Heather O’Sullivan, MS, APRN, President and COO of Healthcare at Home, and her co-panelist, Tom Kiesau, Chief AI & Digital Officer at Chartis, speak at the 2026 HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition.
The 2026 HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition brought together more than 30,000 healthcare and technology leaders from around the world in Las Vegas earlier this month. Each year, the conference examines the most pressing challenges facing the healthcare industry while spotlighting emerging trends, innovations and solutions. Several leaders from Mass General Brigham participated this year, addressing some of the most talked about issues in health IT, including artificial intelligence (AI) and how Home Hospital is reshaping the future of care delivery—underscoring the health system’s role at the forefront of innovation and responsible implementation of new technologies.
Below are some conference highlights from Mass General Brigham leaders, which helped shape both the broader dialogue and the system’s direction as we continue to transform the future of healthcare.
At Mass General Brigham, AI initiatives span clinical care, research, operations, and commercialization, with every patient-facing technology evaluated through a robust governance structure to ensure safety, transparency, ethical and responsible use, and high-impact results. In a keynote presentation titled “How Mass General Brigham Embeds AI Safety and Security into Healthcare's DNA,” Jane Moran, Chief Information and Digital Officer, discussed how the organization has safely and effectively implemented AI across a large, complex health system, highlighting the need for strong data governance, strategic vendor partnerships, and continued focus on building AI literacy among staff. Moran underscored that while AI is advancing rapidly, healthcare must adopt it carefully and responsibly, given the high stakes for patient safety, privacy, cybersecurity, and regulation. She described Mass General Brigham’s deliberate, enterprise-wide approach and emphasized that AI is being deployed to solve real problems across clinical care, research, access, and productivity, noting, “This is not just about adopting AI. This is about solving real business problems, not just putting technology out into the wild.”
Jane Moran, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Mass General Brigham, speaks on stage at HIMSS.
Rebecca Mishuris, MD, Chief Health Information Officer and Vice President of Digital, explored in a session called “The Digital Dilemma” how digital health tools are reshaping care delivery—and whether they are truly empowering clinicians and patients or introducing new complexity. The discussion centered around how organizations can rethink digital health design to better support users, underscoring the challenge of deploying tools that balance diverse stakeholder needs while enabling more holistic, seamless workflows. Mishuris explained how AI-powered ambient documentation, which automatically captures clinical conversations and generates draft notes, has delivered measurable improvements in clinician well-being, in a way that “was truly transformational.”
Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, Chief Data Science Officer, Chief Imaging Information Officer and head of Mass General Brigham AI’s business office, explored in a panel, “Redefining the Hospital Operating System: Where People and AI Move as One,” how Mass General Brigham and companies like Philips are using agentic AI to expand health system capacity through an autonomous digital workforce, while managing operational risk. The presentation highlighted strategies for integrating clinicians, care teams and intelligent agents to address workforce shortages, improve efficiency, and scale care delivery to meet growing patient demand.
In her session, “Hospital-at-Home: Financial Benefits and Superior Member Satisfaction,” Heather O’Sullivan, MS, APRN, President and COO of Healthcare at Home, examined how Home Hospital is a strategic and financially viable care model that improves clinical outcomes, enhances patient satisfaction and addresses the capacity crisis affecting hospitals nationwide. Drawing on her experience leading one of the largest and most successful Home Hospitals in the country, she explained how the model creates measurable financial value and outlined a comprehensive framework for scaling this transformative model of care delivery.
While AI innovation is advancing rapidly, many health systems still lack clear frameworks to evaluate safety, reliability, and clinical impact. Bernardo Bizzo, Senior Director at Mass General Brigham AI, co-led the workshop “Empowering Healthcare Providers to Evaluate Artificial Intelligence Tools,” to bring attention to the Healthcare AI Challenge—a collaborative initiative across multiple health systems led by Mass General Brigham, that equips clinicians and digital health leaders with hands-on tools and frameworks to evaluate AI safely and effectively, enabling informed, real-world AI adoption across healthcare organizations. "The biggest challenge we have is that we lack benchmarks to assess how these tools are performing and how well they can help us," Bizzo said. Initiatives like the Healthcare AI Challenge aim to help close that gap by enabling clinicians to evaluate AI models using shared datasets and standardized benchmarks, looking beyond accuracy to factors like clinical usefulness, speed, and workflow impact.
In his presentation, “FaceAge: Using Artificial Intelligence to Decode Biological Age with a Selfie,” Raymond Mak, MD, member of the AI in Medicine Program and a radiation oncologist, discussed FaceAge, a deep learning tool developed by his team that uses facial analysis to estimate biological age and predict survival outcomes, particularly in cancer patients. The model outperformed clinicians in short-term prognosis and improved clinician accuracy when used alongside clinical judgment, highlighting its potential as an objective health assessment tool. Mass General Brigham findings suggest that the FaceAge tool could provide objective data to help inform treatment decisions in cancer care and other chronic diseases.
Hiyam Nadel, MBA, RN, Director of the Center for Innovations in Care Delivery at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Kimberly Whalen, RN, MSN, CCRN, Nursing Director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Mass General Brigham for Children, led several sessions highlighting how nurses are driving the responsible adoption of AI, informatics, and human‑centered design to transform care delivery while advancing equity, workforce sustainability, and patient outcomes. Together, the sessions underscored the critical role of nursing leadership in moving healthcare innovation from insight to impact through collaboration, evidence‑based decision‑making, and practical implementation. Nadel also received the 2026 Changemaker in Health Award at HIMSS26, which recognizes innovative leaders advancing healthcare through information and technology.
