Banner Health CEO Amy Perry talks about the power of AI

Amy Perry, president and CEO of Banner Health, sees enormous potential in the use of artificial intelligence to transform patient care and engagement.

In an interview with Chief Healthcare Executive®, Perry says she’s very enthusiastic about the potential for AI to rapidly accelerate treatments. She also cited gains in helping patients access the system more easily.

“AI is going to be an extraordinarily powerful tool,” Perry says.

But she says there are challenges, including financial cost pressures that make it more difficult to invest in AI, particularly for smaller systems.

Perry will be talking about the industry’s headwinds during a panel discussion at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas. The digital health conference takes place Nov. 15-18.

When talking about AI, Perry exhibits optimism with a clear-eyed understanding of some of the challenges that come with wider adoption.

“I do think that AI is going to be a powerful tool for patient engagement, way more powerful than any one of us are giving it credit for right now,” she says.

But she also adds, “I think this is definitely the ‘growing pains’ time with AI.”

• Read more: Banner Health CEO Amy Perry says headwinds demand new solutions

The filter of truth

Perry talks about the potential of AI to accelerate advances in treatments, such as cancer vaccines. Banner Health is investing in a bio-incubator to speed advances.

“Our bio-incubator is going to produce things that should have taken 20 years …. we could possibly resolve in two or three years. The amount of advancements that we are going to be able to see in our lifetime, it's amazing,” Perry says.

“But it's also scary, and it also comes with all this other baggage: cyber risks, and, you know, hallucinations, and people getting bad information,” she adds.

She sees health systems having a responsibility to help patients find accurate information, especially as more patients are turning to AI tools to answer questions about medical conditions.

“Healthcare being the sort of filter of truth, I think, becomes really important,” she says. “But it really can only happen, I think, in partnership.”

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Balancing tech investments

Perry talks about the importance of making smart decisions about investing in AI.

“I think that is one of the most difficult things going forward, is for us to be able to balance what makes the most sense in terms of tech investments and care, and where do the two fit together,” Perry says.

She acknowledges that’s an even more daunting challenge for hospitals and health systems without the size and resources of Banner Health. Based in Phoenix, Banner Health operates 33 hospitals and hundreds of care sites in six states. The system reported revenues of $16 billion in the 2025 fiscal year.

With the need to invest more in AI, Perry says she expects to see more consolidation of health systems to get the resources to obtain new digital tools.

Perry says it’s also not necessarily easy to evaluate the returns on AI investments.

“We try to quantify it, but quite frankly, I don't think at this stage the quantification is exact,” she says. “I know that we've had savings in better tracking and in finding things we wouldn't have found before, but how you quantify all of those things, it's really difficult.”

She cites nurses moving from writing down a patient’s blood pressure on notepads, and then later updating records, to using AI tools that can upload patient information right away.

“You're getting more real-time data in the system, looking at an AI deterioration index. So I think that there are a lot of quality pickups with this. With rad AI, identifying lung nodules on a mammogram, things that might not have happened in the past,” Perry says.

“So all of that has a positive economic impact, but how we exactly measure it, we try, and we do have numbers that we use,” she says. “But we also realize that at this point, there's a lot of room for interpretation.”

Perry points to an oncologist at Banner Health that used an AI tool to condense and summarize charts, showing different trends and highlighting the most relevant information in the patient’s record.

Potentially, doctors using that tool could save 50 minutes in preparing for a patient visit.

Perry also sees the potential in AI to reduce burnout and retain staff. She says the big gain is in saving time and helping physicians potentially end their day earlier.

“The truth is, the physician was probably already working till 7 p.m,” she says. “And so now, if I can end that physician's day at 5 or 5:30, that's the win. That's the win.”

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