Women in Healthcare IT (828)

While agentic AI can surface important insights from volumes of data, project professionals have the skills to provide the structure and clarity teams need, says Karla Mae Eidem of the Project Management Institute.

Zebra Technologies CNIO Kassaundra McKnight-Young says that her involvement with the HIMSS Foundation has helped drive her work in leveraging technology to give clinicians more time for direct patient care.

Ini Ekiko Thomas, VP of IT and innovation at Memorial Hermann Health System, credits national and Houston, Texas HIMSS chapter engagement with helping her connect to colleagues and vendors that can help solve complex challenges.

Farhana Alarakhiya of Aga Khan University talks about how she's turning her decades of data expertise towards creating data-driven insights that can solve population health challenges in low- and middle-income countries.

Point-of-Care Partners' Vanessa Candelora says price transparency for services and medications will make it possible for patients to budget for procedures and to shop for better prices with providers in their insurance network.

Including nurses in the development process will ensure that new AI products support nursing workflows rather than forcing nurses to adapt to the technology, according to Kaiser Permanente's Surya Shenoy and Jerri Westphal.

Predictive analytics support AI tools and help clinicians connect with patients, but Anne Snowdon, chief scientific research officer at HIMSS, says that, globally, only about 30% of analytics capacity has been realized.

Tips for physicians and nurses on the frontlines of healthcare delivery on what they can do as well as how their use of EHRs can benefit patients, from Dr. Peggy Allen, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Akron Children's Hospital.

She offers updates on some key IT initiatives for 2026 at the world-renowned health system, from AI to quantum computing. She also gives a sneak-peak of her presentation at HIMSS26, where she'll be discussing smart hospital design.

The phase-out of the Medicare Inpatient-Only list drives value and efficiency, but hospitals lose out on volume and revenue, says Allison Oakes, chief research officer for Trilliant Health.

Virginia Halsey, senior vice president of strategy and product management at FDB, discusses the MCP standard and how it can scale AI safely in clinical workflows and unlock safe automation across medication workflows.

Recovery, downtime and disruption from IT outages cost some independent and senior care providers "tens of thousands of dollars per minute," lower staff morale and pose patient safety concerns, says healthcare IT security expert Danielle Morrison.