Andrea Fox
Artificial intelligence agents coordinating tasks across healthcare workflows were the talk of HIMSS25. In the year ahead, AI is expected to progress cautiously beyond ambient listening to effect new automation in electronic health records.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the organization will be reintegrated into the UK Department of Health and Social Care within two years. The agency pledges to reinvest cost savings into frontline services.
Cybersecurity In Focus
More tech companies, and the government, are needed to address rural healthcare cyberattacks, according to the new Microsoft rural hospital cybersecurity landscape report.
Innovaccer, Veradigm and other companies are integrating real-time healthcare data, analytics and artificial intelligence-enhanced workflows into payer and provider systems to improve patient outcomes and care delivery.
Nursing and IT
Nurses with less than two years of experience increase their confidence in performing during electronic health record outages after escape room-style training, Michael Allen of Indiana University Health said at HIMSS25.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said it will pursue a market-based approach to site selection for its deployments going forward, and will bring its total 2026 deployments to 13 medical facilities.
In partnership with Microsoft, H-ISAC and international agencies, the vendor says efforts to dismantle cybercrime groups over the two years are paying off. There's been a drastic reduction in the number of unauthorized copies used in healthcare cyberattacks.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, along with other agencies using federal EHRs, experienced a system outage just weeks after assuring lawmakers about the success of ongoing improvement efforts.
Advocate Health uses a FHIR-enabled integration with its electronic health records to get customized information to patients before, during and after more than 200,000 annual well-child exams – achieving a 30% lift in patient engagement.
At HIMSS25, Gen. Paul Nakasone, former director of the National Security Agency, said the unique challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence in healthcare mean, "we all must be willing to take a few microsteps."