As U.S. health systems enter a defining period of financial pressure, workforce disruption, AI acceleration, and shifting patient expectations, leaders face a pivotal question: How do we rebuild healthcare for a new era of performance and trust? This opening keynote sets the tone for the conference by exploring the transformative forces reshaping care delivery, from enterprise AI and digital modernisation to new models of patient engagement and cross-functional leadership. Blending strategic insight with real-world lessons, this session challenges executives to look beyond incremental change and embrace the systemic transformation required to thrive in 2026 and beyond.

With most U.S. health systems operating on razor-thin margins, leaders must learn to innovate under financial constraint. This session explores strategies for prioritising investment, sustaining digital innovation, and balancing operational maintenance with strategic transformation, when budgets are tight.

Our signature ‘Shark Tank’ session provides each solution provider with an opportunity to deliver a short pitch, explaining why they are here and how their services can help tackle some of the sector’s ongoing challenges.

AI is everywhere but understanding what is a true value-add, what is hype, and how to ensure safety and effective governance is still a challenge. In this session, leaders will unpack how they are structuring their AI strategy, whilst ensuring clinicians remain central, managing vendor claims and data ownership, consolidating their tech stack and ensuring interoperability, and navigating the explosion of AI tools while ensuring long-term strategic coherence. Expect insights into case examples of clinical applications of AI and real world use cases with outcomes and impacts.

As financial pressure intensifies across U.S. health systems, leaders are turning to “non-sexy” AI, focused on revenue cycle, finance, and back-office operations, to drive real, measurable impact. In this panel, C-suite executives and industry experts discuss how operationalizing AI in billing, denials management, documentation, and financial workflows can reduce waste, prevent revenue leakage, and fund future innovation. Attendees will gain practical insights into building a secure, scalable AI strategy that delivers near-term ROI while laying the foundation for long-term digital transformation.

Explore how large health systems can build and execute a coherent global AI and digital innovation strategy. Drawing on Cleveland Clinic’s experience operating across the US and UK, this session examines how to balance enterprise standards with local market realities, select and scale AI solutions that are not universally available, and avoid fragmented “pilot culture.” The session focuses on governance models, vendor strategy, platform alignment, and investment prioritisation, showing how leaders can move beyond hype to create sustainable, system-wide innovation.

Attendees will leave with practical insights on structuring AI portfolios, managing regional trade-offs, and accelerating adoption at scale without compromising performance, compliance, or long-term value.

From call centers to digital access pathways, patient experience is becoming a core competitive differentiator. Explore how to modernize contact centers, integrate new tech platforms, improve retention, and enable patient self-navigation through smarter digital infrastructure. Discuss the importance of patient access, how technology can have unintended negative consequences on patient experience, such as with older patients and how to best manage this effectively in your systems, ensuring you’re meeting patients where they are and maintaining a human touch.

Discuss how creating safe, supportive, and inclusive environments for staff can directly improve patient access, experience, and outcomes. Drawing on real-world experience in advocacy, leadership, and mental health care, this presentation explores how health systems can strengthen workforce wellbeing, amplify underrepresented voices, and navigate structural barriers to equitable care. Attendees will gain practical insights on fostering cultures where clinicians can show up fully, and how that cultural foundation drives more compassionate, effective, and accessible healthcare.

This talk will describe the challenges of design, development, and implementation of AI-based clinical decision support, discussing a range of implementation projects (and associated pragmatic clinical trials) and the fundamental challenges faced. The focus of this talk will be primarily on various strategies for EHR-based implementation of AI tools, including the development of data pipelines, data issues, performance drift, and considerations for conducting pragmatic trials.  

Facing growing clinical complexity, rising costs, and increasing burnout, MaineHealth embarked on a multi-year transformation to modernize its digital core. Through enterprise-wide standardization and consolidation, spanning Microsoft 365, hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure, unified clinical communications, and a redesigned desktop experience, the organization shifted from legacy, CapEx-heavy IT to a flexible, consumption-based, cloud-smart operating model. This session explores how MaineHealth aligned infrastructure modernization with clinician experience, financial sustainability, and future innovation.

Everyday people walk into healthcare afraid: patients, families, AND health care team members. While they are afraid, they cannot hear the important information we are sharing. In this interactive, experiential workshop, we will explore the speaker’s research study on patient and family’s fear and the most important things we can do to ease their fear and respond with compassion. We will also explore times when the health care team may be afraid, such as times of significant change, and how that fear can impact outcomes. Strategies to alleviate fear, increase trust and improve outcomes will be explored.

This interactive workshop equips health system leaders with a practical, step-by-step framework for leading intelligence-driven transformation. Designed for C-suite and senior executives, the session moves beyond theory to focus on how to systematically build, govern, and scale AI and digital strategies across finance, operations, and clinical teams.

Participants will work through proven templates, checklists, and decision tools to assess readiness, prioritize investments, evaluate vendors, and manage change. Through facilitated discussion and real-world examples, leaders will gain clear, actionable takeaways they can apply immediately, turning ambitious transformation goals into coordinated, organization-wide execution.

Healthcare’s leadership structure is shifting fast, with new roles like Chief AI Officer, Chief Data Officer, and Chief Research Information Officer emerging across large systems. This panel examines what the next-generation org chart may looks like, how CIOs should position themselves, and how to avoid bureaucratic bloat while expanding strategic capability.