HIMSS26: Strengthen the Muscle of AI Strategy With Clinical Insight

Agentic AI Is Gaining Ground in Healthcare Organizations 

Donna Fortson, senior vice president and chief revenue officer at WellSpan Health, recalled inheriting a call center department that was receiving negative feedback from clinicians and patients, who were so dissatisfied with the wait times on the phone that they were showing up in person to schedule appointments. With the help of a vendor partner, Fortson said, the organization launched an agentic AI solution to transform the call center in primary care. 

Dr. Amish Desai, vice president and chief medical officer for population health at Northwestern Medicine, said his organization saw success in deploying agentic AI for certain patient engagement campaigns that usually took weeks to complete but could be finished in a matter of days with the new tool. 

Some current problems healthcare organizations face when considering an agentic AI solution include tool sprawl and workflow reorganization or integration, noted Jeff McCool, assistant vice president of healthcare conversational AI at Amelia. 

That workflow reorganization is key. “When you look at everything innovation is, the biggest challenge is adoption. If they don't use it, you'll never find the value, whether that's robotics, whether that's AI, any number of things — you've got to match that solution with the workflow,” said Craig Anderson, vice president and corporate innovation officer at BayCare Health System. 

That requires a deep understanding of workflows, especially in the clinical space. Anderson gave an example with the testing of an ambient clinical documentation tool: While the primary care space took to the solution with more ease, it required refinement for specialists. 

“A primary care provider is not the same as an orthopedist or a rheumatology expert,” Anderson said. “We were learning all these workflows, and you really cannot have one-size-fits-all because the adoption won't be there. You need to customize it. You need to have that vendor collaboration to exactly cut this to the cloth that those providers want, and that starts by listening.”

That’s why fostering a culture of understanding for what AI is doing and listening to stakeholder feedback is essential. Choice is also important among patients, Forston added, because some of them may not want to interact with an AI agent and prefer working with a human. 

Instead of adopting AI as the new tech of the moment, organizations should focus on what causes their teams friction and how to address those workflow blockages. 

“Where is there low-value work that our teams are doing that they just don't want to do, and let's start there,” Desai said. For example, at Northwestern Medicine, the community health workers who were on the front lines of these patient engagement campaigns would rather focus on building trust with patients and create accessible paths for care than to handle voicemail messages and “ping patients back and forth.” 

Co-designing a solution ensures better adoption. 

“I've been spending a lot of time with our leadership team asking, what are three things you're doing right now that you don't think you should be doing, and what are three things you think, regardless of AI, that you should be doing?” Desai said. “Spending time on friction points has been really helpful for our team.”

Clinical Scrutiny Is Still Critical in AI Adoption 

There are still limits to AI for widespread clinical usage and direct impacts on patient outcomes. The last session of the day for the AI in healthcare track focused on those remaining challenges in the clinical space. 

Dr. Margaret Lozovatsky, chief medical information officer and vice president for digital health innovations at the American Medical Association, noted that although there is growing enthusiasm among physicians about the use of AI for administrative tasks, concerns arise when AI is used for clinical decision support. 

“At the end of every tool is a patient, and there is a lot of fear and concern about how these tools will impact patient care,” Lozovatsky said.

Click the banner below to keep up with key healthcare IT insights after HIMSS 2026.

With previous clinical decision support tools, she said, there was a better understanding of the algorithms being implemented and clearer data sources. But with the newer generation of AI tools, “these are somewhat of a black box in the clinical setting. So, if I'm seeing a patient and I have some sort of decision support pop up, I may not know what the algorithm is in the background. I may not know if the data that was put into the algorithm is accurate,” she said. 

She also questioned what sort of feedback loops were in place for these tools. “When things go wrong, are we going to have a way to report them? Are we going to get them fixed if we report them? What are those mechanisms? And I think having processes in place is going to be so important for us to feel comfortable using these tools in the clinical setting. We absolutely recognize the value of them. We know that they can be really useful in a clinical setting. But there has to be that trust that is gained as we continue to roll them out.” 

Lozovatsky added that organizations must monitor for hallucinations and drift if these models are meant to impact patient care. 

Dr. Kathryn King, chief medical information officer and co-director of the national telehealth center of excellence at the Medical University of South Carolina Health, said that adopting AI in clinical settings will likely require a reconfiguration of workflows that start with the electronic health records system. 

“The immaturity that I'm seeing in AI solutions in the clinical space is really that they are a point solution, if you will, at a single point in a long clinical workflow, typically within the EHR,” King said. “That one point in that workflow doesn't really solve a clinician's whole problem.” 

Though the HITECH Act of 2009 was integral to pushing healthcare organizations to adopt EHR systems, the process at its crux was about digitizing paper records. A number of the hallmarks of the EHR are relics of paper charting. 

“I think the next iteration of this has to be asking the questions, why do we do things the way we have for all of these years, and how do we move toward a different workflow that perhaps is more voice utilization but in a way that makes sense to each individual? And to me, the focus has been so much on, ‘this is the tool, this is the cool thing,’ instead of taking a step back and really reinventing the way that we deliver care,” Lozovatsky said.