Hey Health Techies!

I just got back from ViVE, and my brain is equal parts inspired, overwhelmed, and cautiously optimistic.

If you’ve never been, ViVE is where healthcare leaders, startups, big tech, payers, providers, investors, and policymakers all collide in one very intense week. It was my first time there, and I was really impressed with the quality of the presentations and the showroom exhibitions.

One theme towered above everything else: AI has officially moved from experiment to infrastructure.

What I loved is that the conversations were more than just hype. If anything, the tone felt more grounded than even at the HLTH conference just 4 months ago — less “AI will solve everything,” more “how do we do this safely, responsibly, and at scale?”

Here are the biggest takeaways I brought home.

🧠 AI is everywhere but trust is the real bottleneck

Every panel, booth, and hallway conversation touched on AI in some way. Clinical documentation, prior auth, care navigation, revenue cycle, patient engagement, diagnostics — you name it.

But the most interesting conversations weren’t just about capabilities. They were about trust.

One panel I attended was focused on patient trust and emphasized the importance of informed consent for the use of AI in the exam room.

One of the panelists was Michelle Monaco from Wheel. She stated that “technology is changing faster than any human being can keep up with” and noted that the following are essential for maintaining trust in this rapidly changing environment:

👩‍⚕️ Clinicians are no longer being treated as just “end users”

One of the most encouraging shifts at ViVE this year: clinicians weren't framed as obstacles to innovation, they were treated as partners in it.

Now, I know that might sound obvious to you. But trust me, this is a relatively new ethos in the tech world, and I am here for it. I've only been saying this for years.

Why? Because you can’t scale healthcare innovation without clinical input. Full stop.

That means clinicians are increasingly being brought into roles like product strategy, clinical AI oversight, implementation leadership, safety and quality, digital health operations, and customer success for enterprise tools — not as tokens, but as people whose perspective is genuinely irreplaceable.

If you're a clinician who has ever wondered whether your experience matters outside of direct care, ViVE gave a pretty clear answer this year: yes. More than ever.

🤖 The future of healthcare AI is agentic

The buzzword of last year was generative AI. The buzzword of this year? Agentic AI. And the difference matters more than you might think.

Generative AI gives you an answer. Agentic AI actually does the work — autonomously completing tasks, moving between systems, and getting things done without someone holding its hand at every step. And at ViVE, it was clear this is where healthcare innovation is heading.

What kind of tasks are we talking about? For starters, think documentation burden, prior authorization chaos, payment follow ups, staffing shortages, care coordination gaps, and the endless administrative waste that burns clinicians out and slows patient access to a crawl.

These aren't glamorous problems. But they're the ones that, if solved, actually transform the experience of working in and receiving healthcare. And these are the problems leaders at ViVE were most interested in solving.

🤝 Partnerships are becoming the default strategy

Tech is moving so fast that few companies are even trying to build everything themselves anymore.

The dominant theme at ViVE this year wasn't competition. It was ecosystems. Digital health tools integrating into existing workflows rather than asking clinicians to add yet another tab. Payers collaborating with navigation platforms.

A great example of this in action? Microsoft Dragon Copilot is now adding integrations that let your other tools run directly inside Copilot, so instead of jumping between platforms, everything surfaces in one place. It's a small update that has big implications for how clinicians actually experience their day.

It’s exciting that the future belongs to tools that fit into your world, not ones that demand you rebuild around them.

👥 Your network is more important than you think

If there was one piece of career advice that came up over and over again in conversations at ViVE, it was this:

Your network matters.

So many of the speakers mentioned leveraging their networks for roles, for opportunities, to open doors. Walking around ViVE made this really obvious. Every few steps you’d hear someone say something like “You should meet ___” or “I know someone working on that problem.”

And what was even crazier was the number of people I recognized from other conferences that I attended last year. It was great to reconnect, catch each other up on what we’re doing, and promise to do it again at the next one.

For clinicians thinking about careers in health tech, this is an important shift. Career growth isn’t just about credentials or additional degrees. It’s about conversations, curiosity, and building relationships with people working on the problems you care about. And conferences are a great way to do that.

❓ Why this matters for your career

Whether you're planning to stay in clinical practice or you've been thinking about a pivot into tech, what's happening at conferences like ViVE affects you more than you might think.

The clinicians who are becoming the most sought-after people in the system right now? They're the ones who understand technology, workflow design, patient experience, safety and ethics, and the messy reality of actually getting things implemented.

And even though this group of clinicians is growing (I was pleasantly surprised by the number that I saw at the conference), it's still a gap in the market. Healthcare has plenty of builders. What it desperately needs are translators. People who speak both languages. And if you're reading this, there's a good chance that's you. 😊

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Until next time,

Lauren