Health system technology leaders are heading into 2027 focused less on adding more technology and more on proving it can meaningfully change how healthcare works.
Three health system IT leaders who spoke with Becker’s described different priorities for 2027, but their responses pointed to a shared shift toward becoming more selective, moving beyond isolated technology projects and showing that digital investments are producing results.
For Tressa Springmann, chief information and digital officer and senior vice president at Baltimore-based LifeBridge Health, that starts with focus.
She pointed to continued economic pressure, an “exciting but messy” AI landscape, persistent cybersecurity threats and an approaching new reimbursement model in Maryland as competing demands that make disciplined prioritization increasingly important.
Ms. Springmann acknowledged that her objectives will change over the year and that the work may still feel like daily reprioritization.
“The real strategy to success in this situation is not to push to do more, faster, but rather to be more focused to yield better outcomes,” she said.
At Cedars-Sinai, a similar push toward discipline is shaping the approach to AI.
Craig Kwiatkowski, PharmD, senior vice president of enterprise information services and CIO at Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai, said a top priority is moving beyond individual AI use cases and toward true domain transformation.
Dr. Kwiatkowski said Cedars-Sinai has spent the past few years proving that AI can improve specific workflows and functions. The bigger opportunity now, is to rethink how work gets done within domains such as access and revenue cycle, and ultimately across the broader organization.
“The goal isn’t to put AI everywhere. It’s to make work easier,” he said. “If we’re doing this well, the technology becomes less visible, fades into the background, and helps simplify how work gets done across an entire domain, not just individual activities.”
For Neil Cowles, senior vice president and chief information and technology officer for Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, the next test is whether those investments translate into value. In 2027, he said, healthcare organizations and leaders “will be judged less by the technology they deploy than by the value they create with it.”
Mr. Cowles said data, AI, automation, cloud, cybersecurity and digital platforms are no longer just back-office capabilities or discrete IT initiatives. They are foundations for care delivery, experience, quality, affordability, access and reliability.
But he said technology alone does not create progress.
“The real differentiator is leadership: connecting modern platforms to mission, redesigning work around the people who rely on them, and building the trust required for adoption to become impact,” Mr. Cowles said.
At Kaiser Permanente, that work includes modernizing the digital experience for more than 12 million members, strengthening the technology foundations that support care delivery, improving reliability and cybersecurity, and using AI responsibly. Mr. Cowles said those efforts are part of a broader operating discipline rather than isolated technology projects.
“The next era of IT leadership will belong to organizations that pair innovation with execution and prove that the highest purpose of technology is not to make systems smarter, but to make healthcare simpler, more affordable, safer, and more connected,” he said.
