ViVE 2026 in Los Angeles showed that the promises we’ve been hearing for years, AI transforming care delivery, interoperability finally working, patients owning their data, have moved from aspiration to reality.
Throughout the conference, the conversation shifted from potential to proof. The focus moved from what’s working in live deployments to how organizations are scaling those successes with real infrastructure, real incentives, and real accountability. Here’s what defined the moment.
From Potential to Proof at ViVE 2026
After 2.5+ years of AI in healthcare, the show floor buzz wasn’t about “what if” anymore. It was about “what’s working.” More AI has been deployed in healthcare in the last 6 months than in the last 5 years combined. ChatGPT only went public 3 years ago. As Imran Qureshi pointed out in “Deploying AI-Powered Care Navigation While Maintaining Patient Trust and Safety,” the pace is unprecedented.
Consider the adoption curve. Patient portals took 10 years to reach meaningful adoption. Health apps did it in 4 years. The infrastructure is in place. The regulations have caught up. The incentives are aligned. The question isn’t “Can we?” anymore. It’s “Will we?”
Trust as the Foundation Everything Else is Built On
Across every session, one theme dominated. Trust is the number one barrier to AI adoption in healthcare, not technology.
Patients have spent years behind a “black box” where their data gets transacted and monetized without their knowledge or consent. Now, as they turn to AI for health answers, they need to know they can trust what they’re getting back. Like Kristen Valdes stated in her session, “Building Trust in AI Driven Healthcare,” 15% of queries in LLMs today are health or healthcare related.
The numbers are clear. 92% of consumers want accuracy. 90% want control over their data. 88% want security. Without trust, nothing else matters.
So how do you build it? Transparency means patients need to know when they’re interacting with AI, where the information comes from, and how their data is used. Line-by-line source citations. Clear disclaimers. Neutral, objective tone, not a health cheerleader.
Accuracy over engagement was a recurring theme. As Dmitry Shevelenko, CBO at Perplexity, put it, hallucinations aren’t a feature in healthcare. They’re a bug. Especially when wrong answers can have life-or-death consequences.
Data quality is non-negotiable. Your AI is only as smart as your data. Clean, complete, clinically-validated data isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation. Without it, you’re building on sand, no matter how sophisticated your model is.
Breaking Down the Walls
Healthcare has digitized, but it hasn’t unified. Unlike banking, where you can manage 10 accounts in 1 app, healthcare gave us 10 portals for 10 slices of data. Patients manage dozens of portals over their lifetimes. Amy Gleason, in the session “How CMS is Modernizing Healthcare,” shared that their daughter manages 47 patient portals across her care journey. By age 65, people see up to 30 different providers.
87% of surveyed consumers said they want their data in one place. The infrastructure challenge is real. There are over 5,000 provider directories in the U.S., and the healthcare system spends an estimated $6 billion annually just validating provider information. Where do they practice? What plans do they accept? How do you connect to them through interoperability?
But progress is happening. TEFCA (Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement) is the “rising tide” that will lift all boats, a national superhighway for data exchange. The CMS Health Tech Ecosystem is the “speedboat” running alongside it, with over 700 organizations pledging to achieve interoperability results in 6 months to a year instead of waiting until 2027 for regulations to take full effect.
Standards like FHIR and HL7 v2 are well-deployed and regulatory tailwinds are in place:
- 2020 – CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rules made FHIR APIs the standard
- 2021 – the 21st Century Cures Act made it a legal right to own and access your full medical records
- 2022 – TEFCA established a national standard for healthcare data exchange
- 2024 – the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem launched as a voluntary call to action
But there’s still a gap. We’ve achieved what’s called syntactic interoperability, meaning we understand the format of the data. The next frontier is semantic interoperability, understanding what the data actually means about the patient for clinical decision-making. That’s where the real work begins.
The Vision?
“Kill the clipboard.” QR code sharing, as you do at the airport or a concert. A National Provider Directory that eliminates waste. Identity verification that builds trust in data exchange. Real-time access to your complete health history, not just fragments.
This is already happening. As Joe Ganley from athenahealth described in “The Supply & Demand for Patient Data,” “We just did this announcement with b.well, and one of the things that we’re able to have a patient show up at their doctor’s office, take their b.well app and QR code, scan it at their provider, dump all the information that’s in their app, which is not just EHR information. It could be their wearables or how they’re sleeping. All this data down into the EHR, and then getting their after-visit summary uploaded directly into the patient’s app that has a user interface that they’re comfortable using to manage all of their health care.” It’s bidirectional, comprehensive, and puts patients in the driver’s seat of their own health data.
Patients as Partners, Not Passengers
Here’s the reality of healthcare today. Patients see their doctor an average of 2.4 times per year, with each visit lasting about 15 minutes. Within 3 weeks, 80% of patients forget more than 50% of what was discussed in that visit. Most healthcare happens outside the doctor’s office. The 11 pm symptom search, the question about whether it’s safe to take an over-the-counter supplement, or the follow-up care plan that never got written down.
And yet, no one cares more about their health than the patients themselves. That’s why patient empowerment through data ownership was a central theme at ViVE 2026. Throughout the conference, real patient stories illustrated what becomes possible when people have access to their complete health data.
There were stories of patients managing complex rare diseases across multiple specialists, navigating dozens of medications and care plans spanning 13 to 15 years. Stories of family members who self-diagnosed conditions that multiple physicians had missed by uploading their medical records into AI tools that could finally see the full picture across fragmented systems. Stories of patients discovering decades-old misdiagnoses that, while not changing their treatment history, suddenly opened doors to clinical trials that offered new hope.
These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re happening now. And they’re only possible when patients have access to their complete, unified health data.
What do patients want from that data? In “The CMS Conversational AI Pledge: Real Solutions or Just Fancy Chatbots,” Sara Zywicki shared findings from b.well’s patient survey: 92% want predictive warnings before problems happen. 90% want test results explained in plain language. 89% want help understanding treatment options. 88% want help navigating insurance coverage, the biggest source of friction in healthcare.
Healthcare should be as convenient as ordering an Uber. Real-time booking with transparent costs. Alerts when clinical trials, generics, or manufacturer coupons become available. The ability to donate your data to research if you choose. Patients as stewards of their own health, not passive recipients of care.
From Chatbots to Action and the Agentic AI Evolution
Millions of people are asking AI health questions every day, but answers aren’t enough. Patients need action: booking the appointment, ordering the refill, scheduling the imaging, and closing the care gap. That requires secure connections to real clinical systems, not walled gardens.
But it also requires provider buy-in. Jennifer McCraw at MedStar Health explained, “Our providers want to ask 100 questions in terms of the protocols and the experience. Our patients want to answer 0. So it’s our job to bring those two numbers closer together.” Her approach to specialty groups was to show them the technology will either make their lives easier, or they won’t even know it’s there. MedStar reduced orthopedic protocol questions from 16 to 4, maintaining clinical appropriateness while dramatically improving patient experience.
This is the shift from Gen AI to Agentic AI, moving from advisory to executional. From “you need a mammogram” to “I’ve booked you at 2 pm on Monday, 1 mile away, in-network, with a $50 copay.”
But making that work requires orchestration. Multiple AI agents running workflows autonomously sounds great, until they can’t communicate with each other. How do scheduling, messaging, and triage agents work as one system? That’s the missing piece many organizations are now solving.
It also requires complete, unified data. AI becomes exponentially more powerful when it has access to your full longitudinal health record, not just fragments.
Take bailey™, b.well’s AI health assistant, which was featured in the ViVE digital daily update. bailey is named after Kristen Valdes, our Founder and CEO’s daughter, who manages a complex autoimmune condition across multiple specialists and medications. bailey can instantly retrieve visit summaries and lab results spanning 13 to 15 years, analyze inflammatory markers across disparate lab records, correlate medication history with health outcomes, and summarize follow-up steps like imaging, lab work, specialist appointments, and daily care needs. It makes complex medical data digestible and helps patients like Bailey close contextually relevant care gaps that her care team wants her to follow through on.
That’s the power of agentic AI grounded in real, unified data, and it’s not theoretical. It’s live.
CMS Shows the Way at ViVE 2026
What stood out at ViVE 2026 was how CMS is leading by doing, not just regulating.
The CMS Health Tech Ecosystem launched as a voluntary effort to achieve interoperability within 6 months to a year, rather than waiting until 2027 for regulations to take full effect. Over 700 organizations have already pledged to participate, including providers and payers, EHRs, big tech companies, app developers, and patients themselves.
And CMS is “dog-fooding” its own policies by:
- building a National Provider Directory that consolidates over 5,000 directories and could save the system $6 billion annually
- deploying identity verification infrastructure for both providers and patients to build trust in data exchange
- modernizing Medicare.gov, with identity verification at the top
- providing open-source tools and APIs for states, along with on-the-ground technical assistance teams
The approach is bipartisan. Louisiana and Pennsylvania, one red state and one blue, are co-chairing the effort. The first deadline was March 31st. The next is July 4th. And the message is clear. If you’re not at the table, someone else is speaking for you.
CMS is also backing this with real financial incentives. The CMMI Access Model allows technology-enabled care to bill Medicare Part B, with payment tied to outcomes. You receive 50% of the payment upfront and 50% upon the patient achieving the outcome. It’s a population-based model across four tracks: metabolic, kidney, musculoskeletal, and depression/anxiety.
The Rural Health Transformation Fund provides $50 billion to states to advance rural health technology and access. Nine states have explicitly made Health Tech Ecosystem participation a condition of receiving funding, a “meaningful use” model for infrastructure adoption.
The partnership gap is real. Care teams on the ground want the same outcomes, but many innovations fail not because of poor technology, but because of poor identification of the patient population. Health systems need to step up to leverage their data and identify which populations need what interventions. Population health and quality improvement teams are the bridge between innovation and delivery. Success requires ownership from both sides, companies and health systems.
Now It’s About Execution
Healthcare spent decades talking about interoperability, patient access, and data ownership. ViVE 2026 was about the people actually doing it, with pledges, deadlines, dollars, and proof points.
The infrastructure is ready. The regulations have caught up. The technology is here. The patients are demanding it. The incentives are aligned.
Organizations that invested in multidisciplinary committees, enterprise-wide training, and shared fluency across legal, clinical, ops, and tech teams are the ones balancing safety with innovation. They invested in people first, embraced collaboration over competition, and built on open protocols and patient-centered networks, recognizing that no one company can do this alone.
The convergence moment is now. The question isn’t “Can we?” anymore.
It’s “Will we?”
