AI is no longer taking notes, it's taking charge. As hospitals race to harness agentic AI, the question isn't how fast technology can evolve, but how much control healthcare leaders are willing to give up.
AI has edged out of research labs and quietly walked into the hospital. Agentic AI systems—ones that don’t just support decisions but make them—are now functioning in clinical roles: diagnosing, recommending, even prescribing. For hospital leaders, that shift carries more than clinical risk—it threatens the very structure of care delivery, workforce models, and capital investments.
In our October cover story, senior technology editor Eric Wicklund forces open the key fault lines of this transformation:
How systems are weighing efficiency gains against the erosion of clinician autonomy
Whether AI-driven workflows will hollow out key professional roles or save the system from collapse under human burnout
What governance failures or legal blind spots might emerge when machines take charge in the exam room
This isn’t an academic thought experiment. It’s a high-stakes revolution happening now. Don’t miss this one because in the next decade, the decisions in this story may determine who leads and who just follows.
Hospitals are in the fight of their lives, and the enemy isn't just payers or reimbursement cuts anymore. It's cybercriminals.
Welcome to our September 2025 cover story where our CEO editor Jay Asser lays bare a reality many hospital leaders would rather not confront: cyberattacks are no longer something you can avoid. They are inevitable. And when—not if—your systems go down, the survival of your hospital will depend on how prepared you are to respond.
Jay doesn’t just recap the headlines. He digs into the uncomfortable controversies that industry leaders are grappling with right now:
Should hospitals be left to fend for themselves against foreign adversaries and ransomware cartels?
Can rural hospitals with IT teams of just five people possibly withstand the financial and operational devastation of a breach?
Will policymakers step in with funding and privacy reforms or will communities be left to suffer when their hospital collapses under the weight of an attack?
The story makes one thing clear: this isn’t just an IT problem. It’s a clinical continuity crisis. Cyberattacks can shut down EHRs, divert ambulances, delay care, and put lives at risk. As Jay’s reporting shows, even large systems are pouring millions into backup sites, response drills, and legal protections all while still admitting they’ll never feel fully secure.
For CEOs, the question isn’t whether your organization has strong cybersecurity. It’s whether your culture, governance, and resilience strategies are strong enough to ensure that when the hackers get through, your patients still get care.
This is one of the most urgent, high-stakes cover stories we’ve published and it’s a must-read for every hospital and health system leader.
The hosptial at home care model promised to revolutionize healthcare delivery, freeing up beds, cutting costs, and keeping patients happier at home. But CFOs face a stark truth: without bold cost restructuring and strategic scale, the model's financial foundation could crumble.
Welcome to the HealthLeaders August 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It's all about the viability and financial uncertainty surrounding Hospital-at-Home (HaH) care models.
It was billed as the future of acute care delivery—a model that could free up beds, cut costs, and delight patients. Yet for all its clinical wins, the financial upside of Hospital-at-Home (HaH) is far murkier than the headlines suggest. For most health systems, the strategy is more about capacity relief than cash flow.
The ROI isn’t in the black ink, it’s in fewer readmissions, happier patients, and the elusive promise of long-term sustainability.
More than 400 hospitals have launched Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCaH) programs, riding a wave of pandemic-era necessity and a CMS waiver that unlocked Medicare reimbursement.
But with regulatory uncertainty, CFOs are staring down a blunt question: if the reimbursement goes away—or even shifts—does this model still make sense? CFO editor Marie DeFreitas talks to industry leaders on how they make the care model work for them.
During a time of extreme scrutiny, nursing's commitment to diversity and health equity remains, but how do healthcare leaders preserve the spirit of DEI when the very terminology has been weaponized?
Welcome to the HealthLeaders July 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It's all about diversity, equity, and inclusion's (DEI) role in healthcare.
Seems like a no-brainer in healthcare (and especially nursing) right?
Well, since the beginning of the year, stark criticism and negative connotations of the concept of DEI has swept throughout the country, pushed largely by the Trump Administration and their constituents.
In fact, multiple executive orders on the topic have sparked chaos across hospitals and health systems, many of which rely on federal funds to support community-based DEI initiatives, training, and leadership pathways. Now, pending legal challenges to the EOs and some key provisions, legal teams scramble to determine the line between compliance and conscience.
But here’s the truth no one can scrub from a statute: nurses still show up every day to care for patients from every walk of life. They see the disparities. They feel the gaps. They know that representation, cultural humility, and inclusive environments aren’t political—they’re essential.
So, if the playbook has been stripped away, what’s next? How do nurse leaders preserve the spirit of DEI when the very terminology has been weaponized?
As federal efforts to limit AI oversight falter, healthcare leaders must prepare for a new regulatory landscape. Here's what hospital and health system executives need to know.
As we know, the U.S. Senate just voted 99–1 to remove a 10-year federal moratorium on state-level AI regulation from a sweeping legislative package.
The provision, part of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” would have blocked states from crafting their own rules for AI, handing regulatory authority solely to the federal government.
The Senate's decision ensures that individual states retain the authority to regulate AI technologies, rather than deferring exclusively to federal oversight. This outcome is particularly significant for healthcare organizations that operate across multiple states.
Without a national regulatory framework, hospitals and health systems will now need to track a growing patchwork of rules, each with unique compliance requirements, privacy implications, and risk considerations. For large integrated systems, the burden of managing this complexity will increase.
At the same time, the ruling may empower some states to respond more quickly and locally to the evolving risks and opportunities of AI in healthcare. State legislatures could, for example, address specific regional concerns around bias in algorithms, data privacy, and workforce displacement.
But the benefits of responsiveness come with new responsibilities for healthcare leaders.
They must proactively monitor state-by-state developments, engage with policymakers where appropriate, and tailor their AI deployment strategies accordingly.
Eric Poon, MD, MPH, Chief Health Information Officer at Duke Health, underscored this responsibility in a recent interview with HealthLeaders: “We openly tell our clinicians that AI is not perfect and AI is capable of making mistakes, so we as clinicians need to be responsible for everything that we take advantage of out of these products.”
In other words, AI is a tool—not a decision-maker. Human oversight remains essential.
Now more than ever, hospitals and health systems should continue to invest in building their governance structure. This includes formalizing internal review boards, establishing clear accountability structures, and providing targeted education to frontline clinicians who will interact with AI tools daily.
The Senate's decision has opened the door to a more decentralized regulatory environment. To succeed in this new reality, hospital and health system executives will need to be nimble, informed, and proactive while ensuring that innovation proceeds with responsibility.
Staffing is collapsing, risk is rising, and clinical leaders are on the hook. Patient safety demands bold workflows, tech-enabled care, and the courage to rethink everything. Fast.
Welcome to the HealthLeaders June 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
This month, it's all about clinical leadership.
Nobody says it out loud, but in hospital C-suites across the country, the message is clear: if something in the clinical space goes wrong, clinical leadership is on the hook.
As care teams shrink and patient acuity rises, the safety net is fraying, and patients are slipping through. Virtual nurses, AI scribes, cross-trained teams, and reimagined care environments are no longer innovative, they’re triage.
CMOs and other clinical leaders must walk a tightrope between fiscal responsibility and clinical reality, knowing that when the inevitable safety incident occurs, accountability stops at their desk.
But what if the real crisis isn’t the staffing shortage itself, but the belief that the work must be done the same way it always has been?
In this cover story, our CMO editor Chris Cheney shows clinical leaders how to lead the charge on change.
Healthcare innovators are walking a fine line between big, disruptive ideas and practical, problem-specific solutions. Is true transformation still possible in a system under relentless financial and operational pressure?
Welcome to the HealthLeaders May 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It's all about taking a hard look at innovation and understanding if it's even truly possible in healthcare.
Everyone talks about innovation like it’s an inevitable, shiny fix to healthcare’s most painful problems. But in today’s brutal financial climate, where margins are razor-thin and burnout runs high, is real innovation even possible? For all the talk of transformation, health systems are shackled by practicality.
C-Suite executives say innovation is imperative, but the journey from that lightbulb-over-the-head moment to broad clinical acceptance is tricky, and good ideas don’t necessarily work out just because they’re good.
While many would have described the pace of healthcare innovation as slow and steady during the first two decades of this century, the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything in a blender and pressed puree.
Ideas that would normally take a few years to develop were put to the test in months, if not weeks. And while that era saw incredible growth, it also put the healthcare industry on notice, highlighting the shortcomings: Stress and burnout, leading to dwindling workforce numbers, unsustainable costs, and questionable value.
Large hospital consolidations have always had consequences for the public, but they've started to overburden acquiring health systems as well, making scale no longer the foolproof answer.
Welcome to the HealthLeaders April 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It's all about the potential downfall of mega-mergers.
There's a shift happening within healthcare consolidation. Becoming the biggest health system on the block is no longer the slam dunk strategy for long-term sustainability that it may have once been.
Now, achieving growth is better served through thoughtful, strategic partnerships, rather than chasing sheer size and scale.
In a post-COVID world, the reality for providers is that the margins, both for error and for the bottom line, are slim. Expenses are outpacing revenue gains in many areas, making efficiency the name of the game. The 'too big to fail' mindset for hospitals is of a bygone era.
A look at the balance sheets of some of the largest health systems in the country illustrates how size doesn't necessarily translate to success.
In fact, there's a growing trend of bloated systems struggling to find their footing, but they're indicative of why the tide is turning, if it hasn't already, against mega-mergers.
This month, CEO editor Jay Asser writes about how CEOs are adjusting their strategies.
The payer-provider war is entering a new phase, and the financial fallout is devastating. CFOs are no longer just balancing budgets—they are the last line of defense against aggressive payer tactics.
Welcome to the HealthLeaders March 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It’s all about the escalation of the payer/provider war.
Seventy percent. That’s how much payer-provider disputes have surged in just the last two years.
Contract terminations, lawsuits, and drawn-out reimbursement battles have become the new normal, and hospitals are bleeding cash as a result.
Providers now spend nearly $20 billion annually on claim denials—half of it wasted on disputes that should never have happened. That’s $10 billion that could have gone toward patient care, medical innovation, or staff retention. Instead, it’s being siphoned away in an endless cycle of bureaucratic gridlock.
But this war is evolving. Payers are using AI-driven denials to reject claims at unprecedented rates. Legal battles over reimbursement are intensifying. Patients, caught in the crossfire, are angrier than ever. And yet, policymakers remain largely disconnected from the financial devastation unraveling in hospitals across the country.
If this battle remains an “I win, you lose” game, providers will continue losing billions, patients will suffer, and health systems will collapse under the weight of financial instability. The system is unsustainable—but it’s not unfixable.
CFOs are in a rare position to rewrite the rules of engagement. By standing at the intersection of finance, operations, and policy, they can wield hard data to expose payer tactics, drive regulatory changes, and force a shift in how contracts are negotiated. But to do that, they must step beyond the walls of their own health systems and enter the policy arena.
This month, CFO editor Marie Defreitas writes about how CFOs can stop reacting and start leading.
The frontier of clinical AI isn't just emerging—it's exploding, reshaping the very fabric of healthcare with both exhilarating promise and perilous uncertainty.
Picture a landscape as uncharted and volatile as the Wild West, where the stakes are nothing less than patient lives, clinical integrity, and the future of medical practice. Here, algorithms are the new outlaws and innovators, disrupting traditional workflows, challenging the sanctity of clinical decision-making, and daring to redefine the doctor-patient dynamic.
While AI has comfortably nestled into administrative corners, trimming inefficiencies and enhancing operational flow, its march into clinical territories is met with a starkly different reality. This isn’t about automating paperwork; it’s about influencing diagnoses, treatment plans, and even patient trust. What happens when AI crosses the line from assistant to authority? When it prescribes medication or becomes the voice patients heed over their own physicians?
The HealthLeaders 2024 AI in Clinical Care Mastermind program, sponsored by Ambience, Microsoft, and Rapid AI, convened clinical trailblazers from 10 health systems to grapple with these very questions. Their candid discussions reveal not just early victories in radiology and patient communication, but also the raw, unvarnished struggles: navigating governance without stifling innovation, integrating AI without alienating clinicians, and chasing ROI amidst ethical gray zones.
This report distills their hard-won insights, offering a compass for healthcare leaders navigating their own AI frontiers. Here, you'll find not just lessons learned, but survival strategies for thriving in an era where clinical AI isn’t a distant future—it’s the reality unfolding in exam rooms, operating theaters, and patient portals today.
