When people ask me what 2026 has been about at Accuity, I think of one word: innovation. When I think about what 2027 will be for us, I think of one more word: extension.
As I recently shared with HealthLeaders, 2026 was a big year for AI in healthcare. Most companies in our space start with a model and then go looking for clinical expertise. We go in the opposite direction: clinical expertise first, AI second.
The conversation with HealthLeaders was wonderful, but there is one thing I didn’t share with them, and that is the importance of EGG.
Not egg.
EGG: evaluations, guardrails, ground truth.
That is the north star for us at Accuity, and it’s the three-pronged approach to innovation that more healthcare leaders should take in 2027. Let me explain.
- EVALUATIONS. Before any change to our AI reaches production, we evaluate it against cases our physicians have already reviewed. That is what allows clinicians and doctors to feel confident in the results and approve them.
- GUARDRAILS. To ensure success, we add deterministic layers so every result follows established coding rules and standard MS-DRG and APR-DRG grouping logic. Those layers are the guardrails that ensure that our technology does not hallucinate past reality.
- GROUND TRUTH. Accuity has more than a decade’s worth of physician-built clinical criteria, clinical pathways and DRG validation logic, buoyed by years of physician-reviewed and payer-adjudicated outcomes. That historical bedrock, and all of the data therein, is our ground truth.
Those are the three principles that really helped us drive innovation in 2026, and those are the principles that will allow us to accelerate in the coming year. Because the fact is, every day brings exponentially more and more data. There are so many touch points, so many systems. And nothing works if we’re not empowering our physicians to get the most out of their human judgment. Nothing can replace that, nor should anything replace that.
But for clinicians to best do their jobs, they need to know that the data they are seeing is accurate. It must be evaluated. It must have guardrails. And it must be held to ground truth.
After all, you can’t innovate without embracing some EGGs.
Here is my full interview with HealthLeaders. We look forward to continuing this conversation, today and into 2027!