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September 26, 2026

Takeaways from the most recent news in the technology and policies shaping healthcare.

Health IT

Why Top Healthcare CIOs Lead With Relationships, Not Tech

By Healthcare Technology News ·

The healthcare CIO job has moved well beyond keeping systems running. Donna Roach, assistant chief digital and information officer at University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City, told Becker's Hospital Review that the strongest CIOs are measured by their relationships with executive peers, not their command of the tech stack.

That shift reflects how central technology has become to strategy. CIOs now own decisions on AI adoption, digital front doors, cybersecurity, and data that shape revenue, clinical quality, and patient experience. Roach's point is that pushing those agendas forward requires trust and credibility with the CEO, CFO, and chief medical officer, not just a well-run IT department.

In practice, that means CIOs who can translate technical tradeoffs into business terms and build coalitions across the C-suite carry more weight than those who stay in a purely operational lane. For health systems weighing large AI and digital investments, the lesson is that execution increasingly depends on how well the CIO is wired into the leadership team.

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Health IT

Pointcore Launches Perception to Turn Hospital Data Into Action

Pointcore's Perception platform aggregates hospital operational data and uses AI modeling to help leaders make faster, better-informed operational decisions.

Why it matters: Hospitals sit on vast operational data but rarely turn it into action, and tools that close that gap could reshape how systems manage cost and capacity.

Health IT

Tennr Hires CRO John Capaldi to Scale Sales Push

Patient orchestration platform Tennr hired John Capaldi as CRO and two enterprise sales executives to scale its go-to-market organization.

Why it matters: The hires show a well-funded health-tech startup pivoting to aggressive enterprise sales, a sign of maturing competition in referral and intake automation.

Health IT

AI Turns Messy Clinical Data Into Research-Ready Variables

AI and natural language processing are being deployed to convert fragmented, unstructured clinical data into structured, research-ready variables, easing a core bottleneck in clinical research.

Why it matters: Faster, cleaner data extraction can shorten trial timelines and unlock real-world evidence from records healthcare organizations already hold.