HIMSS flags AI and home hospitals

HIMSS 2026 put artificial intelligence, hospital-at-home care, federal oversight and cybersecurity at the center of the healthcare technology industry’s biggest annual gathering in Las Vegas. The conference ran March 9-12 at the Venetian Convention & Expo Center, according to HIMSS. Chief Healthcare Executive and other trade publications that covered the event described a show floor and speaker lineup focused less on whether health systems will use AI and more on where they will deploy it first. Those reports also pointed to a second theme running alongside the AI push: providers and vendors are preparing for tighter scrutiny from regulators, security teams and health-system governance boards. ### Why did AI dominate the conference agenda? Hal Wolf, president and CEO of HIMSS, said at a media briefing during the conference that health systems need to ask how AI can “redirect my resources for higher acuity and higher delivery,” according to Chief Healthcare Executive. Wolf said hospitals would get meaningful returns only if they applied the technology to the right processes, including work tied to access and clinician workload. (app.himssconference.com) Healthcare Dive reported on March 16 that autonomous AI agents were one of the event’s biggest discussion points. The publication said speakers described agents as a way to handle multi-step administrative work such as onboarding, claims processing, scheduling and care navigation, while warning that governance and cybersecurity controls would have to evolve with the technology. (chiefhealthcareexecutive.com) ### What did Mehmet Oz say about AI and care delivery? Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, used a HIMSS26 keynote to argue that AI agents could widen access to care in rural communities and help Medicare beneficiaries manage information and decisions. Fierce Healthcare reported on March 12 that Oz asked why Medicare could not begin introducing agentic AI for every beneficiary by the end of 2026, while adding that the rollout might not be ready that quickly. (healthcaredive.com) Oz also linked digital tools to care delivered outside hospital walls. Fierce Healthcare reported that he said remote patient monitoring and other home-based technologies could shift more care upstream, and he described the home as a place where the system could “win the battle for health.” ### Why were home hospitals part of the same conversation? (fiercehealthcare.com) Congress and CMS have given hospital-at-home programs fresh runway in 2026. The American Medical Association said the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver was extended for five years in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, allowing hospitals to continue providing inpatient-level care at home for Medicare patients through 2030. (fiercehealthcare.com) Mass General Brigham was among the systems using HIMSS to talk about home-based acute care. Healthcare IT News reported before the conference that the system planned a HIMSS presentation on the financial benefits and patient satisfaction tied to hospital-at-home operations, underscoring how the model has moved from emergency-era workaround to a standing operating question for health systems. (ama-assn.org) ### Where did the FDA fit into a conference about health IT? Jared Seehafer, a senior adviser in the FDA commissioner’s office, said during a first-day HIMSS discussion that the agency was considering new approaches to regulating AI tools and products, according to Chief Healthcare Executive. That placed FDA policy directly inside a conference otherwise dominated by vendor launches and hospital deployment plans. (healthcareitnews.com) The FDA’s Digital Health Center of Excellence says its role includes consistent oversight approaches for digital health technology and increased awareness of digital health trends. That mandate helps explain why federal policy discussions drew attention at HIMSS as AI tools moved closer to clinical and operational use. ### Why did cybersecurity keep surfacing beside AI? Phil Sobol, chief commercial officer at CereCore, told Healthcare IT News on March 9 that AI governance and cybersecurity resilience had emerged as intertwined issues at HIMSS26. (chiefhealthcareexecutive.com) Sobol said ransomware, supply-chain compromises and AI-driven attacks were intensifying even as health systems raced to deploy tools faster than their internal controls were maturing. (fda.gov) Healthcare Dive reported the same week that non-human users created by AI systems could become a new security issue for hospitals, especially as providers integrate more autonomous tools into electronic health record and back-office systems. That framing turned cybersecurity from a separate IT track into part of the AI deployment discussion itself. (healthcareitnews.com) ### What comes next after HIMSS26? HIMSS has continued to market a 2026 AI program series built around “responsible, scalable adoption,” according to its event materials. The organization’s conference site says HIMSS26 ran March 9-12 in Las Vegas, and its post-event materials remain available through HIMSS and trade-publication coverage that tracked the conference’s policy sessions, vendor announcements and federal speakers. (himss.org) (healthcaredive.com)