It’s been fascinating to participate this week in the ViVE Conference at the Music City Center in downtown Nashville. Having attended two previous ViVEs, I was intrigued as to what the atmosphere of the conference might be, several years into its existence. ViVE roared out of the gate along with its autumn counterpart, HLTH, as an in-your-face challenge to the annual HIMSS Conference. Much virtual ink has been spilled over the whole HIMSS-ViVE/HLTH rivalry and which conference might or might not have the upper hand among health IT leaders. Some of that discussion has become a bit stale by now; suffice it to say that both HIMSS and ViVE/HLTH continue to prosper in their own ways, and it’s clear that neither organization will “knock the other out of contention” anytime soon.
But I was particularly interested to find out what the “temperature” of ViVE might be like this year, at a time of change and uncertainty in our industry. Of course, there is the immense uncertainty on the policy and political front in U.S. healthcare; at the same time, the healthcare system continues to evolve forward organically to meet the needs of an aging, increasingly health-challenged population. And with that healthcare delivery system, health information technology is evolving forward.
What I was intrigued to be prepared to learn about this year at ViVE was the extent to which the hype, particularly around artificial intelligence, which has been ever-present in discussions in the industry recently, might be giving way at least ot some extent, to the hard reality of leaders in patient care organizations having to slog through a huge amount of work to see results from their initial adoption of and investments in, AI.
And sure enough, there was evidence aplenty this year that a greater realism has set in. Sure, there remains hype around AI; and not surprisingly, practically every vendor booth that could even remotely plausibly include the term “AI” in its signage, did so. Indeed, it seems that practically everything nowadays is being marketed as “AI-powered,” even technology solutions that are clearly remote from actual AI.
But in my discussions with provider leaders, vendors, and consultants, these past few days, I’ve gotten the strong sense—just as I have been getting in interviews with leaders over the past year—that a strong sense of the challenges ahead is sinking in, and the leaders of AI adoption in patient care organizations—hospitals, medical groups, and health systems—are speaking about their work with a realism and even soberness, that is impressive.
Certainly, that was my experience yesterday in my interview with Yasir Tarabichi, M.D., chief health AI officer at the MetroHealth system in Cleveland, and a practicing physician. Looking at this current moment in AI adoption, Dr. Tarabichi told me that “I’m probably less excited about where the large language models have landed today; they’ve stagnated,” he told me yesterday. “What I can say is that what generative AI is best for is ambient listening, and the other, augmented information retrieval from a busy, terrible EHR [electronic health record].” On the other hand, Dr. Tarabichi predicted that “The technology is going to get cheaper and more accessible, and the next step will be to ask why we’re using it”—meaning that a lot of work will take place in the coming months and few years around health equity, around focusing on practical uses for AI that can enhance clinicians work lives and improve care management, and that a lot of the work will be iterative and will acknowledge that AI development is very much now work in the trenches.
In other words, the early “gee whiz” hype is fading, and is leaving in its place a sober, determined realism among all interested parties. Sure, vendors are going to continue to trumpet dramatic messages in the signage on their exhibitor booths; but I absolutely got the sense that even the most marketing-driven vendor spokespeople realize now that they need to be careful not to succumb to the temptation to overhype their offerings, at a time when realism is becoming the watchword, as work around both algorithmic and generative AI enters a more mature phase.
In a certain way, this moment around AI reminds me of the environment around population health management work 10 to 15 years ago; after an initial kind of near-giddiness in some quarters early on, everyone sat down to work on key population health initiatives, and provider leaders and vendors both entered that more sober phase, one in which the strong foundations of current population health management best practices were forged in patient care organizations, with the strong facilitation of vendor partnerships. It seems like that moment is beginning to happen now around AI development.
It will be interesting to participate in the HIMSS Conference in two weeks in Las Vegas, and to get a sense of the atmosphere there, around AI development. And honestly, speaking as a healthcare journalist with three-and-a-half decades of hearing vendor pitches, a more sober realistic tone among all interested parties is something I can absolutely applaud.
So it will be interesting to share my impressions of ViVE 2026 in Los Angeles. And we’ll see what this coming year will end up having been like. Stay tuned: it’s during the sleeves-rolled-up, nose-to-the-grindstone times that ultimately the really most exciting stuff happens.
