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HealthTech Magazine explores technology and healthcare issues relevant to IT leaders and managers at healthcare organizations evaluating and implementing technology solutions.
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Across industries, solutions powered by artificial intelligence continue to dominate organizational priorities. In healthcare especially, there’s a focus on supporting a strained workforce and doing more despite thin margins. It can be overwhelming to parse through all of the new capabilities, potential regulations and necessary integrations, especially when change can happen so quickly. But even in times of flux, Fairfax, Va.-based Inova takes a measured approach to its AI strategy. “We have spent years figuring out how to fund and deploy technology we want to move forward with safely…
Late at night, when residents at Asbury Communities have a pressing question about tomorrow’s activities or dining options, they don’t have to wait for morning to ask. Now, they can pick up their room phone and ask Joy, a concierge powered by artificial intelligence. It’s similar to Alexa or Siri, but Joy is delivered through an aging tech provider’s AI bot that pulls information from Asbury’s resident engagement platform. It doesn’t replace human concierges, but it extends service to off-hours, says COO Todd Andrews. Joy is one of many innovative solutions the senior care organization has…
To say that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services handles a lot of data would be an understatement. This agency within the Department of Health and Human Services administers Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Health Insurance Marketplace. It is responsible for ensuring the health coverage of more than 160 million people — that’s nearly 1 in 2 Americans. With so much protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) to manage and secure, CMS has been at the leading edge of zero-trust deployment for several years.…
A persistent and costly challenge hinders patient care. In the U.S., hospitals let an estimated $3 billion in unused medication go to waste annually, while long-term care facilities lose another $2 billion, reports the National Conference of State Legislatures. This staggering financial drain occurs while many patients wait weeks for lifesaving treatments. The paradox stems not from a lack of intent but from a broken trust in outdated inventory systems that fail to provide necessary operational insight. RELATED: Third-party risk management best practices that reduce supply chain disruption.…
Healthcare organizations face a labor problem that recruitment alone cannot solve, with staff shortages extending beyond physicians and nurses to administrative and IT teams. A simultaneous demand for healthcare professionals — coupled with persistent and elevated levels of burnout — are placing ever more pressure on the remaining employees. Enter artificial intelligence: While the technology cannot manufacture scarce talent, it can increase the capacity of existing teams by taking on repetitive work, surfacing relevant information and helping employees make decisions faster. The objective is…
With support from artificial intelligence, the possibilities for research advancements are endless. AI tools can review and process information, find patterns and make predictions faster than humans can, with the potential to expand our understanding of complex conditions and accelerate the development of lifesaving therapies. However, just like any other software, AI is only as reliable as the data sets it pulls from. A solid data governance framework — referring to the standards and policies that dictate how data is collected, organized, stored and shared — provides the infrastructure…
An endpoint failure inside a hospital or clinic can quickly become a patient care problem. When a clinician cannot reach an electronic health record or complete documentation, the disruption can affect every subsequent part of the care journey. Endpoint recovery is therefore a critical part of clinical care resilience, and not merely an IT help desk function. Intel vPro® provides out-of-band access when an operating system won’t load, while Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors add fleet intelligence intended to identify potential hardware problems earlier. DISCOVER: Intel helps IT teams…
Artificial Intelligence is no longer something on the horizon of healthcare — it is already embedded in clinical practice. AI systems are routinely used in imaging interpretation, clinical decision support, documentation assistance, scheduling, population health management and patient-facing applications. In many cases, clinicians did not request these tools and may have received little formal training in how they work. Yet their outputs increasingly influence clinical judgment and patient outcomes. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into healthcare, clinicians must remain attentive to the…
Modernized healthcare organizations face steep challenges in securing and managing myriad devices, applications and services. Their environments include on-premises, hybrid and multicloud setups, the network edge, and multiple facilities and affiliates. That means their attack surface offers near limitless potential vulnerabilities. Malicious actors also have emerging capabilities with artificial intelligence to make identity-based attacks even more pernicious and pervasive. Even with these complex environments, Semperis Directory Services Protector ensures the integrity…
As quickly expanding digital healthcare technologies promise to improve access and outcomes, many people face the risk of being left out. Underserved populations, including geographically remote, economically disadvantaged or digitally under-resourced people, are experiencing a digital health divide — an inequality in the ability to access, use and benefit from healthcare technologies. For instance, patients in rural communities without reliable broadband often cannot access telehealth services. As a result, they miss work and travel hours to see their doctors, or they simply don’…
Healthcare organizations are under pressure from every direction: more cyberattacks, shrinking operating margins, staffing shortages and complex technology environments that cannot be easily patched or replaced. A path to cyber resilience reduces risk for healthcare by building the capabilities to recover faster when attacks happen and reducing impacts to patient care. DISCOVER: Ensure healthcare business continuity when IT fails. Making Recovery Readiness a Part of Patient Safety When cyberattacks disrupt hospitals and the healthcare supply chain, the effects reach patients fast. Delayed lab…
As healthcare organizations become more experienced with using artificial intelligence in their workflows, they are looking to optimize operations with the technology infrastructure that best meets their needs. For a growing number of health systems, this means running AI workloads in hybrid environments. In fact, IDC predicts that by 2028, 75% of enterprise AI workloads will be deployed on hybrid infrastructure. “The future of the data center is hybrid,” says Sana Gutierrez, senior manager of the data and artificial intelligence practice at CDW. “There are organizations that are going…
As healthcare organizations recognize the need to improve operational efficiency, ease clinical workflows, and enhance patient care and experience, they are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence. However, many organizations don’t have the proper infrastructure to support AI initiatives. The 8th Annual Nutanix Healthcare Vertical Enterprise Cloud Index dives into healthcare’s current interest and preparedness related to AI. The report points out challenges including infrastructure readiness and shadow AI, plus other trends around containerization. HealthTech spoke with Scott Ragsdale…
Healthcare organizations are under constant pressure to maintain secure, reliable endpoint environments while supporting clinicians and staff who work across distributed systems and locations. For constrained IT teams, managing hundreds or even thousands of devices becomes even more difficult when patching, monitoring and troubleshooting disconnected tools across multiple environments. NinjaOne Endpoint Management is designed to simplify that workload through a unified, cloud-based platform that combines endpoint monitoring, automated patching and remote management into a single interface.…
Earlier this year, a cyberattack hit medical technology company Stryker that shut down its electronic ordering system and derailed order processing, shipping and manufacturing. According to Check Point Research, Iran-linked threat actor Handala took credit for the attack. The incident is an urgent reminder that even a contained cyberattack can still trigger significant consequences downstream, particularly in healthcare, where any operational delays or disruptions can severely impact critical workflows. Click the banner below to find out why AI resiliency is the next phase of cyber resilience.
Traditionally, the most common perception of healthcare was that it was slower to adopt new technologies compared with other industries by at least a decade. Now, as artificial intelligence becomes a feature or the main capability for solutions meant to support the space, healthcare organizations have become savvier about taking advantage of tech sooner. NVIDIA’s latest State of AI in Healthcare and Life Sciences survey found that 70% of organizations in these sectors are actively using AI, and 47% are using or assessing agentic AI. And with budgets on the minds of many healthcare…
At a high level, cyber resilience is the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks or compromises affecting systems and processes that rely on digital resources. When resilience is lacking, the consequences of an event can compound. A data breach may lead to legal and financial impacts, while a systems outage in healthcare could jeopardize patient care. Let’s sift through some common misconceptions about cyber resilience and determine what kernels of truth can ground better strategy. Click the banner below to find out why AI…
Healthcare organizations have been navigating digital transformation for over two decades, and that transformation has made cyber resilience a foundational component of modern care delivery. Cybersecurity is no longer only an IT or operations issue. It’s key to patient safety. As threat actors increasingly target hospitals and health systems with ransomware and other disruptive attacks, the stakes are higher than data loss or operational downtime. When clinical systems fail, the impact is felt by patients and their families. Ransomware attacks on ill-prepared hospitals can be life…
Many healthcare organizations are treating cybersecurity as a cost center instead of a competitive advantage. Quantifying cyber risk in terms of financial exposure helps security teams justify their spending and make the case that security is an enterprise-critical endeavor. This approach pushes organizations to audit existing security tools, prioritize threats based on potential financial impact and measure success in dollar-based risk exposure rather than technical metrics. Here’s how a quantified risk analysis can help security leaders identify which investments meaningfully reduce…
The National Institutes of Health sits on one of the largest collections of biomedical research data in the world. Decades of federally funded studies on health issues such as heart disease, lung conditions, sleep disorders and genomics have generated petabytes of information. But for most of that history, the data was collected by different institutes and under varying standards. Historically, those disparate formats haven’t been easy to integrate. That dissonance is a problem when the goal is to train artificial intelligence models that can accelerate medical research. Three NIH offices —…
Whether executive leaders are aware or not, IT teams across industries are experimenting with “vibe coding,” or coding assisted by artificial intelligence. Here are five considerations for health IT managers as their teams begin to incorporate AI tools into their programming workflows. READ MORE: Code is no longer the bottleneck. What does agentic AI mean for software? 1. What’s the Margin of Error For Coding With AI? AI tools can generate apps based on the direction of the user, and the process is intensive and requires knowledge of organizational network security and data privacy standards…
Healthcare organizations are under immense pressure, from financial constraints to delivering high-quality care that meets changing patient expectations. It’s clear why many providers are trying to transform their operations: The fragmented processes of the past cannot meet the growing demand for care, now and in the future. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been an ongoing area of interest in healthcare, especially as models and capabilities continue to improve. Solutions such as ambient clinical documentation and computer vision incorporated into virtual nursing are gaining ground, which can…
My husband and I met in residency. I left clinical practice. He stayed. He runs a small private office, and I watch it every day: a brilliant clinician who spends a fraction of his time doing what he is trained to do, what he loves, which is taking care of patients. The rest is prior authorizations, documentation and chasing referrals. It’s what makes him want to walk away from medicine entirely — not the patients, but the administrative burden. He’s not unique. I spent the early part of my career in surgical training, and I remember spending more time discharging a single patient than I…
Imagine someone suffering an injury while on vacation. They receive treatment at the nearest emergency department, where they are instructed to follow up with their primary care physician at home. But if the home physician isn’t able to access information about the care their patient received, the physician has to rely on the patient’s own recall. The doctor might order unnecessary tests the patient has already had, wasting time and money. With healthcare interoperability, however, healthcare team members have all of their patients’ medical information at their fingertips. Click the banner…
Mayo Clinic and Microsoft recently announced a collaboration to develop and launch a frontier artificial intelligence model for healthcare, grounded in the health system’s data and insights. The Rochester, Minn.-based healthcare organization has long established its data governance and strategy, which has been foundational to its innovative approaches. That’s why the conversations around AI for the organization have always focused on addressing problems to solve rather than keeping up with the latest technologies. Maneesh Goyal, COO of Mayo Clinic Platform, the health system’s digital…
As rising case rates collide with mounting caregiver shortages and increasing pressure on long-term care systems, dementia care continues to grow as a healthcare specialty. Universities and research groups are exploring how artificial intelligence, robotics and assistive technologies could help detect cognitive decline earlier, support caregivers, improve patient safety and allow more older adults to remain in their homes longer. Current efforts range from AI-powered diagnostic models and assistive-intelligence systems to socially assistive robots, some being tested in real home environments…
Dr. Nancy Cibotti isn’t a stranger to large-scale, intensive healthcare IT rollouts. As the associate chief medical information officer at Cambridge, Mass.-based Beth Israel Lahey Health, she was part of the team that rolled out Epic across the system. “It was really important for a health system to be on one electronic health records system. But anybody who's been through it knows that it’s a long and difficult process,” says Cibotti, who is also a primary care physician. Amid that rollout, she came to learn about an ambient clinical documentation tool through a urologist who was excited…
Someone sick with the flu logs in to an urgent care appointment from their bed. A hospice nurse checks on a patient in their bed at home. A clinician moves from campus to campus throughout the week. In an increasingly mobile healthcare environment, identity management provides nurses and physicians with access to their hospital or health system’s data from wherever they’re providing care. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, identity management is “establishing and managing the roles and access privileges of individual network users.” This process includes…
Primary care access is a persistent problem across the U.S., but a growing number of providers are hoping to address these concerns with the help of technology and hybrid care models. Dr. Melissa Welch is chief medical officer at Sprinter Health, a tech-driven home healthcare provider expanding access to preventive care. Welch, who has had a long career in community-based care and public health, notes that as the technology to deliver care continues to evolve, it’s critical to pair those advances with human-led interventions. “Technology will always be here for us. It will always be an…
The speed of innovation at digital health and telehealth companies is outpacing how quickly regulators can write rules. As tools such as virtual care platforms, data-intensive monitoring and engagement, and workflows driven by artificial intelligence become the backbone of modern care delivery, this rapid growth creates major opportunities while introducing significant legal risk across cybersecurity, privacy and AI governance. For leadership at these organizations, one of the biggest mistakes is viewing these challenges as more administrative or technical tasks for product or IT teams to…
Consumer-grade wearable devices aren’t new to the market, but in recent years, their role in capturing healthcare data has expanded as features improve and clinical interest broadens. With the added layer of artificial intelligence, users can make better sense of the metrics they’re tracking. Dr. Chris Curry is the clinical director of women’s health at OURA. Earlier this year, the company, known for its wearable smart rings, launched its own large language model within its platform to help answer member questions tied to women's health. “As a physician, a lot of my training was…
As healthcare organizations adopt new tools into their workflow, they may struggle with overload from multiple alerts. Healthcare security operations centers are guarded security rooms where health systems receive these alerts and detect, investigate and respond to threats. “A SOC isn’t just protecting data, it’s also protecting patient care,” says Rob Hughes, CISO at RSA. Jason Taule, virtual CISO at Annapolis, Md.-based Luminis Health, echoes Hughes, noting that healthcare SOCs differ from SOCs in other industries because of this patient safety factor. “Early detection and effective…
Business associate agreements between technology vendors and their payer, provider and clearinghouse partners establish how a BAA works with these HIPAA-regulated entities. The contract also underscores how a BAA can — and cannot — use an entity’s protected health information (PHI) through the course of their work. As a frequent business associate of covered entities, Google is bound by the terms of the BAA for its Google Cloud Platform. “The BAA says Google is held to the same level of accountability that I am as a covered entity and healthcare provider when it comes to managing PHI,” says…
It’s been 17 years since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act enforced the use of electronic health records. While the EHR is commonplace in hospitals across the country, a growing documentation burden shows that there’s still room for optimization that improves both clinician experiences and patient outcomes. In recent years, Phoenix Children’s pivoted away from an EHR optimization lens focused on the technology itself to an emphasis on clinical optimization for safety, quality and patient outcomes. That initiative demonstrated the need for clinical…
Despite growing adoption, many healthcare systems continue to struggle with how to leverage artificial intelligence within the flow of patient care. In many cases, healthcare institutions already have access to valuable data and predictive insights. The problem is, those insights often stop short of informing clinical action and driving measurable improvements in patient outcomes. Healthcare institutions have gotten better at using AI for stand-alone use cases — summarizing imaging results, supporting clinical documentation and improving scheduling efficiency, to name a few. Now, it’s time…
Patients expect the same kind of service from healthcare organizations that they get from airlines and their banks. They increasingly demand digital approaches to scheduling, asking questions and confirming appointments. And patients who must stay in the hospital also want to be able to make decisions about that experience. Now more than ever, healthcare organizations are willing to meet those demands. However, it’s important that any patient-facing technology doesn’t impede clinical and staff workflows. In fact, when implemented thoughtfully, it’s possible to improve patient experiences and…
Nurses spend a significant amount of time on documentation and working in an electronic health records system, which can contribute to burnout and decreased job satisfaction. Ambient clinical documentation, powered by artificial intelligence, has been evolving as a solution to support physicians and nurses so that they can spend less time jotting down notes in an EHR and more time facing patients without glancing at a screen. Last year, Tampa General Hospital deployed Microsoft Dragon Copilot for nurses to streamline workflows at the bedside and reduce time spent on charting. So far,…
Healthcare organizations today are facing documentation overload, clinical burnout and rising operational costs. Microsoft Dragon Copilot directly addresses all three by shifting clinicians from writing notes to simply reviewing them. This gives providers back their most valuable asset: time. By reducing after-hours charting, improving documentation quality and strengthening compliance, it also restores focus during the patient encounter, and patients appreciate when doctors pay attention to them. This can lead to higher patient satisfaction and retention. Microsoft Dragon Copilot helps…
Healthcare organizations are leveraging AI PCs to support increasingly data-intensive clinical and administrative workloads, but the systems are introducing HIPAA, governance and endpoint security concerns that many IT teams are only beginning to understand. Unlike traditional PCs, AI PCs include dedicated hardware designed to run artificial intelligence models locally on the device rather than relying entirely on cloud infrastructure. These capabilities enable clinical documentation, image analysis and other AI-assisted processes while reducing latency and limiting the movement of sensitive…
Headlines about the latest data breach affecting a healthcare organization have unfortunately become a norm in the industry. Healthcare is also a regular target for ransomware attacks. It’s clear why cybersecurity is top of mind for healthcare leaders across the country, but security teams often struggle with communicating needs that align with business objectives. They’re focused on solving for technical gaps (such as a lack of identity and access management or immutable backups), but nontechnical leaders can’t always connect how those gaps may put the entire organization at risk.…
There is an ongoing global memory chip shortage that is having a ripple effect across industries — what tech media and analysts have dubbed “RAMageddon.” Some businesses have chosen to purchase ahead of schedule or consolidate purchases to mitigate any impact from rising costs. Others are considering services that could extend lifecycles, or they’re working with what they have or holding off on any wholesale refreshes. In healthcare, research-heavy institutions may be especially affected as they rely on storage and analytics that are supported by large compute infrastructures.…
Healthcare executives are under pressure to reduce clinician burnout, address staff shortages and accelerate revenue cycle timelines. As artificial intelligence solutions are increasingly deployed to help mitigate these challenges, clinical and IT leaders are tasked with picking the most appropriate tools for their health systems — and expected to demonstrate measurable ROI from these investments. Research shows that clinical workflow automation strategies are proving effective across healthcare settings. According to Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI Report, nearly three-quarters of healthcare and…
Cyberattacks in healthcare are no longer slow or opportunistic. They are fast, coordinated and increasingly difficult to contain. According to CrowdStrike’s latest Global Threat Report, the fastest threat actors can move from initial access to lateral movement in under 30 seconds, shrinking the window for detection and response to near zero. That speed is redefining what effective defense looks like. For healthcare organizations — where uptime, patient safety and regulatory compliance are nonnegotiable — the stakes are especially high. Healthcare leaders need to understand how the threat…
Earlier this year, during the HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, healthcare IT leaders convened to share insights on the latest tools and processes gaining interest in the industry, with agentic artificial intelligence emerging as a top priority. For operational and administrative workloads, healthcare organizations are eyeing where AI agents can best support their teams. NVIDIA’s second annual State of AI in Healthcare and Life Sciences report found that 70% of respondents said their organizations are actively using AI (up from 63% in 2024), and 47%…
For today’s hospitals, “IT is a mission-critical aspect of delivering care,” says Josh Howell, healthcare CTO at Rubrik, which means IT security is just as mission critical. “Security has to be right 100% of the time. The attackers only have to be right once.” For the times when attackers do get it right, healthcare organizations need to have in place a clinical care resilience plan that enables them to continue providing care, even during an unscheduled IT outage. DISCOVER: Ensure healthcare business continuity when IT fails. Healthcare Disaster Recovery and Cyber Resilience Planning…
“You should never leverage technology for technology’s sake. It has to solve a problem.” That’s what Dr. Sumbul Ahmad Desai, vice president for health and fitness at Apple, said during her keynote conversation during the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas in March. She’s been at the tech giant for nearly a decade and has overseen the development of its wearables as they become more clinically useful, helping to support monitoring for heart health, sleep and more. “We don’t want to just empower you. We want to empower you to have a better relationship with…
In 2021, when Houston Methodist leaders were setting the design vision for Cypress Hospital, they had to predict the future. They knew they wanted to equip the new facility along Houston’s rapidly growing U.S. 290 corridor with state-of-the-art technology to improve patient outcomes and clinician experiences. But Cypress wouldn’t open until 2025, leaving a four-year window in which technology would continue to evolve. “We said, ‘OK, what do we think will have matured by the time this hospital opens?’” says Chief Innovation Officer Roberta Schwartz. “And then we trialed those technologies at…
The cyberattack on medical technology company Stryker in March reveals how cyber conflict is evolving. Endpoints, malware and data breaches dominate threat coverage. But this incident points to a deeper shift: Attackers are increasingly targeting the systems that establish and manage trust itself. This incident shows a broader shift we’re seeing across the threat universe: Identity and the systems that manage it have become the new attack surface. In cases like this, attackers aren’t just targeting individual endpoints; they’re going after the management planes that establish trust across…
When it’s time for Mayo Clinic to evaluate technology that will support the clinical workforce, features and form factors aren’t the only consideration. “Using technology isn’t the goal,” says Cheristi Cognetta-Rieke, vice chair of enterprise nursing practice transformation at Mayo Clinic. “Transforming nursing practice and elevating patient care is the goal.” Cognetta-Rieke refers to Mayo Clinic’s “for nurses, by nurses” model, which aims to embed frontline clinicians in the process of designing the tools they will ultimately use. That way, she says, “technology can amplify our human…
Artificial intelligence is a tool that can support nurses in their workflows, creating efficiencies that give them more time to spend on patient care rather than documentation. However, according to McKinsey research, while most nurses believe AI is at least somewhat helpful in improving care, some are still skeptical about the technology and its place in healthcare. HealthTech spoke with Katie Barr, senior vice president and chief nursing informatics officer at Advocate Health, about how organizations should approach AI implementation for nurses to improve adoption success. She emphasized…
With more than 60,000 devices on Main Line Health’s network, the Philadelphia-based health system needed better visibility into its complex environment to protect against potential cyberthreats, including ransomware attacks. CISO Aaron Weismann says that’s why his team methodically rolled out a microsegmentation strategy. One of the key challenges in adoption was getting buy-in from clinical operations. “Anytime you walk into a clinical space and say, ‘I'm going to prevent some of your devices from talking to each other,’ that gets very scary when it comes to potential disruptions to patient…
As an endocrinologist with Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health, Dr. Dave Newman knows firsthand how important it is to meet patients where they are. For one routine appointment in fall 2025, his patient (a farmer) never left the cab of his combine. “It was the middle of harvest season,” Newman says, “and he was in the field sunup to sundown.” Rather than make the patient travel for hours from his farm to a Sanford clinic in Fargo, N.D., they opted for a virtual visit. “We went over his conditions, I refilled his medications, and it saved him from the stress of worrying about how he was…
In the most recent season of The Pitt on HBO Max, staff at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center make bets on why they’re receiving patients diverted from nearby Westbridge Hospital. Bets include flooding, a sinkhole, a power outage and even someone setting off fireworks in the bathroom (the season takes place on July 4). As it turns out, the culprit is something IT leaders are all too familiar with: a ransomware attack. The Pitt is one of the most realistic medical shows on television, and the writers’ decision to include a ransomware attack further adds to that realism. Not only…
When leaders and staff at Frasier, a senior living community in Boulder, Colo., want better visibility into their operations, they can now pull up Microsoft Power BI dashboards. They can quickly view resident census data, financial metrics, marketing pipelines, dining statistics, IT help desk trends and more, all aggregated in a Microsoft Azure data lake. Senior IT Director Jeff Puckett led an enterprise architecture initiative that included the data analytics project, which went live in 2025. Puckett joined the 500-resident, 20-acre community in 2017 and has steadily modernized its IT…
Healthcare organizations are migrating to new virtualization platforms because of financial burden and the complexity of today’s infrastructure. Virtualization allows organizations such as health systems to access applications virtually from a single machine while distributing to other computing environments. Components of virtualization include the hypervisor layer, networking, storage, backup, monitoring and identity management. Virtualization was “low-drama infrastructure” for many years, but now healthcare IT leaders face challenges such as steep price hikes and being forced into…
Healthcare organizations manage an extraordinarily high volume of agreements every day, from patient intake forms and consent documents to vendor contracts and clinical research approvals. When those documents are scattered across different systems or tied to paper-based workflows, delays are inevitable. Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management is designed to eliminate that friction by bringing agreements, data and automation together in a single platform powered by artificial intelligence. At its foundation, Docusign’s platform builds on its widely used and well-known electronic-signature…
Point-of-care technology has come a long way since the humble blood glucose meter for patients with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes. Nurses and other team members provide bedside care to streamline assessments and diagnostic and treatment protocols. With handheld readers and mobile devices, care teams stay agile and can avoid treatment delays or medication errors. However, it’s often not feasible to provide a comprehensive level of care with smaller screens. Handheld devices work best to assist with documentation and assessments in conjunction with larger devices and monitors. That’s one reason why…
The landscape for wearable technology in healthcare has seen a significant shift in the past few years. Much of it stems from recent advances in artificial intelligence, especially the combination of AI and edge computing. “Historically, there was a lot of physiologic data that was never integrated into care,” says Arjun Mahajan, M.D. candidate at Harvard Medical School. “Now, AI can filter the noise, identify clinically meaningful patterns and trends, and create more discrete and actionable insights.” AI’s ability to analyze wearable data in real time brings innovation to remote patient…
Historically, machine learning models have been trained by consolidating data from multiple sources into a centralized cloud server or data center and then training the model based on the combined data. This approach can streamline ML model training but “may also create significant privacy risks and potential vulnerabilities if the central data repository is compromised,” as a Google blog post notes. A range of organizations, especially in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, are turning to a solution that has existed for many years but is growing in prominence: federated…
Documentation overload, clinical burnout and rising operational costs are just some of the challenges healthcare organizations face today. This can have a major impact on clinician satisfaction and retention. One way health systems are hoping to address these concerns is with the help of artificial intelligence–powered tools that can streamline clinical documentation so that clinicians can return their attention to direct patient care, focusing on establishing trust and building relationships rather than clicking through administrative tasks on a screen. Last year, Microsoft launched Dragon…
Until recently, campus Wi-Fi and cellular telephony networks were entirely different animals: different vendors, spectrum, equipment and security. As wireless networking and Internet of Things become mission-critical for providers, it makes sense to look at private 5G to supplement or even replace campus Wi-Fi. For questions about how private 5G could work for your healthcare organization, start here. Click the banner below to prepare your network to support emerging AI applications.
At the 2026 Splunk GovSummit in Washington, D.C., Indian Health Service leaders made a clear case: In modern healthcare environments, cybersecurity is inseparable from patient care. IHS CISO Benjamin Koshy and Solomon Wilson, a cybersecurity project manager in the agency’s Division of Information Security, outlined how IHS is aligning security, operations and emerging technologies to support care delivery across a vast and complex network. The agency serves roughly 2.7 million patients across federal facilities in 37 states, spanning highly urban and extremely remote locations. That…
Clinicians have been trained to handle unexpected medical situations, but what’s become clear in recent years is that entire organizations need to strengthen procedures for when an unexpected IT event happens. If a critical application, such as an electronic health records system or an enterprise resource planning platform, goes dark, can care teams still operate? And even if clinicians can switch to paper charting, does everyone know where the paper supplies are and how much inventory is available for a three-hour outage? A three-day outage? What about a three-week outage? This is why…
Artificial intelligence has the potential to help small, rural and independent healthcare organizations optimize operations and combat staff shortages — ultimately benefiting the patients that rely on their services. But rural hospitals often lack the infrastructure and specialized expertise that have allowed larger health systems to integrate AI more readily. The American Hospital Association reports that 56% of rural hospitals are using some form of predictive AI, compared with 81% of urban hospitals. However, experts say there are practical, achievable ways for rural…
Artificial intelligence is offering new possibilities to standardize surgical training, improve intra-operative decision-making and patient care, and generate performance data for clinicians. Last fall, the University of Maryland, Baltimore and medical research and training company Axis Research and Technologies announced a joint venture to create the Surgical Performance Center, a 36,000-square-foot facility to support surgical education and applied research. The linchpin of the ecosystem is an AI-powered platform that integrates data and performance analytics into surgical environments.…
Technical debt comes in many forms, especially for hospitals and health systems. The larger the organization, the more complex the technology, explains David Hotchkiss, vice president and chief information and security officer for the Medical College of Wisconsin. Each application and piece of equipment or software has a cost and a lifespan of five to seven years. Once the lifespan runs out, organizations are vulnerable to security issues, unexpected downtime and, in the case of hospitals, patient safety risks, says Hotchkiss. In addition, many hospitals may have relied on quick fixes for…
Traditional call centers often fail to meet customer expectations related to speed, flexibility and the ability to properly address concerns. In healthcare, where the cost of care is rising, organizations can’t afford to drive patients away due to inefficient systems. Rather than focusing on improvements, health systems need to start thinking about how to transform their traditional call center into a care center that meets patient needs quickly and effectively. Fragmented systems make it harder for healthcare contact center staff to respond to patients effectively. Imagine six different…
The Food and Drug Administration issued updated cybersecurity guidance for medical devices, setting stricter requirements that many existing systems — and the software that runs them — cannot meet without significant redesign. The FDA’s updated guidance, enacted through the omnibus appropriations legislation known as Section 524B, marks a major shift in how device security is regulated. The new framework requires manufacturers to implement security throughout the product lifecycle, including documenting software components, managing vulnerabilities and maintaining secure development processes…
While workers may not be hitting the office printer like they used to, technology-based friction still exists in all industries and departments, despite the massive advancements. Healthcare team members know this evolution all too well, from pagers and floppy disks to smartphones and generative artificial intelligence. But just because an organization adopts a new technology with powerful capabilities doesn’t mean workflows will automatically improve. “There is simply no way to remove that friction without being intentional about it. It’s not going to remove itself. It has to be a leader-led…
Health information exchanges are steadily gaining traction as healthcare organizations look for ways to improve care coordination, reduce costs and meet regulatory expectations. Organizations are seeking ways to use data to make better decisions, which reduces costs and increases revenue. This is especially important for health systems as the federal government cuts funding across the board. The result is an increase in health systems, post-acute providers and even senior care organizations participating in HIEs or actively exploring that as part of their clinical transformation strategies.…
Data literacy is the organizational ability to capture, evaluate, normalize and transform available data sources into actionable business insights. It is as much about culture as it is about processes and tools. To understand whether your organization has good data literacy, ask yourself these questions. Do you know which data sets you have? Do you know the quality of those data sets? Do you know which ones are sensitive or not? Do you know which buttons or levers that bit of data pushes when you’re making a decision about something? That is what data literacy means. The next step is figuring…
The funding landscape for rural healthcare organizations is still riddled with uncertainties. Organizations are bracing for changes that will come with reduced federal spending on Medicaid over the next few years. They’re also eyeing the sustainability of the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP), which awards $50 billion, or $10 billion per year over five years, to state initiatives meant to promote preventive care and develop local workforces, among other goals. Rural health systems operate on razor-thin margins, and many smaller community hospitals have a limited amount of cash…
Increased emphasis on creating a connected care continuum was deemed one of the key health tech trends to watch in 2026. Looking at the big picture of care delivery, it’s easy to see why. Information that remains in silos contributes to a deeply disjointed experience for patients and clinicians alike, especially amid the industry’s push to move care to the setting best suited to meeting a patient’s needs. The smart care continuum should be longitudinal and not episodic, according to Chif Umejei, senior vice president and CIO at NewYork-Presbyterian. “The continuum is designed to ensure that…
Clinician shortages are forcing hospitals to rethink how they plan and deploy their workforce, with many turning to predictive scheduling systems to better match staffing levels with fluctuating patient demand. Built on data analytics and artificial intelligence, predictive scheduling platforms analyze historical and real-time operational data to forecast patient volume and align clinical staffing accordingly. The goal is to ensure adequate coverage during peak periods while reducing unnecessary overtime and burnout when demand drops. Terry McDonnell, senior vice president and chief nursing…
Health systems face the growing risk of IT outages caused by ransomware and other cyber-attacks, forcing healthcare leaders to rethink how care continues after critical systems go offline. For CISOs, IT directors and clinical operations leaders, the priority must be ensuring clinicians can safely treat patients without access to electronic health records, diagnostic systems and other core platforms. This is driving organizations to adopt cyber resilience strategies combining prevention, rapid recovery, business continuity planning and automation to maintain clinical operations during downtime…
Some of the most recognizable names in the generative artificial intelligence space have announced expanded services geared to healthcare and life sciences. At the start of 2026, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude shared their respective solutions meant to support consumers with their health or providers with their workflows. And more than 40% of physicians in the U.S. reportedly log in daily to OpenEvidence to scour peer-reviewed journals to keep up with medical breakthroughs and help with evidence-based decision-making. Despite generative AI becoming a regular fixture in healthcare,…
In traditional vulnerability management, organizations react to, detect and patch known software flaws, but a framework called Continuous Threat Exposure Management offers an iterative strategy for managing and mitigating threats in real time. First introduced by Gartner, CTEM allows organizations such as health systems to take a continuous approach to fighting cyberthreats such as ransomware and credential leaks. While traditional vulnerability management is periodic and volume-driven, with a long list of findings that may not reflect real-world risk, CTEM is continuous and “threat-informed…
Most organizations are familiar with the concept of “shadow IT,” a term that describes any technological solution used on an enterprise network without prior approval or oversight from the IT department. It’s a reality of the modern workplace: Employees who feel that it’s too burdensome to involve IT in signing up for a new cloud-based service, for instance, may use a personal account to do their work, not thinking about compliance or security concerns. Now, with the proliferation of solutions that use generative artificial intelligence, signing up for a service has never been easier. But if…
Healthcare organizations should be prepared to keep operating in the event of planned or unplanned downtime. Besides the impact any amount of downtime can have on patient care, multiple days of it can spell financial troubles for an organization. That’s why the security focus during the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition spotlighted lessons for building up clinical care resilience so that clinical teams and other departments have access to critical applications, such as the electronic health records system, and can adapt their procedures to updated expectations. …
Patients want the same level of ease and seamlessness in their healthcare experiences that they get when interacting with airlines or banks. Artificial intelligence is one way healthcare organizations are meeting that demand. In addition to using AI in the contact center to reduce agent workloads, organizations such as UC San Diego Health are engaging with patients via text and authenticating patient identities to protect their privacy. At HIMSS26 in Las Vegas, HealthTech connected with leaders in the patient engagement space about how they are improving patient experiences, how to measure…
Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve clinician workflows, patient experiences and even patient outcomes, but many AI initiatives aren’t possible without the infrastructure to support them. A hybrid infrastructure, in particular, plays an important role in AI success. On-prem data centers provide lower latency for high-volume inferencing, while the cloud offers on-demand computing power. At HIMSS26 in Las Vegas, HealthTech connected with health IT leaders to discuss how a hybrid infrastructure supports healthcare’s AI initiatives, how organizations can optimize their…
Healthcare’s increased investment in artificial intelligence has turned the industry’s attention to finding ways to maximize the value of AI deployment. One important example is data processing. There’s valuable information to be gleaned from sensors and medical devices operating at the edge, but near-real-time analysis has proved difficult without sending data to the cloud and back. That’s beginning to change. At Lenovo’s Tech World event at CES 2026, Lenovo announced three servers designed to support AI inferencing at the edge. The goal: Run large language models in environments where power…