Key Findings: 5 Things That Changed in 2025–26

The promise of a unified patient record — one that pulls seamlessly from EHR, claims, SDOH, and remote monitoring — remains frustratingly out of reach for most health systems. The technology to do it exists. The governance, resourcing, and organizational will to actually do it consistently does not.

Here are the five most significant shifts SolvEdge observed across our client base and the broader market in 2025–26:

• AI adoption is outrunning governance by a factor of 3. Organizations are deploying ambient documentation, prior auth automation, and predictive readmission tools 3x faster than they're building the clinical AI governance frameworks to manage them safely. The organizations that invested in governance infrastructure first — AI committees, model validation protocols, clinician override documentation — are scaling faster and more sustainably than those that deployed first and govern later.
• Interoperability fatigue is real — but the organizations pushing through it are pulling ahead. Health systems that have successfully implemented FHIR-compliant integration across their major systems are reporting 40–60% reductions in manual data reconciliation for care management teams. The upfront investment is painful. The operational payoff is durable.
• Cybersecurity has become a board-level matter — whether CIOs want it to be or not. Every major healthcare ransomware incident in 2024–25 resulted in board inquiries, executive accountability discussions, and mandatory security assessments. Health systems that conducted proactive NIST CSF assessments before an incident faced dramatically lower incident costs and recovery times than those that hadn't.
• EHR optimization ROI is highly variable — and the difference is almost entirely about training and workflow redesign, not the EHR itself. Health systems getting 2–4 hours per physician per week back in documentation time have done systematic workflow redesign. Those who got the same EHR from the same vendor and aren't seeing the ROI skipped that step.
• The vendor consolidation trend is accelerating pressure on mid-tier analytics platforms. As Innovaccer, Arcadia, and Epic Healthy Planet absorb more of the population health management market, mid-tier vendors are under pressure to differentiate on depth — not breadth. ACOs evaluating PHM platforms in 2026 should press vendors harder on specific use-case performance, not platform feature counts.

Interoperability: The Gap Between Mandate and Reality

The ONC's 21st Century Cures Act rules mandated FHIR API access across certified health IT systems. What they didn't mandate was that health systems actually use those APIs to build a coherent integration architecture. The result is a market where most health systems have FHIR-compliant EHRs and still manage 18–22 disconnected clinical and administrative systems with limited bidirectional integration.

The organizations at Level 3 and above are not spending more on technology than their Level 1 and 2 peers. They made different sequencing decisions — they prioritized integration governance and architecture before buying additional analytics platforms.

IT Investment Priorities for 2026–27: What Health Systems Are Actually Funding

Based on SolvEdge advisory engagements and publicly available health system capital planning disclosures, the following technology categories are seeing the most new investment in 2026: