I just finished reading my 2025 IT Trends blog, published in December 2024 and apart from the general sense of cringe I get anytime I re-read something I wrote, I’m struck by how prescient some of my observations were: President Trump, in fact, signed more than 215 Executive Orders, three of those part of the administration’s larger AI Action Plan; Connection saw an increase in healthcare organizations adopting virtual desktops at point of care; and large enterprise healthcare organizations worked with our team to consolidate their application stack, renegotiate cloud agreements and—gasp—move select workloads on-premises. What I could not have predicted was that healthcare would be at the center of a 43-day government shut down or that more than a year later, we’ve kicked the can on telehealth use and reimbursement waivers to the end of January 2026.
As we greet the new year, I expect healthcare IT professionals to play an integral role in the success of clinical and non-clinical hospital priorities. It’s not going to be easy, but the healthcare IT community never disappoints!
Financial Pressures
Patient care holds a sense of urgency whether the care setting is acute or ambulatory, and 2026 patient care will be shaped by a savvy community of healthcare CIOs who have the agility to manage competing priorities, and they’ll be doing it under tremendous financial pressures. A 2014 NIH study examined the correlation between hospital finances and the quality and safety of patient care and found that, while operating margin by itself is a poor prediction of quality care, financially stable hospitals are better able to maintain the systems that lead to better patient outcomes.
Cost containment, cost avoidance, and good old-fashioned ROI will be central to budget allocation for projects both large AND small. I expect to see more hospital projects—things that would have easily been approved 12 months ago—to undergo a formal bid or RFP process. The C-suite wants assurance that every new solution implemented has clear and measurable return on investment and is deployed with cost consciousness.
AI: It’s Working!
According to a survey from the Commonwealth Fund, 43% of U.S. primary care providers describe feeling burned out, citing administrative burden as a chief contributor. Another, unrelated survey with a much smaller sampling concluded that use of ambient AI significantly reduced healthcare provider burnout by lessening documentation burdens. Ambient AI was a natural starting point for clinicians, and that integration back to the EMR is essential. That patient-facing caregivers, including nurses and allied health professionals, may still be experiencing burnout suggests that there are more areas where applied AI can increase provider productivity and return joy to the provider.
The arrest of Cashmir Chinedu Luke, owner of Four Corners Health, on suspicion of $7M in fraud perpetrated against the Department of Veterans Affairs is a reminder of how susceptible healthcare organizations are to fraud. AI excels at using pattern recognition to identify anomalies, and as this case makes its way through the courts, I expect healthcare payors and provider organizations will turn to these solutions to maintain organizational integrity. Even if financial recovery isn’t possible once fraud has occurred, creating fraud-resistant systems is a significant preventative measure.
Hospital Revenue Cycle teams traditionally require manual work, done repetitively, limited to business hours, in a seemingly endless loop of submitting and resubmitting claims to CMS and insurance companies for the appropriate reimbursements. As more hospitals turn to AI for tech-first revenue cycles, they’re seeing the benefit of 24x7x365 claims submission with fewer denials and a shorter resolution to the claim. Shortening this cycle leads to a healthier cash flow for the provider. These solutions are scalable and right sized across the different points of care, and I predict that we’ll see huge growth in AI project implementations that deliver bottom-line financial impact.
Rural Health
The One Big Beautiful Bill provides a $50B Rural Health Transformation Program aimed at modernizing care delivery in rural areas beleaguered by low patient census, a hard-to-recruit for workforce and heritage infrastructure that can’t support patient care. This funding is in response to the $1T cut to Medicaid over the next 10 years. While the funding is strong, this isn’t easy money, and it probably doesn’t fill the void left from Medicaid cuts accessed by low-income populations served by rural health. Plus, rural healthcare needs are not well understood. The IT OEM-partner community has struggled to meet the essential needs of rural areas lacking both healthcare and IT professionals. There was over $11B in capital that funded AI healthcare IT startups in 2025, and although those organizations will struggle to support this important care setting, the desire to support the promise of equitable access to high-quality patient care will prevail.
Healthcare IT Solutions at Connection
January marks my 16th year with Connection and approaching my third year as the Director of Healthcare. We’ve expanded our team, adding additional resources to support our GPO Contracts. We’ve added more pre-sales healthcare technical expertise, and aligned our solutions to cost containment, provider experience, patient experience and quality outcomes. We built this for you, our clients and our partners, to help you face the challenges ahead. Learn more about our Healthcare Solutions and Services and contact your Account Team to discuss how we can best support you in 2026 and beyond!
Jennifer Johnson
Jennifer Johnson, Director Healthcare Strategy and Business Development, joined Connection in 2010 starting in field sales and joined the healthcare practice in 2015. Jennifer has more than 20 years in IT, including prior roles in distribution and manufacturing. Jennifer holds her Certified Digital Health Leader designation from the CHIME organization and is a member of HIMSS, where Connection is a diamond sponsor. Jen was named CRN Women of the Channel in 2023 and 2024 and holds certifications from NVIDIA (AI Advisor- Sales) and Dell Technologies (AI Champion- Partner Sales).
