Health Systems Struggle with AI Chatbots Reshaping Patient First Impressions

CommonSpirit Health has relied on its “humankindness” slogan for 13 years as more than just a tagline. According to Adam Rice, chief marketing officer at the Chicago-based health system, the deliberate fusion of “humanity” and “kindness” was strategically designed to position the organization as a destination for compassionate care.

But maintaining that human connection has become increasingly challenging as artificial intelligence transforms how patients first encounter healthcare providers. During an April 21 Newsweek event, Rice explained the shifting landscape: “Over the last 12 to 18 months, patients have been making their first interaction through answer engines—information which sometimes is in our control, and sometimes is not. It gets a little bit dicey for us. The ‘hello,’ now, is the click of a mouse.”

The statistics are striking—more than 80 percent of patients first experience health systems online, whether through search engines, ChatGPT queries, or review platforms like ZocDoc. This digital gateway fundamentally alters the initial patient impression, a concern echoed by all participants at the Newsweek webinar, “High Tech, High Trust: Building a Health Care Brand that Resonates in the Digital Age.”

Rice was joined by Brandi West, vice president of consumer innovation at AdventHealth (Altamonte Springs, Florida), and Taylor Hamilton, chief digital officer at Ballad Health (Johnson City, Tennessee), who shared similar experiences with the rapidly changing landscape.

The challenge of misinformation is already apparent. Hamilton revealed that Ballad Health has recently faced an unexpected problem with AI platforms: “In the last couple of weeks, some community members have gone in and updated the names of some of our facilities in [an AI tool], and they aren’t accurate.”

This issue highlights a fundamental concern with large language models. “These LLMs are basically just scraping and summarizing information that’s out there,” Hamilton explained. “Now, we’re having to chase our tails to make sure the information is accurate, because once it’s set, it’s a domino effect across the board.”

The scope of AI’s influence on healthcare information is substantial. According to a January 2026 report from OpenAI, five percent of all ChatGPT messages concern healthcare topics, with over 40 million people asking health-related questions daily. One in four regular users submits at least one healthcare query weekly.

These AI systems vary in how they source information. While some prioritize .gov or .edu websites, they also draw from blogs, Wikipedia, Reddit forums, and news articles—potentially including negative coverage about healthcare organizations.

Health systems are adapting to this new reality where they no longer have full narrative control. Rice advised focusing on ensuring “that your message and your brand is coming through, not just the latest headline that you may or may not want consumers to focus on.”

Organizations are developing various strategies to address these challenges. Ballad Health has adjusted how they write and distribute press releases, publishing them more broadly to increase algorithm visibility. They’ve also centralized their consumer contact center as a unified defense against misinformation.

“Things that are generated on the AI side can be escalated to a real person in the contact center,” Hamilton noted. These local staff can provide personalized information that even advanced AI models can’t match, including hyperlocal knowledge that creates authentic connections with patients.

Similarly, AdventHealth recently centralized its reputation management operations, bringing together social media teams and creative agencies. West explained that this approach helps manage the expanding workload of monitoring numerous digital platforms while eliminating redundant research across markets.

“We had these siloed marketing teams all throughout our markets who were thinking about specific platforms and technologies, like the algorithm of Facebook, when we already had a social media team at corporate who was thinking about that,” West said. “This isn’t taking from the markets, it’s actually enabling our markets to completely serve their communities.”

Traditional health systems face additional pressure from digital-native competitors like Amazon One Medical, Hims & Hers, and HealthTap, which often have larger marketing budgets. To remain competitive, Hamilton emphasized that established systems must become “omnipresent,” acknowledging, “We’re no longer that first voice. We’re one of many.”

Despite these challenges, the panelists remained optimistic. West noted that while marketers typically prefer control, they can adapt by focusing on what remains within their influence: “We have to make sure to feed [AI] the right context…context is only as good as the credibility, expertise and clinical authority that you’re building around it.”

For Rice, CommonSpirit’s commitment to “humankindness” has become even more crucial in this new landscape. “With so much synthetic information out there, the importance of authenticity becomes exponentially greater,” he concluded. “We deliver such a personal product and such a valuable service. The idea of getting stuck behind agents and chatbots to help explain what it is that is so special about what we do in our patients’ most needy moments…that is not something we should be comfortably ceding to an answer engine.”