Clinical AI Use Cases Shaping the Future of Healthcare

Summary

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Clinical AI Use Cases Shaping the Future of Healthcare

Becker’s Healthcare Podcast | Host: Scott Becker | Guest: Marcus Perez, President, Altera Digital Health
Release Date: December 19, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Scott Becker interviews Marcus Perez, President of Altera Digital Health, to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping the future of healthcare. The conversation focuses on the challenge of turning healthcare's immense data resources into actionable insights, the importance of data quality and trust, and how real-world AI use cases like ambient scribing are alleviating clinician burdens and driving industry evolution.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Altera Digital Health

• [00:32–01:42]
  • Marcus Perez explains Altera’s mission: "We measure our success by our clients' outcomes."
  • Focus areas: enabling clinicians, empowering patients, and helping healthcare organizations transform through technology.
  • Altera considers itself a healthcare company, not just a tech company:

    “At the end of the day, we consider ourselves a healthcare company. And that's where we think we're different in this space.” [01:42]

2. The Data Challenge in Healthcare

• [02:24–05:23]
  • The majority of healthcare data—97%—remains unused, largely due to issues with data format, semantics, and standards.
  • Data quality and trust are critical for leveraging AI effectively.
  • Altera’s approach: Ingest data from any source, aggregate and harmonize it, and then apply "governance" to ensure trust.
  • Notable process: Applying a “trust score” to data to identify and eliminate outliers and errors.
  • Notable Quote:

    “If we’re all going to take advantage of the power of AI…let’s start and focus on that data.” [03:49]

  • Product spotlight: “Care Intelligence” automates ingestion, standardization, and governance of data using AI.

3. Unlocking Value-Based and Preventive Care with IT

• [05:23–06:28]
  • Value-based care centers on better outcomes; these depend on quality, harmonized data.
  • The synergy between good data practices and proactive, preventive care is emphasized.
  • Perez states that improving data directly improves care:

    “The better the data, the better the opportunity to deliver better outcomes.” [06:21]

4. Prioritizing Health IT Initiatives

• [06:28–07:30]
  • Leaders should focus on securing reliable, traceable data as the backbone for any AI or IT project.
  • Every community has unique needs, so initiatives must be tailored accordingly.
  • Notable Quote:

    “If I was leading a healthcare organization today… I would be hyper-focused on where are we getting our data from, how much can we trust that data so that we can make sure… we’re going to get great results.” [07:10]

5. Most Compelling AI Use Cases in Healthcare

• [07:30–09:51]
  • Ambient scribe technology is highlighted—AI-powered documentation tools that alleviate clinician burden.
  • Difference between basic dictation and advanced AI: AI can populate structured fields across documentation (notes, CPT codes, referrals).
  • Altera’s "Note Plus" product not only listens and transcribes but fills out comprehensive clinical documentation instantly.
  • Notable Quote:

    “Think about the difference between dictation, which just puts notes in a box, and a tool that not only listens but then populates all the fields… The alleviation of burden that that could do for clinicians, I think is monumental.” [09:33]

6. Change Management: Evolution, Not Revolution

• [09:51–13:07]
  • Change in healthcare IT adoption is “an evolution, not a revolution.”
  • AI should augment, not replace, clinician expertise—success comes from incremental, workflow-driven improvements.
  • Emergency department (ED) example: Aggregated data at the point of care streamlines workflows, improves outcomes, and reduces payment denials.
  • Every organization has unique workflows; solutions must meet them where they are.
  • Notable Quote:

    “There’s no revolution, Scott... It’s an evolution and I think you’ve got to find places that you can get incremental and sustainable progress.” [10:20]

  • Customization and adaptability are keys to successful change management.

7. Looking Ahead: Future Technologies and Approaches

• [13:07–15:22]
  • Data—particularly “clean data with robust governance”—will be the linchpin of future success.
  • Predictive analytics, proactive care, and denial management are all powered by data accessibility and quality.
  • Emphasis on investing in tools to unlock the full power of healthcare data.
  • Notable Quote:

    “Imagine a world where you could have a single source of reliable, true data fueled by strong governance... That’s where the technology really does start to be a force multiplier.” [13:47]

  • Missed opportunities: The potential advances possible if the massive volume of unused data were harnessed.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the state of healthcare data:

  “97% of the healthcare data out there today isn’t used at all.” — Marcus Perez [02:59]

• On ambient AI and burden reduction:

  “The alleviation of burden that that could do for clinicians, I think is monumental.” — Marcus Perez [09:33]

• On change adoption:

  “There’s no revolution, Scott... It’s an evolution and I think you’ve got to find places that you can get incremental and sustainable progress.” — Marcus Perez [10:26]

• On visionary data use:

  “Imagine a world where you could have a single source of reliable, true data fueled by strong governance... That’s where the technology really does start to be a force multiplier.” — Marcus Perez [13:47]

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:32 — Introduction to Marcus Perez and Altera Digital Health
• 01:32 — What Altera specializes in
• 02:24 — The data challenge in healthcare and need for trusted data
• 05:23 — Value-based care and importance of data
• 06:28 — Health IT priorities for leaders
• 07:30 — Compelling AI use cases: Ambient scribe and “Note Plus” product
• 09:51 — Change management: Evolution vs. revolution
• 13:07 — Unique approach of Altera: Meeting organizations at their workflow
• 13:25 — Future value: Robust data governance as healthcare’s linchpin
• 15:22 — Closing thoughts and thanks

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Final Thoughts

The episode provides an engaging look into how AI and data management are reshaping healthcare. Marcus Perez emphasizes that high-quality, trusted data is the foundation for meaningful clinical AI applications, from advanced documentation tools to proactive population health. Success, he asserts, comes through incremental evolution tailored to each organization's unique workflows—not a one-size-fits-all technological revolution.

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Transcript

[A]

This is Scott Becker with the Becker Healthcare Podcast. I am thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant leader. We're going to talk today about clinical AI use cases that are shaping healthcare's future. We're excited to be joined by Marcus Perez. Marcus, the president of Altera Digital Health. He's also by background, we should all be thankful to him. He's a West Point graduate. Marcus, so thrilled to have you on with us today. Can you take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about Altera Digital Health?

[B]

Sure. Well, thanks for having me, Scott. I. I've been with Altera three and a half years since we acquired these assets from Allscripts in May of 2022. I've been with Harris, which is the parent company of Altera since 2012 in various roles. Harris is the wholly owned subsidiary of Constellation Software, which is the publicly traded entity. We're a vertical market software organization, the 16th largest in the world, and we acquire and hold forever assets like these. So we're doing our best over the last three and a half years and going forward to build as strong a portfolio of businesses in the healthcare space as we can.

[A]

Marcus, let me ask you another question. Before we dive into data and technology and all of what you're doing and what you're seeing out there and when you see value being added, can you take a moment and just give us a snapshot of what Altera Digital Health does and specializes in, just so our audience has familiarity.

[B]

Sure. So Scott, we have a vision and that vision is we measure our success by our clients outcomes. What does that mean? Well, we really focus on three areas.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We want to enable clinicians to be able to do more. We want to empower patients to be able to drive their own health care on some level. And we want to help organizations transform. What does that mean, really? It's how do you take advantage of the power of technology to deliver better care as an organization? Ultimately, we look at ourselves as a health care company, not a technology company. Yes. We have electronic health records, we have data businesses, we have hosting businesses, we do outsourcing. There's all sorts of stuff we do, but at the end of the day, we consider ourselves a health care company. And that's where we think we're different in this space.

[A]

Thank you very, very much. And take a moment. There's not a shortage of data in health care. I mean, there's so much data roaming around, but organizations still struggle with data quality and then taking that data and turning it into useful action. How is this Mismatch between data and use and how much data is out there and use and active usefulness of it, how is that shaping the broader implications? What are some of the broader implications for clinical and financial operations?

[B]

Yeah, well, what I think is interesting, Scott, is 97% of the healthcare data out there today isn't used at all. And it's because of what you've described. There are all kinds of challenges, particularly around how the data is collated, the semantics around it. There's a lack of standards. And so if you think about, you know, how do we maximize AI? AI is really driven by data. So data quality, particularly trusted data, becomes paramount to anything you want to do in healthcare with AI. And so if you think about that, right, the duplicative nature of data that's out there, the semantic issues, the challenges around errors and misdiagnoses that result from poor data or lack of trusted data, I think that's one of the things we're focused on more than anything, is trying to make sure that we create a way to deliver trusted data to any and every source possible. Again, if we're all going to take advantage of the power of AI, and our job at Altera is to serve our constituents, and that means doing all we can do to help our constituents deliver the best care possible, let's start and focus on that data. And we're working through that today with a product called Care Intelligence that really does ingest the data from any source. And then you've got to aggregate that data. What does that mean? Aggregate? It really means we got to put it into a standard language. So you get these, all these semantic issues, then you now need to harmonize the data, which is resolve all those semantic issues, have this standard data set, but then you have to apply governance to it, Scott, and the governance is what really matters because you track the lineage of that data and make sure that it's trusted. Well, how do you do that? We've applied what we call a trust score to the data to make sure that any outliers or things that don't match or things that look a little wonky get eliminated. And so that the data that's left, that has been aggregated and harmonized, is now able to be used in any way, shape or form. And, and we're doing that process through AI, which means then that you can essentially plug and play any AI engine or tool or agent into the system and be able to take advantage of all that data. In the absence of trusted data, we're never really going to be able to accelerate change in healthcare through AI.

[A]

Thank you very, very much. And Marcus, take us a step further. We see more and more value based care in different systems. Different areas become a good priority. What health IT capabilities should leaders be focusing on and where does it hold the most promise for supporting proactive and preventive care delivery? What are the most important health IT capabilities?

[B]

I think if you think about value based care and value based, what is that all about? It's about better outcomes. I think at the end of the day, having this aggregated, normalized, harmonized data means that you can then deliver better outcomes. And again, if you're an organization who's trying to think about proactive preventative care, that again, is about better outcomes. And so these two things are, I think very congruent and on a parallel track that the better the data, the better the opportunity to deliver better outcomes, which means that's what will drive value based care.

[A]

Thank you. And to follow up on that, how can leaders decide what are the most important initiatives, what's going to bring measurable value and what shouldn't they be doing in terms of health IT priorities?

[B]

Yeah, you know, everybody loves to talk about AI and driving AI initiatives and I think that's important. But when it comes down to it, you know, every community's got unique needs and this idea around reliable, traceable data becomes super critical. If I was leading a healthcare organization today, well, I would be absolutely focused on trying to drive AI. I would be hyper focused on where are we getting our data from, how much can we trust that data so that we can make sure that whatever we use that data for relative to AI or processes, we're going to, you know, get great results. We want to make sure that our clinicians have, that they're, they're most informed at the point of care so we can drive these better outcomes. That all again hinges back on, on data.

[A]

Thank you. We're seeing the last couple years and really accelerating ambient scribes and agentic AI continue to gain traction across healthcare. From your perspective, what are the most compelling AI use cases right now? And you could, can you share an example that illustrates why these things are driving impact and where they're driving impact?

[B]

Sure. I think for us anyway, AI is an asset that connects with human intelligence. Right. We want to connect AI to the human side of care. So you mentioned scribes and, and I think that's important.

[A]

Right.

[B]

To have this AI ambient listening, machine learning that that can drive, you know, alleviate clinician burden, which is certainly a problem. But at the end of the day. What you don't want is just glorified dictation, right? You think about again, back to the data and you know, the ability to read unstructured notes is super critical. And so here we are, you know, with this dictation, essentially this ambient listening that's supposed to alleviate burden, but really all it does is, is data dump into the unstructured note and you got to be able to read that unstructured note and you've got to be able to process the data inside it. What we're doing is taking that ambient listening and machine learning and AI to a different level. Our Note plus product in, in our touchworks business, what it does is not only do the ambient listening, it then populates all of the clinical documentation to include notes, data sets, referrals, even CPT codes. What that does now is it really does allow the clinician to review that note as soon as the encounter is over and make sure that everything is there. Then there's no documentation at all to be done later. Think about the difference between dictation, which just puts notes in a box, and a tool that not only listens but then populates all the fields in a clinical documentation, including the note and the CPT codes and the referrals and all of the order sets. And now that's a full note that doesn't need to be worked on later. The alleviation of burden that that could do for clinicians, I think is monumental.

[A]

Thank you. And we love that. And that is so important in the era of burnout and change as well. Talk for a second about change management. We constantly hear a critical change management is for moving IT initiatives from pilot to wide scale adoption. How are you seeing clinicians and operational teams adopt to the pace of change in health care, especially as technology plays a much bigger role in everyday workflows. What are you seeing there?

[B]

You know, we love to, I love to hear folks talk about healthcare revolutions. There's no revolution, Scott.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That the, the folks aren't coming with the pitchforks and the torches. It's an evolution and I think you've got to find places that you can get incremental and sustainable progress. Right. And really this is around to me, meaningful workflow improvement. And this is where AI can really augment that improvement.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's never going to replace the expertise of clinicians, but it can augment them in terms of meaningful workflow improvement. And let's look at a use case like say the ed. Right. It's a great example of where if you have this aggregated, harmonized data that you've gotten from all these different sources. Now a clinician is able to, at the point of care, have all that data, including all the claim history, to help alleviate denials, to make sure that they process what they're going to do and get it, you know, get it paid for. They get all the clinical data that they need on that patient at the point of care and they can make sure that they can deliver great care that they know they'll get paid to do and the patient will have a better outcome. That's, that's the win that everybody's looking for. That candidly today just doesn't exist.

[A]

But I think your point on this being an evolution versus revolution is, is right on. And it seems to be sort of cascading waves, some of them quicker, some of them slower. We all know in the long term technology is going to have a bigger and bigger impact in input, but it really is an evolution. It's not like a switch goes off and it all changes. It really is an evolution and teams and people got to get used to it as well. I think you're right on there. I love that.

[B]

That's right. Yeah. If you think about what's unique about Altera is that we actually can work at the pace of change for an individual entity and their workflows, because workflows are very unique and organizations all have a uniqueness to them that can't be addressed by a one size fits all approach. And so if you think about trying to pull people along this spectrum of change, this evolution, if you will, you've got to have the ability to meet them where they're at. And where they're at is in the workflows. And so I think that's what makes us quite unique and is that we can work at the pace of change that folks are comfortable with. Some organizations are trying to accelerate, others are really sort of dipping their toe in the water and looking for wins, simple wins, that drive more energy and enthusiasm towards doing more things to evolve. I think that's the joy of what we do, is we're willing to meet folks where they are.

[A]

Thank you. No, and I love that. I'm going to back to you with another question about Tara in a moment. Before we go further, let me ask you this question. Looking ahead, what technologies or innovative approaches do you believe will have the greatest value for healthcare organizations over the next few years?

[B]

Yeah, to me it still distills down to the data. And I know I sound a bit like a data wonk right now, but it really does when you think that 97% of healthcare data goes unused and clean data with robust governance is really the linchpin for, for success, I think, you know, imagine a world, right? It's one of the things I love to do is sort of, you know, ask people to close their eyes and imagine a world where, right? Imagine a world where you could have a single source of reliable, true data fueled by strong governance, right? That enables clinicians and organizations to unlock the full potential of both the data and AI. And that's where the technology really does start to be a force multiplier because it still is the linchpin of the data. And so if I was, you know, if I was an organization and I was thinking over the next few years, where do I invest my time, energy, attention and resources I would be investigating in how do we get tools that ensure that we can take advantage of the power that lies in this data. And that's not just power to treat patients, but again, it's, it's the power to improve, right? Denials and denial rates because you've now got all this payer data. There's so many things, there's predictive analytics, there's proactive care, there's all kinds of things you can do when you unlock the power of the data. And if you think about how much healthcare data is out there today, it's almost mind numbing to realize how much is out there and to know that 97% of that goes unused is. I think it's quite disappointing because what could we do if we could access all that data and then apply the technological tools like AI and machine learning to it? The advances could be vast.

[A]

Marcus, I think just fantastic what you're doing in Altera Digital Health. Again, we're joined today by Marcus Perez, the president Volterra Digital Health. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast.

[B]

Thanks for having me, Scott. Really enjoyed it.