Artificial intelligence (AI) is an avalanche heading for the healthcare industry.
The use of AI in healthcare settings is growing rapidly, with the technology being leveraged or considered for everything from medical charts and visit notes to assistive diagnosis and AI-enabled robotic surgery.
According to a 2025 American Medical Association survey, physicians’ use of AI for certain tasks nearly doubled in just 1 year, with 66% of physicians surveyed reporting use of AI in 2024—a 78% increase from those who said they used it in 2023. With the fervor surrounding AI technologies, these numbers will only grow.
In the face of this incoming AI surge, healthcare practitioners have a decision to make: step aside and hope to avoid it, get swept under by the momentum, or learn to navigate this new era of healthcare and lead the path to an exciting and productive future.
Promise of AI in Surgery
For today’s surgeon, AI offers a unique opportunity to transform the way complex care is delivered. From preoperative diagnostics to intraoperative guidance and postoperative monitoring, AI can integrate multiple clinical domains simultaneously into a coordinated system. Rather than operating in silos, these domains can be woven together to form a seamless, real-time response that can reduce delays and streamline critical decision-making.
In the OR, advanced imaging can provide rapid 3-D reconstructions, while robotics paired with AI analytics can allow for more detailed assessments of surgical technique and performance. Beyond the OR, AI-driven simulation environments enable trainees to practice on lifelike cases, benchmark their performance against national databases, and carry those lessons back into clinical care.
This type of data capture and outcomes measurement can enable continuous refinement of best practices, inform training protocols, and ultimately improve outcomes for trauma patients and surgical populations alike.
The use of AI is already being studied and realized across the surgical field. In the October 2025 issue of the Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons, Dominic Emerson, MD, FACS, director of robotic cardiac surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, highlighted the continued advancement and clinical integration of robotic cardiac surgical techniques, while Husam H. Balkhy, MD, FACS, director of robotic and minimally invasive cardiac surgery at The University of Chicago Medicine in Illinois, reported that robotic endoscopic mitral valve procedures have demonstrated excellent 30-day surgical outcomes, reinforcing the growing role that minimally invasive robotic systems can play in complex cardiac operations.
In July 2025, AI systems, trained on 17 hours of video showing gallbladder removals, conducted the first realistic surgery performed autonomously by machine. Dr. Balkhy also moderated what is considered to be the world’s first intercontinental robotic cardiac telesurgery. The procedure, an atrial septal defect closure, was conducted remotely from a facility in Strasbourg, France, to an OR in Indore, India.
These dramatic accomplishments represent pivotal moments in the evolution of surgical practice and indicate a future that will be very different from the past.
New Infrastructure for New Era of Healthcare
While the promise of AI is clear, it is uncharted territory. There currently are no established guidelines or guardrails that standardize its use or establish governance for how it should be implemented. AI is not without risk, and how it will be used in healthcare settings, especially when patients’ lives are on the line, raises important questions about accountability and responsibility. If a critical negative event occurs, who is responsible? Is it the manufacturer, the software, the hospital, or the surgeon? If a patient in India is being operated on remotely from France, which country’s laws take precedence?
Just like with the evolution of transportation, AI in healthcare requires entirely new infrastructure and oversight. A century ago, the transition from horse-drawn carriages to motor vehicles demanded not just faster transportation but also the creation of roads, fueling systems, mechanics, and safety regulations. Without these updates, adoption would have been slow, and motor vehicles would not have been able to function safely or efficiently. Fast forward and the introduction of autonomous vehicles also required new infrastructure and governance, this time related to the complex network of sensors, algorithms, and regulatory frameworks that come with a vehicle no longer operated by a human driver.
AI is following a similar trajectory, and proper implementation requires rethinking the entire framework of clinical care, from data capture and integration to governance and accountability. It requires data integrity, real-time access, robust networks, and meaningful clinical integration—and the establishment of systems and governance to support its uses that includes broad stakeholder buy-in.
Moving Toward Industry Guidance and Frameworks
The establishment of industry standards and governance developed by trusted leaders and experts in healthcare quality, safety, and AI systems will be critical to navigate this new era of healthcare. Aligning objectives among stakeholders and establishing responsible use of AI frameworks can help evaluate what works, what is scalable, and what best serves the patients.
Institutions such as Joint Commission, with its global reach and work helping to drive healthcare quality and safety for more than 22,000 healthcare organizations in the US, are well-positioned to lead this effort. The Joint Commission’s Responsible Use of Health Data™ certification program is already helping healthcare organizations manage data ethically and transparently by providing a framework for responsible data use, as well as guidance for how to harness the value of this data to advance treatments, improve outcomes, and safeguard privacy through consistent, risk-mitigating practices. Similar guidance for AI is essential as these technologies are increasingly integrated into healthcare delivery.
AI guidance that considers the perspectives of all stakeholders, from the C-suite to the surgeons performing procedures in the OR, can be used by healthcare organizations of all sizes looking to set policies for procuring, implementing, and using AI, with considerations for governance, privacy, transparency, data security, and quality. More importantly, it’s a starting point for determining the standards and frameworks needed around ethics, responsibility, and utility to help ensure responsible adoption.
Looking Ahead
A surgeon’s responsibility is always to the patient—not the algorithm, not the speed, not the financial margins. Fastest and cheapest are not always best, especially when considering that the priority of patients and their families is the desired outcome. AI is not, and should never be, a replacement for clinical judgment, but if used and developed wisely, it can be used as a tool to enhance surgical skills and aid decision-making.
Surgeons have an opportunity to be informed stewards of this technology and must take the time to understand how these systems work, lean into the ways AI can help deliver better care, and identify the areas where it is falling short.
Data out are only as good as the data in, and by getting involved now, the surgical community can take the lead in training these tools on everything from broader datasets that incorporate more diverse patient populations to testing limits on diagnostics.
By taking the lead and advocating for a clinical AI governance structure rooted in ethics and transparency, the surgical community can ensure the future of AI in healthcare prioritizes quality patient outcomes over all else. With careful stewardship, AI can help build a healthcare system that is safer, smarter, and more equitable—but it must be designed that way.
For more information about the Joint Commission’s work on the responsible use of data, visit: www.jointcommission.org/en-us/about-us/key-initiatives/ai-data-analytics-research.
Disclaimer
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of Dr. Jacobs and do not necessarily reflect those of the Joint Commission or the ACS.
Dr. Lenworth Jacobs Jr. is a professor of surgery at the University of Connecticut in Farmington and director of the Trauma Institute at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.
