We’ve all heard the promises. AI will revolutionize healthcare. It will predict disease, personalize treatment, and solve our most pressing challenges. But if you’re a healthcare leader trying to actually implement AI, you know the gap between those promises and practical reality feels more like a canyon.
That’s exactly why we developed The Playbook: Implementing AI in Healthcare, and why the process of creating it might be just as valuable as the final resource itself.
The vendor pitch deck blitz
Healthcare organizations are drowning in AI vendor promises and theoretical frameworks. What’s been missing? Evidence-based guidance grounded in real-world deployment experience. The kind of guidance that helps you distinguish between truly transformative opportunities and expensive distractions that will gather dust after the pilot phase.
The Playbook delivers practical insights on the questions that healthcare leaders are facing today: How do we assess total cost of ownership? What infrastructure do we really need? How do we integrate AI into clinical workflows without disrupting care? And critically—how do we prepare for tomorrow’s AI landscape while implementing solutions today?
Healthcare infrastructure, realistically
One area we spent time on was Edge AI and distributed computing approaches. Why? Because while everyone’s focused on today’s cloud-centric implementations, the infrastructure realities of healthcare are already shifting.
This isn’t just future planning. Organizations are currently implementing edge solutions—partners like Intel are working with health systems to optimize existing infrastructure to run AI models locally, thereby achieving faster clinical decisions without relying on cloud dependencies. But these early success stories raise critical questions for healthcare leaders: When does edge deployment make sense for your organization? What are the real infrastructure trade-offs? How do you plan for scalability? The Playbook helps healthcare leaders answer exactly these questions, while offering true, insight-driven collaboration with leaders in the ecosystem.
The not-so-secret, secret: Learning together
That’s what made this project different. The process itself became a collaborative learning environment for our partners. In regular convenings—a few per month—DiMe brought together project partners (clinicians, patients, technology leaders, regulatory experts, and implementation specialists) for peer learning, information sharing, and candid discussion of challenges in a pre-competitive space.
“What sets this resource apart is its multi-stakeholder perspective,” said Abhishek Khowala, Principal AI Engineer at Intel. “The collaborative development process ensured input from clinicians, patients, technology leaders, regulatory experts, and implementation specialists.”
Our partners told us these sessions delivered immediate value. They connected with peers facing similar implementation challenges. They shared what worked and what didn’t. They learned from each other’s experiences in real-time. The convenings created a community of practice that extended beyond The Playbook‘s pages.
This multi-stakeholder approach ensured the final resource was informed by the collective wisdom of those doing the hard work of AI implementation every day.
What Makes This Different
The Playbook champions a clinician-driven approach that keeps patient benefit at the center. Not technology-first implementations that look impressive but fail to integrate into actual workflows. Not AI for AI’s sake. Real resources that increase the likelihood of successful adoption and meaningful impact on care delivery. At the same time, The Playbook encourages organizations to adopt a pragmatic approach to deployment challenges and total cost of ownership, ensuring that AI projects go live and deliver value to stakeholders over the long term.
And it meets organizations where they are. Whether you’re just beginning to explore AI applications or seeking to scale existing implementations, you’ll find relevant resources and practical tools. Because successful AI adoption is as much about organizational readiness and change management as technical capabilities.
Join Us
The Playbook: Implementing AI in Healthcare represents months of collaborative development, dozens of expert perspectives, and countless hours of real-world implementation experience distilled into actionable guidance. We’re proud of what we built together—but the building doesn’t stop here.
DiMe is bringing leaders in the field together to scale trustworthy, AI-enabled care navigation to transform patient care journeys while delivering measurable returns for the industry, including health systems, payors, and innovators. AI will continue to change the landscape of healthcare. The opportunity is to lead the way.
Dive deeper with our comprehensive resource The Playbook: AI Implementation in Healthcare, and enroll in our free online course Health AI for low-resource healthcare settings, to access in-depth knowledge and practical training that healthcare professionals can use to successfully implement AI in their settings.
The Digital Medicine Society convenes healthcare stakeholders to develop practical guidance for emerging technologies. Learn more about our collaborative approach.
