10decodersA platform is not a solution. Someone still has to build the worker.
The healthcare AI market sells two very different things under one word. Confusing them is the single most expensive mistake in a mid-market evaluation, because the cost of the second model shows up in your headcount plan, not the vendor's invoice.
You buy the tooling. You supply the build team.
Licence covers the platform, the connectors and the studio. Getting a prior-authorisation workflow into production requires solution architects, integration engineers, a clinical SME and someone to own it at 2am — sourced by you, or from the vendor's partner network at day rates.
Where the cost hides: the internal team you didn't budget for, and the 9–14 months before the first workflow touches a real claim.
You buy the working system. We build and operate it.
We scope one healthcare workflow, build the digital worker on CheiAI, integrate it into your record and claims systems, validate it against your own historical data, and then run it — with named engineers, monitoring and an escalation path that belongs to us.
What you own: a workflow in production and the outputs it produces. Not a backlog of platform configuration.
Twelve criteria, four categories, weighted to reflect what breaks deployments.
Each criterion scores 0–5. The category weights below are our defaults; you can change them in the scorecard to match your own risk profile. Under each criterion is the evidence to demand — from us, and from everyone else you're evaluating.
Delivery & production ownership
Default weight — 30 / 10001Post-go-live operation ownership
After launch, does the vendor run the system, or hand you a runbook? Ask specifically who receives the alert at 2am and whose payroll they are on.
02Time to first workflow in production
Not time to demo, and not time to pilot. Time until one real workflow processes real records under real volume. Count from contract signature.
03Delivery bench depth and continuity
Can the vendor absorb a scope increase or an engineer leaving without restarting your project? Boutiques stall; large SIs rotate staff off the account.
Healthcare data & clinical fit
Default weight — 28 / 10004PHI handling and HIPAA posture
Where PHI sits, who can see it, whether it leaves your tenancy, and what happens to it inside model calls. A signed BAA is table stakes, not a differentiator.
05Record, claims and document integration
Healthcare data arrives as faxes, scanned PDFs, HL7 messages and free-text notes. Ask what the vendor does with the 30% that is malformed — not the clean 70% in the demo.
06Accuracy validation method
How accuracy is measured, on whose data, and what the published failure modes are. A vendor that cannot describe where its system fails has not measured it.
Security, compliance & auditability
Default weight — 24 / 10007Independent certification
Certifications held by the delivering entity, current and verifiable by number — not a parent company's badge reused in a deck.
08Zero-trust architecture and access control
Least-privilege access for engineers, secrets management, network segmentation, and whether offshore delivery staff can reach production PHI at all.
09Audit trail, traceability and explainability
For any automated decision, can you reconstruct which inputs produced it, which model version ran, and who reviewed it?
Commercial risk
Default weight — 18 / 10010Contractual accountability for outcomes
Whether performance claims survive into the contract as service levels with consequences, or evaporate between the deck and the MSA.
11True cost including your build team
Licence plus implementation plus the internal headcount the model requires. Score this on the three-year total, not year-one list price.
12Portability and exit path
If you leave in year three, what do you keep? Prompts, evaluation sets, integration code and fine-tuned artefacts should be yours in a usable form.
Score us against anyone on your shortlist. The second column is yours.
Our column is fixed — those are the scores we're willing to defend on a reference call. Set the other column using the evidence you've collected, adjust the category weights to your priorities, and print the result for your evaluation file.
Healthcare AI vendor comparison
Scores 0–5 per criterion. Totals are weighted to 100.
Category Score Breakdown
Three criteria where a different vendor may beat us — and how to tell.
A scorecard where the publisher wins every row is marketing, not an evaluation instrument. These are the rows where we'd expect a well-prepared competitor to score higher, and the questions that will reveal whether they actually do.
Portability and exit path
Digital workers we build run on CheiAI, our orchestration layer. You keep the integration code, prompts, evaluation sets and data artefacts, and we document the exit path — but rebuilding the orchestration elsewhere is real work.
US federal compliance regimes
We hold ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 and operate to HIPAA requirements. We do not hold FedRAMP authorisation. If your workload falls under federal programme requirements, that constraint is real.
Analyst presence and brand cover
We are not in the major analyst quadrants. If your board requires an analyst-recognised name to sign off the decision, that is a legitimate constraint and we would rather you raise it early.
Delivered outcomes across enterprise healthcare workloads.
"Healthcare AI doesn't fail in the demo room. It fails when PHI integration hits real-world edge cases. We build digital workers that stay in production."Abinaya SoundararajanHead of Delivery, 10decoders
