“All things AI.”
That’s what Matt Weger, senior vice president and CIO of Columbus-based OhioHealth, is focusing on in 2026. So are 12 of his peers from across the industry.
From agentic to conversational to generative, the next 12 months figure to be a year of AI innovation — and optimization — for health systems. Becker’s asked CIOs and chief digital officers from around the country which digital innovation trends they plan to pay the closest attention to in 2026. Here are their answers, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:
Ryan Smith. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer of Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City): In 2026, Intermountain Health will advance a new generation of AI capabilities designed to meaningfully improve care delivery, caregiver and consumer experience, and operational performance. A major focus will be advancing agentic AI tools designed to manage multistep processes, such as scheduling, documentation, care coordination, clinical follow-up, and contact center automation, so caregivers can spend more time with patients. These solutions will help reduce administrative burden for caregivers and streamline patient journeys across the system.
Intermountain will also continue strengthening the governance, safety, and oversight structures needed for these more capable AI systems. This includes expanded human checks built into the process, clear responsibility decisions made with AI, and stronger monitoring checks to keep AI fair, reliable and clear as models become more autonomous.
Additional strategic focus areas for 2026 include scaling responsible use of AI in supply chain forecasting, advancing AI‑supported clinical decision tools within the EHR, modernizing cybersecurity protections for increasingly interconnected data environments, and maturing enterprise platforms that simplify how teams build, evaluate, and deploy AI at scale.
Together, these priorities position Intermountain to lead the industry in creating a safer, smarter and more resilient healthcare environment powered by responsible AI.
Scott Richert. CIO of Mercy (Chesterfield, Mo.): Generative AI and automation have already delivered measurable productivity gains in healthcare, from reducing clinician documentation time to streamlining back-office processes like revenue cycle management. These efficiencies matter because they free up our caregivers to spend more time with patients and improve the overall care experience.
Looking ahead to 2026, Mercy is most interested in solutions that integrate AI-driven insights with automation orchestration to create a seamless “think-decide-do” model. This evolution will enable AI agents that can be trusted to handle complex tasks reliably, supporting faster decisions, faster actions, personalized care plans and smoother patient journeys. Ultimately, these innovations aim to reduce administrative friction and ensure patients receive timely, high-quality care.
Jerry Fox. Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Digital Officer of BJC Health (St. Louis): The healthcare digital innovation I’ll watch most closely in 2026 is enterprise-scale AI orchestration, where the data and operating model lets AI run consistently throughout the enterprise safely and measurably across multicloud, multivendor environments.
Health systems increasingly operate across heterogeneous clouds, hypervisors, and vendor ecosystems, with many partners deploying AI in disparate settings. In this reality, the challenge isn’t access to AI — it’s achieving control, consistency, and integration. Without strong architectural discipline, organizations risk fragmented deployments, inconsistent governance, and local optimizations that suboptimize the enterprise.
The leaders in this space will intentionally put data at the center: governed, interoperable and accessible so AI agents can work seamlessly across domains. When data is structured and managed correctly, AI can be applied consistently to hospital operations, revenue cycle, back‑office operations, patient experience, and clinical workflows, rather than being limited to isolated use cases or vendor‑specific platforms.
From a CDIO perspective, success in 2026 means treating AI as an enterprise capability that spans clouds, vendors and functions, with clear accountability for outcomes. That requires aligning data strategy, infrastructure, security, and operating models so AI improves end‑to‑end performance, boosting efficiency, clinician experience, and patient outcomes, without introducing unmanaged risk.
In short, the most important trend is the shift from AI pilots to the architectural and data foundations that allow AI to scale responsibly across the entire healthcare system.
Al Smith. Senior Vice President and CIO of Lifepoint Health (Brentwood, Tenn.): We are focused on improving clinical workflows and efficiencies for our caregivers, and we know that utilizing EMRs infused with AI agents — along with support from remote care team members — can make a real difference. With the advanced digital tools and technologies available today, we are on the brink of making the EMR more user-friendly and useful to our clinicians as they focus on delivering high-quality patient care.
From streamlining documentation with ambient listening for MDs, RNs and other clinicians, to chart-intelligent summaries and surveillance algorithms, to AI agents with voice navigation; to virtual caregivers lifting some burden off of nurses — all of this meaningful progress will make the EMR easier to navigate, reduce the burden of charting, turn data into actionable insights, and return some time to direct patient care tasks.
Maggie Helms. Senior Vice President and Chief Data, AI and Digital Officer of HealthPartners (Bloomington, Minn.): In 2026, I’ll be paying closest attention to initiatives that prove real ROI and genuinely redesign workflows — especially prior authorization modernization and scheduling/access transformation — because the greatest value will come from reducing friction and reshaping how work gets done, not just automating today’s processes.
Joel Klein, MD. Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Information Officer of Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.): In 2026, we’re moving past the “wow” factor of new AI. The most important trend for us is a relentless focus on outcomes. It’s easy to get excited about new tech, and we’re exploring a lot of it. But now, the big question is: What’s the tangible benefit? Does this tool help a patient get a faster diagnosis? Does it give a nurse more time to spend with the people in their care? If we can’t prove that value, it’s just noise. We’re looking for real impact, not just interesting ideas.
Eric Smith. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Memorial Hermann Health System (Houston): One area I’ll be watching closely in 2026 is patient engagement through AI. We are already seeing meaningful progress as interactions become more personal, and capabilities continue to expand. The opportunity ahead is using AI to deliver both scale and relevance in how patients engage with their care, which can support more effective individual health management.
Multichannel engagement will be a key part of this evolution. AI that can interact through voice, messaging and other digital touchpoints based on what works best for a patient in a given moment is far more impactful than a one-size-fits-all approach. Behind the scenes, AI can manage context across those interactions, coordinate outreach, and summarize key insights so care teams stay informed and can step in when it matters most. Done well, this has real potential to improve outcomes and the overall patient experience at an individual level.
Matt Weger. Senior Vice President and CIO of OhioHealth (Columbus): It’s hard not to immediately answer this question with all things AI. There are meaningful opportunities to advance the productivity of our team members and accelerate what we can accomplish to help us further our mission — to improve the health of those we serve.
I am particularly focused on emerging technologies that can help OhioHealth scale our services to reach more lives and improve the quality of care we provide. There are two examples I’d like to highlight.
First, we are beyond pilot in agentic AI connecting with more patients than ever before, following up on their care with our virtual agent (Rachel). Second, we’re scaling ambient listening solutions for our providers, allowing them to focus on what’s most important to them — their patients. In addition, this technology aids in timely, complete and thorough charting, reducing provider burden. That’s a win-win.
Jim Venturella. Senior Vice President and CIO of WVU Medicine (Morgantown, W.Va.): Agentic AI is the trend that would top my list. We’re starting to move from experimentation to some real use cases being implemented. Granted, there’s still a lot of hype, and there’s going to be a lot of success and failure.
As the technology matures, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in healthcare: in revenue cycle areas, clinical areas, population health, patient care or patient journey management. Looking at this coming year, there will be a lot of trying to filter the real stuff from the hype.
We’ll be focusing a lot on our core vendors. We’re an Epic client, and they’re doing a lot of work, so step one is to figure out: Is it something they have that we think is worthwhile? If not, then we look at the marketplace, because there are lots of smaller, startup companies trying to develop novel solutions that can add a lot of value.
Brent Lamm. Senior Vice President and CIO of UNC Health (Chapel Hill, N.C.): The digital innovation trend that’s really on my mind is conversational AI, like the things we’re doing around putting autonomous AI agents in front of patients and for administrative workflows, for scheduling, care gap closure, outreach, allowing our leaders to talk to the data.
And now, can you stratify that by X, Y or Z? With conversational AI, we see the voice continuing to become more and more the user interface of the future.
Lee Schwamm, MD. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Health Officer of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health: We will be keeping a close eye on the deployment of agentic AI in 2026. We see this as a major step forward in the evolution of RPA (robotic process automation) and a major opportunity to reduce administrative burden and labor savings, repurposing the effort of our teams onto tasks that matter. It will also be a key enabler of superior digital patient experience.
However, agentic AI is not without risk, especially if it is deployed as part of the ever-expanding ambulatory remote patient monitoring solutions and operates without a human in the loop.
Charles Wagner. Senior Vice President of Information Services and CIO of Franciscan Health (Mishawaka, Ind.): In 2026, the most important digital innovation trend will be the transition of generative AI from experimentation to sustainable, trusted execution at scale. The early excitement phase is behind us; the next year must be about converting promise into reliable, governed and interoperable solutions that are safely embedded into everyday clinical and operational workflows — solutions that measurably improve care quality, staff experience, and patient engagement.
Randall Gaboriault. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer of ChristianaCare (Newark, Del.): ChristianaCare is focusing on generative AI and scaling its initiatives. A specific example of this is the use of clinician-based avatars, which aim to enhance clinical access and capacity, leading to significant improvements in areas such as teach-back scores. This makes it possible for family members to engage in AI-based conversations with the healthcare provider, breaking the traditional constraint that doctor-patient interactions are limited to business hours.
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