AI Impact Awards 2025: How 7 Health Care Winners Measure Impact

Artificial intelligence is an all-consuming force in the health care industry—and it’s still gaining momentum. In 2024, the global health care AI market was estimated at more than $26 billion, and it’s expected to grow to over $187 billion by 2030.

There’s good reason for the boom. Health care executives, physicians and tech leaders alike agree that AI has enormous potential in the industry. It can help make outdated processes more efficient, generate new meaning from massive pools of data and even improve communications between industry stakeholders.

But as the AI market grows, it’s becoming more challenging for health systems to parse through the noise and find solutions that will actually improve care outcomes.

Newsweek spoke with health care and life sciences winners of our inaugural AI Impact Awards to determine how they define and measure impact. Health care and life sciences were just one of the industries represented, and across more than a dozen categories, there were 38 total winners were selected by a panel of AI and subject matter experts.

Here’s how seven award-winning companies distinguish their AI models from the hype cycle:

AI Health Care, Best Outcomes, Care Coordination – Xsolis

Xsolis has created a suite of AI solutions to better connect health care providers with payer organizations and health plans. It serves more than 500 hospitals and health systems and 18 health plans nationwide—and is rapidly expanding its market share, securing spots on the Inc. 5000 and the Deloitte Tech Fast 500 for the fastest growing private companies.

To measure impact, Xsolis tracks the number of cases that are denied and overturned by insurance companies, according to Dr. Heather Bassett, the company’s chief medical officer.

“We’re able to show our clients, through the use of our AI and other analytics, that they were able to appropriately capture revenue based on the medical intensity of their patient population,” Bassett told Newsweek. “Today, we’re at about $1.5 billion that we’ve either protected or helped our clients appropriately capture [across our company’s lifetime].”

Since most hospitals are understaffed, they aren’t always able to fight every claim and maximize their reimbursements, she added. Xsolis’ tool boosts the efficiency of utilization management teams by approximately 20 percent, allowing them to review a larger share of cases.

AI Health Care, Best Outcomes, Health Equity – Bunkerhill Health

“For us, it’s actually fairly easy to quantify impact,” Nishith Khandwala, co-founder and CEO of Bunkerhill Health, told Newsweek.

The company uses AI to identify clinically significant findings that are hidden in patient records, and ensure that patients receive the follow-up care they need to prevent future complications. For example, a patient might get into a car accident and receive a CT scan to check for cracked ribs. The CT scan might also find signs of coronary artery disease—but in today’s medical system, those findings would never be flagged because they weren’t relevant to the car crash.

Bunkerhill Health tracks success by counting the number of patients that it flags for a separate encounter with a specialist, like a cardiologist or an oncologist.

“In our office, we have a counter,” Khandwala said. “Every time we find a patient who we discovered to have high risk for some other problem, we increment that counter, because that’s the number of lives that we have impacted.”

AI Health Care, Best Outcomes, Patient Care – Cera

Based in the United Kingdom, Cera is harnessing technology and AI to predict and prevent avoidable falls and hospitalizations in the elderly population. Its ecosystem includes a proprietary app that allows health care staff, patients and families to log health indicators in real time, along with two AI models.

The first, Falls Prevention AI, predicts 83 percent of falls up to seven days in advance—allowing health care staff to intervene and prevent the leading cause of hospitalizations in adults over age 65. The second, its Hospitalization Predict-Prevent tool, predicts three-quarters of hospitalizations one week in advance.

Together, the pair of AI tools flag up to 5,000 high-risk alerts each day, according to Cera founder and CEO Dr. Ben Maruthappu. Data like this shows the impact that the tools are having on patient safety (and on the U.K.’s health system, which spends over £2.3 billion per year on falls in the over-65 population).

“Most importantly of all, we are using AI to make an impact at scale,” Maruthappu told Newsweek. “Cera works with over a hundred U.K. Local Governments and the majority of NHS regions, reducing costs, transforming life for patients, and bringing healthcare services into the future.”

AI Health Care, Best Outcomes, Diagnostics – Color Health

Color Health is the largest virtual cancer clinic in the United States, created in partnership with the American Cancer Society. Last summer, it teamed up with OpenAI to develop its Cancer Copilot: a novel AI architecture that creates accurate clinical recommendations for clinicians, expanding access to world-class oncology expertise for doctors working at major cancer centers, small community health facilities and every setting in between.

The company primarily charts AI impact in two ways, co-founder and CEO Othman Laraki told Newsweek. First, it tracks how much time clinicians save by using the AI tool. Traditionally, nurses and oncologists had to spend 1-2 hours looking through a patient chart and determining how to prepare them for treatment, Laraki said. Using AI, they can craft the same plan in just 15 minutes.

Additionally, Color Health measures how, when and why clinicians opt to change the output of the AI model. The company’s most recent data shows that physicians choose to make changes in less than two percent of the clinical decision factors suggested by the model. Most of those changes had to do with formatting, Laraki added; the model has an error rate under one percent.

“It’s performing way better than anything that we’ve seen published so far,” Laraki said. “And it’s not because we’re using better models—we’re using standard open AI release models—but it’s because of this architecture that makes the model behave in a very predictable way.”

AI Health Care, Best Outcomes, Physician Satisfaction – Iodine Software

At Iodine Software, impact is measured in reimbursement gains, along with improvements in productivity and physician satisfaction, according to co-founder and CEO William Chan.

The company utilizes AI to automate the middle of the revenue cycle, which traditionally requires nurses and physicians to manually collect, interpret and analyze patient data. By inserting AI into the process, Iodine Software paints a more complete clinical picture for insurance companies, ultimately resulting in fewer denials and more accurate reimbursements to health systems. Across all of Iodine’s 1,000 hospital clients, that rightsizing yields a cumulative $2.4 billion per year, Chan told Newsweek.

Iodine Software also saves time for health care providers, cutting the time spent reviewing patient case records by “at least half,” Chan said. Since the AI model presents information in a concise, precise and actionable way, physicians can respond to information requests more quickly. Clarification asks that once took three days to answer have been whittled down to two hours, in some instances.

“Physicians love that interaction compared to what it was previously,” Chan said.

Best of – Most Innovative AI Technology or Service, Extraordinary Impact in AI Innovation – Phare Bio

In 2020, researchers at the Collins Lab at MIT made a landmark discovery when they used AI to identify a new class of antibiotics. Phare Bio was born from that breakthrough, and has since leveraged AI to uncover two additional novel antibiotic classes.

The company’s model prioritizes the superbugs identified as the most dangerous by the CDC and the WHO, and predicts drug efficacy, toxicity and pharmacokinetics with high accuracy. Phare Bio has also developed AIBiotics, a generative AI platform that designs new antibiotics.

Ultimately, the company aims to improve the efficiency of antibiotic research and development, according to Dr. Akhila Kosaraju, its president and CEO.

How does it measure that? Ultimately, by “taking better and fewer shots on goal,” Kosaraju told Newsweek. It often costs between $1.3 and $1.5 billion to get a single drug over the finish line for FDA approval.

“Those numbers are so high [because they] encompass all of the failures along the way to get to that one exceptional drug,” Kosaraju said. “If we can reduce the number of shots on goal substantially, we can half or quarter the cost and time to get these drugs into clinical trials, and then ultimately to be FDA-approved.”

AI Education, Best Outcomes, Higher Education – MedCerts

MedCerts has integrated conversational AI, generative AI and natural language processing into its training programs for health care and IT students. Now, students can interact with virtual patients who respond and adapt to their input in real time.

One of the company’s major innovations was an in-house AI program for certified nursing assistants (CNAs), designed to develop and assess soft skills like empathy, communication and problem-solving. Traditionally, these skills have been tough to measure—but with MedCerts’ AI model, students can practice responding to high-pressure situations in a safe, yet nuanced environment.

Student engagement is a primary indicator of an educational tool’s impact, according to Dana Janssen, MedCerts’ chief product officer. AI has enabled the company to give students a more interactive experience and bolster their chances of success.

“One of the biggest KPIs for us is program completion, because you can’t get certified and you can’t get a job without first completing your programs,” Janssen told Newsweek. “The more engaging we can make our content or our training—the more interactive—the more effective it ultimately is.”

To see the full list of AI Impact winners, visit the official page for Newsweek’s AI Impact Awards.

Newsweek will continue the conversation on meaningful AI innovations at our AI Impact Summit from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California. Click here to follow along on the live blog.