Becker's Hospital Review

26 CIO / HEALTH IT The buzz at HIMSS 2026: 6 notes By Giles Bruce and Ella Jeffries A er attending HIMSS March 9-12 in Las Vegas, health system CIOs are excited about implementing agentic AI — and getting a return on investment from it — while governance is becoming "cool," as one leader put it. e healthcare IT conference, which brought about 24,000 attendees from 75 countries to the Venetian Expo center, included a who's who of tech companies, as well as smaller upstarts, showcasing their latest innovations. Here were the big themes at the event, as told to Becker's, which reported on-site: 1. Agentic is the AI of the moment — just not on the clinical side. As John Halamka, MD, executive director of Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic Platform and the opening keynote speaker, noted: First it was predictive AI, then it was generative AI, now it's agentic AI — what will it be next year and beyond? Regardless, he said, the "principles" of the technology will remain the same. As will the goals in healthcare: to create safer, more personalized medicine, speeding time to treatment or cure. Mayo Clinic Platform, with tens of millions of deidentified patient records, is trying to do just that. But agentic (i.e. autonomous) AI remains largely on the administrative side, from the call center to revenue cycle management. Health system leaders said humans will remain in the loop on treatment and care decisions for the foreseeable future — if not forever. At Cambridge (Mass.) Health Alliance, a public safety-net health system, AI agents are answering phone calls and routine questions in multiple languages, offloading work from staff and improving patient experience, said Hannah Galvin, MD, chief health information officer. Handing more of the administrative aspects of medical appointments to agentic AI, including scheduling and previsit tasks, will only increase access further, she said. Some leaders said that in the near future, AI will just be baked into technology platforms and won't be the talking point it is today. 2. Can healthcare take on a startup mindset? Many health system leaders were inspired by the opening keynote from Jon McNeil, who helped build Tesla while serving as its president from 2015 to 2018. He said clear-cut goals are needed: say, cut diagnosis time in half, reduce documentation time by 30%. At Tesla, it was doubling digital sales, cutting manufacturing costs in half, or getting to 10 clicks to buy a car (the number of clicks Elon Musk discovered it took to order a pizza on the Domino's app). Tesla got close on the last one (13 clicks) largely by transforming a 12-page loan document into a single paragraph. "Question every requirement" was the organization's driving philosophy — if it wasn't an actual law or regulation, get rid of it. Both Mr. McNeil and Dr. Halamka barely mentioned AI in their talks, with the former noting that automation always came last at Tesla. Automating a flawed process just gets you to a bad outcome faster, he said. Sarah Hatchett, senior vice president and CIO of Cleveland Clinic, said she notices more Silicon Valley influence entering healthcare — her own boss, Chief Digital Officer Rohit Chandra, PhD, comes from that world — and hopes it can speed up innovation (while keeping the necessary guardrails in place). 3. e hospital of the future is here (and increasingly in the home). At Mayo Clinic's new $5 billion campus, under construction, lidar (light detection and ranging) technology will monitor patients (with their consent) to improve safety, while drones will deliver supplies and collect samples, Dr. Halamka said. Omaha-based Nebraska Medicine is looking ahead to the new, $2.2 billion academic medical center the University of Nebraska is building. But as Chief Transformation and Digital Officer Michael Hasselberg, PhD, RN, noted, with things changing so rapidly, he won't be making any big technology decisions until a year or two out. Julie Demaree, vice president and chief technology and digital innovation officer of Amsterdam, N.Y.-based St. Mary's Healthcare, said she was captivated by a demo by virtual care company AvaSure of a camera-based facial analysis technology that detects patients' vital signs. Aer the federal government extended the CMS waiver to reimburse for acute hospital care at home through 2030, health systems have been expanding their programs. Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham, for example, recently treated its 10,000th home hospital patient, doubling in size over the past two years. "We're really hitting our stride," said Heather O'Sullivan, MSN, APRN, president and COO of Mass General Brigham Healthcare at Home. "is honestly is going to be the future." Long-term growth could be enabled by technology: AI to identify eligible patients, at-home cameras with facial analysis to take vitals (as mentioned above). Salt Lake City-based University of Utah Health recently started using AI to find patients for its Heal at Home post- acute care offering, said Chief Digital and Information Officer Donna Roach. In the past, program operators had to wait for hospital floors to call or manually review charts to fill open slots. 4. Health systems rely on enterprise IT platforms — and vendors follow suit. CIOs are increasingly turning to enterprise platforms such as their EHRs or ERPs to dictate their tech strategy rather than relying on point solutions. And vendors are changing their sales pitches, with many offering "platforms" rather than one-off applications. Several CIOs say they continue to be "Epic-first," making sure a solution doesn't exist in Epic before searching elsewhere. A few health system leaders say they recently launched several of the EHR's new AI features, with results to be determined. Jane Moran, chief information and digital officer of Mass General Brigham, described an AI strategy centered on working with technology partners, explaining that high-performing startups are frequently absorbed by major platforms. is enables development teams to focus on delivery rather than ongoing vendor discovery. 5. Healthcare IT leaders hunt for that elusive ROI. While health systems start to report benefits from AI — "AI is still the buzz, but it's a legit buzz," said Amy Trainor, RN, senior vice president and CIO of New Orleans-based Ochsner Health — others are still le wanting. "Everyone is searching for ROI," said Simon Nazarian, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer of Duarte, Calif.-based City of Hope. He said it's important to be clear about the outcomes you're trying to achieve — think back to those Tesla metrics — before starting a project. City of Hope has experienced benefits from its internally developed HopeLLM platform, which supports clinicians and improves clinical trial matching. Part of the success includes making innovation "invisible," he said, by easing

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