Live From HIMSS 2026: The Future of Healthcare IT - Part 2
David Wright sits down with four healthcare technology leaders live from HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas for a series of short, direct conversations capturing the real state of digital health transformation. Tom Boyle (Head of Telecoms at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust), Tonya Reeder (CIO, Walter Reed National Military Mediacl Centre), Trip Humphrey (Director of Data Science and AI, Carilion Clinic), and Dr. Kaitlan Baston (Founder and CEO, Vinyl Health) each bring a distinct vantage point on AI adoption, governance, equity, and patient empowerment in a sector moving faster than its own roadmaps.
Key Takeaways:
00:00 Introduction.
02:30 UK patients accept longer waits , but only if health systems proactively keep them informed along the way.
04:00 Start AI with admin and radiology triage — win trust first, then pursue bigger clinical transformation.
06:00 The NHS and US health systems face more digital parallels than differences — same conversations, different funding models.
18:00 AI bias is a data gap problem, for example, underrepresented populations were simply absent from early military health records.
18:30 Buying a $25M AI tool means nothing if you're only using $1M worth of its functionality.
30:00 Building AI models from scratch is a research undertaking. Most health systems should focus on implementation science instead.
34:00 Health system leaders learn about new AI capabilities hours before their stakeholders ask about them — roadmaps are nearly impossible.
38:30 The right response to breakneck AI change is empathy, not telling people to just deal with being scared.
49:30 Care coordination is duplicated everywhere, but patients and families are rarely the ones driving it. Vinyl fixes that.
52:30 Federal momentum — CMS Tech Ecosystem, data blocking rules, TEFCA — is directly aligned with patient-held records. The timing is right.
Resources Mentioned:
University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust
CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule
Tefca (Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement)
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