Healthcare AI adoption hits 70 percent, but drug discovery and imaging lead the gains
A widely cited industry survey finds 70 percent of healthcare organisations now actively use AI, up from 63 percent two years ago, with medical imaging and drug discovery emerging as the clearest return-on-investment use cases.
Seventy percent of healthcare organisations are now actively using AI in some form, up from 63 percent as recently as 2024, according to a widely cited industry survey published earlier this year — with generative AI and large language model usage climbing even faster, from 54 to 69 percent over the same period.
Digital-health-focused organisations report the highest adoption at 78 percent, followed closely by medical technology companies at 74 percent. The clearest return on investment shows up in specific, well-bounded use cases rather than broad general-purpose deployment: medical imaging accounts for the majority of AI use among medtech firms, while more than half of pharmaceutical companies surveyed now use AI somewhere in their drug discovery pipeline.
The investment case looks strong on paper — 85 percent of healthcare executives say AI is helping increase revenue, and a similar share plan to grow their AI budgets further this year — but a separate industry snapshot found a much starker gap between enthusiasm and execution: while the vast majority of healthcare leaders believe AI improves efficiency, only around one in ten organisations have actually moved a pilot project into full production use, underscoring how much harder deployment is proving than experimentation.
