Is Healthcare in Harmony on Digital Transformation?

As ViVE 2025 kicks off in Nashville, health system and hospital leaders are faced with a challenging path toward innovation. Can they agree on what works and what doesn’t?

Amid the uncertainty of the Trump administration and the hazards of winter travel, ViVE 2025 kicked off this week in Nashville with a focus on digital transformation and innovation. The four-day event is expected to draw about 8,000 attendees.

Co-produced by HLTH and CHIME (the College of Health Information Management Executives), ViVE boasts a busy agenda—and a refreshing number of panels that feature health system and hospital executives, who are making up roughly one-quarter of the attendees this year.

And despite the goings-on in Washington and the wintry weather, the focus of this week’s conversations will fall squarely on figuring out how to make transformation work.

At a time when the healthcare industry is struggling, healthcare leaders have to find a way to make things better. And while new ideas like AI might seem like the solution to much of what ails the industry, many are finding they can’t just plug in technology and watch it make everything better. The industry as a whole is reluctant to change, shrugging off disruptors with the admonishment that “healthcare is hard” and stubbornly clinging to a status quo that isn’t working.

In fact, it’s almost as if “innovation” is becoming a dirty word. Execs are wondering if the idea is just a lofty concept, suitable for high-minded discussion but not implementation. Where are the concrete examples of healthcare innovation that are pushing the industry forward, demonstrating both sustainability and scalability?

We’re going to find out this week.

The answer may lie in how the industry identifies value. Hospital leaders often approach a new program with two different goals, playing financial ROI against clinical improvements. But one doesn’t have to counteract the other. Sometimes the measurements just need to be redefined.

During a Sunday afternoon panel on care collaboration, Bonnie Clipper, DNP, MA, MBA, RN, CENP, FAAN, a nurse futurist and founder and CEO of the Virtual Nursing Academy, pointed out that healthcare is changing whether we like it or not.

“Just consider the visual of a robot inserting your catheter or a robot doing your surgery,” she said.

Transformation, she explained, is inevitable. And it’s up to the healthcare industry to set the goalposts and define the ROI. Instead of being told how innovation will happen, healthcare leaders, from the C-suite on down to doctors and nurses, need to embrace those changes and mold these new technologies and ideas to fit their needs.

This week, healthcare leaders from a wide swath of organizations across the country will discuss what innovation and transformation mean to them, and how AI, virtual care, digital health and other technologies and ideas will work for them. They will be defining the value.

They might not even agree on that value, but if something works for them, that’s moving the needle forward. Best practices and common goals might sound nice, but transformation doesn’t have to mean everybody’s following the same blueprint.

Perhaps some are shooting for goals that are too high. Allen Taylor, MD, FACC, regional chair of cardiology for MedStar Health’s Washington DC region, pointed out that doctors and nurses may have a different perception of innovation than the C-suite.

“Yoga mats don’t solve [physician burnout and] wellness,” he said, referencing one of the key pain points in healthcare. Clinicians, he said, want to have tools that will improve their ability to care for their patients, whether it be an AI algorithm that reduces their time on the computer or a device that enables them to gain better insight into their patient’s health condition.

And while many might be looking for that splashy program that saves millions of dollars and countless lives, Taylor added, doctors and nurses just want something that moves the needle a little bit forward. They don’t necessarily want to be faster, just better.

“Small things will work for us,” he said. “Solve a problem for us and we will redeploy the assets elsewhere.”