Emerging forces reshaping health care – including AI, innovation, workforce challenges and financial sustainability – are driving rapid transformation, and two Sanford Health leaders brought their perspectives to keynote panel discussions at the Becker’s Healthcare 16th Annual Meeting.
The four-day conference in Chicago included Sanford Health’s Tommy Ibrahim, M.D., MBA, MHA, executive vice president and chief transformation officer, and Brad Reimer, chief technology and digital officer, to join executives from the nation’s top health systems.
Dr. Ibrahim joined a keynote panel discussion, “C-suite Reboot: What Health Systems Need for the Next 5 Years,” focused on how chief executives are reimagining strategy, structure and leadership to meet the demands of the next five years.
“The next five years will require health system leaders to fundamentally rethink how we structure our organizations, develop our workforce and lead through rapid transformation,” said Dr. Ibrahim. “At Sanford Health, that means building an AI-ready workforce, putting strong governance in place to earn trust and staying disciplined about solving the right problems – so we can move forward with innovation while keeping the human connection at the center of care.”
Reimer participated in an opening keynote panel called “Predicting AI’s Impact as Healthcare Continues Big Shifts.”
“As health care undergoes rapid change, the real opportunity with AI is to apply it in ways that meaningfully improve both the patient and clinician experience,” said Reimer. “That requires balancing speed with discipline – ensuring strong governance, aligning every investment to our mission and building the capabilities, including forward-deployed engineering and agentic platforms, to scale innovation responsibly and effectively.”
How AI is making a difference for patients
“I think everyone is understanding that we’re kind of getting past that point of it being just hype around AI and we’re starting to see some meaningful results,” Reimer said. “This year, we will double down on those things we know are working well and scale them across the organization.”
The biggest impacts across Sanford Health include backend efficiencies, interactions with patients and clinical algorithms that better provide preventive care to patients.
One example Reimer shared was technology around chronic kidney disease.
“We’ve got a machine learning algorithm that can look at data across our patient set and identify those who maybe don’t meet traditional characteristics for high-risk disease, but we can then interact with them and get some additional proactive screening done,” he said.
That machine learning model has doubled the number of screenings and tripled the number of early diagnoses for chronic kidney disease.
“If you’re in rural America, having to travel for dialysis, having the ability to predict that earlier, get patients screened and diagnosed early is meaningful change,” Reimer said.
Looking ahead
Dr. Ibrahim speaks to Sanford’s continued investment and growth in this enablement platform to take clinical care, proficiency, quality, and patient and health plan member experience to the next level.
“I’m very excited to see all the transformational efforts that are now underway,” Dr. Ibrahim added. “The past 18 months have just been phenomenal, and I think we’re only getting started.”
This is the fifth consecutive year Sanford Health leaders have taken part in the Becker’s Annual Meeting.
Learn more
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Posted In Innovations, Leadership in Health Care, Thought Leadership, Workplace Health
