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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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The healthcare use cases for artificial intelligence continue to expand, from improving diagnostics for rare diseases to integrations with critical applications that ease clinical documentation burdens. In connection to AI and data governance, much of the focus has been on which models are appropriate or the right number of graphics processing units, but the underlying issue is really whether organizations are ready to support and secure AI workloads. “Local computing, networking, security — all those elements are part of a hospital’s infrastructure that is leveraging AI as a normal…
Maintaining uninterrupted, secure connectivity is vital for modern healthcare operations, from critical applications such as electronic health record (EHR) systems and connected medical devices to virtual care platforms. IT leaders, therefore, must evaluate how their current systems are running and assess where clinical care resilience could be falling short. When 71% of healthcare organizations report poor patient outcomes because of delays in procedures and tests from technical disruptions, achieving foundational resilience becomes a necessity to improve care delivery. Executives must…
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have become a regular part of healthcare headlines, and when organizations join together, their application portfolios join too. Shared electronic health records systems (such as Epic, Oracle Health and MEDITECH) have a similar effect: Larger organizations extend their EHR to smaller hospitals and clinics that would not have the budget or in-house teams to deploy such a system on their own. Extending a system carries many of the same implications as an acquisition. In both cases, a group of users inherits an instance they did not design, along with its…
Mergers and acquisitions are off to a strong start in 2026. According to Kaufman Hall, there were more transactions in Q1 2026 than in any of the previous five Q1 results. That pace continued into Q2 2026, when the industry saw the highest Q2 M&A levels since 2019. Healthcare organizations are continuing to engage in M&As as a strategy to expand care access and bolster stability amid increasing economic pressures. Many of the deals were between hospitals and regional health systems. Click the banner below to sign up for HealthTech’s weekly newsletter.
Healthcare organizations are balancing tight budgets and operational transformation. While finances remain in a perilous state (market research finds year-to-date operating margin increases are hovering below 0.5%, with nonlabor expenses driving cost inflation), healthcare is ramping up its use of artificial intelligence, with more than two-thirds of organizations actively using AI and close to half assessing or using agentic AI. Standing at the intersection of these trends is the evolving question of where and how to best deploy AI. Often, healthcare organizations focus on the balance…
Downtime in a hospital can happen for a number of reasons: Sometimes, it’s scheduled, and care teams received enough warning to plan for it. Other times, it can be an unplanned IT outage or an actual system disruption from a cyberattack, a third-party dependency being unavailable or a natural disaster. Whatever the case, healthcare organizations must be prepared to stay operational during downtime. Otherwise, they could face serious patient care and financial setbacks that can shutter entire facilities. Clinical care resilience must therefore be as active and deeply ingrained as any…
In 2023, University of Iowa Health Care surveyed their clinicians about their documentation experience to find out where it could improve. A majority of respondents cited clinical documentation as a roadblock to their own efficiency and patient care. With that feedback, UI Health Care sought a solution to alleviate administrative burden and hopefully reduce pajama time. It’s a similar journey that many other healthcare organizations have taken to combat clinician burnout by finding the right ambient documentation platform. “It has really become a standard expectation in almost any health…
Healthcare does not lack promising applications for artificial intelligence. It lacks a disciplined way to distinguish a scientific possibility from something ready to be trusted in clinical practice. That distinction matters more than ever. IEEE’s 2030 Technology Megatrends assessment identifies personalized medicine as the technology with the greatest potential impact on humanity among the trends evaluated. Accessible early-disease diagnostics, genetic engineering and gene therapy also rank among the leading health opportunities. But high potential is not the same as broad adoption. In…
Clinical decisions can’t wait for batch analytics. Edge computing, real-time data streaming and artificial intelligence (AI) inference at the point of care bring intelligent analysis to the bedside — enabling faster sepsis detection, deterioration alerts and treatment optimization, among many other uses. “These technologies bring useful insights right where patients are being diagnosed or tested,” says Romina Hipolito, chief nursing informatics officer at Dell Technologies. While there are many benefits and use cases for edge computing in healthcare, it’s important that organizations…
As health systems across the U.S. continue to explore how artificial intelligence fits into their operations, a frequent point of concern is whether or not a solution can be trusted in a clinical context. How will an AI-powered solution affect patient outcomes? How will it impact staffing and workflow? These are all valid questions that should be addressed at an organizational level even before the search for a solution is in the works. Not having clear answers before deployment can lead to difficulties scaling a project. A 2026 survey from clinical platform company Carta Healthcare found…
When Richmond, Ind.-based Reid Health set out to improve its electronic health record (EHR) system, it didn’t approach the transformation as an IT-led project. It started with listening to clinicians and understanding their work firsthand. “Burnout isn’t a soft issue. It’s a systems issue. It shows up in turnover, productivity, patient access, quality and, of course, patient engagement and financial performance,” says CIO Muhammad Siddiqui. “IT’s role isn’t to be an order-taker, and it doesn’t have to be a department of ‘no.’ IT should be a partner that brings structure, safety and execution…
Healthcare organizations across the U.S. are rolling out chatbots powered by artificial intelligence to answer patient questions, guide people to care and help navigate the system. The logic is understandable. If patients are already using ChatGPT and other AI tools for health information, healthcare organizations naturally want to meet them where they’re at. As a business leader, I understand the appeal. As an emergency physician, I think the growing interest in healthcare chatbots reveals something more important: how difficult it can be for patients to access care. What looks like an AI…
Workplace violence in healthcare facilities has become so prevalent that hospital workers in several states have gone on strike. Healthcare staff make up 10% of the U.S. workforce but experience 48% of nonfatal injuries from workplace violence. There’s room for improvement, because traditional hospital security measures may no longer be enough to address concerns about workplace violence. That’s why several healthcare IT and security leaders have started to deploy AI-powered weapons detection systems to protect providers and patients. Click the banner below to enhance your health system…
Data is crucial to making solutions powered by artificial intelligence work. But it’s not just the volume of data — it’s all the contextual elements that matter too. “Organizations that treat data as raw inventory will fall behind those that refine it into actionable intelligence,” as one Google Cloud blog puts it. “The key is understanding what that data means and applying it to real business decisions.” Here are five questions that can help clarify why data context is a key ingredient for successful AI. READ MORE: Turn healthcare data into actionable insights. 1. What’s the Difference…
For years, healthcare IT teams have built their cybersecurity plans based on a stable assumption: Both the good guys and the bad guys work at human speed, have human capabilities and follow logical paths in their thinking. Artificial intelligence is changing all of that. On the attacker side, hackers are accelerating their lateral movement and privilege escalation with AI-controlled agents that bring truly novel attacks to the table. But on the defender side, security operation centers can use AI tools to correlate alert data, bubble up the most important issues and even react in…
A ransomware shutdown in healthcare could cost $1.9 million per day on average, according to one 2024 report. The good news is that the average cost for healthcare providers to rebound from a ransomware incident dropped from $2.6 million in 2024 to just over $1 million in 2025, according to the “State of Ransomware in Healthcare 2025” report from Sophos. Still, given how serious ransomware threats are, health systems face challenges to build the right budget to protect against these attacks. Frameworks such as Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) provide a model for how to gauge the…
For data to have a positive impact on patient care, it must be quality and accessible. That’s why the Analytics Resource Center at Children’s Hospital Colorado has focused on improving data management by offering clinicians custom-built, self-service dashboards within the electronic medical record. “Our clinical teams contribute a lot of data to the electronic health record, but really extracting that data in a meaningful way can be a challenge,” says Miriam Conant, director of patient safety for the health system. “Doing so has allowed us to achieve some pretty incredible outcomes.” For…
Medical students may be comfortable using digital tools, but that does not mean they are prepared for the electronic health record demands of residency. New clinicians must navigate the EHR to review extensive patient histories, manage orders and document decisions while keeping pace with clinical workflows. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence–powered ambient listening tools are transforming documentation from a writing task into one that requires clinicians to edit, verify and accept responsibility for AI-generated text. It’s important that medical students get early, hands-on training in the…
At the end of May, I attended a discussion on artificial intelligence and healthcare hosted by the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School at the school’s Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. The speakers were Ziad Obermeyer, Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and Zachary Lipton, assistant professor of operations research and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Dr. Emily Boss, physician and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public…
As the volume of medical research continues to grow, keeping up to date on recent findings can be challenging. The number of cancer-related publications listed in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed citation database, for instance, has more than doubled since 2005, according to news platform OncoDaily. To help researchers sift through this deep pool of data, some federal agencies are employing large language model (LLM) functionality. This includes the National Cancer Institute, which used a chatbot feature it had added to its Fellows and Young Investigators (FYI) app to onboard fellows…
As a widely used electronic health records system, Epic now connects with medical imaging, analytics, artificial intelligence and numerous clinical workflows, making the infrastructure beneath it central to care delivery, operational resilience and long-term data strategy. This means Epic modernization must go beyond the conventional infrastructure refresh: Over the next three to five years, healthcare CIOs must balance uptime, consistent performance, cyber recovery and cost control simultaneously. “Epic, and EHRs in general, are no longer isolated applications,” says Chris Kopinski, head of…
The dark web and threat actors have been targeting the healthcare industry for years, but the threats are improving in accuracy, legitimacy and damage as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve. Given these advances, the staffed IT department at a hospital may lack the training and 24/7 coverage needed to maintain a strong security operations center, or SOC. Without the manpower to constantly monitor the system’s devices and network against threats, healthcare leadership may consider outsourcing the role of a SOC to a trusted, third-party vendor. Click the banner below to read CDW's…
To the left, a team of transfer center nurses coordinates intake processes for patients arriving from other facilities. Nearby, clinical expeditors identify and resolve any issues that might delay important procedures or disrupt patient flow. Separately, a rapid response team monitors high-risk patients for signs of deterioration. Welcome to Tampa General Hospital’s TGH Care Coordination Center (otherwise known as C3), an 8,000-square-foot space described as the hospital’s “nerve center.” It houses everyone from transport dispatchers to a dedicated environmental services team, sitting on the…
In many health systems, a nurse must log in to multiple applications before seeing the first patient. A doctor may bounce between an electronic health record, imaging software, schedule tools and documentation systems during one patient visit. While each app promises better efficiency, too many disconnected technologies can have the opposite effect. Due to years of mergers, department-level purchasing and one-off point solutions, many health systems run hundreds if not thousands of applications. Nearly one-third of clinicians use four to 15 different applications on shared mobile devices per…
While healthcare providers have identified best practices for deploying ambient listening tools for clinicians, the industry has been slower to develop consensus around governance from a patient perspective. As a result, deployments are often inconsistent, and patients may have questions about privacy, security and data access. In March, a panel at the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference and Expo in Las Vegas called “Stakeholder Governance Strategies for Ambient Artificial Intelligence Scribes” set out to address that gap. Wendy Charles, teaching assistant professor in the health informatics…
As providers move beyond piloting artificial intelligence-powered clinical documentation tools to scaling deployments, they’re sharing best practices that can guide later adopters: using data to understand expected and unexpected outcomes, tailoring solutions for specific roles and specialties, and applying change management expertise to make new workflows sustainable. Two healthcare organizations in Pennsylvania and one based in North Carolina are highlighted here as they expand their use of ambient AI to reduce documentation time and improve patient interactions. Each has deployed AI…
When an artificial intelligence system makes a “bad decision,” most organizations can’t really explain why. They aren’t entirely sure which data trained it, where the error was, which version it was running or which third-party components were involved. This is an ethical and regulatory blind spot that creates risk for healthcare tech leaders in organizations of all sizes, and it’s driving interest in a newer framework called the AI bill of materials. If you’ve ever seen a software bill of materials, or SBOM, then you already understand the concept. But many organizations have not yet thought…
It’s not just you. A March 2026 poll found that nearly a third of adults have typed their symptoms into generative artificial intelligence platforms to inquire about their physical health. But this activity can be risky. Not only are people sharing personal information with what are technically public databases, but AI chatbots have been shown to produce inaccurate answers. Researchers at the Duke University School of Medicine say that such chatbots can produce hallucinations, or misleading advice, because the models are trained to please users. To counter this, healthcare organizations are…
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.…