2025 was a year of transition for healthcare IT.
AI largely moved out of the pilot phase, showing real returns on investment in dollars — and lives — saved. Several big health systems completed or continued big EHR switches. With emerging technologies, cybersecurity approaches evolved.
Becker’s reached out to IT and digital leaders from the biggest health systems in the country to ask which technology projects and trends excited them the most in 2025. Here are their responses, lightly edited for clarity and brevity:
Ed McCallister. Senior Vice President and CIO of UPMC (Pittsburgh): 2025 marked a pivotal year of IT transformation at UPMC. At the core of this progress is our journey toward a single, unified EHR, laying the foundation for improved care delivery and a more seamless clinician experience. In parallel, we advanced preparations for the UPMC Kamin Tower project, set to open in 2027, by designing and planning next-generation technology solutions. Beyond clinical systems, we launched multiple IT modernization initiatives to enhance claims processing, elevate member engagement, and strengthen the digital backbone for UPMC Insurance Services Division operations. Our international facilities are also slated to adopt a new EHR, extending the benefits of integration globally.
A major milestone this year was the migration to a modern IT service management platform, enabling greater automation, streamlined incident and request handling, and improved transparency across enterprise IT services. Collectively, these efforts are transforming how we deliver care, connect data and workflows, and position UPMC for the future. Looking ahead, these activities will scale innovation, responsibly leverage advanced analytics and AI, and deliver a frictionless experience for patients and employees, cementing UPMC’s role as a leader in healthcare.
Jane Moran. Chief Information and Digital Officer at Mass General Brigham (Somerville, Mass.): Scaling and simplifying patient access to care through digital innovations such as providing easier-to-use virtual care visits, patient self-service tools to manage scheduling, and conversational AI for appointment management.
One truly standout program was our launch of Mass General Brigham Care Connect. Launched as part of our AI innovation roadmap, Care Connect uses conversational and predictive AI to expand access to primary care. By shifting from experimental AI to practical, workflow-embedded AI, we are redefining how patients connect with our care teams — quickly, accurately, and with a personal touch.
Mass General Brigham’s digital team is reshaping how patients connect with care and how clinicians connect with patients. From smarter scheduling to easier virtual tools, we are creating a seamless, transparent care experience that gives both patients and clinical teams more control, convenience and confidence at every step.
Nari Gopala. Chief Digital Officer of Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.): Across the industry, the most promising trend we saw this year was the shift toward using AI and data transparency to improve consumer decision-making. Whether patients are selecting hospitals, exploring treatment options, or trying to navigate fragmented health information online, the demand for tools that are both credible and easy to understand is only growing. Health systems that embrace this direction — responsibly and transparently — will be best positioned to strengthen public trust.
In 2025, we launched HealthLocator to advance Mayo Clinic’s commitment to data transparency and empower patients with trusted healthcare information. Combining clinical expertise, analytics, and user-centered design, HealthLocator helps people find safe, high-quality care. Since October, it has reached millions and earned strong user trust.
HealthLocator exemplifies how technology can make complex data accessible and support informed healthcare choices. As the industry shifts toward AI and data transparency, tools like HealthLocator will be key to building public trust. In 2026, we will continue to expand its features and impact.
Kristin Myers. Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y.): Our most successful digital project in 2025 was the Epic wave one implementation, delivering a stable and scalable platform for about 35,000 users. This achievement reflects the collective effort across Northwell and required strong leadership, close team collaboration, and a relentless focus on patient care. Through this shared commitment, we were able to quickly stabilize operations, accelerate user confidence, and establish a solid foundation for our next implementation wave.
One of the most promising digital trends this year is agentic AI. This capability has the potential to enable more autonomous, task-oriented workflows that improve the patient experience, enhance workforce effectiveness, and increase operational efficiency across multiple use cases. We began exploring several use cases this year and plan to expand this capability next year as part of our digital strategy.
Ryan Smith. Senior Vice President and Chief Information and Digital Officer of Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City): In September 2025, Intermountain Health completed one of the largest systemwide projects in the organization’s history: transitioning from eight separate EHR platforms to a single instance of Epic. This massive undertaking involved thousands of caregivers throughout our system, including physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, pharmacists, IT, and other support staff.
Our Digital Technology Services team ensured all our caregivers were ready through extensive advanced preparations. Planning and readiness work included around-the-clock support centers, at-the-elbow and super-user coverage, a coaching hotline, and thorough testing of clinical and operational processes. Clinicians were trained ahead of the go-live and cross-operational coordinated stabilization efforts occurred daily following the go-live. It was truly a single, systemwide transition that our teams completed in just a few hours’ timeframe.
This year, one of the most compelling digital health trends has been the rapid expansion of AI. From predictive models that help clinicians intervene earlier to tools built into the EHR that guide clinical decisions, these technologies are already strengthening outcomes and enhancing the caregiver experience.
Our approach is grounded in disciplined stewardship, using structured reviews, risk assessments, and ongoing oversight to ensure all AI tools remain trustworthy and patient‑centered. This balance of innovation and responsibility is why Intermountain is recognized nationally as a leader in safe, ethical and effective AI adoption.
Eric Goodwin. Vice President and CIO of Universal Health Services (King of Prussia, Pa.): This year, we have successfully embedded AI into the workflows of a number of clinical and back-office operations, and we’re pleased to see tangible results that go beyond the hype. It’s about the combination of the right building blocks — effective prompt engineering, tailored AI models, data access and integration into the systems used by our staff each day. We’ve streamlined several administrative processes, keeping our staff informed and providing them with material efficiencies.
As an example, our clinical staff that works with payers to appeal potential payment denials and downgrades is now supported by a new AI-enabled process whereby technology helps our nurses quickly understand the root cause of a potential payment denial, summarize our patient’s case history, track prior interactions with the payer, ensure compliance with our payer agreements and criteria, and draft a comprehensive, high-quality appeal letter. Our ability to harness AI has been a game-changer in this and other areas, allowing us to improve operational efficiency.
Rohit Chandra, PhD. Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Cleveland Clinic: This year happens to be unique, with one project rising above the rest. The AI scribe is a huge home run for healthcare. Our physicians embraced the technology, which has enhanced patient care and caregiver efficiency. Its ability to streamline workflows and enable more meaningful interactions during office visits has profoundly impacted the patient and caregiver experience, making it a standout achievement in our digital transformation efforts.
Industrywide, the trend is a lot of investment and activity within the health-tech ecosystem. Organizations are applying AI across a broad spectrum of areas — from patient experience to caregiver support to back-office automation. This activity is accompanied by efforts to apply these technologies safely and responsibly, underscoring the need for thoughtful approaches to ensure long-term success and ethical implementation.
Luis Taveras, PhD. Senior Vice President and CIO of Jefferson Health (Philadelphia): No. 1 for me is that we had the true rollout of AI solutions. AI is becoming a household word — I don’t even have to explain it to my grandkids anymore. The end result is much better patient care and much better results for our patients.
The second thing was the focus on physicians with ambient listening. We launched it earlier in the year, and it just caught on like rapid fire. The results have been amazing from the physician standpoint, but also from the patient satisfaction standpoint, because now they’re able to see the physicians’ faces again instead of the back of their heads while they’re typing into the computer and the medical record.
The third was the entire organization has really come to realize the value of data and that it’s the foundation of any kind of technology that we do now or in the future. We’re making a big investment in data, making sure that our data is pristine and that data is accurate. Also, cloud migration became de facto for large-scale solutions like Epic. We moved to the cloud because of resiliency but also because of cybersecurity.
The last one is AI became a diversion from our cybersecurity focus in 2025, and that’s a dangerous trend. So I’m hoping that we will rebalance in 2026 and that cybersecurity continues to be front and center for everything that we do as an organization.
Patrice Bordron. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Information Officer of Community Health Systems (Franklin, Tenn.): Digital technology continues to play a mission-critical role in advancing patient care while helping address the complex administrative demands of operating modern healthcare systems. Following a successful multiyear implementation, 2025 marked our first full year leveraging our Oracle enterprise resource planning platform, which enabled us to centralize core business functions including human resources, finance, and supply chain management. This transformation has delivered higher-quality data and analytics, more accurate decision support, and increased organizational agility.
Building on this momentum, we are now advancing our EHR modernization, cloud strategy, and interoperability initiatives by transitioning to a unified acute-care EHR, also with Oracle Health. This next step will further strengthen our digital ecosystem and better support clinicians in delivering exceptional care and outcomes for their patients. As these systems come together, we are well-positioned to harness technology and AI across the clinical continuum, enabling earlier, more personalized prevention, detection, and treatment of disease. We are particularly excited about the potential of AI to enhance clinical imaging, including radiology, pathology, MRI, and early disease detection.
Michael Pfeffer, MD. Senior Vice President and Chief Information and Digital Officer of Stanford Health Care (Palo Alto, Calif.): At Stanford Medicine, we’ve seen our ability to leverage AI throughout our mission areas of patient care, biomedical research, and medical education advance in a transformative way. We launched ChatEHR, our generative AI platform embedded within our EHR, that allows for robust, workflow-driven real-time automations as well as a chat-based user interface within a patient’s chart. This has been transformative for how we leverage patient data in real time to automate and augment patient care.
We have expanded AI-enabled draft message responses for patients to include result messages and billing inquiries. We launched AI Clinical Coach for medical trainees to cultivate a “thinking mindset” in clinical care and judgment. In addition, we launched MedHELM, a benchmark to test large language models on real-world clinical tasks to help monitor the performance of current and future models in healthcare.
All of this is possible because of an incredible team of IT and informatics professionals, deep collaboration with faculty and clinicians, and incredible support from our leadership. I look forward to continuing to leverage AI and agentic AI to transform medicine in a fair, useful and reliable way.
