HPN East Coast 2026 Agenda

Everyone has AI pilots. Few have organizational adoption. This session explores why the biggest barriers to AI are rarely technical. Drawing on lessons from large-scale transformation efforts, attendees will learn how leadership, incentives, governance, and culture determine whether AI creates lasting value or becomes another abandoned initiative.

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.

Most patient access technology measures the wrong thing: calls answered, links sent, or chatbots started. These reflect intent, not access. Access is complete only when a patient reaches the right provider, prepared and on time. Between intent and completion lie complex rules, unworked referrals, and lost context where patients stall. Drawing on data from 225 million patient interactions, this session reveals where access journeys break, which steps AI can manage end-to-end, and how shifting focus from volume to completion rates prevents lost revenue and lost patients.

Health systems apply rigorous measurement, accountability, and continuous improvement to revenue cycle management, yet many access challenges occur long before a patient is scheduled. This session explores how Alluvium applies the same operational disciplines to patient access, creating better outcomes for patients and organizations alike. Attendees will learn how to predict supply and demand across their network, respond dynamically to changing capacity and patient needs, and evaluate technologies that transform insight into action. By ensuring the right patient reaches the right provider at the right time, organizations can improve access, reduce delays, strengthen financial performance, and deliver better care

Hospital sourcing often focuses on commodity spend, but laboratory needs require a different approach. As health systems consolidate, complex lab products and technologies can be grouped into traditional sourcing frameworks that may not account for their impact on clinical workflows, technology, workforce, growth, and patient care. Northwell Health has taken a specialized approach to lab sourcing, recognizing the unique requirements of testing, systems, implementation, and validation. In this session, Northwell Health and the Fisher Healthcare channel will share how strategic sourcing, collaborative governance, and data driven contracting strategies can align clinical needs with operational efficiency, cost savings, and consistent, reliable supply.

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.

Israel’s healthcare system is widely recognised for its rapid digital innovation, advanced data integration, and strong collaboration between providers, government, and technology partners. In this international perspective session, a CIO from a leading Israeli health system shares practical lessons on how their organisation has accelerated digital transformation, embedded data-driven decision-making, and operationalised AI at scale 

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.

By 2035, the highest-cost population in American healthcare will also be its fastest-growing. Physician shortages will hit 86,000. Medicare's trust fund will be insolvent. And yet — almost everything needed to fix this is already possible today.

In this session, Justin Brueck lays out the four forces (demographic, workforce, consumer, and financial) converging to force healthcare from a reactive, fee-for-service system into a proactive, value-based one — whether organizations are ready or not. Drawing on Endeavor Health's work running the largest primary-care-embedded clinical genomics program in the country (225,000+ patients screened, 55,000+ genetically tested), Brueck shows what's already working: ambient AI cutting clinician burnout by 21 points, hospital-at-home models delivering equal outcomes at 30% lower cost, and genomics moving disease detection to stage zero.

This isn't a forecast of distant innovation — it's a field report from an organization already building the 2035 model, with a clear framework for where healthcare leaders should be placing their bets, their capital, and their attention right now.

You'll leave with: a working model of the four forces reshaping healthcare economics, real performance data from live deployments (not pilots), and a practical framework for where to intervene early — before the decisions that define your organization's next decade get made without you in the room.

 

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.

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.

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.

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 keynote 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.