ViVE 2026 Wrap-Up: AI, Cyber & Compliance in Focus for Healthcare

The biggest digital health event of 2026 just wrapped in LA (no we didn't get to attend, but we did follow the announcements and streams!). The implications reach far beyond hospital walls. Here's what matters for every business navigating healthcare IT, compliance, and the AI revolution.

ViVE 2026 descended on the Los Angeles Convention Center from February 22–25, bringing together more than 9,000 healthcare executives, technology leaders, and policymakers for four days of keynotes, product launches, and candid conversations about where healthcare technology is actually heading. Co-created by HLTH and CHIME, ViVE has cemented itself as the event where healthcare's digital strategy meets real-world execution.

This year's event carried a distinctly different energy. The hype cycle around AI has given way to hard questions about governance, security, and measurable outcomes. Federal policymakers shared stages with CISOs, and the conversations that mattered most weren't about what's possible — they were about what's working, what's broken, and what's mandatory.

For IT leaders and managed service providers supporting healthcare clients, ViVE 2026 delivered a clear set of signals that demand attention. Here's the breakdown.

AI Has Graduated: From Pilot Projects to Enterprise Infrastructure

If there was a single throughline at ViVE 2026, it was this:

AI in healthcare is no longer experimental — it's operational

The conversation has shifted decisively from "what could AI do?" to "how do we govern, scale, and secure AI that's already running in production?"

Ambient AI Goes Beyond Documentation

Ambient clinical documentation — AI that listens to patient-clinician conversations and generates notes — was the breakout use case of 2024 and 2025. At ViVE 2026, the leading vendors showed they've already moved past it.

• Oracle Health announced that its Clinical AI Agent now supports automated order creation. Using ambient listening during patient appointments, the system drafts prescriptions, lab orders, imaging requests, referrals, and follow-up appointments in real time — then queues them for clinician review and approval. Oracle reports the tool has already saved US doctors more than 200,000 hours of documentation time since launch. The key differentiator: Oracle's agent uses semantic reasoning that evaluates patient history, prior orders, physician preferences, and organisational standards to produce contextually appropriate orders, not just transcribed text.
• Abridge, named the #1 market leader for ambient AI in revenue cycle management by KLAS for the second consecutive year, announced a systemwide deployment with UCHealth. With over 100 health systems now using its platform, Abridge's Contextual Reasoning Engine goes beyond documentation to produce billable notes aligned with revenue cycle guidelines at the point of care.
• Wolters Kluwer showcased UpToDate® Expert AI and agentic AI innovations designed to embed clinical and medication intelligence directly into workflows — moving from passive reference tools to active clinical decision support.

The direction is unmistakable: ambient AI is evolving from a scribe into a clinical co-pilot, and the winners will be platforms that integrate deeply into EHR workflows rather than sitting alongside them!

Agentic AI: The New Battleground

The term "agentic AI" was everywhere at ViVE 2026. These are AI systems that don't just respond to prompts — they take autonomous actions within defined workflows. Healthcare is rapidly adopting them:

• 64% of healthcare organisations are now experimenting with or deploying agentic AI, according to findings from the 2026 Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study released at ViVE by Censinet
• Kontakt.io launched a full suite of AI agents at the event — including Patient Flow Agent, Supply Chain Agent, and Access Agent — designed to help hospitals optimise throughput and remove operational bottlenecks
• symplr unveiled AI-powered innovations across workforce management, contract lifecycle management, and vendor credentialing, targeting the fragmented back-end workflows that strain health systems

Dr. Joshua Liu, CEO of SeamlessMD, captured one of the event's sharpest insights:

"To predict the future of AI agents, you must follow the capital. If data is the new gold, then the power lies with the major application providers. This helps answer the question: will we truly see dozens of independent agent providers, or will EHRs simply build those agents directly into the existing clinical workflow?"

The practical takeaway for IT leaders: AI agents are going to operate inside existing systems, not replace them. EHRs are becoming stickier, not more vulnerable. The opportunity lies in helping healthcare organisations prepare their data foundations, workflows, and security posture for agent-driven automation.

The AI Governance Gap Is Wide Open

Perhaps the most sobering data point from ViVE 2026 came from the Censinet 2026 Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study, released in partnership with the American Hospital Association, Health-ISAC, and the Health Sector Coordinating Council:

The gap between governance structures and operational execution is stark. Organisations have committees, but they lack inventories, detection mechanisms, and formal controls. As John Riggi, National Advisor for Cybersecurity and Risk at the American Hospital Association, noted:

"Cyberattacks supported by criminals and nation-states continue to target healthcare's critical infrastructure, and the rapid integration of AI may introduce new vectors of risk to patient safety and care delivery without sufficient oversight."

What this means for IT teams & support providers: There's a significant consulting and implementation opportunity in helping healthcare clients build AI governance frameworks, maintain AI inventories, assess shadow AI risk, and integrate governance into existing cybersecurity programs.

Cybersecurity: From Perimeter Defence to Mandatory Segmentation

Cybersecurity dominated ViVE 2026 — not as a side conversation, but as an existential priority woven into every keynote and panel.

AI Is Accelerating Attacks

The CISO panel featuring leaders from Baptist Health, Luminis Health, and Northeast Georgia Health System delivered some of the event's most candid moments. James Case, CISO at Baptist Health, didn't mince words: "How hasn't [AI] changed [cybersecurity]? From attacks, from governance, from data analysis, everywhere."

The panel highlighted:

• Phishing is faster, more targeted, and more personalised thanks to AI — with higher success rates than ever 
• Social engineering now leverages publicly available data to craft attacks against individuals, not just organisations 
•  Baptist Health removed external email from thousands of frontline clinical staff entirely — a program called "Safe Mail" that limits nursing and clinical teams to internal-only mailboxes.
  
  As Case put it: "If you can't get the email, you can't click on it. It's fundamental, foundational." 

The mindset shift at ViVE was palpable:

security leaders have moved from "how do we keep attackers out" to "how do we contain the damage when they get in."

Containment, micro-segmentation, restricted access, and blast-radius reduction are now the priorities.

The HIPAA Security Rule Is Getting Teeth

(While not directly applicable to Australian Health providers, these recommendations will have a flow-on effect and, IMHO, are just good practice anyway!)

The proposed updates to the HIPAA Security Rule, discussed extensively at ViVE 2026, represent the most significant regulatory shift for healthcare cybersecurity in over a decade:

• Network segmentation moves from "addressable" to required — no more flexibility in deciding whether to implement it
• Mandatory multi-factor authentication across all systems handling electronic protected health information (ePHI)
• Encryption required for ePHI both at rest and in transit
• 24-hour incident notification requirements for business associates
• Annual security testing mandated
• Comprehensive asset inventories and network maps required — segmentation without accurate asset visibility will be impossible to defend during audits

For MSPs and IT service providers supporting healthcare clients, these are no longer aspirational best practices — they're becoming compliance obligations that will need to be implemented, documented, and audited (and not a moment too soon!).

Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Gary Salman of Black Talon Security delivered a stark warning at ViVE: "Threat actors don't go in cycles. They're not scanning for vulnerabilities every three months. They are continuously attacking."

He predicted the window from vulnerability disclosure to active exploitation — currently averaging around seven days — will collapse to one day by the end of 2026. Quarterly vulnerability scans and annual penetration tests are no longer sufficient. Healthcare organisations need continuous threat exposure management, and most don't have it yet.

The panel also challenged the industry's over-reliance on detection tools:

"Everyone's relying on EDR, MDR, SIEM, SOC, everything to detect this stuff. But those tools are typically triggering when bad things happen."

The shift from detection to prevention — particularly through identity-based micro-segmentation that stops lateral movement — was a recurring theme.

The Workforce Equation: AI as Enabler, Not Replacement

A nuanced and encouraging thread at ViVE 2026 was the focus on AI as a tool to empower healthcare workers rather than displace them.

Tampa General Hospital's Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, Amit Patel, presented on the rollout of Microsoft Dragon Copilot for nursing workflows. The key insight: what works for physicians doesn't work for nurses. Nursing documentation requires filing into specific flow sheets with specific values, making the AI challenge far more complex on the back end.

Patel's advice was practical: "They need to understand how [AI] works, when to use it and when not to. They still need to trust their own clinical judgment and the experiences they learned in nursing school, because it's their responsibility, not the AI's, to take care of the patient."

Stacey Johnston, MD, captured the emerging workforce reality: "As we move toward autonomy, we are upskilling our staff to manage these AI systems rather than perform the manual tasks themselves. Moving forward, the critical question we must ask is: how many people will it take to effectively monitor AI?"

City of Hope shared their approach of building "Hope LLM," an internal AI model that synthesises referral information and clinical data into summaries for physicians — demonstrating that healthcare organisations are increasingly building custom AI capabilities in-house.

The pattern was clear: healthcare organisations need partners who can help them implement, integrate, and manage AI tools while supporting the change management and training that determines whether these tools deliver value or gather dust.

Diagnostics and Data: The Intelligence Layer

ViVE 2026 introduced a dedicated Diagnostics Zone, reflecting a broader recognition that diagnostics isn't a transactional lab step — it's the intelligence layer that powers personalised medicine, AI models, and clinical decision-making.

Key themes included:

• AI-powered diagnostic imaging seeing significant investment, with tools designed to automate MRI interpretation and extend specialty-level diagnostics to more settings
• Point-of-care testing and digital pathology converging with AI to enable earlier detection and more personalised treatment
• Revenue Cycle Management getting its own showcase at ViVE for the first time, highlighting how AI is transforming billing, coding, claims, and prior authorisation.

Trinity Health leaders discussed their work shutting down obsolete systems — an initiative that produced approximately $80 million in savings, with more expected. It's a powerful case study in how IT rationalisation and system decommissioning can fund digital transformation.

What This Means for Australian Healthcare and IT Providers

While ViVE is a US-centric event, the trends and technology shifts it surfaces have direct implications for Australian healthcare organisations and the IT providers that support them:

1. The HIPAA precedent will influence Australian regulation. 
   As Australia's own healthcare cybersecurity frameworks evolve, the move toward mandatory segmentation, MFA, and continuous monitoring in the US sets a benchmark that Australian regulators and industry bodies will reference.
2. AI governance is a universal gap.
   The finding that 70% of organisations have governance committees but only 30% have AI inventories is not uniquely American. Australian healthcare providers adopting AI tools face the same challenge — and the same need for structured governance frameworks.
3. Ambient AI and clinical documentation tools are coming to ANZ.
   Microsoft Dragon Copilot, Oracle Health's Clinical AI Agent, and platforms like Abridge are all expanding globally. Healthcare clients in Australia will need MSP partners who understand these tools and can support their deployment.
4. Zero Trust and microsegmentation aren't optional.
   Whether driven by HIPAA, the Essential Eight, or evolving Australian Privacy Act requirements, the direction is the same: network segmentation, continuous monitoring, and identity-based access controls are becoming baseline expectations.
5. The T/MSP opportunity in healthcare is growing.
    Healthcare organisations are moving from pilot AI projects to enterprise deployments. They need partners who can manage the underlying infrastructure, ensure compliance, implement security controls, and provide the data foundations that make AI work.

The Bottom Line

ViVE 2026 made one thing abundantly clear:

healthcare technology has crossed a threshold.

AI is in production. Cybersecurity mandates are tightening. Interoperability is becoming infrastructure. And the organisations that thrive will be those that pair innovation with governance, security with usability, and ambition with execution.

For IT leaders and managed service providers, the message is both a warning and an opportunity. The warning: healthcare clients are facing unprecedented complexity across AI, compliance, and security — and they need partners who can navigate all three simultaneously. The opportunity: the organisations that position themselves at this intersection will be indispensable.

The future of healthcare technology isn't being debated anymore. It's being built.

The question is whether you're ready to help build it.

Microsolve helps healthcare organisations and businesses across the Illawarra and beyond navigate cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and digital transformation with confidence.

If the trends from ViVE 2026 resonate with challenges you're facing, get in touch to discuss how we can help.