From Clinical Hype to Operational Value: Assessing AI Use Cases in Polish Hospitals
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Abstract
Despite intense policy attention, artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the Polish healthcare system remains far more visible in rhetoric than in formal procurement requirements. This study provides a managerial and policy-oriented mapping of AI deployment intent by analysing public procurement as an empirical proxy for organisational investment decisions. Using official repositories the Polish Public Procurement Bulletin (BZP) and EU Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), the study compiled a corpus of 85,501 healthcare-related notices published in 2022–2024 and applied a deliberately conservative, multi-stage identification pipeline combining large-language-model screening, Terms of Reference (TOR) verification, and expert oversight.
Only 210 procedures (approximately 0.25% of the corpus) contained explicit, verifiable AI functionality at TOR level, highlighting a substantial gap between “AI hype” and procurement-grade specification. The confirmed AI procurements are strongly concentrated in clinical applications (64.2%), while administrative processes account for 15% and research/scientific applications for 14%. The findings suggest a structural imbalance that may reflect not only technology maturity and clinical prestige, but also asymmetric funding incentives, including the National Recovery Plan (KPO), which has explicitly linked parts of digital-health modernisation to clinically framed AI implementations more strongly than to back-office automation. The article discusses governance implications under the EU AI Act, and argues that administrative AI can provide a lower-risk, faster-to-benefit pathway to measurable operational value, if procurement strategies and incentive structures are rebalanced.
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