Healthcare IT Today Interviews

Every clinic wants a simple recipe for digital health adoption. The problem is that most recipes fall apart the moment real-world workflows enter the picture.
In this conversation, Dr. Chandi Chandrasena, Chief Medical Officer at OntarioMD, lays out why the province is shifting toward a flexible digital health toolkit instead of a rigid playbook. She explains why “technology is an enabler to the problems you have,” why standardization still matters, and why uniformity misses the mark.
She also digs into AI scribes, the rise of AI inbox tools, how bandwidth gaps drive inequity, and why digital literacy needs to start long before medical school.
What do you think clinics need most right now: structure, flexibility, or better guardrails? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
🔔 Subscribe for more great interviews with Health IT leaders.
Learn more about OntarioMD at https://www.ontariomd.ca
Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

As those who read Healthcare IT Today regularly know, we attend a lot of healthcare IT conferences throughout the year. One of the newest conferences we attend that has grown to be one of the most influential is the ViVE conference that is co-organized by HLTH and CHIME. As ViVE is just around the corner, we thought it would be valuable for healthcare IT leaders that are attending or still considering whether they should attend to get a preview of the event from the organizers.
In our interview below, we sat down with Alifya Parekh, Senior Content Manager and Leah Callahan, Senior Content Manager at HLTH. We kick off our discussion by asking them what the business case is for a CIO or healthcare IT leader at a hospital or health sysetm to attend ViVE 2026 happening Feb 22-25, 2026 in LA.
Learn more about ViVE: https://hlth.com/events/vive/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Healthcare IT leaders are finding innovative ways to address one of medicine’s challenges: the exponential growth of clinical knowledge that physicians must navigate daily. In our recent interview, we hear from Julia Vu, Pharm.D., Vice President, GTM North America at Elsevier and Colin Banas, MD, MHA, Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst about their partnership to integrate AI-powered clinical decision support directly into e-prescribing workflows.
Both leaders bring extensive backgrounds in clinical informatics, having worked through the Meaningful Use era and witnessed firsthand the challenges of fragmented systems and information overload. Their collaboration addresses a critical gap: providing physicians with trusted, evidence-based content at the moment they need it, without adding to alert fatigue.
Learn more about ELSEVIER: https://www.elsevier.com/
Learn more about DrFirst: https://drfirst.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Ben Beadle-Ryby, Senior Vice President and Co-founder at AKASA, says that a typical patient record contains 50,000 words spread across 59 clinical documents. Trying to code a single patient's conditions is comparable to reading The Great Gatsby and extracting key facts.
Historically, he says, organizations "have thrown armies of people at the problem." Not only is that unfeasible; these people are not as accurate they need to be. Due to this and other reasons, claim denials have increased from 9.8% in 2019 to 12.7% now. Other revenue cycle measures have also gone in the wrong direction: for instance, cost to collect has gone from 2.7% in 2019 to 3.7% today.
This video at the AHIMA Annual Conference interviews Beadle-Ryby along with two clients: Nick Judd, Senior Director, Revenue Cycle and Health Information Management at Cleveland Clinic, and Jennifer Nicholson, Assistant Vice President, Revenue Cycle and Health Information Management at Duke University Health System. They talk about leveraging generative AI solutions for coding and the benefits of leveraging this technology.
Learn more about Cleveland Clinic: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/
Learn more about Duke University Health System: https://www.dukehealth.org/
Learn more about Akasa: https://akasa.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Just as Internet providers and transportation companies often struggle with the "last mile" of reaching the customer at the end of the chain, hospitals are too often blind to what's happening in the patient's room. This problem drives the recent acquisition of eVideon, smart room solution provider, by TigerConnect, a unified communication platform. In this video we hear about the goals of the combined companies from Sean O’Neal, CEO of TigerConnect, and Jeff Fallon, General Manager of eVideon, a TigerConnect Company.
Learn more about TigerConnect: https://tigerconnect.com/
Learn more about eVideon: https://www.evideon.com/
Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/