Twelve health systems formed a Diagnostic AI Consortium this week and will publish shared governance practices “any health system can adopt.” Here is the map those practices will be derived from.
Advocate Health, Cedars-Sinai, Hartford HealthCare, Houston Methodist, Mercy, Mount Sinai, Northwell, Northwestern Medicine, Sutter Health, UF Health, University Hospitals and WellSpan say they collectively care for nearly 20 million patients a year. That number is true and it is also not a map.
Every square below is a state, sized equally, shaded by how much of that state’s staffed hospital capacity sits inside a consortium member.
The two numbers are not in conflict — they are different units, and the difference is the whole point. “Nearly 20 million patients annually” counts people touched anywhere across twelve systems: clinic visits, EDs, imaging, inpatient stays. AHRQ’s Compendium counts something narrower and more useful for this purpose — staffed beds and inpatient discharges at hospitals it can link to a named system.
Two-point-one million inpatient discharges out of 32.2 million nationally. If the consortium’s product is comparative evidence, that is the denominator its evidence was drawn from.
Before you take a shared governance practice off the shelf, ask what it was validated on. This cohort’s 216 hospitals include 33 major teaching hospitals and one children’s hospital, and 83 of them have fewer than 100 beds — but those small hospitals hold only 3,460 of the country’s 133,717 sub-100-bed beds. A practice tuned to the twelve is a practice tuned to large, mostly urban, mostly academic inpatient care.
Coverage is not the same as usefulness. A protocol that twelve serious systems agree on is worth more than nothing even in a state none of them operate in, and the roster is described as still growing. Every named member is also already a public Aidoc customer, which is a selection problem the map cannot show you.
But the consortium’s stated deliverable is governance practices any health system can adopt. Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia will be adopting them sight unseen.
Twelve competitors now hold the same comparative data. That is a real change. It is also a change that happened almost entirely inside nineteen states.