Why Healthcare AI Needs More Than Just Intelligence: The Case for Robust, Reliable Infrastructure
When we first started our journey at Empathia AI, we were, on the one hand, pleasantly surprised by how quickly physicians embraced what we offer, driven by the burnout they’ve long endured. On the other hand, we quickly realized just how mission-critical our service is to them. As physicians across North America become increasingly reliant on AI to help streamline their workflow, the robustness, stability, and scalability of a service become just as important as its quality and customizability. Yet, these system qualities are often underemphasized by vendors and difficult for end users to discern.
Just this past week, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and API service went down for over 10 hours, followed the next day by a three-hour Google Cloud outage. Meanwhile, Empathia AI maintained its 24/7 availability and upheld our 99.999% uptime promise to users. Another underappreciated aspect: how well our service scales—from initially supporting dozens of clinicians to now serving thousands across the globe—gracefully and reliably.
We’ve been able to maintain these exceptional standards by adhering to a few core engineering principles:
1. A model-agnostic, multi-layered infrastructure.
Since day one, we’ve avoided reliance on a single LLM. Clinical workflow integration, starting with AI scribe, is too important to put all eggs in one basket. Our system dynamically routes tasks across multiple models, including our own fine-tuned model, balancing cost, performance, and medical accuracy. That way, clinicians aren’t left stranded when a model fails or lags.
2. A resilient and scalable cloud architecture.
We’ve leveraged the cloud to its full potential. Uptime and performance are non-negotiables. Our platform is designed for 99.999% availability, featuring regional failover, autoscaling, and intelligent task orchestration to support anywhere from 10 to 10,000 users efficiently and without incurring excessive compute costs.
3. End-to-end security and compliance.
From PHI redaction to regional data storage, security is built into every layer of our system. We go beyond HIPAA and PIPEDA standards, with workflows backed by regular audits from leading third-party firms and full traceability because trust can’t be retrofitted. This commitment has made us a leading vendor for Canada Health Infoway’s 10,000 Family Physician Initiative, PHSA’s 8,000-physician adoption trial in BC, and the e-marketplace for OntarioMD.
4. Local, clinician-centered support.
Even the best technology can occasionally falter. That’s why we’ve invested in local customer success teams across North America, people who understand clinical workflows, speak the language of medicine, and provide white-glove onboarding and real-time support when it matters most.
Over the past two years, I’ve spent countless hours visiting clinics, hospitals, and ER departments, speaking with hundreds of frontline healthcare providers. Pricing is important, but growth at all costs can lead to a race to the bottom, where maximizing signups overshadows the need to deliver a product that is higher quality, more customizable, and truly physician-friendly. The recent outages from OpenAI and Google Cloud serve as a timely warning.
In the end, it’s the overall quality of both product and service that will truly help clinicians combat burnout and give healthcare a real chance to rebalance its strained supply and demand.
–Walter M. Yuan, Ph.D.
CEO, Empathia AI
Jun 15, 2025
