Matt dives into a specific healthcare topic to help those in the industry, and those outside of it, better understand the market drivers causing today’s healthcare challenges.

Biopharma spent the last year telling everyone it went patient-centric and AI-powered. The press releases wrote themselves. Every earnings call name-dropped AI. Every conference booth promised a patient at the center of everything, usually rendered in soft focus next to a stock photo of a clinician holding someone's hand.

Then Courier Health surveyed more than 170 innovators across 80-plus companies for its 2026 State of Patient-Centricity in Biopharma report, and the real number landed. Eighty-three percent of those companies now use AI in some capacity, up from 46.6 percent a year earlier. Adoption nearly doubled in twelve months. That kind of jump usually signals a real shift.

Here is the part nobody printed on a banner. The same survey found that only 9 percent of companies reached the data maturity needed to actually power AI use cases. Eighty-three percent bought the engine. Nine percent built the fuel line.

You feel the gap immediately if you have ever worked inside one of these teams. The tool shows up. The vendor demos a dashboard that anticipates patient needs and surfaces the next best action. Leadership claps. Then the thing sits there, because the patient data it needs lives in four systems that have never once spoken to each other. The engine revs. Nothing moves. The patient waits exactly as long as they waited before the purchase order cleared.

I have watched this movie in too many commercial reviews to pretend it surprises me anymore. Companies fall in love with the visible win and starve the invisible work that makes the visible win possible. AI did not break patient-centricity. It exposed how little foundation was ever there. The water was always going to find the cracks. AI just turned the pressure up.

Sit with those two numbers. Eighty-three and nine. They describe the same companies, in the same survey, at the same moment in time. The distance between them is the whole story.

The rest of the Courier Health data fills in that distance, and every data point pulls in the same direction. Fifty-eight percent of respondents say they cannot access, connect to, analyze, or act on their own data in their daily operations. 46% describe the data as fragmented across teams and systems. Only 12 percent have approved AI tools with real governance attached. And just 3 percent run agentic AI, the kind that executes complex work without a human pushing every button. Read those four numbers in a row, and you stop seeing a technology story. You see a foundation in failure.

Now hold all of that against the spending signal, because the spending signal is real. Internal or hybrid Patient Services teams jumped to 75 percent of companies, up from 60 percent the year before. Companies are pulling patient support in-house, hiring the people, owning the relationships, putting their own names on the experience instead of renting it from a vendor.

So the will exists. The bodies exist. The infrastructure does not. Teams grow by fifteen points in a single year, and then someone hands those new people insight they cannot use, because the pipes underneath were never connected. You can staff patient-centricity. You cannot staff your way out of broken plumbing.

Archo's ELAVAY research shows the same fracture from the outside in. Advocacy organizations consistently rate companies higher on stated intent than on follow-through. The gap between what a company says it values and what a patient actually receives shows up in advocacy data long before it ever surfaces on an internal dashboard. The BIOADVOCATE Benchmark draws the same line, separating teams that fund patient infrastructure from teams that fund the appearance of caring. The advocacy community feels the gap first because they live downstream of it. They catch the runoff.

Call the failure what it is. A budgeting choice, not a technology problem.

Companies approve seven-figure AI pilots while patient data sits scattered across CRM, medical, and patient services systems that refuse to talk to each other. Leadership funds the layer everyone can see. The dashboard photographs well. The press release quotes well. The pilot earns its own slide in the board deck and a proud paragraph in the annual report.

Then the same leadership underfunds the layer nobody photographs. Data integration. Governance. The unglamorous grind of making one system hand clean, current information to the next system without a human re-keying it at midnight. That work wins no applause and generates no headline, so it loses the budget fight every single cycle. The money flows to the part you can show off.

Watch where that leaves the Patient Services teams that just grew by fifteen points. They sit on top of insight they cannot operationalize, because nobody paid to connect the plumbing beneath them. A patient tells a support coordinator something that matters, something that could change how that patient gets treated next month. The insight enters a system. The system does not connect to the team that could act on it. The insight dies in a slide deck, and the patient never learns it could have been otherwise.

The Courier Health experts say it without flinching. The barrier is not the regulators. Only a small slice of respondents blame compliance or regulatory concerns for their inability to act on their own data. The real culprits are siloed systems, shaky data quality, and insights that arrive too late to drive a decision. Companies built a patient-first story on a foundation they never bothered to pour, then acted shocked when the story cracked.

That is the entire con. You cannot AI your way out of plumbing you refused to install. The model is only as smart as the data you feed it, and you starved the line that feeds it.

The companies pulling ahead do the boring work first, and they do it on purpose, with a budget behind it.

ELAVAY's top tier funds Business and IT alignment before the next tool purchase. They treat the order of operations as the strategy itself. Foundation, then capability, in that sequence, every time. The Courier Health experts from Genentech, Pfizer, and Denali flagged the same discipline in their own words. They engage their technology counterparts early and often, design around the outcomes they want rather than the org chart they inherited, and refuse to bolt a shiny tool onto a base that cannot support it.

These leaders treat data governance as patient-facing work. Most companies file governance under back-office overhead, somewhere near IT ticketing and expense approvals, a cost to minimize. Top performers know better. A patient insight you cannot act on is a promise you cannot keep. When a coordinator learns that a patient keeps falling out of therapy, and the system cannot route that signal to anyone with the power to intervene, the patient pays for the broken pipe with their health. Governance decides whether a captured insight becomes an answered need or a dead entry in a database.

The best teams measure follow-through, not intention, and they hand the grading pen to someone else. They let the advocacy community score them rather than scoring themselves. Self-assessment always flatters the assessor. A company that surveys its own people will always sound patient-centric, because the people answering built the programs they are grading. A company that lets advocacy organizations evaluate its actual behavior finds out exactly where the story and the substance split apart. ELAVAY exists to surface that split, because the patient already feels the difference, whether or not the company ever chooses to measure it.

Andres Diaz at Denali named the trifecta cleanly in the Courier Health report. People, process, and technology, working together toward an outcome, none of the three carrying the load alone. The companies that win the next several quarters move from pilots to production and from aspiration to execution. Everyone else keeps buying engines and parking them in the garage.

Here is the move. Audit one thing this quarter. One insight. Not a transformation initiative, not a maturity assessment, not a six-month working group. One.

Pick a single patient insight your team collected in the last twelve months. Something a coordinator heard on a call, a survey surfaced, or an advocacy partner flagged to you directly. Trace it end-to-end. Follow that insight from the moment you captured it to whatever action it produced downstream. Then ask the only question that matters. Did anything actually change because we learned this?

If the trail goes cold in a slide deck, you have a plumbing problem, not an AI problem. No tool fixes that. No pilot fixes that. The next dashboard makes the same dead insight prettier and just as useless. You connect the pipes, or that insight dies the identical death next year, and the year after, while the press release keeps promising otherwise.

I will tell you what the audit usually turns up, because I run a version of it with commercial and advocacy leaders. The insight existed. Someone captured it and did the genuinely hard part, the listening. It entered a system. And then it stopped cold, because the system that held it never connected to the team that could have used it. The company nailed the listening and skipped the wiring that turns listening into care.

Archo helps commercial and advocacy leaders measure that gap and close it. We show you where your stated intent and your patient reality diverge, then we hand you the data to fix the divergence instead of just narrating it in another deck.

See where you stand against the advocacy community in the 2026 ELAVAY report. Or email [email protected], and we'll start the conversation today. You can also join us for an introduction to this year’s ELAVAY insights through our webinar on June 30th, 2026. You can register for the webinar here. You can also hear from me at the World Orphan Drug Summit, July 13 - 14, or the Chief Patient Officer Summit, July 23- 24. Use my link below for a discount for the CPO Summit!

The industry has already proven it will spend on AI. Eighty-three percent of these companies signed up in a single year. The winners spend on the pipes first. Everyone else funds another press release and keeps wondering why the patient never feels a thing.