strategic Planning
When a small practice suffers a cyberattack, recovery costs may force closures that leave communities without local care options, according to All Covered's Danielle Morrison.
Abhinav Shashank, Innovaccer CEO and cofounder, highlights the company's recently published manifesto, Autonomous Healthcare, and previews his upcoming HIMSS26 panel with other unicorn founders on tackling challenges in health tech.
Emerging Technologies
Esther Kim, head of emerging technologies at Mass General Brigham, shares how the health system evaluates new technologies and decides which innovations to explore while considering clinical need, operational feasibility and scalability.
Intermountain Health CISO Erik Decker talks about the SMART toolkit, which identifies critical healthcare functions so leaders can plan ways to keep their organizations running in case of cyberattacks.
According to Clearwater's Jackie Mattingly, sustainable cybersecurity funding for rural hospitals remains elusive, with many states allocating little to no Rural Health Transformation Program money to security.
Lakewood Health System's Jim Roeder says building regional alliances enables rural hospitals to share expertise, strengthen defenses and keep care available when cyber incidents happen.
While HIMSS Media editors anticipate that AI will be used in every layer of healthcare's tech stack in 2026, they stress that governance and human oversight are essential to ensure AI works safely at scale.
Doug Meil, author of The Rise and Fall of Explorys and IBM Watson Health: A Personal Memoir of a Healthcare Moonshot that Misfired, discusses some lessons learned from that era, and offers perspective on where artificial intelligence may be headed next.
Sam Davis Jr., in the second part of our interview, says meeting regularly with surgical staff and building trust in its predictive analytics helped Rush University Medical Center enhance OR efficiency and forecast surgical demand with 90% accuracy.
According to Rom Eizenberg, Kontakt.io's chief revenue officer, hospitals in 2026 will deploy AI to track people, space and equipment and to optimize length of stay, which can help reverse losses and increase profitability.