Healthcare AI today: AI bubble may burst, AI hype and hope, agentic AI coming on strong

News and views you ought to know about:

• What do you get when you fall in love with AI in healthcare? A guy with a pin to burst your bubble. The guy is Eric Spitznagel. The pin is a piece published in Medscape Oct. 24. “Investors have firehosed billions into chips and data centers, and healthcare is one of the only sectors large enough to make the math work,” Spitznagel reminds. “And yet a lot of AI company valuation is based on hype.” The crux of the problem gathering in the gap between AI vendors’ promises and AI users’ returns on investment: The dynamic represents a monster version of the classic battle over what’s best for patients and what’s best for investors. The result is an economic bubble of potentially historic proportions. How historic? For Spitznagel it calls to mind the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s. More: 
   
  • “Bubble talk brings to light specific ‘whys’ in AI,” writes Spitznagel, an intrepid journalist with eclectic interests. “Why was the entire AI rollout so fast, so urgent and so ubiquitous? Why was so much of the tech pushed on us even when buggy and hallucinatory and clearly unable to hold up to real scrutiny? Why does AI have to be in everything?”
     
  • If the AI bubble does indeed burst, the economic impact would be “devastating,” Spitznagel warns. “And a market crash could happen fast since one third of the S&P 500’s value comes from only seven AI-driven companies.”
     
  • And yet it’s too soon to panic. “If or when the bubble deflates, the impact on healthcare may look less like a single pop and more like a shakeout,” Spitznagel offers. “Scribes and revenue tools will likely persist because clinicians feel the benefit and finance teams see the return. Hospitals and clinics would feel pauses and rollbacks, tighter privacy terms, rising energy bills and cuts to tools that cannot show outcome gains. It would be disruptive and costly—but more of a sorting than a systemwide shutdown.” Nothing like dropping a bomb and then telling everyone below to relax because, hey, chances are it’ll be a dud. Read the whole thing.
     
• ‘It makes me want to vomit.’ The hype around healthcare AI, that is. The quote is from a hospital executive who only spoke it to Business Insider on condition of anonymity. The occasion was the HLTH 2025 conference in Las Vegas last week. “Everyone is framing themselves as the most generic, enterprise-wide agentic AI solution,” the unnamed source said. “I get it—you want to tell this cool story about how many things you can do. But I need to know what your company actually delivers, today, in the real world.” Kind of puts an exclamation point to the previous item, doesn’t it? 
   
• AI agents, quantum computers and robots in hospitals. Just three hot technologies expected to deepen their hooks in healthcare next year. Watch for providers to use the first of those for building autonomous copilots that assist with managing the entire patient journey—from triaging symptoms to scheduling tests, analyzing results, flagging up anomalies and managing follow-up care. The heads-up is from futurist Bernard Marr, who had his predictions published in Forbes Oct. 27. He also expects telehealth settings will evolve into virtual hospitals. These Marr defines as “hubs for the delivery of the entire spectrum of healthcare services, either directly to patients’ homes or by giving local and regional facilities access to the expertise of specialists located anywhere in the world.” He names as already-there examples Saudi Arabia’s SEHA Virtual Hospital, which connects 130 healthcare facilities with the capacity to treat 400,000 patients each year. “With a growing elderly population and worldwide shortages of healthcare specialists, initiatives like this will become increasingly vital to healthcare delivery.” Get the rest. 
   
• Agentic AI deserves the hype it’s been getting in healthcare. That’s the view of at least one hospital executive. Scott Arnold, chief digital and innovation officer at 1,040-bed Tampa General, expressed the positivity at a MedCity event this month. After reporting the institution’s call-center bots are already proving their worth, Arnold said the smart use of such agents could put some real distance between competing haves and have-nots. “I’m surprised not more [health systems] are bullish” on the technology, Arnold adds. “It’s one of those things that, when done correctly, can really supercharge your brand in a community and relieve a lot of people from doing a lot of administrative work that, frankly, a machine can do.” 
   
• On the soft ROI front, it’s precisely the hyper-commercialization of healthcare that AI can counter. No less an expert than Eric Topol, MD, believes so. “Who would have the audacity to say technology could make us more human? Well, that was me, and I think we are seeing it now,” says Topol, a cardiologist and researcher who still sees patients after selling mountains of books. “I think we can leverage this technology to make it much more efficient but also create more human-to-human bonding.” The Vox reporter to whom Topol gave the quote asked an astute follow-up question: Won’t healthcare workers gifted by AI with more time just use the extra minutes to see more patients? Indeed, won’t they be incentivized to do so “I have been worried about that,” Topol responds. “If we don’t stand together for patients, that’s exactly what could happen. AI could make you more efficient and productive, so we have to stand up for patients and for this [clinician-patient] relationship. This is our best shot to get us back to where we were or even exceed that.” Full Q&A here. 
   
• Also worth your while: 
   
  • AHA responds to OSTP request on AI policies for healthcare (American Hospital Association)
     
  • An AI in healthcare warning: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should (Medical Marketing + Media)
     
  • Do we need AI guardians to protect us from health information overload? (NPJ Digital Medicine)
     
• Research news of note: 
   
  • AI-powered diabetes prevention program shows similar benefits to those led by people (Johns Hopkins) 
     
  • Generative AI can help athletes avoid injuries (UC-San Diego) 
     
  • Using AI to shed light on emergency care (University of Bergen) 
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s sibling outlets:
   
  • Radiology Business: AI bests radiologists at predicting lung cancer treatment responses
     
  • Radiology Business: VR teaching tool leads to ‘significant gains’ in procedural skills for IR residents