Tag: himss

HIMSS 2026 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

Viva Las HIMSS. The world’s largest healthcare IT conference officially has its swagger back.

The themes at HIMSS might have rhymed with the themes at ViVE, but the conversations were definitely louder – mainly because the exhibit hall was packed with attendees.  

Agentic AI has moved from promises to receipts, and measurable ROI is now mandatory for the pitch decks that want to make it to the top of the pile.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that health systems aren’t looking for quick fixes to old problems. They’re looking for long-term partners to lean on as they navigate a technology landscape that’s shifting faster than ever.

Without further ado, here’s our roundup of the biggest announcements from HIMSS26:

  • Abridge rolled out its enterprise-grade AI platform for clinical conversations across WVU Medicine, the largest health system (and private employer) in West Virginia. It turns out that balancing decision support with clinician control resonates just as much at rural systems as it does at the most complex academic medical centers in the country.
  • Amazon brought Health AI to the biggest patient acquisition channel in the world: Amazon.com. The new Health AI agent can answer questions, manage prescription renewals, and even book appointments. Better yet, over 200M Prime members can use it to get five direct message care visits with a One Medical provider on the house. Not a bad way to follow up last week’s big news and one of the best interviews at the show.
  • athenahealth introduced athenaConnect to deliver a single access point for external health systems, pharmacies, and labs looking to connect with the 170k+ providers using athenaOne. The intelligent interoperability layer brings together integration solutions that bridge the EHR to outside partners as it looks to improve care coordination across local markets.
  • Artera showcased its latest AI Agents for patient access workflows, which recently got the nod as Best in KLAS for Patient Communications. The agentic AI wave has helped grow Artera into the trusted access partner at over a thousand provider orgs, and it now supports over 2B patient communications annually.
  • Cognosos upgraded its RTLS portfolio with encounter-sensing tags designed to improve compliance and automate data capture during patient interactions. The disposable patient wristbands generate time-stamped data that feeds directly into the EHR without the need for fixed infrastructure.
  • Epic previewed its no-code Agent Factory, a visual builder that lets health systems create and deploy custom AI agents directly within their EHR. This could end up tightening Epic’s golden handcuffs on health systems if it catches on, and it also probably means that selling workflow automation agents just got even harder at 40% of U.S. hospitals.
  • Google Cloud kicked off a string of industry partnerships with CVS Health, Highmark, Humana, Quest Diagnostics, and Waystar. The collaborations embed Gemini-powered agentic AI into a wide range of operations, with Waystar announcing that it’s already helped prevent 15B denials and CVS launching an entirely new Health100 subsidiary built from the ground up on the foundation.
  • Innovaccer unveiled a new AI-powered solution within Flow by Innovaccer that codes 80% of encounters autonomously in seconds, tackling coder shortages, revenue leakage, and rising cost per encounter. We got the full scoop on Flow Capture straight from the top.
  • Meditech released its own native AI scribe for physicians and nurses. Welcome to the party, it’s still pretty fun even though everyone else got here last year.
  • Microsoft made its presence felt with new Dragon Copilot capabilities that were front-and-center on the showfloor. The biggest enhancements included a huge suite of new AI partner apps spanning from RCM to CDS, and expanded role-based experiences for docs, nurses, and radiologists. More on this one next week.
  • PointClickCare launched Discharge Intel, an AI-powered solution designed to give health plans timely clinical intelligence within 24 hours of hospital discharge. Discharge Intel is PCC doing what PCC does best, eliminating manual processes and manilla envelopes from transitions of care.
  • RevSpring expanded its agentic AI capabilities for patient billing support, natural language payments, and real-time staff guidance for financial conversations. Not one to rest on its agents’ laurels, RevSpring also unveiled RevSpring Prime to help scale membership-based care models for direct-to-employer and direct-to-member programs.
  • Salesforce expanded Agentforce Health with six new AI agents built to act as a 24/7 administrative layer to automate high-stakes tasks that previously stalled treatment. The lineup includes agents for Referrals & Assessments, EHR Writeback, Claims & Coverage, Rural Health, Epidemiology Analysis, and Hospital Operations.
  • Snowflake released research revealing that 77% of healthcare orgs are already investing in agentic AI. Two-thirds have adopted, are piloting, or plan to implement new AI agents within the next 12 months, and the vast majority of leadership teams (85%) report that improving data interoperability is a higher priority than it was two years ago.
  • Stryker made waves with its new SmartHospital Platform through a newly formed business unit called Smart Care, serving as the connective tissue between all the hardware, software, and people inside of hospitals. It combines ambient sensors, the Engage alarm-filtering engine, Sync Badge devices, and virtual nursing workflows – the culmination of its recent M&A streak that included AI-enabled virtual care company Care.ai and communication platform Vocera.
  • Surescripts released its always-excellent Annual Impact Report to unpack the latest trends in e-prescribing and prescription benefits. Key takeaways from this year’s report were that interoperability looks like it finally reached a tipping point, with the Surescripts network clocking 30.5B health data transactions in 2025 – up 12.3% YoY – as well as nearly a billion real-time prescription benefit responses across 973K prescribers.
  • Talkdesk debuted a Complex Scheduling tool to help patients access specialty appointments. The specialized capability within Talkdesk’s CXA platform uses agentic AI to reduce delays and optimize physician capacity in contact centers and clinics.
  • Verily is bringing Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 onto its Pre precision health platform to provide an integrated solution for generating evidence and monitoring real-world populations. The joint offering is geared toward accelerating research for life sciences and government agencies by combining advanced health analytics with consumer-grade wearable data.
  • Vital debuted Vital Guard, an AI-driven solution that combs through clinical documentation and radiology reports to flag incidental findings that were uncommunicated, then closes the loop with auditable, asynchronous patient outreach. That means less malpractice exposure, and more downstream revenue.
  • VSee introduced “the world’s first autonomous telehealth AI robot” that’s purpose-built for hospitals. It leverages LiDAR to navigate hospital hallways independently for use cases like virtual rounding, supply/medication deliveries, or specialist coverage in the ED.
  • Zoom announced a string of healthcare updates to create a more unified “AI-first ecosystem.” Zoom Contact Center is now available in Epic Toolbox to eliminate app switching, Clinical Note added deeper Epic integrations, and Zoom Workplace for Frontline is getting new capabilities for  urgent messages and faster handoffs.

Even notoriously slow industries can cover a ton of ground in 12 months, so stay tuned for deeper dives into some of these announcements next week. 

Shoutout to all the old friends, new readers, and great sushi hosts that made our trip to Vegas so amazing.

HIMSS 2024 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s the final day of HIMSS 2024, and although most exhibitors are still either valiantly stationed at their booths or playing hooky at Disney World, the giant wave of announcements has already crashed and it’s time to round up some of the biggest stories from the show.

The topics du jour among the ~35,000 attendees weren’t entirely unexpected. Generative AI was definitely the main course, but with an especially heavy portion of HIMSS’ signature interoperability sauce poured over it following the TEFCA go-live. Cybersecurity was also an even more popular side dish than usual (anyone’s guess as to why).

HIMSS24 major announcements, launches, and partnerships:

  • Abridge added UCI Health to its quickly growing roster of health system deployments, and the system-wide ambient AI roll out sounds like it’s already helping out significantlywith “pajama time.” The expansion hits less than a month after Abridge closed its $150M Series C.
  • Altera Digital Health showcased Paragon Denali, its cloud-native EHR built on Microsoft Azure that’s designed for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. Paragon Denali’s SaaS model gives smaller hospitals a single platform for managing clinical and financial data without having to do the heavy lifting of on-premises implementations and upgrades.
  • Ambience Healthcare is now fully integrated with Oracle’s Cerner Millennium EHR, enabling clinicians to seamlessly interface with Ambience’s medical scribe, coding assistant, and full suite of generative AI products within their standard workflows.
  • Caregility presented its new class of adaptive telehealth edge devices that support multiple audio and video streams at the bedside, enabling providers to deploy advanced hybrid care delivery models at scale.
  • emtelligent unveiled the next generation of its medical AI platform dubbed emtelliPro+, which uses a custom medical LLM to produce hallucination-resilient outputs that can be used to make safe determinations in even the most complex use cases.
  • Google Cloud launched Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, a genAI tool that allows providers, payors, and life science orgs to make better use of their clinical data. Users can search for information across clinical notes, scanned documents, and other data sources to find natural language answers to their questions (e.g. patient medical history).
  • Hyro announced a long-term strategic partnership with healthtech consulting firm Disruptive Innovations that’ll see Hyro’s Responsible AI platform and voice assistants help DI’s clients address key challenges such as agent burnout, patient access, and operational efficiency.
  • Innovaccer previewed its upcoming provider AI copilot, a portable tablet designed to deliver multi-solution clinical support at the point-of-care. Not to outshine its foray into the hardware game, Innovaccer also announced its acquisition of Pharmacy Quality Solutions to accelerate VBC in pharmacy settings. Stay tuned for a deeper dive on this next week.
  • Intermountain Health became the first organization in the world to attain Stage 7 validation of the HIMSS Infrastructure Adoption Model (INFRAM), which basically means it’s the bee’s knees across all corners of care delivery, including clinical outcomes, adoption, sustainability, performance, and cybersecurity. We’ll unpack the newly modernized INFRAM framework in an upcoming issue, and want to give a major congratulations to Dr. Farukh Usmani and team.
  • Juno Health demonstrated a range of new features within its modular EHR that enhance its user experience through personalization, including a Clinical Content Builder, Care Planning tool, and Treatment Plan solution.
  • Linus Health introduced two huge upgrades to its cognitive impairment detection platform, including Hearing Screener tests to identify signs of MCI and a new Digital Trail Making Test Part B (an FDA Class II medical device designed to capture more data than traditional paper-based exams). The cherry on top? Linus also acquired speech analytics vendor Aural Analytics.
  • Microsoft is spearheading the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), a consortium of top tier organizations aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles in healthcare. The packed announcement also casually included three major deployments for Nuance’s DAX Copilot at Stanford Medicine, WellSpan Health, and Providence.
  • Nabla announced that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (the largest pediatric multi-specialty medical group in the US) has selected Nabla Copilot to streamline clinical documentation after collaborating closely throughout the pilot to tailor specific capabilities for the unique requirements of pediatrics in a hospital setting.
  • Philips expanded its partnership with AWS to combine its expertise in digitization and pathology with AWS’ scalable cloud solutions to help pathology labs store, manage, and analyze growing volumes of digital pathology data.
  • Salesforce debuted Einstein Copilot: Health Actions, a new solution geared toward letting healthcare workers submit natural language prompts to summarize information, update patient and member data, and automate manual outreach.
  • Surescripts put out a gem of a report on health intelligence sharing in the US, highlighting the fact that its network saw a mindblowing 24 billion exchanges of clinical and benefit information in 2023. The report is filled with insights that make it a must-read, including the fact that last year saw 10% growth in e-prescribing among non-PCPs (29% among pharmacists), and a 49% increase in electronic processing of prior auths.
  • symplr took the lid off symplrAI, the culmination of its enterprise-level approach to AI/ML integration for accelerating productivity gains in healthcare. symplrAI will leverage genAI services from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q, to bolster both established and new AI capabilities within symplr’s SaaS portfolio.
  • Talkdesk introduced Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare, a generative AI solution built to deliver EHR-integrated self-service experiences to resolve complex needs without burdening human contact center agents.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health unveiled its newly unified UpToDate portfolio of Clinical Decision, Drug Referential, and Patient Engagement solutions to improve interoperability and care coordination. On top of that, WK announced that its AI Labs solution now has access to the complete set of UpToDate’s evidence-based clinical content and graded recommendations across over 25 specialties. 

For the first HIMSS meeting since the conference changed hands to Informa ownership, the upbeat show floor still seemed right at home in the Florida sunshine. We hope that everyone had an awesome time if you made it out in-person, and welcome all of our new readers that we met at the show!

HIMSS23 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s Thursday morning on the final day of HIMSS23, and although most exhibitors are still diligently manning their booths in the Windy City, the announcement fireworks have already gone off and it’s time to round up some of the biggest stories from the trade show.

The exhibit hall chatter had a familiar ring to it, touching on the same themes of healthcare consumerization and workforce burnout that were favorites at ViVE, but with a good amount of HIMSS’ signature interoperability seasoning sprinkled on top.

The list of generative AI launches somehow managed to be longer than the line at a McCormick Place Starbucks, but it seemed like most of the ~35,000 attendees were balancing the initial shock and awe with a realistic understanding of the tech’s current limitations in healthcare.

HIMSS23 major announcements, launches, and partnerships:

  • Amazon rolled out several Alexa Smart Properties features designed to improve the patient and staff user experience at hospitals. The updates look like they make the lives of IT teams easier as they set up and maintain Alexa devices like the newly available Echo Show 15.
  • Caregility announced a new portfolio of hybrid care solutions built on Caregility Cloud that’s designed to reduce tech investment risks for health systems by offering the flexibility to choose apps that are a good fit for their environment without creating more IT silos.
  • eClinicalWorks introduced ChatGPT to its EHR and practice management solutions with the goal of making clinical workflows more efficient as it deepens its collaboration with Microsoft. Azure OpenAI Service will also be enhancing Scribe, eClinicalWorks’ AI dictation service.
  • Epic and Microsoft are bringing generative AI powered by Azure OpenAI Service to the Epic EHR, which might take the cake as the biggest announcement of the show. The partnership delivers a “comprehensive array” of solutions, including SlicerDicer self-service reporting. 
  • Health Gorilla took the lid off its HG Accelerator Program that gives startups access to its solutions, portfolio of healthcare data APIs, and interop mentorship. The inaugural class already includes Oatmeal Health (AI cancer screening) and Long Health (patient onboarding).
  • Innovaccer unveiled six new solutions that together look like the beginning of a new chapter in the company’s growth story. The Sara conversational AI leads the lineup that also includes Health Equity, Readmission Predict, Risk AI, Network Optimizer, and Health 1:1.
  • Memora landed $30M to scale its SMS-based care communication platform that automates clinical responses to frequently asked questions, nudges patients with care prompts, and sends reminders via text, escalating only the most urgent concerns to care teams.
  • Philips released its Future Health Index 2023 global report, which found that healthcare leaders are investing heavily in AI for both critical decision support and operational efficiency, and that these execs are leaning into outside partnerships to help provide the best possible care.
  • RevSpring launched Engage IQ to coordinate patient interactions from pre-service to post-service to payment. The platform handles intake, clinical reminders, and billing to improve clinical and financial outcomes while solidifying patient loyalty.
  • Rimidi’s clinical management platform is now integrated with MEDITECH, allowing clinicians to see remote patient-generated data and PROMs within disease-specific views in the patient chart alongside CDS support to drive next best steps.
  • Salesforce customers can now use Einstein GPT to generate info using natural language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM, with a new Slack integration also allowing care teams to summarize chat information and complete CRM tasks.
  • symplr debuted four product suites as part of its Connected Enterprise initiative to help health systems address burnout and cost pressures. The new portfolio includes a Workforce Suite, Supply Chain Suite, Quality Suite, and Credentialing Suite.
  • Withings completed its new range of smart scales with the introduction of the Body Smart scale that brings body comp, heart rate, visceral fat, metabolic age, and basal metabolic rate analysis to the entry-level tier of the lineup.

It’s now been three years since the pandemic stopped HIMSS20 in its tracks, but healthcare’s biggest IT conference is very much alive and well with an in-person energy that’s straight out of 2019. We hope that everyone had an awesome time if you made it to Chicago, and welcome all of our new readers that we met at the show. Stay tuned for a deeper dive into some of these announcements next week.

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