SAN FRANCISCO—New divestiture announcements and lasting AI adoption are in the cards for CommonSpirit Health, CEO Lassiter Wright told attendees Tuesday morning.
In a presentation that covered the $40 billion Catholic system’s ongoing turnaround plan and, more extensively, its ongoing AI initiatives, the executive pointed to strategic opportunities where CommonSpirit can collaborate with other organizations or strengthen its existing market presence.
However, “we are making some decisions to transition parts of our portfolio to other providers who we believe can do that community better than we can,” he said. “So those decisions we made, we made about a half dozen of those (since our merger). We'll be announcing a couple [more] in the next quarter. And then we're also looking very aggressively at, how do we augment our portfolio, particularly around ambulatory care, and particularly around communities that need us more intently than we have today.”
The portfolio realignment is concurrent with efforts to strengthen CommonSpirit’s operating margins to a level the room’s bond investors “would be very comfortable with” by 2028, he said.
But between the slides on finance and strategy, Lassiter spent a substantial portion of his talk outlining his and the system’s views on AI in healthcare.
CommonSpirit currently has 242 AI tools deployed across its organization, most of which “are approaching enterprise application and are not just point solutions,” he said. The longer term hope is to find platform opportunities to scale the technology organization wide, he said.
Still, the technology and advanced automation has so far generated $100 million in annual value, including through automated clinical notetaking and patient call processing.
On the clinical side, another rollout that’s been scaled across over 50 facilities has helped triage neuro emergencies and speeding up door-to-treatment time by more than 40%. AI-enabled sepsis monitoring for over 21 million patients, in place in some form at CommonSpirit since 2015, played a role in saving 3,655 in fiscal year 2025.
Lassiter said the organization is largely aligned with high-profile Trump administration officials like Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, M.D., who have urged AI adoption as an opportunity to reduce operating costs in healthcare. Those officials are “open to ideas that we might present to them” on AI, the executive said with the caveat that CommonSpirit isn’t pursuing the technology “just because of any current administration or any current focus in Washington.”
At the same time, he lamented that healthcare provider organizations are “at times, deploying AI for what I consider the wrong reasons. We’re deploying AI to protect ourselves, to protect our revenues because at times AI has been deployed to reduce our revenues” he said in reference to payers’ automated claims denials or related administrative burdens.
“My call to insurers is that … we really need to spend our time focusing how do we ensure that we can take cost and complexity out of our organizations and not think about AI in a militarized zone, of pointing it against ourselves, pointing against insurers, pointing against delivery systems. We’re still doing too much of that, … and I’d love for us to deploy more of our AI for our employees and our patients.”
Lassiter closed his AI commentary with an acknowledgement that AI-driven cost cuts “will, frankly, reduce head count because it will replace things human beings are doing.” With that in mind, he said CommonSpirit launched an “AI Workforce Readiness Academy” 18 months ago that’s reskilling and upskilling “several thousand” employees. Doing so, he said, will allow health systems to preserve their role as large employers and economic drivers in their local communities.