America's largest health insurer wants to use AI to 'solve some of the most wicked problems in healthcare'

Optum, the $91 billion business within UnitedHealth Group, has its hands on a lot of information, from clinical data to information about healthcare consumers. The organization on its own has 140,000 employees, who work with 124 million members and 300 health plans. Now, it's exploring what it can do with that all information to make people healthier using artificial intelligence, an endeavor titled OptumIQ. "It's the coming together of the data, the analytics, and the expertise in the context of all of our businesses," Steve Griffiths senior vice president and chief operating officer of Optum Enterprise Analytics, told Business Insider. "So we work collectively with each of our business lines to understand the intelligence within various products." The idea is that by applying artificial intelligence to the massive amounts of data that comes from all of Optum's businesses, it can predict when someone might get sick and solve problems healthcare experts can't on their own.