No Pilot Graveyards: How Novant Health’s CAIO Turns AI Into Patient Outcomes

Healthcare has accumulated friction that patients have come to accept as normal. Novant Health’s Chief AI Officer is systematically dismantling it.

In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Vijay Sankararaman, Chief AI Officer at Novant Health, about deploying AI across patient experience, clinical operations, and proactive population outreach at a system with 22-plus hospitals and 8 million annual patient encounters.

Sankararaman came to healthcare from retail product and engineering leadership at Walmart and Lowe’s, and he brought a problem-first discipline with him: every AI initiative must justify the problem it solves before the technology is considered. His team has deployed a 24/7 surgical companion, a lung-cancer screening outreach program that contacted more than half of 20,000 at-risk patients in a fraction of the time human call programs managed, and a mammography scheduling agent that drove call abandonment to near zero.

Key Highlights:

Why the hardest part of a CAIO’s job is saying no to AI proposals

How a conversational AI agent reached thousands of at-risk lung-cancer patients human callers could not

What 40% after-hours engagement reveals about suppressed patient demand

Why the CEO’s frame on AI (technology feature vs. business reimagination) determines whether a CAIO role makes sense

How Novant’s build/buy/co-develop architecture avoids vendor lock-in without slowing deployment

This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io