Nathan Eddy

Emergency medicine, radiology and anesthesiology still lag the overall benchmark across multiple indicators – pointing to ongoing workflow and staffing pressures in acute care environments.

Hospitals must balance financial pressure with clinician wellbeing as cost-first strategies are linked to burnout.

At HIMSS26, panelists said the OR is a "black box" evolving into a connected ecosystem, with surgical video and procedural data providing new ways to prevent complications.

During HIMSS26, Guido Giunti, chief data officer at St. James's Hospital Dublin, said hospitals' AI investments will succeed if paired with workforce-focused initiatives.

Its batch-style approach allows both providers and payers to extract large datasets, stream them into analytics platforms and use them for data pipelines and population-level analysis, interoperability leaders showed at HIMSS26.

Health systems evaluating AI must look beyond datasets and algorithms to understand the assumptions and priorities embedded within the applications themselves.

At HIMSS26, leaders from Emory Healthcare and Mass General Brigham discussed how initiatives like the Healthcare AI Challenge aim to help health systems make safer deployment decisions.

Translation systems are "trained to understand medication dosages, medical codes and other clinical terminology so the AI model works as it should," an Oracle engineer explained at HIMSS26.

McLeod Health approached AI deployment with a focus on removing friction from clinical workflows rather than chasing financial returns, says CMIO Bryon Frost.

At HIMSS26, panelists discussed whether healthcare technology is improving care or adding challenges to the healthcare journey for clinicians and patients.