to include radiology, using Aidoc’s AI technology to review and flag patients’ imaging scans and produce preliminary drafts of radiology reports.\n\nSutter Health also partnered with OpenEvidence, an artificial intelligence platform and medical search engine, in February to help Sutter physicians find fast, evidence-based answers to clinical questions.\n\nAnd, this spring, Sutter Health announced plans to launch the Bay Area’s first new medical school in over a century, in partnership with Santa Clara University, with plans to center the school around emerging AI technologies and make the medical profession more efficient and accurate.\n\nSutter Health’s inaugural Chief AI Officer, Ashley Beecy, spoke with Bay Area News Group about some of the ways Sutter Health is using artificial intelligence to support physicians, improve patient care and transform the healthcare industry.\n\n**Q:** What is your role as Chief AI Officer for Sutter Health?\n\n**A:** As Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at Sutter Health, I lead efforts to use AI responsibly to improve care and make health care work better for patients and clinicians. My team really is the Center for Applied AI.\n\nOur work can include building tools or partnering with vendors where there’s opportunity. We support training employees about AI and how to use it in their own work. We also lead AI governance. That includes making sure that we’re using AI safely and we can monitor it appropriately.\n\n**Q:** Why is AI a priority for Sutter Health?\n\n**A:** At Sutter, we want to make sure that we can make work easier for our clinicians and we also deliver the best care possible for our patients. And AI is really an enabler to be able to do that. We’re in Northern California — one of the largest AI centers worldwide.\n\n**Q:** How are Sutter Health clinicians using AI?\n\n**A:** When we think about making work easier for our care teams, we think about all the digitized data in the electronic health record. How do we synthesize that in a way that they have better insights when they’re in an encounter with a patient? Or when they’re in that patient encounter, how can they focus on that human touch with the patient and not the administrative burden of taking notes and documenting it? So we have chart summarization tools and tools that can summarize information to help doctors prepare for a visit. We also have ambient scribes to be able to document the encounter so that they don’t have to do that when they go home; they can spend more time with their families, and they come to work the next day really refreshed to engage in patient care again.\n\n**Q:** How are Sutter Health patients using AI?\n\n**A:** We just rolled out a patient-facing chatbot where our patients can connect any time of day to their electronic health record and ask questions against it. Whether they’re having new symptoms or they want to understand who’s the right provider or care team member to see, they can go to a place that has the right data privacy protections and connects them to their own personalized data as opposed to using the publicly available tools.\n\n**Q:** How is Sutter Health navigating distrust and skepticism around AI?\n\n**A:** With every digital tool, it’s about building trust with our patients, our care team members and our employees. We do that by showing them that we’re evaluating these tools before we deploy, that we’re being transparent about the performance and how to use them, that we’re onboarding people and teaching them how to use it, that we’re monitoring over time and we’re reporting back the outcomes and safety measurements that we establish in advance of any deployment.\n\n**Q:** What do innovations in AI mean for the healthcare industry overall?\n\n**A:** It means that we’re actually increasing the human touch and care by taking some of the administrative work off of our care teams. We’re allowing them to focus on that human engagement with the patient, to focus on the really complicated cases that require their human-level thinking and intelligence applied to clinical decision-making.\n\nOne of our goals is to make sure that we provide the right access to our patients. So anybody that wants to come to our health system, we make it as easy as possible for them to find the right care team. We know that as a consumer in other industries, there’s a lot of technology to support things you do, whether it’s travel or shopping. And in our mind, there’s no reason that healthcare shouldn’t parallel these industries in creating the same level of experience.\n\nAshely Beecy Profile\n\n**Position:** Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at Sutter Health\n\n**Education:** Bachelor’s degree in computer systems engineering at Boston University, medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and additional training at Columbia University and Technische Universität Dresden. She is board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, echocardiography and clinical informatics.\n\n**Residence: Emeryville, CA** \n\n#### 5 things to know about Ashley Beecy\n\n1. In her free time, she enjoys visiting museums, cultural events, theater and traveling.\n2. She began her career as a computer engineer at IBM and later worked in risk management at Citi before pursuing medicine.\n3. She never entirely left engineering behind. At home, she loves building things with her three children. Their projects have ranged from launching model rockets to designing doll furniture.\n4. Her favorite time outside of work is spent with my family. She also spends time running and playing tennis as opportunities to recharge.\n5. She was named one of Reuters’ Trailblazing Women in Healthcare for 2026, an initiative that highlights prominent female executives, clinicians and innovators transforming global healthcare, pharma and digital health.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-a-bay-area-healthcare-system-is-navigating-ai-by-balancing-tech-upgrades-and", "canonical_source": "https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/09/13/bay-area-healthcare-system-using-ai-to-transform-care/", "published_at": "2026-09-13 18:00:05+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-13 18:21:06.328935+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Sutter Health", "Ashley Beecy", "Aidoc", "OpenEvidence", "Santa Clara University", "Center for Applied AI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-a-bay-area-healthcare-system-is-navigating-ai-by-balancing-tech-upgrades-and", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-a-bay-area-healthcare-system-is-navigating-ai-by-balancing-tech-upgrades-and.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-a-bay-area-healthcare-system-is-navigating-ai-by-balancing-tech-upgrades-and.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-a-bay-area-healthcare-system-is-navigating-ai-by-balancing-tech-upgrades-and.jsonld"}}