Reflections from the 3rd Annual AHEAD Healthcare Summit

April 22-23, 2026 | Cleveland, OH 

You’ve heard the usual talking points, and you’ve sat through the vendor keynotes and board presentations promising transformative AI. Which means you’re also familiar with the gap between what’s being promised and what’s actually landing in your environment.  

This was the gap the 3rd Annual AHEAD Healthcare Summit set out to close.  

We brought together a select group of approximately 20 healthcare CIOs and CTOs, ranging from regional community systems to major academic medical centers, for a day and a half of off-the-record conversation at The InterContinental Hotel at Cleveland Clinic. 

No vendor theater. No sanitized case studies. Just senior technology leaders comparing notes and having honest discussions about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s keeping them up at night. 

The Voices in the Room  

This year’s summit was already substantive, but it was the caliber and candor of the participants that truly elevated it. 

Sarah Hatchett, SVP and CIO at Cleveland Clinic, opened by sharing how one of the world’s leading health systems is approaching research innovation and clinical outcomes at scale. Her remarks set the tone for the day: Progress in healthcare technology is real and earned, inch by inch, through disciplined execution. 

Rob Adamson, EVP and CIO at RWJBarnabas Health, challenged the room to think about technology leadership as an active, advocacy-first discipline. From his perspective, if you’re waiting to be asked about the state of your infrastructure, you’ve already lost the budget cycle. The job is to get in front of the question before it’s even asked. 

Deb Anderson, CIO at Endeavor Health, and John Groth, MD, AP Informatics Director at Endeavor Health, brought the IT-clinical partnership to life in their session on digital pathology. They demonstrated what’s possible when technology and clinical leadership operate as true co-owners of innovation rather than separate functions.  

The Executive Tightrope panel featured three of healthcare’s most thoughtful technology executives: Laura Bagus, CTO at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Nick O’Connor, CTO at Trinity Health; and Shibu Thomas, CTO at Cleveland Clinic. Facilitated by Tony Blood, EVP at AHEAD, the conversation focused on the near-impossible balancing act that defines the modern healthcare technology leadership role.  

A sponsor panel moderated by Josh Perkins, VP of Emerging Technologies at AHEAD, featured Aaron Anderson of NVIDIA and Ryan Shullaw of Dell Technologies. They discussed what they’re seeing across the healthcare landscape, from research-stage AI, to infrastructure modernization, to the early emergence of agentic workflows.  

Rounding out the day was Brandon Musarra, Senior Program Administrator of Digital Innovation at Cleveland Clinic, who led the room through a private tour of the IBM Quantum System One. As the first quantum computer dedicated to healthcare and life sciences research, it offered a fascinating look at what’s to come in the industry. 

What the Room Taught Us  

The insights below didn’t come from the keynote sessions or our featured speakers. They came from peers in the room, trying to solve many of the same healthcare concerns. 

Agentic AI: The Governance Question Has a Surprising Answer  

By now, most executives know what agentic workflows are. The real operational question is how to deploy those workflows responsibly, without strangling them in process. 

The answer was counterintuitive in an industry like healthcare, where so much is carefully regulated. As it turns out, agentic workflows tend to perform best with a deliberately light touch of governance. Early, successful adopters didn’t abandon accountability; instead, they set clear guardrails, assigned ownership, and then stepped back and let the system work. 

Healthcare organizations that front-loaded heavy governance before deployment ended up watching their pilots stall. Those with simple, pragmatic guardrails moved faster and learned more. 

This approach requires a genuine shift in posture for technology and healthcare leaders alike. The instinct to protect is correct, but it’s the mechanism that matters.  

The Physician AI Literacy Paradox  

Here’s a statistic worth sitting with: 92% of physicians say they want more AI training.  

And yet that training almost never actually happens, due to hectic clinical schedules. When training is available, the competency bar physicians are asked to clear is often higher than the one set for most IT staff.  

This boils down to an organizational design problem. Clinicians are being asked to trust and use AI tools they aren’t prepared to meaningfully evaluate, while workforce and scheduling issues make it difficult to build even basic competence.  

IT and clinical leadership must work together to redesign how time and talent are allocated beyond a standalone training program. Otherwise, the skill and AI adoption gap between your systems and the clinicians that use them will only widen. This may be one of the most important conversations healthcare technology leaders can have today, and they’ve only just scratched the surface. 

Technical Debt Is Still the Tax on Everything  

Technical debt came up in nearly every session, as an active drain on capacity, budget, and strategic attention for organizations of every size. 

Legacy infrastructure, already struggling under routine operations, is now being asked to support AI workloads, cloud-native integrations, and modern security architectures it wasn’t designed to handle. The result is a quietly compounding risk; one that often goes unnoticed until the moment it becomes a full-blown problem. 

Everyone in the room recognized how important it was to explain this risk to non-technical stakeholders. The most effective technology leaders at the summit were those who translated the technical debt conversation into capital allocation language. They reframed deferred infrastructure investment, so it wasn’t seen as another IT budget request but an active organizational risk. This reframing changed the course of their internal conversations. 

Budget Pressure Isn’t a Phase. It’s the Operating Condition.  

No one was expecting margin relief for the next fiscal year. Leaders were already trying to figure out how to do more with less. That doesn’t just take a new approach to budgeting, but a different level of organizational access.  

Technology leaders who have built genuine executive alignment—who can speak the language of clinical operations and financial risk, and who are seen as strategic partners rather than service providers—are making sharper, more confident tradeoffs. They’re saying no to work that doesn’t move the needle, and yes to the initiatives that do. 

Advocacy, as one panelist put it, is an offensive sport.  

Security and Governance: The Conversation That Never Ends  

For every health system in the room, security is now a permanent operating condition. 

The attack surface has expanded significantly. AI integrations, third-party tools, connected clinical devices, and increasingly complex data environments have introduced new risks that traditional security frameworks aren’t prepared for. AI in particular has raised specific (and still unresolved) governance questions: Who owns policy when a model touches patient data? How do you balance the speed of AI deployment against the rigor your security and privacy teams require?  

No one has all the answers. But effective leaders have started bringing in security architects to shape AI conversations from the very beginning. As design partners, these experts help shape how these systems are built and deployed. 

Why the Room Matters  

Beyond our robust agenda and fantastic speakers, some of the best discussions at the summit took place at roundtable debates. Others over dinner at The Vault at Marble Room. Still others during the private tour of the IBM Quantum System One, where a side conversation about the timeline for quantum in healthcare went deeper than a conference panel ever could. 

All these insights came from peers who lead organizations like yours, operate under similar constraints, and wrestle with familiar pain points. These are the conversations AHEAD has worked to enable for three years—and is already preparing for in year four. 

If you weren’t in the room this year and want to join the conversation next time, reach out. 

The seats fill up fast for a reason. 

The AHEAD Healthcare Summit is an invitation-only gathering for senior healthcare technology executives. Contact your AHEAD account team to learn more about future events.