From Scribes to Scorecards: How AI Came Up at the WHA May Forum
AI came up in nearly every session at the WHA May Forum. Not as a distant possibility, but as something already reshaping how care gets delivered, how data gets used, and how employers should think about the system they’re buying into. Here’s what the forum revealed.
The WHA May Forum, “Beyond the Bottom Line: Strategies for High-Value, Affordable Healthcare,” brought together employers and union trusts, health plans, physicians and health systems, and state agencies in Seattle this May for a full day focused on what is and is not working in Washington’s healthcare system. Sessions covered workforce health strategy, whole-person care integration, and health data infrastructure. AI wasn’t a dedicated topic on the agenda. It came up anyway, in keynotes, panel discussions, and audience questions throughout the day.
It’s already in the exam room.
Amazon One Medical is rolling out AI scribes across its practice. The technology listens to patient visits, handles documentation, and frees physicians to make eye contact, hear the full story, and build the kind of relationship that actually changes health outcomes. One Medical District Medical Director Dr. Sibyl Siegfried described the shift plainly: “It has allowed me to sit, make that eye connection, hear the story.” For physicians, documentation burden is one of the leading drivers of burnout. AI is starting to reduce it.
It’s becoming a clinical copilot.
Vida Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Richard Frank described a different application: AI that acts as a decision-support tool for clinicians. His example was blood pressure. Patients with diagnosed hypertension reach their treatment goal only about 25% of the time, not because the treatment doesn’t work, but because follow-through breaks down. An AI copilot that flags a patient who still hasn’t hit their blood pressure goal, and surfaces that gap for the physician at the next visit, changes that dynamic without adding cost. Frank sees the same pattern across cardiometabolic conditions: AI filling the space that 15-minute visits can’t.
It’s an opening for employers who want to change the system.
Jennifer Posa, the CIA’s first chief well-being officer and the forum’s opening keynote speaker, made the most direct argument. Healthcare is a system with deep inertia. AI is forcing change on a scale that individual employers, health plans, and physicians and health systems rarely generate on their own. Her advice: don’t fight the disruption, use it. “If you need to change a system and the system is going to be forced to change because of the technology, you actually have more of an opportunity now,” she told the forum. The employers who use that momentum to push for better plan design, better data, and better accountability from their partners will move faster than those waiting for the industry to sort itself out.
Governance matters as much as the technology.
Washington State Department of Health Chief Medical Informatics Officer Dr. Bryant Karras urged caution. AI is moving faster than the trust infrastructure needed to support it. He described the current federal posture as “let everything go and deal with the aftermath later,” and said Washington State is taking a more deliberate approach. For employers, the takeaway is direct: ask your care partners what guardrails they have in place, not just what the technology can do.
The WHA May Forum was a gathering on May 13, 2026, of Washington’s employers, health plans, and physicians and health systems. Learn more at wahealthalliance.org/health-forum-seattle.