Ardent Health and AI: Current uses and future plans | ViVE 2025

Nashville – Ardent Health has been using AI to help doctors save time and headaches, Marty Bonick says.

Bonick is president and CEO of Ardent Health, a for-profit system that operates 30 hospitals and more than 200 other healthcare locations. Ardent is based in Brentwood, Tennessee, a Nashville suburb.

So it was a quick trip to attend the ViVE digital health conference. While at ViVE, he talked with Chief Healthcare Executive® about the ways the system is utilizing artificial intelligence, where Ardent is being cautious, and why he’s enthusiastic about AI. You can read the full story, but here’s an excerpt of the interview.

Q: How is Ardent Health utilizing AI?

A: “At Ardent, we're really excited about the potential of how AI is going to help us with care at the bedside, in terms of making it easier for our caregivers to deliver care, safer, more effective for our patients to receive care, and then also looking behind the scenes in terms of, how do we make our processes more efficient? How do we make care easier to access? How do we make it easier and more effective and efficient to deliver through our system?”

“And we see just a lot of potential at these early innings of what AI has been able to do these last couple years, and more importantly, what it's going to be able to do for us the next couple of years.”

Q: What are you excited about in the next few years?

A: “I think the ability for AI agents to take off a lot of the rote and sort of low-level tasks that all health systems have to do to stay engaged with their patients, to make sure that the appropriate pre-op phone calls are happening, post-op discharge, follow up, just communication reminders, prescription refills, all the things that we interact with.”

“We have millions of encounters every year with our patients, and there's a lot of friction in the system. People have to call phone trees and call somebody, get voice mail, get re-directed. AI think is going to be able to just liberate a lot of that information and help us to provide a better, seamless care for our patients.”