The 59 leaders featured in this article are speaking at Becker’s 10th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference. The conference will take place Sept. 30th – Oct. 3rd at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago. If you’d like to be considered for a speaking spot, please reach out to rhaseman@beckershealthcare.com.
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What’s your top focus for the second half of 2025?
Pooja Vyas, DO, MBA, CPE. System Vice President, Care Coordination and Physician Advisement at SSM Health: As a system vice president focused on maximizing revenue by reducing clinical denials and improving CDI, my top priorities for the second half of 2025 are clear. First, I’m committed to strengthening our denials management strategy using data-driven approaches. This means closely analyzing denial trends, implementing intelligent prevention tools within EPIC and streamlining our appeal workflows to improve both efficiency and outcomes. Second, I plan to expand and deepen our CDI programs. We need to invest in specialty-specific education, embed real-time documentation prompts in EPIC and work closely with physician champions to drive adoption and engagement. Lastly, I’m focused on leveraging automation and AI to enhance revenue integrity. By deploying AI tools to review clinical notes, automating pre-bill reviews and integrating CDI with coding workflows, we can help reduce errors and ensure alignment across teams. These initiatives are not only essential for addressing immediate financial risks but also for building a strong foundation for long-term revenue optimization and compliance.
Robb Wetmore, MHR. Director for Digital Healthcare at Variety Care: For the second half of 2025, my top focus is advancing the use of responsible AI to reduce burden and improve access in community health. We’re working to implement Navina AI to streamline clinical decision-making and reduce provider friction. I’m also exploring new eVisit use cases that convert inbound calls to telehealth sessions, improving efficiency and access for patients. With a new chief of population health on board, we’re evaluating AI-enabled remote patient monitoring solutions that align with our mission to serve vulnerable populations more proactively. It’s an exciting time to shape ethical, equitable digital care models that actually work in the real world.
Sunil Dadlani. Executive Vice President, Chief Information and Digital Transformation Officer and Chief Cyber Security Officer at Atlantic Health System: As chief information and digital officer, my top focus for the second half of 2025 is driving measurable value from our AI and digital investments—particularly in enhancing patient access, clinical decision support and workforce productivity. We’re prioritizing scalable use cases that improve outcomes, reduce friction for clinicians and optimize operations across care settings. Strengthening our AI governance framework remains critical to ensure responsible innovation, data integrity and security.
David L. Reich, MD. Chief Clinical Officer at Mount Sinai Health System as well as President at The Mount Sinai Hospital: For the second half of 2025, my top focus is prioritizing the use cases for AI-driven initiatives that leverage rapid advances in LLMs and agentic agents to improve patient experience, safety and quality. The challenges of determining return-on-investment and scalability of each project will drive strategy. The use cases that are likely to be prioritized include patient access assistance, medication management and facilitating evidence-based stewardship of laboratory and radiology testing.
Diane Constantine, MBA, MSN, NI-BC, NEA-BC. Director of Clinical Informatics at University of Maryland Medical System: As director of clinical informatics, my top focus for the second half of 2025 is advancing the integration of AI within Epic to meaningfully support clinical decision-making and improve workflow efficiency. We’re leveraging embedded generative AI tools to reduce documentation burden, surface predictive insights at the point of care and enhance clinician experience — all while ensuring strong governance and alignment with patient safety and equity goals. It’s not just about adopting AI; it’s about applying it responsibly and effectively to deliver measurable value to both providers and patients.
Mari Findley, RN, MPA. Director for Transition Care at Hennepin County Medical Center: As a county regional trauma center, our focus is now on reducing trauma transfer refusals. To do this, we need a strong length-of-stay focus on all of our inpatient beds and moving patients to the right level of care at the right time in their care continuum. We have created a LOS taskforce that is focusing on creating a playbook for all of our common discharge barriers and are trying to be creative and innovative in moving patients to reducing delays in discharge.
Pidge Lohr, DNP, RN. Chief Nursing Officer at Integris Health: For the second half of 2025, my strategic focus as system CNO will center on strengthening frontline engagement through our nursing shared governance structure, ensuring nurses are empowered to drive quality, safety and experience outcomes. We will accelerate adoption of the Highly Reliable Experience (HRE) framework, embedding leadership behaviors that foster trust, accountability and high performance. A key initiative will be the continued spread of virtual nursing to support clinical teams, improve workflow efficiency and enhance both patient and caregiver experience. Additionally, I’ll prioritize workforce stability by advancing retention strategies, optimizing staffing models and investing in leadership development. Finally, we’ll align clinical excellence initiatives with financial stewardship, ensuring our nursing teams deliver value-based care that is both compassionate and efficient.
Samuel Pueringer, MHA. Senior Director for Retail Health Operations at Hartford HealthCare: Definitely optimizing some of our new ventures that we have implemented this past year – especially those that get patients the care within hours of when they need it as it isn’t just ‘same day’ anymore but about getting patients the care they need ‘now.’
Deepti Pandita, MD, FACP, FAMIA. Chief Medical Informatics Officer, Vice President of Clinical Informatics and Associate Professor of Medicine at University of California Irvine Health: In the second half of 2025, my top focus is making sure that the technology behind patient care actually makes their experience better—more connected, more efficient and more personalized. That means bringing in smart tools that help doctors focus more on patients and less on screens, improving how health records are shared securely across UC hospitals and clinics, and making sure digital innovations support fairness and safety for everyone. At the end of the day, our goal is simple: Technology should make care feel easier and more connected and convenient, not harder.
James Matera, DO, FACOI, ACPE. Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs and Chief Medical Officer at CentraState Medical Center: As we move into the second half of 2025, I am prioritizing two main issues at the hospital.
- Civility across all disciplines. We have seen a marked increase in incivility between and among patients, families, medical staff and other hospital employees. This has ranged from lack of respect in the way we speak and communicate, all the way up to threats from family members. There is simply no room in a healing institution for this, and leaders need to be at the forefront to handle these situations.
- Standardization of workflows, practices and utilizing evidence-based order sets. I feel that clinical variation remains one of the highest priorities to increase the value in healthcare and further balance the quality/cost chasm. Setting the ‘norms’ and allowing for performance improvement will only strengthen us in our missions to provide quality, compassionate healthcare beyond 2025.
Klaus Thaler, MD, MBA. Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at CHI Creighton University System: We have to focus on our staff reducing turnover and increasing retention. We have to be innovative in opening new recruitment pipelines for clinical and ancillary staff. We need to reduce burn out by supporting wellbeing activities in and out of the workplace. We have to be strategic in the choice of service offers and service optimization with respect to growth forecasts in the inpatient and outpatient sector and market integration. We must continue our work on equity in healthcare by reducing disparities in the communities we serve.
Michael Laukaitis, MBA. Director for Revenue Cycle Analytics, Accounting and Quality Assurance at UT Southwestern Medical Center: We’re doubling down on agentic AI for the phone — evaluating every inbound and outbound call for revenue cycle into an autonomous, voice-driven workflow that can listen, think, act and document in real time. In practice that means:
- Conversation co-pilots for patients and payers. LLM-powered agents will verify eligibility, answer balance questions, start prior authorizations and even schedule follow-up calls while a human stays in the loop only when nuance is needed.
- Real-time voice engineering. We’re training custom acoustic models that understand regional accents and medical jargon, then pass intent and sentiment to our RPA bots so the next task fires before the caller hangs up.
- Zero-click documentation. Every call is transcribed, summarized and written back to Epic and our CRM, giving staff instant context for the next touchpoint and shaving minutes off each interaction.
Zafar Chaudry, MD, MS, MIS, MBA, CITP. Senior Vice President, Chief Digital Officer and Chief AI and Information Officer at Seattle Children’s: Top focus for Seattle Children’s will be centered on aggressively advancing its digital transformation and expanding regional access to care. This strategy involves leveraging a deep partnership with Google Cloud to harness artificial intelligence and data analytics for improved clinical decision-making. Simultaneously, the hospital will continue to enhance the patient experience, all underpinned by a robust IT modernization and cybersecurity framework.
Nolan Chang, MD. Executive Vice President of Strategy, Corporate Development and Finance at The Permanente Federation as well as Medical Director for Business Management at Southern California Permanente Medical Group: Our integrated, patient-focused system of care demonstrates improved health outcomes and satisfaction for our patients so continuing to provide this quality care, while at the same time ensuring physician wellbeing and engagement of the entire care team, is top of mind for me. Leveraging technology can help us reach these goals by making our processes more effective and efficient. For example, in the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, we’ve instituted what we call ‘smart triage,’ a process of gathering information ahead of a patient visit to determine the patient’s care needs. Seventy percent of our primary care physicians are using it now with some evidence showing it saves several minutes per patient interaction and increases patient engagement and patient satisfaction. In fact, survey data shows that this tool is saving physicians two to three minutes per visit, which is impactful when you consider that it might save them about 30 minutes a day.
Kristine Lee, MD. Associate Executive Director for Virtual Medicine and Technology at Kaiser Permanente: We’ve had great success with the rollout of ambient artificial intelligence scribes to physicians across Permanente Medical Groups in diverse settings and specialties. These tools transcribe notes during doctor appointments, which physicians then review and edit for accuracy. They have significantly reduced administrative workloads, enabling our physicians to spend more time focused directly on their patients. In the second half of 2025, one focus will be to facilitate customization for individual users that will likely further enhance the benefits of these tools and promote additional engagement of nonusers. We’re also continuing to conduct broad assessments for incorporating AI into other clinical workflows.
Stephen Parodi, MD. Executive Vice President of External Affairs, Communications and Brand at Kaiser Permanente Federation: Our focus will continue to be on strengthening our commitment to value-based care by leveraging technology to improve patient access. This approach is important given the projected physician shortage, especially in primary care. For example, we have developed more protocols using e-visits, which allow us to take care of the patient’s problem on the first contact. If you email us or answer questions online about a sinus infection, we have protocols in place where we can diagnose and then get a prescription to you at the first point of contact, even if that’s electronically. This is just one example of how we can have technology help us continue to provide the same high-level care to a broader population with fewer clinicians.
Shannon Cameron, MBA, MHIIM. COO, Revenue Cycle at AFS of Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians: Our top priority for the remainder of 2025 is the continuation of transforming denial management from a reactive process into a proactive strategy. We’re focusing heavily on front-end accuracy—tightening authorization workflows, eligibility checks and documentation compliance. By addressing root causes early in the revenue cycle, we can significantly reduce downstream denials and streamline the path to payment. This shift not only accelerates cash flow, but also reduces the administrative burden on our clinical and billing teams.
We’re also doubling down on data analytics to gain real-time insights into performance trends, payer behavior and bottlenecks across the revenue cycle. We are working to implement predictive modeling, and our KPI dashboards are being refined to move from lagging indicators to actionable foresight. By equipping our RCM department leads with clear, intelligent data, we can guide targeted interventions, improve net collections and align our financial goals with clinical operations more effectively.
With evolving CMS regulations, payer contracts and emerging payment models, ongoing education and workforce agility are critical. We’re prioritizing staff training on AI-assisted tools, compliance updates and cross-functional workflows. At the same time, we’re evaluating automation opportunities in claims processing and AR follow-up to ensure we stay competitive, compliant and scalable. Our goal is to create a resilient, high-performing RCM team that can anticipate change and lead through it.
Anoop Vijayan. Director of Data, Analytics, Governance, AI and Data Science at Texas Children’s Hospital: As we move into the second half of 2025, our focus will be on expanding and strengthening our data engineering and data management capabilities. This effort is central to accelerating analytics delivery and enabling scalable, enterprise-grade AI. Key priorities include enhancing real-time data ingestion and advancing metadata management to improve discoverability, lineage and governance. We are also evolving the AI Governance and Guidance Committee to serve as a more effective steward of responsible AI. Our aim is to strike the right balance between trust and agility—ensuring ethical, transparent AI practices while enabling faster innovation and deployment. Another major priority is the transformation of our data governance framework. This includes redesigning processes and implementing a scalable operating model that embeds governance into day-to-day operations—driving consistency, accountability and long-term sustainability across the organization.
Haris Ackerman. Director of Integration and Strategic Operations at Virtua Health: For the remainder of 2025, Virtua Health is focused on seamlessly integrating care pathways to enhance the patient journey from outpatient care to inpatient stays and post-discharge support. By streamlining clinical workflows and leveraging innovative technologies, such as advanced in-room technology and next generation at-home patient monitoring programs, we aim to deliver coordinated, patient-centered care that improves outcomes and experience. This holistic approach ensures patients receive the right care at every stage of their care journey, supported by robust data analysis and simplified communication across our health system.
Carla Graves. Vice President and Chief Ambulatory Revenue Officer at Advent Health: Reflecting on my top focus for the second half of 2025, the dynamic landscape of healthcare and the numerous executive orders impacting healthcare and revenue cycle are at the forefront of my attention. Staying abreast of these regulatory changes is crucial for being prepared to adjust accordingly. Additionally, AdventHealth is experiencing significant growth, and to support this, I am keen on leveraging more automation to increase efficiency and accelerate cash flow.
More importantly, leadership development is a core value for me. I am actively working with my team to identify needs and provide the necessary tools for their success. In summary, my focus areas include staff development, monitoring regulatory changes and increasing efficiency and cash flow through automation and the increased use of AI in the denials space.
Carol Yarbrough, MBA, CPC, OCS, CHC. Telehealth Business Operations Manager at UCSF Health System: As the primary educator for our revenue and coding teams with regard to telehealth updates, I will be concentrating on disseminating any new extension information past Sep. 30, 2025 granted by Congress and verifying commercial insurance policies billing requirements. The variations are many: modifier 95 with POS 10 or 02, or just POS 10 or 02, etc. Hoping that a two-year extension will go into effect for breathing room in order to assess any immediate Federal budgetary impacts as well as the 2026 MPFS updates.
Eric Snyder. Executive Director for Technology and Innovation at University of Rochester Medical Center – Wilmot Cancer Institute: For the second half of 2025, my top focus is driving breakthrough innovation in the healthcare space, beyond the buzz around AI. While AI remains a powerful tool, true transformation requires reimagining how data, systems and human insight intersect to solve real problems. I’m committed to building infrastructure and strategies that accelerate impactful solutions, not just hype. It’s about changing the paradigm, not just upgrading the toolkit.
Michael Archuleta. CIO and HIPAA and Information Security Officer at Mt. San Rafael Hospital: For the second half of 2025, my focus is leading a seismic shift in how rural healthcare leverages AI, cybersecurity and data-driven innovation to elevate care, protect patient trust and build future ready ecosystems. We are advancing a secure AI-powered infrastructure that doesn’t just support care delivery, it enhances IT, accelerates decision making and scales precision across the enterprise. At Mt. San Rafael, we’re proving that rural shouldn’t mean limited. We’re deploying technologies that rival and often surpass those of large urban systems, because innovation should be equitable.
We’re integrating lifesaving AI algorithms into clinical workflows, transforming data into actionable intelligence and hardening our cybersecurity architecture to ensure resilience in an era of escalating digital threats. All of this while staying rooted in one mission: to create a healthcare environment that is secure, intelligent and relentlessly patient-focused.
The next chapter in healthcare won’t be written by those who wait, it will be authored by leaders who dare to build it. That’s our commitment. #GSD
Jaideep R. Deshpande, MBA. Executive Director of Strategy and Marketing at College of Dentistry as part of University of Illinois Chicago: Our top focus for the second half of 2025 is our Epic Wisdom Implementation project which is a strategic initiative at the UIC College of Dentistry & Clinics focused on revolutionizing dental education and patient care through the integration of an advanced eHR platform. This transformation includes optimizing business processes, standardizing clinical workflows and enhancing analytical research capabilities.
Lisa Stephenson, MSN, RN, NI-BC. Chief Nursing Informatics Officer t Cedars-Sinai Health System: Our focus at Cedars-Sinai is to continue to improve patient engagement and access while also realizing optimal clinical efficiency and well-being through the expansion of digital tools and automation. However, as we look to implement these tools that introduce new approaches like AI and virtual care, we need to ensure that we are considering the change management needed for successful outcomes. We are reimagining our approach to engaging, training, and supporting staff and patients to deliver precise, pertinent, and personalized results that align with the rapid pace of change.
Darrell Keeling, PhD. Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Parkview Health: What’s on my mind this quarter? Agentic AI and the future of work: As we move through the second quarter of the year, I find myself taking a step back to reflect on the evolving role of artificial intelligence, specifically agentic agents and how they are poised to reshape the workplace. These tools come at a significant cost and must deliver value well beyond basic tasks like grammar correction, writing emails, creating presentations or creating a unique drawing to justify their return on investment. The real opportunity lies in training staff to thoughtfully integrate these agents into their daily workflows, not only to automate repetitive tasks but to enhance the value of their expertise.
A central question is: How do we equip our teams to utilize these agents in a manner that is scalable, secure and aligned with organizational goals? It’s not just about individual productivity. It’s about creating repeatable processes that others can adopt and build upon, enabling the enterprise-wide adoption of agentic AI in a controlled and responsible manner.
This also raises critical considerations around governance: What safeguards, policies and training are necessary to ensure the secure and ethical use of these tools? How do we protect the integrity of the data being used and generated by these systems and sustain having a human in the loop?
Finally, from a strategic perspective, we must ask: Can we cost-effectively invest in agentic agents without undermining our existing workforce? True success lies in leveraging the intellectual capital of our employees to guide, shape and optimize these technologies, not replace them. It’s more about reskilling our workforce and workforce augmentation.
These are the challenges and opportunities that are top of mind for me this quarter as we navigate the next chapter of digital transformation.
Aimmon Lago, MHA, MS. Executive Director for Revenue Cycle and Population Health Systems at Stanford Health Care: Here at Stanford Health Care, we’re very excited for the potential efficiency and accuracy gains from Epic’s Payer Platform integration with our major health plan partners. We’ve successfully connected with all our major payers, and we’re focused on additional feature adoption to realize benefits across the revenue cycle including eligibility, authorization and claims. We’re also focused on piloting AI features in all areas of our revenue cycle to summarize clinical data and help alleviate administrative processing. From a process perspective, we seek to follow a LEAN IT methodology that not only creates value, but creates sustainable value with limited long-term technical debt and system maintenance.
Sandeep Rustagi. Chief Data Analytics Officer at University of Mississippi Medical Center: Here are some of my top focus areas for second half of 2025:
- Establish a structured approach for selecting high-ROI AI solutions across the organization
- Develop and implement a comprehensive AI governance model
- Accelerate data standardization and quality improvement initiatives to enhance organizational performance
- Launch advisory analytics services to support stakeholder decision-making
Robbie Freeman. Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Mount Sinai Health System: Our top focus for the second half of this year is advancing our digital strategy to better support our workforce, patients, consumers and care teams. We’re prioritizing tools that enhance experience, streamline workflows and enable more personalized, coordinated care. A key initiative is the development of an agentic AI roadmap—focused on deploying responsible, scalable AI that aligns with our strategic priorities and delivers meaningful impact. This includes co-designing solutions with frontline teams and ensuring governance structures are in place to guide safe and effective implementation.
Nirmit Kothari, MD, MPH. Associate Chief Medical Officer at Baptist Memorial Hospital – Memphis: Since our new fiscal year starts in October, the first few months of the second half of 2025 will be the time for us to reflect on processes and performance this year so far as well as start finalizing our goals for the upcoming fiscal year. Our primary focus will remain on achieving high-quality performance, particularly in areas such as mortality rates, readmission rates, patient safety and patient experience. We firmly believe that timely and efficient patient care contributes significantly to the overall improvement of care quality and the reduction of adverse events. Consequently, optimizing patient flow, enhancing capacity and expanding patient access remain our top operational priorities. As a system, we will continue to explore and implement various AI tools that enhance clinical documentation, mitigate provider burnout, provide predictive analytics and facilitate personalized care in diverse settings. Additionally, we will continue to have a strong emphasis on workforce recruitment, retention and development.
Salim Saiyed, MD, MBA, FAMIA. Chief Medical Information Officer at UT Health Austin as well as Assistant Professor for the Hospital Medicine Division in the Internal Medicine Department and Assistant Professor for the Population Health Department in the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin: As I look ahead to the second half of 2025, our team’s focus is on three strategic priorities as we build the first academic health system in Austin, Texas – The University of Texas Medical Center, anchored by Dell Medical School. These priorities are grounded in our broader vision: As a world-class academic medical center working in partnership with our community—and powered by cutting-edge technology and digital capabilities—we are setting the standard for excellence in integrated, multidisciplinary patient care.
Designing a digital-first, sustainable academic health system that delivers person-centered care while pushing the boundaries of clinical innovation, technology and behavioral health with the patient as the center of it all. We are not just creating an academic health system—we are establishing a new institution built to define the future of health.
Leading the transition to Epic as our new EHR platform. This is more than a platform replacement—it’s a transformative opportunity to reimagine care delivery, streamline workflows and enhance the clinician and patient experience. Building the foundational blocks of our digital ecosystem, including a robust data platform, digital engagement platform and ERP. These platforms will enable AI-powered automation, personalized care experiences and seamless integration across the continuum of care.
Sam Shen, MD, MBA, CPPS. Vice Chair for Clinical Operations in the Emergency Medicine Department and Patient Safety Officer at Stanford Health Care: At the Stanford Healthcare emergency department, for the second half of 2025, we are focused on continuing to leverage our telemedicine platform to improve patient flow in our ED while investigating new use cases for virtual visits. We recently implemented a pilot utilizing telemedicine to provide real time consults at a local skilled nursing facility to reduce avoidable ED visits/admissions. In addition, we continue to utilize our Scheduled Virtual Visits for discharged ED patients to reduce return ED visits.
Jill Kalman, MD. Executive Vice President, Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Physician-in-Chief at Northwell Health: One of the top focuses for the second half of 2025 is digital engagement of our physician and clinicians and specifically as a lever for wellbeing and efficiencies. Our focus will be on how the EMR, ambient technology and AI can create a better connection to our patients and create a better work environment.
Preston Hodapp, BS. Director for Patient Access at Phelps Health: I will be working on enhancing the patient experience by using innovative technology and strategic process automation. Streamlining administrative tasks and exploring new digital tools can create a more seamless and personalized patient journey
Edward Thomas. Director for Enterprise Revenue Cycle Training Deployment at Trinity Health: For Trinity Health Revenue Excellence Training and Deployment, our top focus area is the ongoing development of capability within our global workforce of colleagues and vendors to decrease the cycle time and total cost to collect our revenue. This requires us to focus on our values, patients, and information management in an efficient methodology to decrease third party payer denials.
Erik Zempel. Director for Service Management and Interim Senior Director for Business IT at Michigan Medicine: My top focus for the second half of 2025 is driving transformative productivity across our administrative operations. We’re spearheading a major consolidation effort, unifying multiple standalone Microsoft 365 environments into a single tenant to streamline collaboration and communication across the organization. Alongside this, we’re launching the Power Platform to empower staff with low-code tools for building custom workflows and departmental apps—enabling true citizen development. Finally, we’re embracing AI-driven solutions to intelligently offload routine tasks, freeing up our teams to focus on higher value work.
Pam Austin. Senior Vice President and CIO at Ballad Health: Some initial thoughts on my top focus for the second half of 2025 are literally listed on my ‘white board.’ My focus is defined by growing cybersecurity threats, rapid AI adoption, rising pressure to enhance patient engagement while trying to manage with ever-pressing budget constraints. The urgency to move from operational firefighting to strategic enablement has never been greater and as Ballad Health’s CIO, the pressure is mounting but success is achievable.
Here are my five IT focus areas between now and year-end:
1. Cybersecurity is now a board-level imperative: Ransomware attacks on healthcare have escalated in both sophistication and severity. In 2025, my aim is to ensure that cybersecurity isn’t viewed as an IT issue but an enterprise-wide business risk. This includes third-party risk management, proactive training, and response simulations that include executive and clinical teams.
2. AI governance must come before AI expansion: CIOs must now lead the development of cross-functional AI governance frameworks that address data integrity, clinical risk, ethical usage and regulatory compliance, not just with the EHR but all systems across the company. But first, ‘AI 101’ type education that explains the basics along with use case examples.
3. Digital front door 2.0: It’s now or never. The pandemic jumpstarted digital transformation and patients now expect seamless, mobile-first access to care. The digital front door must evolve into a cohesive experience: smart appointment scheduling, virtual care options, real-time updates and bilingual accessibility.
4. Prepare the data foundation for what’s next: AI, population health, health equity and value-based care all require the same thing: clean, interoperable, real-time data, you know the adage–garbage in garbage out. We still face fragmented architectures and data silos that make innovation difficult. The second half of 2025 we are focusing on application rationalization by focusing on platform modernization, eliminating duplicative systems thus inconsistent data.
5. Reskill, retain and elevate IT leadership: As trends in the industry allude, CIOs need to shift toward strategic leadership while operational oversight must be distributed. Now is the time to invest in building the next layer of IT leadership–while upskilling teams on AI, data governance and agile delivery models. Burnout is real, but so is the opportunity to reshape how we lead.
Healthcare CIOs in 2025 aren’t just technology leaders–we’re enterprise change agents. The organizations that will thrive are those whose IT leaders can both stabilize and innovate, delegate and elevate, and move fast but never recklessly. The second half of this year is our window to build for resilience, readiness and reinvention. Let’s go do just that!
Robert Poznanovich. Chief Growth Officer at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation: In the second half of 2025, Hazelden Betty Ford is focused on expanding our integrated cooccurring care model nationwide that blends mental health and substance use treatment into a unified approach. We are continuing the investments in our digital transformation which includes new patient pathways, AI-driven tools and EHR enhancements which will provide better patient experience, care delivery and operational efficiencies. We are also expanding our family and children programs in ways that will improve treatment outcomes by further integrating family and children support into recovery.
Lewis W. Marshall Jr. Chief Medical Officer at NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln Hospital: The second half of 2025 is going to be challenging. With potential cuts to Medicaid and Medicare on the horizon, many of our solutions will involve IT, specifically AI and machine learning. We will need to look at how AI and machine learning can automate standard operating procedures and reduce the strain on our diminishing staff. For example, using AI to converse with patients to help them schedule appointments with providers. AI will help providers identify more specific diagnoses to help more accurately depict the patient’s medical condition. AI identifying lesions on radiological studies already exists but will get better and involve more diagnostic studies. We will need to look at agentic AI to make some decisions and take some actions, but we will need to make sure to have human oversight. While we are entering challenging times, there are potential solutions, that if identified, implemented and used thoughtfully, we will reduce staff stress while improving patient care and satisfaction. Top focus for the second half of 2025 is to identify and implement AI that works for our patients. Not every hospital or hospital within a system will be the same. It will need to be individualized and based on the needs of the specific community being served.
Anna Flattau, MD, MSc, MS. Alumni Professor and Chair of Family and Community Medicine as well as Enterprise Chief for Primary Care Services at Jefferson Health: Jefferson Health’s primary care system cares for over a million people, and our centralized telehealth services deliver on comprehensive clinical management in ways that complement traditional practice-based visits. One major focus will be to build a ‘patient school’ that creates access for health education and lifestyle medicine at scale. Prevention, chronic disease management, wellness and longevity require that we support our patients with the information and partnership they need for lifestyle management, such as healthy eating, stress reduction and exercise. Over the next six to 12 months, we will plan and launch group-based visits, mostly through telehealth, to ensure our patients can receive the evidence-based counseling that is core to implementing evidence-based best practice. We will also continue to grow and strengthen our existing centralized telehealth programs, for example, by working with geriatrics leadership to ensure the content of our Annual Wellness Visit program incorporates the best practices of Age-Friendly Health Systems. Overall these programs create the operational infrastructure that allows our clinical teams to deliver on the comprehensive, relationship-based care that is the heart of primary care and a major driver of population and public health.
Roxanne Lopez. Director for Patient Financial Services at Children’s Hospital Colorado: My top focus for the second half of 2025 is to keep the patient financial and team member experience center while continuing to work toward payer accountability in this complex environment, cost reduction and eliminating preventable denials. I am excited for our upcoming denial mitigation program revamp that will lead the path to faster identification of ‘root cause’ and prioritization to eliminate denials that will lead to necessary cash flow acceleration.
Karen E. Hunter, DNP, RN, NI-BC, CENP. Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Adventist Health: For the second half of 2025, our top focus is preparing for our Epic go-live in September 2026. But we’re not treating it as a routine implementation—we see it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to re-architect how we deliver care. Epic is becoming the operating system of our health system, and we’re using it to lay the groundwork for scalable innovation and long-term transformation.
Our clinical informatics model is central to this shift. We refuse to bolt innovation onto broken systems. Instead, we’re embedding informatics into operational teams—making it part of the daily rhythm of care, not an external advisory layer. It’s about real-time insight, continuous improvement and making transformation tangible for the people who deliver care every day.
We’re also pushing forward with a mobile-first strategy—not for aesthetics but to enable real-time data capture and consumption. This is about giving care teams what they need, when and where they need it, to act decisively and effectively.
It’s ambitious. It’s complex. But we believe it’s not just worth doing—it’s non-negotiable.
Regina Foley, PhD, MBA, RN. Executive Vice President, Chief Nurse Executive and Chief Transformation and Integration Officer at Hackensack Meridian Health: At Hackensack Meridian Health, our primary focus is recruitment and retention to reduce administrative burden for our bedside caregivers. By embracing technology through efforts such as virtual nursing, we’re reducing the time our bedside team spends away from patients. A new remote telemetry transport algorithm, launching in the latter half of the year, will allow caregivers to stay within their unit while patients travel to testing. Through shifting supplemental time to hands-on care, we strive to increase team member satisfaction and decrease vacancy rates.
Lisa Carter, NE-BC, FABC. Southern Regional President at Ballad Health: As we focus on the second half of the calendar year, many leaders will be focusing on the first quarter of a new fiscal year and financial sustainability. As we look for ways to gain financial efficiency, technology utilization will be at the forefront. Focusing on ways that technology can shift the workload burden of our frontline team members and improve our care delivery will be a priority. As a health system, the focus on governance of artificial intelligence and piloting its utilization in many areas will also be crucial. My personal leadership focus surrounds listening to our customers and team members throughout our service area so those voices can drive decision making.
Bo Wilkes. President at Ballad Ventures: Our top focus for the second half of 2025 is backing solutions that meaningfully improve workforce efficiency and expand access to care, especially in rural communities like those we serve across the Appalachian Highlands. At Ballad Health, we’re prioritizing investments in AI-driven tools that reduce administrative burden and free up clinicians to spend more time with patients – we want to enable caregivers to ‘do more of what they love.’ We’re also monitoring the evolution of reimbursement models, which are accelerating the shift toward scalable, value-oriented care models, including virtual care, team-based delivery and home-centered services. These trends aren’t just market signals; they’re practical solutions we believe will define the next wave of sustainable, high-impact healthcare innovation. That’s where we’re placing our energy and capital in the months ahead.
Scott Simeone. Vice President for Experience and Digital Transformation at Ochsner Health: In the second half of 2025, our focus is on strengthening the foundation that ensures our AI and virtual care efforts are both sustainable and scalable. We’ve made deliberate decisions on several key AI partnerships and already achieved significant operational scale and signal readiness in virtual care. Now, we’re refining our infrastructure, governance and integration strategies to build responsibly on that momentum to support lasting impact and continued innovation.
Stacey Benson. Director for Revenue Cycle Operations at Houston Methodist Physician Organization: Our top focus for the rest of this year is data trending and workflow efficiency. We need good data in order to determine payer behavior and trends which in turn drives efficient workflows. We have been working closely with our teams on tracking and trending, now we need to take this information and take action on it. This action includes identifying areas where we can automate, finding more front end edits that will reduce backend denials as well as using our system to queue up accounts that are most likely to pay. Good data is the key to our decision making capabilities.
Will Johnson, MBA, CHCIO, FHIMSS. Chief Information and Digital Officer at Tidelands Health: As we prepare to close out the fiscal year and calendar year of 2025, Tidelands Health IT is focused on a few key initiatives leveraging the latest technology to improve efficiencies and the overall experience for our patients.
First, we are completing our rollout of Dragon Ambient for our physicians after a successful pilot program. The technology provided many benefits during the pilot, most notably making the physicians’ charting time more efficient and allowing more time for patient care. During the pilot, we quantified the success by examining the time spent in the chart, physician activity in the chart, time to close the chart and the time for billing/reimbursement after the patient’s visit. We look forward to this streamlined charting that benefits our patients and physicians and can translate into increased revenues for our health system.
Another priority for us is virtual care/remote patient monitoring to supplement the high-quality care provided by our dedicated nurses. We are currently evaluating several of the latest technologies that may enable nurses to manage care more efficiently.
Finally, we are looking for all opportunities to leverage technology to reduce overhead costs. There may be technologies that can help make scheduling patients more efficient, perform standard processes that are repetitive and reduce long-term indirect operating costs.
We just wrapped up our annual budget and performance process, and our efforts have been truly successful in reducing IT costs while delivering more efficient technologies to benefit our patients and team members.
Susan Milford. Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at OSF HealthCare: Over the past three years, our team has advanced to leading with digital marketing strategy. Upskilling the team, adding new positions in user strategy, user experience and SEO, adding a new digital experience platform and aligning our content strategy have ensured we meet our consumers health and wellness needs. As we go into the second half of the year, we want to continue to show this value to our Ministry and build trust among our prospective and current patients. Specifically in the next six months, we are going to laser-focus on demonstrating the value of digital marketing. The challenges with ad pixels and user privacy have stymied the ability for healthcare marketers to show outcomes further down the marketing funnel. We are embarking on a new tool that is HIPPA compliant and will allow deeper marketing results eventually from lead generation to full conversion.
Debbie Trau, MSN, NEA-BC. Director for Clinical Registries at OSF HealthCare: The top focus for myself and my team will be to incorporate and further expand technology to help enhance the depth and breadth of our abilities. As a leader, I will strive to help champion change for advancing care delivery and outcomes by being agile, adaptable and empowering my team to do the same. Utilizing a growth mindset, with a laser focus on what is best for the patient and improving patient outcomes, we will engage in using tools which will enable us to optimize processes and efficiencies allowing further time and efforts on driving strategy, innovation and critical thinking for our patients. Our passion and our Mission “…of serving others with the greatest care and love” will fuel our work further cultivating a positive team culture and ensuring we help achieve improved access to care and continuous improvement.
Kathy Sanford, DBA, RN, FAAN. Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at CommonSpirit Health: We recently completed our first CommonSpirit Health five-year plan for nursing, which included a system-wide nurse residency program, leveraging virtually integrated care, establishing an internal traveler agency and developing a virtual care base to provide virtual support for local care teams. We’re now developing our plan for the next four years with input from clinical leadership and frontline nurses. Our focus will continue to be supporting our nurses so they can deliver the highest quality, patient-centered care.
Jeffrey Sattler, PharmD, DO FAMIA. System Medical Informatics Physician, CDI Physician Advisor, Hospital Medicine Division at Saint Luke’s Health System: For the second half of 2025, one of our top priorities is having a better understanding of the cost to benefit characterization with our current AI tools. For many health systems, determining the key area(s) of where to start using AI and in what capacity have been challenging, if not daunting given the number of possibilities. For us, most AI efforts have started in the EHR space working with Epic. However, determining budgetary numbers that are reasonable, considering AI scalability and the impacts of the AI tools are sources of challenge and concern. Simultaneously, realizing that those who successfully find areas of utility and impact of AI tools will have benefits and stay ahead of the curve also brings its own pressures. These are exciting but unparalleled times for technology adoption.
Michael Schnabel. Vice President and CIO at University of Texas Health Science Center: For the second half of 2025, my priority is advancing our IT operating model in alignment with a service-optimized approach—shifting from system ownership to service accountability. This involves designing IT around clearly defined, outcome-oriented services that enable AI-supported workflows and data-informed decision-making across clinical, operational and research domains. We’re focused on modular service delivery, tighter service integration and adaptive governance structures that can evolve with institutional needs. By aligning capabilities with measurable outcomes, we’re building a more responsive, transparent and sustainable IT foundation that directly supports enterprise priorities.
On the cybersecurity front, we’re operationalizing a threat intelligence framework that applies advanced analytics across identity, audit and cloud environments—enabling more precise and timely risk detection. We’re also strengthening data protection through enhanced access controls, improved infrastructure resiliency and more robust vendor risk oversight. These initiatives reflect our shift toward proactive, integrated services designed to anticipate and meet the demands of a rapidly changing healthcare environment.
Jill McKinney, BSN, RN. Vice President and Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Novant Health: For the remainder of 2025, our clinical informatics team at Novant Health is prioritizing the development of digitally enabled care environments, including the expansion of virtual nursing through telehealth-integrated patient rooms. These innovations are designed to enhance clinical workflows and support more efficient, patient-centered care. As Novant Health continues to grow, we are also focused on integrating new facilities onto our core systems, including Epic, to ensure consistency, interoperability and care continuity across our system. Throughout this work, we are steadfast in our commitment to delivering safe, high-quality care and a remarkable patient experience for all.
Girish N. Nadkarni, MD. Chair, Windreich Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health as well as Director for the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health and Chief AI Officer at Mount Sinai Health System: My top priority for the second half of 2025 is creating and implementing a comprehensive finance dashboard for the Windreich Department of AI and Human Health. This dashboard will serve as a centralized, real-time resource for tracking budgets, expenditures and forecasts, ultimately improving our data-driven decision-making. Ensuring financial transparency and operational efficiency is critical to our success, and this dashboard will be a foundational tool to help us achieve those goals.
Denise Boykin, CPA, MBA, CHFP. Vice President, System and Strategic Finance at Ascension: Ascension is and has always been committed to our Mission to serve all persons with special attention to those who are poor and vulnerable. That means staying nimble and versatile to ensure we can meet the changing needs of our patients. As we enter a new fiscal year, we will continue to build on the momentum created by our positive trajectory. We look forward to further investments in new technologies and innovations that further enhance quality and access in the communities we serve.
Manish Sapra, MD. Executive Director for Behavioral Health at Northwell Health: In the second half of 2025, we are excited about the implementation of a new EMR across Northwell Health which will bring all providers on one EMR across the system. A key initiative at Northwell will be the expansion of access to behavioral health services through a recently launched virtual behavioral health access hub, designed to provide patients with greater accessibility. This hub will offer personalized guidance, helping individuals to connect with appropriate mental health resources in a timely manner. We also plan to start implementing digital behavioral health therapeutics across a few pilot sites, aiming to enhance patient outcomes. The organization will continue to explore the application of artificial intelligence in improving clinician documentation. Additionally, by leveraging our internal AI Hub, we seek to optimize patient-provider matching, enhancing the precision with which patients are connected to suitable behavioral health resources.
Anjali Bhagra, MD, MBA. Medical Director for Automation at Mayo Clinic: Building on the automation foundation in place across Mayo Clinic, we are now entering a bold new phase of innovation and impact. Our focus for the remainder of 2025 centers on pioneering and integrating agentic automation capabilities that seamlessly support both clinical and operational workflows.
At the heart of this evolution will be the development of an agentic automation architecture, an integrated framework designed to enable scalable, secure and sustainable deployment of intelligent agents across the organization.
Simultaneously, we continue to accelerate high-impact use cases, including next-generation human-AI interactions. By leveraging emerging technologies such as holographic interfaces and digital avatars, we are reimagining how care is delivered, experienced and supported: all anchored in our commitment to innovation, excellence and compassionate care.
Vikesh Tahiliani, MD, MBA. Vice President and Domain Leader, Clinical Documentation Transformation, Digital Transformation and Innovation at HCA Healthcare: HCA Healthcare’s department of digital transformation and innovation continues to focus on streamlining workflows that enable providers to dedicate more time to direct patient care and spend less time on administrative responsibilities. This initiative is supported by the appropriate and compliant integration of technology to facilitate provider documentation across various care settings. Ultimately, these efforts are expected to lead to improved quality of care, higher patient satisfaction and increased provider satisfaction.
