1,006 Patients Were Asked About AI. Where Should Healthcare Draw the Line?
“Healthcare is one of the most complex categories because the buyer, the influencer and the user are often different people,” says Dr Jaslyin Qiyu, a marketing and customer experience leader formerly at Cigna Healthcare. She explains what that means for how marketers use data and automation.
Ask who the customer is in healthcare, and the answer is often several people.
That is where Dr Jaslyin Qiyu starts. A marketing and customer experience leader formerly at Cigna Healthcare, she argues that the split between who buys, who influences and who uses shapes everything that follows: how marketers read data, what they promise and where they put automation between a brand and its customers.
Qiyu offers two examples of how the roles divide.
“In corporate healthcare, for example, an employer may purchase the plan, HR may influence the decision, and employees become the end users,” she says. “In family healthcare decisions, one person may research while another ultimately receives care.”
Marketers, she says, need to move away from “thinking about individuals in isolation” and towards “understanding connected decision journeys.”
Data’s value comes from context
A click or a form submission can signal interest. It does not show who is behind it, what role that person plays in the decision, or what they need next.
“Data remains critical, but its value comes from context. Rather than asking, ‘Who clicked on this?’ the better question is, ‘What problem is this person trying to solve and where are they in their decision journey?’” Qiyu says.
The test of good data, in her view, is not volume.
“The organisations that win aren’t necessarily the ones with the most data. They’re the ones that connect behavioural signals, customer feedback and service insights into a richer understanding of customer needs,” she says.
Together, those sources cover what people did, how they felt and where they got stuck.
The experience is tested after the campaign
That last part matters because service is where a brand’s promise gets tested. Healthcare brands often promise simplicity, personalisation and care, and delivery occurs after a customer responds to a campaign and begins interacting with the organisation.
That is where the biggest gap opens.
“The biggest disconnect occurs during the handoff between acquisition and service,” she says.
A campaign may generate interest, but customers still need to find answers, navigate processes and resolve issues when something goes wrong. When marketing, operations, digital platforms, service teams and providers work independently, customers can face repeated information requests, inconsistent messaging and uncertainty about who is responsible for fixing a problem.
In healthcare, where several people may be involved in a single decision, a broken handoff is harder to spot and costlier to repair.
Acquisition metrics may show that a brand has won attention, but they cannot, on their own, show whether it delivered on its promises. This is why Qiyu argues that the questions organisations ask about performance need to change.
“The most important question isn’t, ‘Was the campaign successful?’ It’s, ‘Did we deliver the experience we promised?‘” she says.
Automation should free people for the harder moments
The same attention to context applies to automation, because healthcare interactions can carry very different emotional weight. Finding benefits information or submitting a claim may be routine. Other situations involve uncertainty, anxiety or decisions that need reassurance.
Patients appear to draw the same line. A 2025 survey by KLAS Research and Luma Health, which polled 1,006 US patients in July, found that they were more comfortable with AI handling administrative tasks and least comfortable with it aiding clinical care. For clinical uses, their concerns centred on accuracy and oversight.
Qiyu describes good customer experience as automation that “should free people to handle higher-emotion, higher-stakes interactions while maintaining human oversight.” Routine work such as finding benefits information, submitting claims and handling pre-authorisations can be simplified, she says, leaving human teams more time for the moments that call for judgement, reassurance and care.
“I don’t think the future is automation versus empathy. The future is automation, enabling empathy at scale,” she says.
The risk, in her view, is confusing the two.
“The risk is when companies mistake efficiency for experience. Healthcare decisions are often deeply personal and emotionally charged. Patients and members may not remember the technology, but they will remember how they felt during an interaction,” she says.
Accountability stays with people
Qiyu encourages teams to use AI for research, summarisation, content drafting, insight generation and workflow efficiency. The line she draws is about responsibility.
“My advice is simple: use AI to accelerate thinking, not replace accountability,” she says. Responsibility for accuracy, compliance and customer impact, she adds, “remains firmly with humans.”
The compliance conversation around AI is also moving quickly, she says. It is no longer only about data privacy. Organisations are increasingly looking at governance, explainability, third-party AI risks, human oversight and accountability frameworks.
For healthcare marketers, that makes trust a compliance matter as well as a brand one.
“Trust is becoming a compliance issue as much as a brand issue,” Qiyu says. Customers need confidence that their personal information is handled responsibly and that critical decisions are not handed entirely to algorithms.
Whether the task is reading a click, honouring a campaign promise or routing a claim, her answers point to the same test: Does the organisation understand the person it is serving, and is someone accountable for the outcome?
As Qiyu puts it, “The organisations that succeed will be those that use AI to become more human, not less.”
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