< + > Healthcare at Home – 2026 Health IT Predictions

As we wrap up another year and get ready for 2026 to begin, it is once again time for everyone’s favorite annual tradition of Health IT Predictions! We reached out to our incredible Healthcare IT Today Community to get their insights on what will happen in the coming year, and boy, did they deliver. We, in fact, got so many responses to our prompt this year that we have had to narrow them down to just the best and most interesting. Check out the community’s predictions down below and be sure to follow along as we share more 2026 Health IT Predictions!

Check out our community’s Healthcare at Home predictions:

Andy Flanagan, CEO at Iris Telehealth
As AI becomes woven into diagnostics, treatment planning, patient monitoring, and routine administrative work, the distinction between ‘digital health’ and ‘health’ will fade. Just as we no longer refer to ‘electronic banking’ or ‘digital photography,’ the same evolution will occur in care delivery. Terms like ‘telehealth’ and ‘telepsychiatry’ will recede as virtual and in-person visits become interchangeable parts of the same system. Healthcare will simply be healthcare, with technology operating quietly in the background to support more personalized care, better-timed interventions, and smoother coordination. And as patients move comfortably between physical and virtual settings without thinking about the modality, the language will follow, reflecting a system organized around accessibility rather than the mechanics behind it.

Houda Hachad, Vice President of Clinical Operations at Aranscia
In 2026, virtual care will shift from episodic convenience visits to fully integrated care journeys. Tele-visits will increasingly connect to remote monitoring, follow-ups, and home-based interventions rather than exist as standalone encounters. Virtual care will also begin embedding personalized data streams, from wearables, genomics, and phenotype data, directly into visit and follow-up workflows instead of treating them as add-ons. Consumer expectations for convenience, access, and hybrid care will only intensify, and organizations that can’t deliver a seamless virtual experience will face a real competitive disadvantage.

Adam Hesse, Executive Vice President of Engineering at Full Spectrum
The shift of healthcare products and services out of traditional clinical settings and directly into the hands of the consumer will be a major market driver in 2026. Consumer-direct therapeutics and medications like GLP-1s (for diabetes and weight management) are fundamentally acting as blockbuster consumer products, bypassing or minimizing the traditional physician-gatekeeper model. Additionally, there are financial and entrepreneurial drivers, with the increased prevalence and utilization of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) that will continue to drive opportunities for entrepreneurial healthcare businesses, as consumers have more direct control over their healthcare dollars.

Also, advanced remote patient monitoring (RPM) tools will increasingly be marketed as consumer products, expanding beyond chronic care to general wellness and acute event management. Examples include personal ECG devices (like those in the Apple Watch), home-use concussion assessment tools (like Evoke), and consumer-accessible auto-injectors like EpiPens and Narcan.

Maninder Kahlon, Co-Founder & CEO at Beheld
The biggest opportunity in 2026 will come from recognizing that the most revealing conversations in healthcare aren’t happening in exam rooms at all. They’re unfolding in care-navigation calls, benefits questions, sales dialogues, customer-service escalations, and the countless informal moments where confusion, intent, and unmet needs surface. These conversations have always been rich with signal – but we’ve historically ignored them because there was no scalable way to interpret what they contained. That changes now.

LLMs and related tools, tuned not just for language but for conversational understanding, can extract structure, meaning, sentiment, and risk signals from these analog, dynamic exchanges in low-cost, scalable ways. Ambient scribes were an early indication of this future, beginning with documentation and now expanding toward more discovery. But they remain limited to the conversations we were already listening to: the formal clinical encounter.

In 2026, the shift will be toward seeking out the conversations we’ve overlooked altogether. By engaging with people in the moments where they naturally voice their life concerns, motivations, and readiness for change, we can surface the kinds of longitudinal insights about health and daily life that conventional systems have missed, and the treatment of chronic conditions requires.

Andy Maurer, CEO at RedSail Technologies
2026 will be the year pharmaceutical companies go directly to independent, community, regional chain, and long-term care pharmacies to reach patients more directly and effectively. As major national chains continue to shutter locations, community pharmacies are emerging as critical healthcare access points. Patients already interact with their pharmacists more frequently than with primary care physicians, a touchpoint advantage pharma can no longer overlook. The pharma companies that succeed next year will be those that realign their engagement strategies to partner with these frontline pharmacist providers, filling current gaps in patient support, and delivering care where it’s needed most.

Stephen Vaccaro, President at HHAeXchange
The concept of food as medicine will move from a policy conversation to a meaningful operational shift for home care providers, especially as more states offer medically tailored meals to Medicaid members. New York is an early adopter, expanding nutrition benefits for high-risk individuals who need food that supports chronic-disease management, recovery, and overall stability at home. As these programs grow, home care agencies will play a role in ensuring clients receive meals that truly support their health outcomes. This shift will introduce new considerations for homecare, such as:

• Making sure individuals are matched with the right meals for their conditions
• Interpreting whether the meals are being eaten, enjoyed, or just tolerated
• Closing the gap for members living in rural communities and nutrition deserts

Homecare technology and management platforms that let caregivers record real-time observations about eating habits, preferences, and nutrition-based health improvements will provide states and payers with visibility into program effectiveness. These insights can refine meal plans, identify members at risk, and ensure that food-as-medicine initiatives deliver on their promise.

Kristen Richards, Vice President of Ambulatory Care at Cardiovascular Logistics
In 2026, care outside of hospitals will define the future of healthcare. As new reimbursement models, minimally invasive procedures, and technological advancements enable the provision of high-quality care outside of conventional hospital systems, outpatient and ambulatory models will continue to grow. Leading this change is cardiovascular medicine, which demonstrates that when backed by a common operational infrastructure, physician-led, physician-owned organizations can produce outstanding results. These approaches lessen burnout, increase retention, and enhance patient access by granting physicians more authority over the provision of care and relieving them of administrative duties.

Jonathan Stelzer, CEO at SimplePractice
In 2026, U.S. healthcare will wake up to providing tools for healthcare professionals to practice in care settings that they choose. We live in a time where software development, coupled with artificial general intelligence, is dramatically reducing the operating cost to run an outpatient healthcare practice, which will shift the balance of influence back to healthcare professionals. The vast majority of mental health clinicians operate independently, and I remain optimistic that mental health can avoid the consolidation that has continued in all other aspects of healthcare.

Eyal Zimlichman, Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba Medical Center
In 2025, telemedicine has not nearly reached the potential we anticipated, especially after the pandemic. This is largely due to payment systems that still haven’t fully embraced it, cultural hesitancy from both patients and providers, and technology that isn’t fully supportive. During COVID-19, there was an enormous need, but solutions weren’t yet there. The rush to implement quickly at the time, despite the fact that the technology wasn’t ripe, created setbacks as people reverted to traditional care models.

As we move forward, technology is catching up, enabling us to deliver ambulatory care, home care, and post-acute care in safer and more cost-effective ways with less dependence on human presence. Financially, sending doctors and nurses to patients’ homes isn’t sustainable, but telemedicine can be a viable replacement in many situations. The path forward for home care and telemedicine in 2026 and beyond lies in harnessing advanced solutions and AI to create truly sustainable models that can be adopted by the entire ecosystem.

Thank you so much to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a prediction to us, and thank you to all of you for taking the time to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support. What do you think will happen for Healthcare at Home in 2026? Let us know on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!

Be sure to check out all of Healthcare IT Today’s Healthcare at Home content and our other 2026 Health IT Predictions.