AI Companies Are Cutting Hospitals Out of Healthcare

American healthcare has long operated on a fixed sequence: a patient enters a healthcare institution, a physician orders imaging, a radiologist reads it, and the results flow back to the institution that ordered it. AI is breaking that sequence apart. Leading AI companies are inverting the order, reaching the consumer first and leaving the clinical system to manage what comes next. Over the past three years, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have each built consumer health products that sit between patients and the traditional clinical system, bypassing hospital procurement entirely. In June, AI image generation company Midjourney took that shift one step further. It announced a full-body ultrasonic scanner, a physical device in a physical room, that it plans to deploy in consumer wellness venues called Midjourney Spas. Raw HTML Block — preview on published page The AI companies are looking to bring costs down drastically. An MRI that can cost up to $4,000 may now cost just $100 with the advanced imaging solutions. 2 Models, One Problem Radiology is facing a supply and demand mismatch. The American College of Radiology reported in February that radiologist workforce shortages ranked as the single biggest structural threat to the field for the third consecutive year, with rising imaging volumes ranked second. Two distinct responses have emerged, and they point in opposite directions. Incumbent imaging hardware manufacturers are solving the problem through institutional integration. GE HealthCare acquired imaging software company Intelerad for $2.3 billion in November 2025, positioning itself as what analysts called a "digital diagnostics consolidator" by building AI-enabled workflows that it sells to hospitals and health systems. At the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting last December, GE unveiled its Signa One MRI platform, which weaves AI across pre-patient planning, scanning, and image reading, all within the clinical procurement channel. Siemens Healthineers presented comparable AI-enabled radiology services at the same conference, specifically targeting staffing and workflow pressures at health systems. Consumer AI companies are solving the same problem by removing the hospitals from the equation. Midjourney's scanner, built by a nine-person team led by a former Apple Vision Pro engineer, submerges users in a shallow pool of warm water and fires sound waves through their bodies using 358,000 transducers. Founder David Holz has set a target of 1 billion scans per month, with the first Midjourney Spa planned for San Francisco by the end of 2027. Raw HTML Block — preview on published page The Price Compression and What It Unlocks The consumer imaging market has been compressing costs at a pace institutional players cannot match. Preventive healthcare startup Prenuvo (the market leader in Whole-body MRI) charges $2,499 for a comprehensive scan. Ezra, acquired by Function Health in May 2025, dropped its base scan price to $499 after the deal. Holz, without specifying the exact price, has described Midjourney's target price as “extremely reasonable,” while noting the raw scan has "almost no price." Each price reduction is enabled by the same regulatory mechanism. Under the FDA's general wellness policy for low-risk devices, companies that market imaging output as a "body composition map" rather than a clinical diagnosis operate entirely outside medical device regulation, in the same category as fitness trackers. No diagnostic clearance is required. No insurance reimbursement is involved. The company captures the scan revenue; the healthcare system absorbs what follows. What follows is the more expensive part. A hospital diagnostic MRI of a single body part costs $1,000 to $4,000, depending on insurance. A hospital CT abdomen with contrast runs comparable figures. Prenuvo covers the full body for $2,499. But those hospital costs exist within a reimbursable, physician-ordered, clinically indicated framework. Consumer scans do not, and the follow-up they generate enters the system without that framework in place. Who Inherits the Follow-Up The clinical term for an abnormal finding in an asymptomatic patient is an incidentaloma. Research published in Radiology Advances identifies downstream follow-up costs as the central economic burden of whole-body screening programs, with a significant share coming from findings that ultimately prove benign. In a large population study of asymptomatic individuals, 30.3% had at least one incidental MRI finding; among those who underwent biopsy, 62.1% showed no malignancy. Prenuvo and Ezra have already established the handoff model: the company delivers the scan report, and follow-up care is directed to the patient's own healthcare providers. At the scale Midjourney is targeting, that handoff becomes a structural transfer of clinical and financial burden to health systems that had no role in generating it. Steve Forthuber, Eastern

AI Companies Are Cutting Hospitals Out of Healthcare

2 Models, One Problem

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