By Doug Kelly:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping medical researchers discover new treatments and enabling doctors to catch diseases sooner, including cancers that used to be found too late to treat. This isn’t just about medical research timelines – this is about more time with our loved ones.
To spotlight AI’s role in game-changing medical breakthroughs, the American Edge Project today released new ads on how AI is transforming American healthcare. Our new ads, Healthcare, Progress, and Early Detection, show what that progress looks like in practice, including how AI helped give a new lease on life to a person with a deadly brain aneurysm. You can read more about our ads here:
While the ads tell the human story, the evidence behind them is powerful.
For example, AI-powered diagnosis is quickly becoming a force multiplier for patients, doctors, and hospitals. Researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Beth Israel Deaconess recently tested an advanced AI model against physicians across difficult clinical reasoning exercises, including real emergency department cases. AI matched or beat the doctors at every stage. At the most critical moment, when patients first walked through the door with limited information, AI correctly identified the diagnosis 67 percent of the time, compared with 50 and 55 percent for two attending physicians.
Faster and more accurate diagnoses matter in every hospital, but especially in a healthcare system where the federal government projects a shortage of 141,160 full-time equivalent physicians by 2038. While AI cannot nor should it replace human doctors, it is a tool that can immensely support physicians – from the ability to process more information to catching warning signs earlier to improving patient outcomes.
Cancer is where the AI payoff becomes even clearer:
- In breast cancer, one of the largest AI mammography trials ever found that AI-supported screening helped reduce missed cancers without increasing false alarms. It also cut radiologist workload nearly in half, meaning earlier detection, fewer missed warning signs, and less burnout in an overstretched field.
- Lung cancer remains one of America’s deadliest cancers because too many cases are found too late. But at Sarasota Memorial, AI is helping scan more than 430,000 radiology reports a year to flag suspicious lung nodules, even when people came in for something else. In 2025, the hospital diagnosed 75 percent of its lung cancers at Stage I or II. The national average is 28 percent.
- Pancreatic cancer is one of the most challenging cancers. . It has no routine screening tests and symptoms often come too late. But Mayo Clinic researchers have developed an AI model that can detect signs of pancreatic cancer on CT scans up to three years before diagnosis, often when it is still curable. For families, three years can mean more treatment options, more time to plan, and a better chance at a positive outcome.
AI is also helping researchers move faster toward cures. Kelonia Therapeutics is developing a treatment that helps a patient’s own body fight multiple myeloma, where early studies found no detectable cancer remained after treatment. Additionally, in heart disease, one early AI-assisted treatment lowered harmful LDL cholesterol by as much as 62 percent with a single dose. Both results are still early and require more testing, but they show where medicine is headed: treatments that are more targeted and effective.
And AI’s promise goes beyond cures. Meta is donating AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta glasses to blind veterans, giving them tools to read text, navigate surroundings, and live more independently.
Why America Must Win the Healthcare AI Race
Every one of these breakthroughs depends on the same foundation: advanced AI models, massive computing power, data centers, energy, chips, researchers, doctors, and a policy environment that lets American innovation move.
China understands this. Its latest five-year plan calls for integrating AI across its economy and advancing leadership in technologies, including healthcare and biomedicine.
Ultimately, the AI race is about who sets the standards, shapes the future of medicine, protects sensitive health data, and captures the economic benefits of new cures. An AI healthcare future led by America will reflect privacy, competition, patient choice, open research, world-class doctors, and human dignity. If China sets the standards, sensitive medical information could become a tool for state control.
To ensure America leads, policymakers must stop treating AI infrastructure as optional or threatening. Blocking data centers, energy, transmission, chips, and skilled workers slows the doctors, researchers, hospitals, patients, and families depending on these tools.
America also needs one national AI playbook that encourages innovation while setting guardrails for real risks. A state-by-state patchwork could slow lifesaving technologies.
The United States has always led the world in the technologies that define the future of medicine, transform care, and save lives. AI is foundational to the next era of American medical leadership. We should embrace AI’s promise, not hold it back.