Last week, our team attended Becker’s 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference, where digital leaders from hospitals, health systems, and digital health organizations convened to advance innovation across technology, care delivery, and revenue operations. This year, about 2,500 attendees, 370+ speakers and 100+ industry partners gathered in Chicago to share practical insights for improving operations, strengthening financial performance, and accelerating digital impact across healthcare organizations.
For us here at Xealth, one major highlight was a roundtable moderated by Xealth’s Strategic Medical Advisor Dr. Ricky Choi, which focused on the next chapter for digital health and how AI, consumer data and financial pressure are changing the rules. The panel featured insights from Advocate Aurora Health’s Director of Strategic Partnerships Edward Mitchell, Montage Health’s Director of Human Experience and Enterprise Delivery Meg Dingae, and Montefiore Health System’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer Sudipto Srivastava.
Elsewhere at the conference, our team took note of a few key themes emerging:
- Strategic automation and AI governance are competitive strengths: Health systems benefitting most from digital resources have implemented the clearest frameworks to evaluate and scale new technologies. Building governance structures will help organizations quickly evaluate and deploy tools that align with their desired goals.
- Hospitals and health systems face digital sprawl: As health systems expand their digital program library, an inventory of existing solutions can help identify gaps and guide investments that support the broader digital strategy. An operating model for integration and governance helps ensure initiatives fit within current priorities and deliver measurable value.
- The patient-facing digital experience remains subpar: Health systems are still behind other consumer industries in scheduling simplicity. At the same time, patients increasingly arrive after consulting AI tools for health guidance, raising the bar for the digital experiences organizations must deliver.
- Automation and AI are different: Intelligent automation handles routine work that once consumed teams, freeing them to focus on more strategic initiatives. Automation handles predictable, rules-based work; AI predicts, reasons, and surfaces patterns at scale. Health systems that treat automation as AI could be underinvesting in the tools that will deliver transformational value.
- Scaling personalization is a hot topic for patient access: Technology’s ability to route the right patient to the right care at the right time is key and requires combining clinical and operational with patient preference. This requires a sophisticated level of data and workflow interoperability that health systems are working towards.
- Pilot programs need an expiration date: Pilots in healthcare are almost the level of folklore. Defining and committing to clear success thresholds before launch helps organizations avoid pilot-itis and creates a path for scaling the digital programs that work.
Beyond discussing AI agents, Becker’s also held a hands-on AI agents workshop, giving attendees practical skills that they could use in practice.
Seeing healthcare’s progress and what is on the horizon excites us for what is next! New technology is promising, but we must be focused on ensuring it is helping us solve the right problems, enhancing how care is delivered, and producing measurable value to patients, clinicians, and health systems.
As digital health shifts from experimentation to execution, staying ahead requires more than innovation—it requires orchestration. Follow Xealth here for insights on how leading health systems are scaling digital solutions that work, or connect with us at bizdev@xealth.com.