Evaluating the National Value of AI in Healthcare: Economic Savings, Productivity Enhancement, Long-Term Health Outcomes, and Environmental Impact

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is increasingly positioned as a transformative force for national healthcare systems, promising economic savings through more efficient resource allocation, productivity enhancement through automation of administrative and clinical documentation tasks, improved long-term health outcomes through precision prevention and early intervention, and, less visibly, carrying its own environmental footprint through the computing infrastructure that underlies its deployment. Evaluating AI's true national value requires weighing these four dimensions together rather than assessing any one in isolation, and requires holding genuine benefits alongside documented risks, including instances in which AI-driven administrative tools have themselves generated new burdens rather than reducing existing ones. This article proposes and examines a national evaluation framework spanning economic savings, productivity enhancement, long-term health outcomes, and environmental impact, synthesizing national frameworks for AI-powered precision public health and AI-driven prior authorization transformation, empirical evidence on ambient AI scribe technology's impact on clinical documentation burden, critical evidence on AI-assisted prior authorization denial practices in Medicare Advantage, and recent quantification of the public health and environmental costs of AI computing infrastructure. It further draws on high-resolution petrophysical characterization of geothermal reservoir quality and machine learning-enhanced geomechanical characterization of wellbore stability to examine the subsurface science underlying geothermal energy's emerging role in mitigating the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure. The article concludes by identifying persistent gaps in cross-domain evaluation methodology, regulatory oversight, and infrastructure sustainability, and proposes a research agenda for advancing a genuinely integrated national evaluation of AI's value in healthcare.