Every major healthcare company, along with the smaller ones, are pushing forward on artificial intelligence strategies, and this was clearly evident at recent industry conferences.
If generative AI was the key theme last year, then AI agents were the star of the show at the latest big conference in Las Vegas. During interviews at HIMSS 2025, healthcare executives shared their thoughts on the evolution of AI with a big focus on scaling the technology, integrating it with existing systems and gaining adoption.
Agentic AI also was a buzzword at this year’s HIMSS. Designed to be autonomous, agentic AI makes independent decisions and takes action based on the goal it’s built around, which goes a step further from AI agents that are designed to handle specific tasks.
"My prediction on the buzzwords of the year are really open-source models and agentic AI," said Don Woodlock, head of global healthcare solutions at InterSystems, during an interview at HIMSS 2025. "Open-source models I think will be just interesting from a PHI (personal health information) point of view. You know, running the model inside your firewalls versus external and I think that will open up AI to some organizations that are a little nervous about it."
"I think agentic AI will be interesting for the next couple years, which is basically allowing the software to do higher level things like, ‘This patient’s coming in for surgery, can you just take care of the pre-visit appointment, sending the patient some education materials, scheduling the resources,’ so having a bundle of activities that can be done for you, which I think is will take AI to the next useful level." EHR companies investing in AI
At HIMSS, InterSystems debuted a new electronic health record and healthcare information system designed with AI and interoperability "at its core," executives said.
At the HLTH 2024 conference back in October, along with ViVE in February and HIMSS this month, the showroom floor was buzzing with startups offering AI solutions.
"I am a little concerned about all the smaller companies because they’re not all going survive," Woodlock mused. "I think that we’ve proven that integrating into […]
The race is on for AI agents in healthcare. Can providers keep up with the pace of change?
