How Cognizant Is Powering Health Care's Data Revolution
Health care is undergoing a fundamental transformation from a labor-intensive industry to a data-intensive sector, as artificial intelligence revolutionizes how health care organizations handle everything from insurance claims to drug discovery, representing the biggest operational shift since the introduction of electronic medical records.
Take one of health care's most onerous administrative tasks: provider credentialing, the laborious process of enrolling doctors in insurance networks with varying coding across multiple insurance plans and geographic regions, which can consume weeks or months of work from dozens of staff members.
"Now, with AI, we can get the task done within hours, if not minutes," explains Surya Gummadi, president of Cognizant Americas. AI is creating these kinds of efficiencies in back-office functions, faster clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies bringing treatments to market and real-time insurance authorization that helps health care providers streamline patient care decisions.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Canva
Cognizant, whose platforms are used by two-thirds of the U.S. insured population, approaches health care AI through what Gummadi calls three distinct vectors. Companies first enhance productivity through AI tools and models. They then focus on helping clients "infuse AI across their technology stack"—preparing data layers and applications for AI integration. And the final step, he says, is "agentification," which can coordinate multiple AI processes to handle complex tasks.
"We have agentified our intranet," Gummadi explains. For example, if a Cognizant employee has a major life event, such as a new baby, they do not need to update their information in multiple systems for health insurance and paid time off. "Just one single update," he says, "and the agents across the intranet will coordinate and make it seamless for the associate."
Anchoring Cognizant's role in the administrative backbone that keeps the American health insurance sector functioning is its $2.7 billion acquisition of TriZetto in 2014, which created one of the largest health care technology infrastructures in the United States. TriZetto's platforms serve approximately 350 health insurers, covering about 180 million lives, processing everything from claims adjudication to benefits enrollment.
"We are not approaching AI as a technology solution," Gummadi says. "We are approaching AI as an enterprise solution to help our clients in their business outcomes." This focus on outcomes rather than technology has allowed Cognizant to address what he describes as "value pools that we never had access to," including core business functions that were previously kept in-house.
This shift toward data-driven operations represents more than a technological upgrade—it's health care evolving into an industry where intelligent information processing, rather than human labor alone, drives core functions and patient outcomes. "Twelve months ago, most of the enterprises were a bit skeptical, and they were approaching AI more from an experimentation angle," Gummadi notes. "Now, many companies in different sectors are moving from experimentation to scale."
While regulatory concerns initially slowed AI adoption in health care's highly regulated environment, there are now ways for organizations to "leverage AI by staying within the regulatory guardrails." And as health care organizations race to implement AI solutions, they increasingly opt for outside services rather than build proprietary systems. "There is a common agreement across clients and the service providers that there is no point in reinventing the wheel. So, there is more appetite for partnerships," Gummadi says. "All of us are racing against time when it comes to AI."
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