The Complete Guide to Using AI in the Healthcare Industry in Honolulu in 2025

Honolulu's healthcare landscape in 2025 is being reshaped by local AI research and capacity-building: UH Mānoa's ALOHA Lab developed GenBEE, a structure‑aware model that improves biomedical event extraction and will be presented at an international database conference, while Chaminade and JABSOM's AIM‑AHEAD–supported ARCH project is training “AI navigators” and building a web gateway to connect community providers with models and datasets - practical moves that speed reliable synthesis of clinical text for research and equity work.

Clinicians, administrators, and public‑health teams can pair these advances with skills training - Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work - Nucamp AI Essentials bootcamp (15 weeks) - to turn algorithmic output into faster, actionable insights; see the ALOHA Lab publications and Chaminade AIM‑AHEAD project for local evidence and pathways to collaboration: ALOHA Lab AI research at UH Mānoa and Chaminade AIM‑AHEAD partnership and ARCH project.

“UH Mānoa and the ALOHA Lab are at the forefront of AI research, driving innovations that improve information accessibility, enhance healthcare insights, and adapt technology to meet the unique needs of diverse communities,” said Zhang.

In 2025 the AI trend in healthcare is practical adoption focused on clear ROI and trustworthy outputs: providers are moving from proof‑of‑concepts to tools that reduce clerical load and surface actionable signals - think generative AI plus retrieval‑augmented generation for up‑to‑date answers, ambient listening to capture encounters, and targeted NLP for clinical text extraction; ambient AI scribes have been reported to save clinicians roughly one hour per day, a concrete time‑saving that translates directly to more bedside care and less burnout.

Local research powers this shift - UH Mānoa's ALOHA Lab (GenBEE) improves biomedical event extraction for cleaner, structured inputs that feed safer RAG workflows (ALOHA Lab GenBEE biomedical event extraction) - while national overviews outline the same priorities: chatbots, predictive analytics, imaging support and workflow automation as top 2025 use cases clinics should pilot (AI healthcare trends to watch in 2025).

“UH Mānoa and the ALOHA Lab are at the forefront of AI research, driving innovations that improve information accessibility, enhance healthcare insights, and adapt technology to meet the unique needs of diverse communities,” said Zhang.

AI in Honolulu shows up first where pattern recognition matters most: endoscopy and oncology. Local gastroenterology practices have adopted the GI Genius™ intelligent endoscopy module - deployed at Pacific Endoscopy Center in Pearl City and the Endoscopy Institute of Hawaii in Honolulu - to flag suspicious polyps in real time and boost adenoma detection, a concrete win because every 1% rise in detection cuts colorectal‑cancer risk by about 3% (GI Genius intelligent endoscopy rollout in Hawaii).

Oncology and precision‑health teams at the UH Cancer Center are another hotspot: the campus' AI Precision Health work (AI tools in use since 2018) powers image‑based searches, trial matching, and a $7M NIH‑backed Dietary Assessment Center studying personalized nutrition for Hawai‘i's diverse population (UH AI Precision Health Institute).

Outside hospitals, AI is embedded in retail and virtual care workflows - Longs/CVS in‑store clinics, pharmacy platforms and telehealth triage are expanding access and closing gaps - so patients often meet algorithmic decision support before they see a specialist (Honolulu health care trends article on virtual care and retail clinics), a practical shift that channels scarce specialist time to higher‑value cases.

“The AI revolution is already upon us, and poised to dramatically change the face of medicine,” said Yousif A‑Rahim, M.D., Ph.D.

UH Mānoa's ALOHA Lab, led by Assistant Professor Haopeng Zhang, is translating cutting‑edge NLP research into tools that make clinical text more actionable for Honolulu providers: the lab's new GenBEE model is a structure‑aware generative approach that uses structured prompts to better recognize and organize layered biomedical events - demonstrating superior performance on benchmark datasets and slated for presentation at the 30th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications in Singapore - while companion work (DomainSum and a systematic survey of text summarization) targets robust, domain‑aware summarization so clinical notes and research abstracts stay accurate across diverse Hawai‘i populations; see the UH News summary of these publications and the ALOHA Lab project page for methods and papers.

UH Mānoa ALOHA Lab AI research summary · ALOHA Lab homepage and project details

“UH Mānoa and the ALOHA Lab are at the forefront of AI research, driving innovations that improve information accessibility, enhance healthcare insights, and adapt technology to meet the unique needs of diverse communities,” said Zhang.

Telehealth and hybrid care are already reducing Honolulu's geographic barriers by shifting specialty access to the screen and the neighborhood pharmacy: the Pacific Basin Telehealth Resource Center (PBTRC) has driven statewide telehealth adoption (from 2% in 2014 to 20.5% in 2019), piloted library-based Telehealth Access Points with MiFi loans and navigator support to close digital‑literacy gaps, and frames telehealth as a practical remedy for island travel burdens - about 5,000 pregnant people fly to Oʻahu annually for prenatal ultrasound screening, with roughly 100 emergency flights costing $10,000–$15,000 each that telemedicine can help avoid (PBTRC Hawaiʻi telehealth resources).

Health systems like Queen's standardized video care inside Epic (ExtendedCare) and expect roughly 165,000 telehealth visits a year with ~85% patient satisfaction and technical‑success rates, showing how integrated platforms make hybrid workflows reliable across home, clinic and inpatient settings (Queen's Health Systems telehealth virtual care build-out).

Practical pilots should align with Hawaii's reimbursement landscape - Medicaid allows live video, RPM and (temporarily) audio‑only services - so teams must design hybrid programs that pair in‑person follow‑ups, pharmacy‑based care and remote monitoring to protect access for rural and kūpuna populations while planning for upcoming Medicare rule changes that narrow at‑home coverage (Hawaii telehealth laws and reimbursement overview).

“Telehealth is a natural fit for our island state, where the majority of health specialists are in Honolulu, but need to service patients on the other islands,” said Christina Higa.

Honolulu's ethics and equity work centers on Chaminade's partnership with JABSOM and the NIH‑backed AIM‑AHEAD consortium to make AI tools accountable, community‑driven, and usable: Chaminade helped secure a $500,000 Phase II AIM‑AHEAD award to expand the ARCH (AI Resource Concierge for Healthcare) web gateway - training “AI navigators,” funding student internships and a health‑equity hackathon, and packaging datasets, tools and technical assistance so clinics, community groups and policymakers can apply AI without amplifying bias (Chaminade AIM‑AHEAD ARCH project).

That local work links directly to AIM‑AHEAD's national mission to increase researcher diversity and ethical practice in EHR‑driven AI (AIM‑AHEAD consortium resources) and grew from community listening sessions and a Pacific stakeholder symposium that foregrounded indigenous and island perspectives - an important outcome: concrete training pipelines and engaged governance so models used in Honolulu are built with Pacific data stewardship in mind (Pacific engagement symposium summary).

The so‑what is immediate and practical: ARCH moves Honolulu from external, one‑off pilots toward locally governed AI deployments by embedding trained navigators and students into projects that address diabetes, PTSD and other regional priorities, reducing the chance that large, non‑representative datasets will drive care decisions for Pacific communities.

“We wanted to engage the community and understand some of the things that are really important to them.” - Dr. Claire Wright

As Honolulu hospitals and clinics bring more AI into diagnostics and virtual care, local IT leaders are treating INTERFACE Honolulu 2025 as the practical hub for hardening those deployments: the one‑day conference (May 22, 2025, Sheraton Waikiki) gathered CIOs, CISOs and infrastructure teams to tackle ransomware, “AI: The New Attack Surface,” and cloud‑native recovery strategies, with sessions like IBM's “AI: The New Attack Surface,” Rubrik's “Restoration in 72 Hours, Not 72 Days,” and practical demos on microsegmentation and SSE - concrete topics that matter for healthcare because an effective cyber recovery plan can mean restoring clinical systems within days instead of weeks, keeping operating rooms, EHRs and telehealth services running during an incident.

INTERFACE also showcased regional providers and vendors (Cynerio, DRFortress, Netskope, Rubrik) and an attendee mix focused on healthcare and government, which makes the event a targeted place to align procurement, zero‑trust designs, and local data‑residency solutions for Hawaiian health systems; see the INTERFACE Honolulu 2025 event page and the INTERFACE attendee list for planning follow‑up meetings and vendor evaluations.

“Thanks to Vendelux, we're able to confidently choose which events we should be sponsoring and attending!” - Robyn Hazelton

By 2030 Honolulu's healthcare will shift along three clear vectors: first, precision and personalized care - AI models that mine EHRs, genetics and imaging will enable tailored treatment plans and faster trial matching, a trend seeded locally by UH Mānoa's GenBEE work to extract richer clinical events (UH Mānoa GenBEE clinical event extraction research) and reinforced by broad clinical use cases for AI‑driven personalized treatment (AI‑driven personalized treatment future overview); second, operational transformation - ambient scribes, administrative co‑pilots and predictive triage will reclaim clinician time and streamline workflows so specialists focus on high‑value care, a change the World Economic Forum highlights where AI both speeds diagnosis and reduces administrative burden (World Economic Forum report on AI transforming global health); third, community‑centered governance and equity - local training pipelines and ethics programs will keep Pacific data stewardship local, reduce bias in models, and make telehealth and AI tools practical for neighbor‑island care (so what: fewer costly emergency transfers and more clinic time - telemedicine can help avoid $10,000–$15,000 emergency flights while putting skilled hours back into patient care).

These three shifts - precision, productivity, and locally governed equity - will together change who gets care, how it's delivered, and who designs the systems doing the work.

“UH Mānoa and the ALOHA Lab are at the forefront of AI research, driving innovations that improve information accessibility, enhance healthcare insights, and adapt technology to meet the unique needs of diverse communities,” said Zhang.

Hawai‘i's strength in healthcare comes from connected, locally governed assets that make high‑quality care and equitable AI work possible: the University of Hawai‘i Cancer Center - the only National Cancer Institute‑designated center in the state and the Pacific - anchors clinical research and translational pipelines (University of Hawai‘i Cancer Center - NCI‑designated cancer research center), while the Hawaiʻi & Pacific Islands Mammography Registry (HIPIMR) already holds more than 45 million images plus linked demographics, imaging interpretations and cancer outcomes, creating a rare, population‑representative resource to train and validate imaging and screening algorithms for Native Hawaiian, Japanese and Pacific Islander patients (Hawaiʻi & Pacific Islands Mammography Registry (HIPIMR) - population imaging dataset).

Complementing data and research capacity, federally funded pilots have converted innovation into measurable savings and care redesign - for example, Pharm2Pharm at the University of Hawaii at Hilo received a large award to reduce medication‑related hospitalizations and is highlighted among Hawaii's Health Care Innovation Awards that document multi‑million dollar grants and projected three‑year savings (Health Care Innovation Awards in Hawaii - CMS program details).

The so‑what is concrete: a vast, linked imaging registry plus an NCI center and proven innovation projects let Honolulu test AI tools on local data, reduce bias for Pacific populations, and turn pilots into cost‑saving clinical workflows - while persistent challenges remain in making those tools accessible across islands and closing outcome gaps for Native Hawaiian patients.

“Currently, many imaging sites across the state and USAPI are collecting inadequate information to accurately determine a woman's risk of developing breast cancer in the future using current breast cancer risk models. This information can be used to make better recommendations on when women should begin screening, what resources are needed, and identify patterns that can help clinics be more effective at catching breast cancer in its early stages.” - John Shepherd

Ready to move from curiosity to action in Honolulu's health system? Start by using local, trusted resources: the University of Hawaiʻi's Online Innovation Center (UHOIC) curates AI guidance, events and ITS‑reviewed tools to help teams choose vetted models and training (University of Hawaiʻi Online Innovation Center AI resources and events); partner with Chaminade's ARCH effort (AIM‑AHEAD Phase II) to tap AI navigators, datasets and technical assistance that keep projects community‑governed and equity‑centered (Chaminade ARCH AIM‑AHEAD AI partnership details); and build practical workplace skills - Nucamp's 15‑week AI Essentials for Work bootcamp teaches promptcraft, tool workflows and job‑based AI skills (early‑bird $3,582) so clinical teams can turn model outputs into measurable pilots (Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration).

The so‑what: combine UH's vetted tools, ARCH's navigator support and a focused 15‑week skills program to run an ethical, locally validated AI pilot that leverages Pacific data and minimizes bias while creating clear operational value for Honolulu clinics.

“UH Mānoa and the ALOHA Lab are at the forefront of AI research, driving innovations that improve information accessibility, enhance healthcare insights, and adapt technology to meet the unique needs of diverse communities,” said Zhang.