AI in Healthcare: Current State and Outlook

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — In 2025, investments in artificial intelligence for healthcare are projected to grow by 169% compared to 2024 — the fastest growth rate across all industries in Europe and the Middle East.

This optimism is driven by the success of pilot projects, 87% of which met or exceeded investor expectations, according to a joint report by IDC and Lenovo for Chief Information Officers.

Healthcare organizations are deploying AI in several key areas:

• supply chain and inventory optimization;
• compliance;
• improving patient and user experience;
• reducing cyber threats and business risks.

Despite this positive momentum, only 2% of healthcare institutions are actively using AI. Another quarter are at the early stages of adoption, while the majority (60%) remain in the pilot or planning phase.

Several factors are slowing progress:

Data quality. Access to medical data is strictly regulated, creating barriers for collecting high-quality datasets and applying AI directly in patient care. As a result, many organizations focus on implementing AI in management and security domains.

Overblown expectations. AI cannot yet replace doctors or make autonomous decisions. Physicians must remain responsible for interpreting test results, diagnosing patients, and defining treatment plans.

High costs and limited expertise. Healthcare systems often face underfunding, and AI is rarely a top budget priority. This leads to delays in adoption, suboptimal technology choices, and limited resources for training or hiring machine learning specialists.

To overcome these challenges, medical organizations increasingly rely on partners who can provide AI implementation expertise and secure, high-performance infrastructure for ML applications.

Around one-third of organizations currently use public cloud solutions for AI infrastructure, with nearly as many opting for private cloud. Local infrastructure and edge computing remain less common. Meanwhile, 68% of healthcare providers plan to adopt AI-powered computers soon, with 27% already piloting them — though only 5% have achieved wide-scale deployment.

Researchers forecast that the key drivers of AI adoption in healthcare will include partnering with capable integrators, building internal expertise, ensuring data sovereignty, simplifying integration with existing systems, and expanding access to AI-enabled devices.