Hospitals are beginning to give AI systems something more consequential than the ability to generate text: permission to act. That shift is already underway. A September 2026 survey of 250 U.S. healthcare leaders found that 28% of organizations had agentic AI in production and another 44% were piloting it, while 72% reported AI tools or agents deployed without formal IT approval. The problem is no longer simply whether a hospital has an AI governance committee. Health systems need to know, agent
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
The Next Competitive Advantage in Drug Development Won’t Be a Better Molecule. It’ll Be Better Patient Selection.
For decades, the industry has organized itself around a single question: how do we discover more, and better, drug candidates? Target identification keeps getting smarter, molecule generation keeps getting faster, and AI has now touched nearly every stage of early discovery. Yet a molecule is only ever as good as the patients it happens to be tested on, and that half of the equation has received a fraction of the innovation investment.
Consider what happened across non-small cell lung cancer
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Evolving the EHR from a System of Record to a System of Action
The EHR is poised to evolve from its original role as a place to store patient information. The next step is for it to take a more active role in the patient care journey.
As more of the journey becomes digitized, the EHR can help move work forward by connecting workflows, surfacing what needs attention, and using AI to reduce administrative burden. This shifts the EHR from a system of record to a system of action.
In ambulatory care, that shift has practical implications. Scheduling,
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Why Behavioral Health Demands Purpose-Built CRM Architecture
When my business partner and I ran a multi-state behavioral health organization, one of our top challenges was accounting for how we spent our marketing dollars. Like many owner-operators, we also struggled to track conversations with potential clients and our business development team’s plans and pipeline. In the early days of our operation, which was more than 10 years ago, we tracked admissions with generic customer relationship management, or CRM, software. My partner and I spent hundreds of
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Beyond 8 P.M. Charting: Why Solving “Pajama Time” Demands Upstream Pre-Visit Intake
For most physicians, the workday does not end when the last patient leaves. Notes still need to be finished. Messages are still waiting. Administrative tasks are still open. This after-hours work has a name, pajama time, and healthcare has treated it as an unavoidable cost of practicing medicine for far too long.
Because the truth is, it isn’t unavoidable. And the fix has almost nothing to do with the time of day. Most of what follows clinicians home starts hours earlier, before the patient
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Why AI Must Contextualize, Not Automate, Crisis Hotlines
Put yourselves in the shoes of a health plan’s behavioral health hotline responder. This is a person, typically a clinician, whose job it is to provide immediate support as soon as members are flagged as a risk – a routine call that is made every day.
Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States, with the CDC reporting over 48,000 suicide deaths in 2024. For a health plan’s response services team, the interaction likely begins before the member ever picks up the
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How Peristaltic Pumps Are Enabling the Next Generation of Robotic Surgery
Surgical robotics gets talked about the way AI gets talked about in every other industry right now. It's the thing everyone in medtech eventually brings up when the conversation turns to the future of surgery. As robotic-assisted procedures spread across specialties, from urology to orthopedics, the robot itself understandably gets most of the attention. Intuitive's da Vinci system remains the best-known example, but the category now includes an entire generation of platforms purpose-built for
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Healthcare CIOs Need a Plan for November’s State Ballot Measures
State ballot initiatives can become practical questions for healthcare technology teams: who remains eligible for coverage, which expenses must be reported, who can access a record and when systems should change. Those questions deserve attention as voters decide state measures in the November 3, 2026 election.
Chief information officers should put ballot implementation on a shared planning calendar with finance, clinical and compliance leaders. Preparing for both approval and rejection can
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AI Agents Are Stress-Testing Healthcare Interoperability and Governance
Healthcare has become one of the most active testbeds for AI agents. In a single week of January 2026, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health and Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare. Ambient scribes such as Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot are generating clinical notes in production. The 2025 CAQH Index found that more than half of health plans and a quarter of provider organizations now use AI somewhere in their workflows.
But these agents are descending on infrastructure that wasn’t made for
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Hospitals Can No Longer Afford to Manage Revenue Cycle After the Fact
For years, hospital finance teams have run revenue cycle on a familiar loop: a claim goes out, a claim comes back denied or underpaid, and staff spend the next several weeks working it back. That loop was manageable when denial rates held fairly steady and reimbursement was reasonably predictable. Neither of those things is true anymore, and the gap between how revenue cycle is typically run and what today's payer environment actually demands is widening fast.
Denials are climbing, and they
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