ViVE always attracts a wide variety of technologies to the show floor. One minute you’re looking at a payer solution, the next you’re staring at a medical device, and then an EHR. I saw everything from Facetec using “3D Liveness” to solve patient identity to Karen Cross’s Mimosa DX (powered by Google Pixel) for diagnosing skin conditions.
But the real shocker? The utter lack of talk about AI Scribes. For the past two years, you couldn’t turn a corner without tripping over a vendor offering a scribe or scribe integration, but at ViVE2026, there was scribe-silence. It felt like the industry has reached a point of accepting scribes as standard infrastructure and moved on. The “bright shiny thing” of 2024 and 2025 has officially lost its luster, replaced by something much more grounded: AI automation.
Policies and Partnerships at ViVE2026
On the policy front, CMS representatives clarified details of the Rural Health Transformation Program, which is set to award $50 billion over five years to make rural care sustainable. CMS also reaffirmed its commitment to the pledge-model of interoperability and building a national provider directory.
There was also a big announcement involving DirectTrust, the CARIN Alliance, and CMS regarding a new accreditation program for consumer-facing apps. It’s a lot to digest, but it signals a major move toward modern identity management.
AI for Healthcare Automation at ViVE2026
If I had to pick a theme for ViVE2026, I would have to say that it was AI for “un-sexy” administrative tasks. While some vendors were pitching “agentic AI,” the talk felt nebulous and aspirational at best. The real meat of the conversations was in the revenue cycle (using AI to process claims faster), data analysis (research synthesis), and resource optimization.
In a surprising twist, the majority of vendors and attendees were not talking about this form of AI as a cost-cutting measure, but rather as a technology that would help relieve stress on already overworked staff. It’s a welcome development.
What Healthcare IT Leaders Are Asking
With AI scribes becoming standard infrastructure, where should health systems point their AI budgets next? The reality is that the next wave of AI adoption belongs to the “un-sexy” administrative workflows like revenue cycle management, claims processing, and resource optimization. Instead of framing these tools purely as cost-cutting measures, IT leaders should prioritize deployments that directly relieve the crushing workload on already stretched operational staff.
Will the new CMS National Provider Directory actually reduce the administrative burden of roster maintenance? The industry currently wastes billions of dollars a year trying to maintain thousands of disjointed provider directories that still end up inaccurate. By building foundational infrastructure for a single national directory, CMS aims to create a centralized source of truth, allowing organizations to update their information in one place rather than fielding dozens of validation requests a month.
How can IT teams close the dangerous exposure gap between software vulnerability announcements and internal patching? The traditional audit model often leaves health systems exposed for months while attackers exploit newly announced vulnerabilities on day one. Shifting to continuous, real-time software risk visibility allows IT and security leaders to immediately identify and mitigate threats across their enterprise and vendor networks.
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