Healthcare organizations aren’t facing one change at a time. Regulatory shifts are redefining how care is measured and reimbursed. Artificial intelligence is outpacing some health systems’ ability to evaluate it. Value-based care can fuel margin volatility without the right strategies in place. And costs keep rising despite national attention on affordability.
No one health system can solve all this alone. At Breakthroughs 2026, Premier’s annual conference and exhibition, health system leaders, federal policymakers and suppliers came together not just to name these challenges but to define practical next steps. “With all the pressures that are occurring, it’s going to require a great deal of partnership with many people in the ecosystem,” said Dr. Emad Rizk, Premier’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
Across three days of education and collaboration, seven priorities emerged for leaders preparing for what’s next:
1. Value-based Care: Build New Muscle in Longitudinal Data
Value-based care is expanding beyond hospital walls, and it demands more than most health systems’ current data structure can support. According to speakers, keeping pace will take new muscle in longitudinal data that tracks patients and outcomes long after discharge.
The conference’s first general session opened with a conversation about value-based care between Rizk and two public-sector leaders who helped shape it: Dr. Mark McClellan, Director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS); and Dr. David Shulkin, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA). The central question: Why is it taking so long for value-based care to expand?
Part of the answer is how much the model now asks of organizations. The newest national joint replacement model, for example, holds providers accountable for patients 30 to 90 days after a procedure, which McClellan called “a step beyond coordination.” That’s “probably some muscles that you haven’t used before,” Rizk said, and it calls for using technology and data “in a way that’s very, very different.”
Pace and data are the other major obstacles. “The biggest barrier to innovation is incrementalism,” Shulkin said. McClellan noted that despite 20 years of effort, it’s still “not that easy to get timely, accurate, critical data.” All three panelists called for healthcare leaders to push for stronger partnerships, better infrastructure and policymakers’ support to build new models required for measuring key performance metrics.
2. Shared Data: Unlock Information Across Systems, Settings and Payers
Later, a panel of seven leaders imagined rebuilding healthcare from scratch and echoed one recurring idea: shared data can help unlock better outcomes and a friction-free patient experience.
Dr. Omar Lateef, President and Chief Executive Officer of Rush University Medical Center, pointed to a missing piece: payer data. “To be able to do value-based care, you have to have retrospective data of at least 18 to 24 months,” he said. When patients switch payers, the new payer has only the file from the time of enrollment. “If you democratize that data, you will drive down the cost of care and improve collective outcomes and decrease the death gap,” he said.
Panelists positioned health passports as another way to improve access to data, because they allow patients to build a record and opt in to share their data with health systems and payers to improve the experience. “If we want patient-centric care, [patients] should have access to a passport that has all [their] health information,” said Catherine Stueland, Chief Executive Officer of GeneDx. Stueland added that sharing patient data benefits the patient, others and society.
3. Affordability: Know Costs Down to the Line Item
Rising costs remain a primary concern for healthcare leaders, federal agencies and patients. To control them, hospital and health system leaders need a much more detailed view of what they’re spending and where.
Rizk put it plainly: “Value-based care is going to require cost compression and consistent quality outcomes, and it’s going to require you to understand your cost structure like you’ve never done before.”
Lateef shared an example of what examining costs at the case level can reveal. His team at Rush reviewed line-item data from two academic medical centers, down to the catheters and beta blockers used. They found that patients with similar risk profiles who underwent the same procedures had similar outcomes, but the supply costs differed significantly between the two centers. “There’s so much money to take out of hospital systems because of these duplications.”
Donna Sabol, Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at St. Luke’s University Health Network, said getting that view is still hard. “If I want to look at the cost of supplies linked to outcomes by each of my orthopedic surgeons, it is very difficult to get all of that data.”
4. Quality Improvement: Measure Only What Matters
Like costs, speakers urged leaders to get a clear, current read on the measures tied to their payments and to focus on the few that drive outcomes. The problem often isn’t a lack of data but an overabundance of metrics from fragmented sources.
Dr. Oz said more measures aren’t the answer. “Medicaid alone has 450 quality measures, almost all of them process-based,” he said. “Checking this [box] does not drive quality.” CMS is working with governors to cut the list and focus on outcomes, and Oz asked hospitals to help by telling CMS which measures matter and which don’t.
In a later session on quality, Sabol described the same pressure from a health system administrator’s seat. With value-based programs growing and carrying significant risk for unprepared organizations, she said, managing all the metrics while keeping her system focused on “those key things that are going to make a difference” is what keeps her up at night. She expressed excitement for her organization’s involvement as a lighthouse member for Premier’s Quality and Performance, a solution created to help quality teams identify opportunities and drive improvement at scale. The solution is currently in beta testing.
5. Prevention: Invest in Upstream Programs and Outreach
The U.S. healthcare system is still built around treating an illness after it arrives. Speakers agreed that the answer largely rests on investing in prevention and proactive outreach, building the business case over several years.
Prevention and healthy living are high on Oz’s list of federal priorities. “Chronic disease causes about 75 percent of total healthcare expenses in this country, most of them driven by obesity,” he said. He noted early progress, with the national obesity rate falling over the past two years, and said further gains would reduce hypertension, diabetes, stroke, heart failure and kidney failure incidence.
Oz also noted an economic payoff: Keeping Americans healthy enough to work one more year instead of retiring at 62 is “worth $1 trillion to our economy every year,” he said.
Shulkin shared a similar view of early intervention in an earlier session. When new hepatitis C cures arrived, he said, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) identified 176,500 veterans with the disease, secured $1.5 billion in funding and reached out to each of the veterans to coordinate treatment. In a value-based system, you “proactively go out and identify where you can make the intervention.” McClellan called the approach a net saver but noted that scaling it “takes both data and investment, and that takes a change in business model.”
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Use Where It Shows Results and Discontinue Where it Doesn’t
AI was a throughline of the week, mentioned in nearly every main-stage session.
Health systems are rapidly adopting AI across nearly every department, from supply chain to care delivery. There were several examples where AI is creating value for health systems.
Prior authorization review.
Clinical decision support.
Supply chain analysis to identify savings.
Quality measurement.
Remote and home monitoring alerts.
Workforce, physician performance optimization
Speakers agreed the challenge is separating the tools that drive results from the tools that only add activity. In a breakout session, one speaker noted a running joke among finance teams: AI shows up everywhere in healthcare except the bottom line. It supports growth and savings in many areas but is overused in others.
Oz offered a test to help distinguish the two. “If they provide value, we will pay for them,” he said. “CMS will pay for technology that produces a measurable change, such as a lower A1C.” The takeaway was for health systems to define success metrics, set benchmarks and measure ROI after implementation. Only the AI program with proven results should be retained.
7. Women’s Health: Pair Modern Data with Collaboration
Women’s and maternal health outcomes depend on current data and on hospitals working together to act on it. Dr. Dorothy Fink of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said sharing evidence and scaling what works is the way to keep improving.
When Fink began working on maternal health in 2019, she found mortality and morbidity data that were four to five years old. “We were making policy decisions about the health of women based on data that were years out of date,” she said. HHS responded by building a collaborative, in partnership with Premier, composed of more than 220 hospitals to put current evidence into practice at the point of care. The collaborative helps participants collect and analyze clinical and non-clinical measures, including social determinants of health, to pinpoint causes of preventable harm and improve outcome for mothers and babies.
Delivery visit mortality in the collaborative fell 41.5 percent, compared with 5.9 percent in similar hospitals, according to Fink. “These are not abstract numbers,” she said. “These are mothers, these are babies, and these are families whose lives were changed.”
Fink’s next priorities: growing the collaborative to more hospitals, extending its focus to conditions such as anemia and mental health “before, during and after pregnancy,” and applying a new prenatal risk index that better predicts severe complications. Her ask of leaders: “We have to examine the evidence, we have to share best practices, and we must identify strategies that improve outcomes in the real world and then scale them.”
Moving Forward Together
Taken together, these priorities point to one conclusion: None can be achieved by a single organization or through incremental change. Whatever the goal, true transformation will require longstanding collaboration between health systems, payers, suppliers and policymakers.
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