New survey of 60+ health system technology leaders finds EHR dependency, pilot purgatory, and vendor sprawl are slowing progress as the preference for one platform partner rises
SAN FRANCISCO, April 9, 2026 — Qventus, the leader in AI-driven care operations automation, today released its second annual report on how health system CIOs are adopting and scaling AI: Beyond the Pilot: How CIOs Are Operationalizing AI Across Health Systems in 2026. The findings come from a survey and 1:1 interviews with more than 60 CIOs, Chief AI Officers, CMIOs, and other senior IT leaders at medium and large health systems. The report reveals the latest approaches to AI adoption, barriers slowing ROI generation — including a widespread inability to measure it in the first place — and the strategies separating health systems and hospitals driving enterprise-wide impact from those struggling to move beyond the pilot phase.
The survey found that 65% of respondents ranked the pressure to operationalize AI as 7 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10. That urgency is driven by razor-thin margins, a worsening workforce crisis, and spending cuts to Medicaid and the ACA over the next decade. The research focuses on the central figures driving this critical AI transformation: senior IT leadership. Nearly 45% of CIOs are now the primary decision makers on AI purchasing. The pressure is on to deliver real results, not just promising pilots, with 94% of respondents saying delays in operationalizing AI would put their organization at a competitive disadvantage and 77% reporting even a one-to-two year delay would lead to meaningful lost savings and efficiency gains.
“The pace of change in the past year has been remarkable. Agentic AI has made it exponentially easier to build solutions — but that same explosion of capability has made operationalizing AI ten times harder,” said Mudit Garg, co-founder and CEO, Qventus. “The CIO’s role has never been more critical. Identifying the shallow solutions that look compelling in a pilot but can’t scale or deliver sustained ROI once they meet real-world operations requires a level of scrutiny that didn’t exist two years ago. This report gives healthcare leaders an unfiltered look at where that gap between pilots and payoff actually comes from and what they can do to close it. What separates health systems driving enterprise-wide impact and those stalling out are fewer point solutions, shared risk and reward with vendors, and treating AI as a core component of the tech stack.”
Additional key findings include:
- 65% of leaders rate the pressure to operationalize AI at 7 or higher on a 10-point scale — and 94% say delays would put their organization at a competitive disadvantage
- 74% cite EHR dependency as a top execution barrier; willingness to wait for an EHR feature dropped from 52% in 2025 to 22% in 2026
- 45% cite difficulty scaling pilots as a top obstacle; only 4% have achieved scaled implementation with measurable outcomes
- 51% report spending 11% to 25% of IT bandwidth on vendor management, integrations, and implementations alone.
- 55% already run AI workflows with limited staff oversight, laying the groundwork for more autonomous operations
“The decisions we’re making about AI right now are among the most consequential we’ve faced — and the margin for error is razor thin,” said Jim Whitfill, SVP, strategic partnerships and chief transformation officer, HonorHealth. “Getting the strategy wrong doesn’t just slow you down, it can set you back in ways that are hard to recover from. Research like this matters because it gives us an honest benchmark: where are our peers, what’s working, and where are the traps. The health systems and hospitals that come out ahead will be the ones that move deliberately, consolidate around the right partners, and treat AI as a long-term operational commitment.”
The full report — including findings on agentic AI adoption, vendor consolidation strategies, and recommendations for CIOs — is available here.
Methodology
The 2026 CIO Report is based on a survey and 1:1 interviews with more than 60 CIOs, Chief AI Officers, CMIOs, and other senior IT leaders at medium and large U.S. hospitals and health systems. The research focuses on how technology leaders are navigating the pressure to prove ROI for AI investments, closing the gap between AI pilots and payoff, navigating EHR dependency, and the preference to consolidate vendors.
About Qventus
Qventus uses AI to intelligently automate operations across care settings and help health systems secure the margins needed to achieve their mission of delivering exceptional care to their communities. Leveraged by more than 180 hospital facilities, the Qventus enterprise platform reduces administrative burden, identifies potential issues upstream, surfaces suggested interventions, and takes action to solve problems for busy healthcare staff — a system of action that sits on top of a hospital’s enterprise systems of record. Learn more at www.qventus.com.
