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Forum Season Report Out: What We’re Hearing So Far Across Five Spring Forums
THMA's Spring 2026 forum season is in full swing! So far, we’ve brought together health system leaders across finance, supply chain, HR, technology, value-based care, and more. Each forum surfaced distinct challenges as well as a few common threads: AI's gap between investment and ROI, the scramble for organizational infrastructure that matches strategic ambition, and the policy pressures reshaping how systems compete.
We've distilled key forums into Forum Insider pieces. Here's a quick look at what each covers:
CIOs: Navigating the Timing, Talent, and Trust Questions Around AI
Platform vs. point solution timing, shadow AI as a demand signal, and why cyber resilience planning in hours isn't enough.
Supply Chain Officers: From Saving Money to Building Strategic Infrastructure
Data as the real AI bottleneck, the talent shift from analysts to critical thinkers, and why integration is cultural work that takes years.
VPs of Finance: The Gap Between Ambition and Infrastructure
Finance outrunning its own capability, AI's talent paradox, and why the single source of truth is a culture problem.
Value-Based Care Leaders: Moving Past the Vocabulary Problem
The language rebrand that can earn clinician buy-in, attribution as a trust problem, and right-site care models producing results beyond pilot scale.
CHROs: Earning the Seat by Redesigning How Work Gets Done
A role expanding into AI governance and financial transformation, benefits design as a board-level risk conversation, and why integration demands presence, not soft plans.
Supply Chain Leaders Shift from Saving Money to Building Strategic Infrastructure
Supply chain leaders convened at THMA's Spring 2026 SCO Forum to confront a role that is expanding faster than most teams are resourced to support. The through-line: supply chain's credibility as a strategic function depends on data readiness, talent cultivation, and partnerships that extend well beyond procurement.
Key Takeaways:
1. Data readiness is the real bottleneck on AI — not the technology.
Personal enthusiasm for AI runs high among supply chain leaders, but fragmented and inaccurate data remains the binding constraint.
Investment cases increasingly require hard-dollar quantification — overtime saved, billing discrepancy recovery, contract throughput — rather than satisfaction narratives alone.
Some systems are adopting process mining as a prerequisite to automation, mapping bottlenecks first to avoid automating flawed processes.
2. Supply chain is repositioning from cost center to strategic asset.
Some leaders are reframing supply chain as a growth differentiator and revenue contributor, with span of control expanding into non-traditional domains like construction and real estate.
Standardization framed through clinical quality rather than cost alone tends to earn physician buy-in faster.
When making the case internally, effective narratives center on what other leaders care about — clinical outcomes, patient experience, operational performance — rather than defaulting to cost and efficiency.
3. The talent gap has shifted from finding experienced operators to cultivating new capabilities.
Leaders need people who can interpret cross-functional data and engage the C-suite — with AI increasingly handling the analytical and table-building tasks that used to define the role.
One system reported 3.5x retention rates for employees in funded education programs, extending typical tenure from two-to-three years to four-to-five.
Fellowships, academies, and upskilling tracks are supplementing traditional recruitment as systems build longer-term pipelines.
4. The COO-supply chain partnership is where strategic credibility gets built.
Supply chain's expanding mandate depends less on organizational charts than on the quality of its relationships with operations and clinical leadership.
When asked for a single do-over, one senior operations leader said he should have pushed harder on data infrastructure — describing it as foundational to supply chain's role in growth strategy.
Credit-sharing builds the trust that sustains expanded scope. Narratives that position supply chain as the hero — even unintentionally — can undermine the cross-functional relationships the mandate depends on.
5. Integration is cultural work that takes years, not a transaction that closes in months.
Multi-year M&A journeys show that successful integration is fundamentally relational — and supply chain often sits at the center as a shared service touching every facility.
Post-close surprises can be significant: hoarded supplies, expired inventory, and staffing gaps invisible during due diligence.
One system's growth from two hospitals to over 30 was anchored in a deliberate playbook built around cultural alignment and patience — with some partnerships taking as long as seven years.
Finance Leaders Confront the Gap Between Ambition and Infrastructure
VP-level finance leaders convened at THMA's Spring 2026 VPF Forum to work through a shared tension: finance is being asked to operate as a strategic enterprise partner, but the infrastructure — data, talent, and systems — hasn't caught up. The conversations were direct about where the gaps are and what it takes to close them.
Key Takeaways:
1. Strategic partnership has outrun finance capability.
Finance is now embedded in affordability strategy, service-line operations, enterprise transformation, and joint ventures — areas that would have felt out of scope three years ago.
One system consolidated revenue cycle, payer contracting, and revenue recognition under a Chief Revenue Officer with a finance background, compressing the monthly close from 15 days to Day 5.
Some systems are holding weekly cross-functional huddles — CFO, CSO, medical leadership, government affairs — to push back on pricing and policy pressures in real time.
2. AI creates a talent paradox for finance.
Efficiency gains are shrinking teams while making it harder to develop the deep analytical judgment those leaner teams still need to interpret AI outputs and catch errors.
One system's FP&A function is now half the size it was five years ago. The concern: AI compresses the analyst learning curve, making it harder to build the data fluency needed to validate what the tools produce.
The future-fit finance professional provides a translation layer — not "here's what the data says" but "here's what this means and what to do about it."
3. The single source of truth is often a culture problem, not a technology one.
Finance, IT, quality, and clinical leaders each read the same data points differently — and the real barrier is organizational willingness to commit to one answer.
One system's ERP implementation surfaced more than 1,000 process variations, including nine different definitions of a single holiday.
When other functions define calculation logic in AI or analytics tools without finance involvement, existing data problems compound and recourse is limited.
4. AI hits the bottom line when workflows are rebuilt end-to-end.
Most AI deployments are designed around the work organizations already have rather than the outcome they need. Partial automation frees time that gets redirected to other tasks rather than eliminating cost.
Systems reporting measurable P&L impact tend to have rebuilt entire functions — one cross-industry example compressed a 30-day, 18-hour manual process to 1 day and 4 minutes by scrapping the workflow entirely.
Shifting AI value targets from a central team to individual business lines changed the dynamic from a push model with limited buy-in to a pull model where the business owns the outcome.
5. Foundation first, vendor tools second.
Leaders are treating ERP modernization as organizational transformation rather than a technology project, applying the same skepticism to AI vendor claims and offshoring.
Multiple leaders cautioned that realistic ERP ROI horizons stretch years, with early phases focused on stabilization rather than value capture.
Pushing messy processes offshore often moves them to a lower labor rate without solving them — the same principle applies to AI.
Value-Based Care Leaders Move Past the Vocabulary Problem
Value-based care leaders convened at THMA's Spring 2026 VBS Forum to work through what's actually required to build programs that change care delivery — not just reporting. The conversations were grounded in operational specifics: how to earn provider trust, close the gap between analytics and action, and navigate a CMS landscape that keeps adding models.
Key Takeaways:
1. The language around value-based care may be getting in its own way.
Organizations gaining traction are finding that terminology shapes whether clinicians engage or disengage — and that absorbing friction matters more than adding initiatives.
One system's sentiment research found the term "value-based care" felt cheap and transactional; rebranding to a philosophy-first frame produced stronger buy-in without changing the underlying work.
One system doubled wellness visit volume by pre-completing documentation workflows, leaving providers only to verify during encounters.
2. Attribution is a trust problem, not just a data problem.
Patient attribution inaccuracy is one of the fastest ways to erode provider buy-in, and systems that treat it as a purely technical challenge may be missing the relational work that makes population health programs function.
One system estimates that distrust from just 10–15% of physicians could be enough to undercut everything else the organization is trying to accomplish in VBC.
Transparency matters more than perfection: being direct with providers about rosters and methodology — even when imperfect — has done more for relationships than chasing a polished solution.
3. Analytics need to reach the point of care, not just the presentation.
One system's framework offers a useful test: What will I do with this? How does it reach the point of care? How do I know it's working? How do I measure ROI?
Leading metrics — registry completion, care plan status, screening rates — allow care teams to self-correct without waiting for quarterly claims reviews.
SDOH data treated as an intervention design input (not a reporting exercise) uncovered disparities that directly informed which wraparound services to deploy and where.
4. Payment model proliferation rewards optionality, not bets.
CMS has shifted from a consolidation strategy to a "more is more" posture, with multiple mandatory and voluntary models advancing simultaneously — and methodology details still incomplete on several.
CJR-X is a near-term pressure point: proposed as mandatory for every IPPS/OPPS hospital not in Maryland or already in TEAM by October 2027, potentially affecting over 2,000 hospitals.
Policy experts cautioned that some CMS models may function as bargaining chips rather than durable programs — organizations should prepare based on specific exposure, not headlines.
5. Right-site care models are producing measurable results beyond pilot scale.
Some systems are building connective tissue between care settings — virtual emergency departments and community health worker networks — with cost and utilization results that hold up.
One system redirected 67% of engaged patients away from the ED after building a virtual triage model in eight weeks.
List-based cold-calling produced limited engagement at one rural system; shifting to embedded navigators in free clinics and health departments generated meaningfully stronger results.
CHROs Are Earning the Seat by Redesigning How Work Gets Done
CHROs convened at THMA's Spring 2026 CHRO Forum with a role that looks fundamentally different than it did three years ago. Traditional HR hasn't gone away, but AI governance, financial transformation, and integration work are now landing on the same desk — and the leaders generating real influence are earning it through demonstrated value, not organizational mandate.
Key Takeaways:
1. The CHRO role is being redefined in real time.
The scope is expanding into enterprise strategy, AI governance, and workforce integration — without a commensurate reduction in legacy HR responsibilities.
CHROs who frame their role around process architecture — how work gets redesigned — are converting the seat at the table from a courtesy into a strategic necessity.
Influence is earned through demonstrated value and business impact, not reporting-line authority. Leaders who spend their first months defining success and grounding interactions in outcomes report far greater traction.
2. Employee experience and patient experience are the same strategy.
The boundary between caring for caregivers and caring for patients is dissolving, and CHROs who align the two are seeing retention gains and care quality improvements simultaneously.
Systems running employee and patient experience data on a single platform report deeper insights, but building the cross-functional governance that determines who acts on that data is where the real work sits.
Workforce belonging — staff feeling seen, heard, and valued — directly shapes the quality and equity of care patients receive.
3. Benefits design is now a board-level risk conversation.
Employee health plans have become a major cost lever, and CHROs applying employer-lens thinking and formal governance are outpacing those still treating benefits as an annual administrative cycle.
Systems analyzing plan design the way a self-insured employer would — persona-based analysis, clinical partnership design — are unlocking cost avoidance while building capabilities that can eventually be sold externally.
GLP-1 cost containment is being actively solved: systems carving out physician-led programs report up to 80% cost reductions; others using compounded alternatives are saving millions annually.
4. AI's value lives in how HR shapes the work, not the technology itself.
The gap between AI pilot and scaled impact is an organizational design problem — and CHROs who embed themselves in the work-redesign conversation are positioning HR as the architect of the change rather than the recipient of it.
Framing AI strategy around processes to enhance — not jobs to eliminate — generates champions and defuses workforce resistance before it takes hold.
Systems where HR sits alongside operational leaders inside AI work teams report that CFOs are now asking "Who do you want on your team?" rather than questioning HR's presence.
5. Integration demands physical presence, not paper plans.
Multiple systems are simultaneously mid-integration, and the CHROs leading the work are converging on a few lessons: socialization outperforms speed, presence outperforms planning, and culture transfers through people — not communications.
Redeploying leaders from established sites into acquired facilities is what actually transfers culture. No integration plan succeeds when leadership lacks visibility into core details like compensation structures.
Middle managers are the systematically under-communicated band. Engagement survey data is surfacing a consistent pattern: senior leaders and frontline staff receive disproportionate communication investment while the managers carrying integration work are left without context.