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The region's healthcare leaders outline the key digital health and AI trends they expect will shape clinical care, data use, and innovation in the new year.

While he stresses that AI won't replace doctors, surgeon and futurist Dr. Shafi Ahmed says it is already being used for imaging, documentation, digital surgery and agentic assistants to help build future-ready health systems.

Ahead of HIMSS26, Sairohith Thummarakoti of Texas A&M University–Kingsville previews his talk on how agentic AI and low-code platforms can automate routine claims and prior authorization workflows.

Severance Hospital researchers have developed an AI platform that converts paramedic voice reports into clinical records, predicts patient deterioration, and recommends suitable transfer hospitals.

At Annapolis Internal Medicine, patient satisfaction ratings jumped, labor capacity more than doubled without adding staff, and hold times dropped from four minutes to under one minute, all because of the agentic AI technology.

The Emirates Health Service, according to Dr. Amina Al Jasmi, is using AI to strengthen radiologists' skills and to reduce workload by acting as a second reader that catches subtle findings humans might miss.

Beth Meese, the health system's executive director of IT, digital health and enterprise EMR, offers a preview of her HIMSS26 session, which will offer an up-close perspective on how to make ambient tools work to "meaningfully reduce" clinician burden.

And that was just in the first six months. By catching needed radiology follow-ups and ensuring patients receive recommended follow-up care, the Virginia health system helps prevent more advanced disease and supports value-based care initiatives, one exec says.

New agentic tools, medication management advances, medical device guidance and the "great tech reckoning" were among just some of the hundreds of artificial intelligence and machine learning stories we published this past year.

Rural hospitals are overcoming fears of artificial intelligence and adopting tools that integrate with electronic health records on their own terms – whether that's all at once or by cultivating buy-in slowly and deliberately.