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Change at the Speed of Trust: 4 Takeaways from Aidoc's Clinical AI Partnership with Hartford Healthcare

Adoption, C-Suite, Workflow
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When Aidoc CEO Elad Walach joined Hartford HealthCare’s President and CEO Jeffrey Flak and fellow AI innovators for the health system’s annual Leadership Summit on deploying clinical AI at scale, the conversation didn’t stay theoretical for long. Here’s what stood out.

1. The hardest part of deploying clinical AI isn’t the technology.

It’s trust. Walach opened with a number that reframes the entire AI-in-healthcare conversation: it takes 17 years, on average, for a clinical innovation to reach standard care. That timeline is incompatible with the pace of AI development — and the pace of patient need.

His answer is a principle Aidoc has built its culture around: you can only change at the speed of trust. That means investing in safety, transparency and reliability before asking a health system to move fast. Cutting corners on any of those fronts doesn’t accelerate deployment. It stalls it.

2. Speed is a byproduct of alignment — not pressure.

Trust is necessary. But it isn’t sufficient. The second ingredient for moving fast, Walach argued, is a partner structurally able to act on it.

That’s what makes Hartford HealthCare different. As Walach put it: “You have something very unique here in Hartford — an impatience, which is healthy, combined with top-to-bottom alignment, which is incredibly rare. We’ve been able to deploy over 15 AI solutions in the span of weeks. That’s an insane velocity for change.”

Fifteen-plus AI solutions in weeks isn’t a technology story. It’s a culture story.

3. Real-world proof points matter more than benchmarks.

In HHC’s first week of go-live with Aidoc, a 41-year-old patient came in for a routine oncology exam. Aidoc flagged a significant pulmonary embolism he had no idea he had — on a Friday afternoon that otherwise would have meant a weekend without care. The radiologist expedited treatment immediately.

No benchmark captures that. No slide deck makes that case better than the patient who went home treated instead of waiting.

Walach also shared that Aidoc received FDA clearance for the world’s first imaging foundation model — capable of identifying more than a dozen diseases in the abdomen simultaneously. The Friday afternoon PE catch and the foundation model are different scales of the same idea: AI that works in the real world, for real patients, right now.

4. “Pleased, but not satisfied” is the only acceptable posture.

The panel closed with each CEO sketching a two-year vision. Walach was precise: “We want Aidoc to be the clinical AI companion for every care interaction — to ensure that every diagnostic decision is made with reliability, with accuracy and on time.”

His leadership lesson for the room borrowed a phrase HHC’s own leadership had shared: be pleased, but not satisfied. The FDA milestone matters. The 41-year-old patient who received immediate treatment matters. But with 400,000 diagnostic deaths still on the ledger, the work is nowhere near done.

Hartford HealthCare’s CEO Jeffrey Flaks closed with a line that captured the partnership plainly: “We have the humility to know what we don’t know, and a willingness to trust others who can help us get better faster.”

That’s the kind of partner worth moving fast for.

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