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Dr. Payvand Milani demonstrates using the Abridge Inside AI clinical documentation application on a cell phone at Sutter Health medical offices on Thursday, July 30, 2026, in Los Altos, Calif. (Aric Crabb\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\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.<\/p>\n
Sutter 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.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the healthcare giant launched its San Francisco \u201cinnovation center\u201d to work with AI and tech firms on digital health apps, remote monitoring programs and other emerging technologies.<\/p>\n
Dr. Payvand Milani demonstrates using the Abridge Inside AI clinical documentation application on a cell phone at Sutter Health medical offices on Thursday, July 30, 2026, in Los Altos, Calif. (Aric Crabb\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sutter 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.<\/p>\n
In January, Sutter Health expanded the partnership to include radiology, using Aidoc\u2019s AI technology to review and flag patients\u2019 imaging scans and produce preliminary drafts of radiology reports.<\/p>\n
Sutter 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.<\/p>\n
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Sutter 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 transform the healthcare industry (Courtesy of Sutter Health).\u00a0<\/p>\n
And, this spring, Sutter Health announced plans to launch the Bay Area\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Sutter Health\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Q: What is your role as Chief AI Officer for Sutter Health?<\/p>\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.<\/p>\n
Our work can include building tools or partnering with vendors where there\u2019s 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\u2019re using AI safely and we can monitor it appropriately.<\/p>\n
Q: Why is AI a priority for Sutter Health?<\/p>\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\u2019re in Northern California \u2014 one of the largest AI centers worldwide.<\/p>\n
Q: How are Sutter Health clinicians using AI?<\/p>\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\u2019re in an encounter with a patient? Or when they\u2019re 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Q: How are Sutter Health patients using AI?<\/p>\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\u2019re having new symptoms or they want to understand who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Q: How is Sutter Health navigating distrust and skepticism around AI?<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0With every digital tool, it\u2019s about building trust with our patients, our care team members and our employees. We do that by showing them that we\u2019re evaluating these tools before we deploy, that we\u2019re being transparent about the performance and how to use them, that we\u2019re onboarding people and teaching them how to use it, that we\u2019re monitoring over time and we\u2019re reporting back the outcomes and safety measurements that we establish in advance of any deployment.<\/p>\n
Q:\u00a0What do innovations in AI mean for the healthcare industry overall?<\/p>\n
A: It means that we\u2019re actually increasing the human touch and care by taking some of the administrative work off of our care teams. We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
One 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\u2019s a lot of technology to support things you do, whether it\u2019s travel or shopping. And in our mind, there\u2019s no reason that healthcare shouldn\u2019t parallel these industries in creating the same level of experience.<\/p>\n
Ashely Beecy Profile<\/p>\n
Position: Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at Sutter Health<\/p>\n
Education: Bachelor\u2019s degree in computer systems engineering at Boston University, medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and additional training at\u00a0Columbia University and Technische Universit\u00e4t Dresden. She is board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, echocardiography and clinical informatics.<\/p>\n
Residence: Emeryville, CA\u00a0<\/p>\n
5 things to know about Ashley Beecy<\/p>\n
\u00a0In her free time, she enjoys visiting museums, cultural events, theater and traveling.
\nShe began her career as a computer engineer at IBM and later worked in risk management at Citi before pursuing medicine.
\nShe 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.
\nHer favorite time outside of work is spent with my family. She also spends time running and playing tennis as opportunities to recharge.
\nShe was named one of Reuters\u2019 Trailblazing Women in Healthcare for 2026, an initiative that highlights prominent female executives, clinicians and innovators transforming global healthcare, pharma and digital health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As artificial intelligence begins to transform the workforce and reshape industries, one Bay Area healthcare system is using…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[181,3805,28,358367,2356,4887,97,252,253,2558,983,3,3804,358368,74],"class_list":["post-847087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bay-area","tag-business","tag-business-qa","tag-california","tag-california-news","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pm-report","tag-sv-chat","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}