Leadership, Governance, and Lasting Change: Key Takeaways From the 2026 KLAS Arch Collaborative Learning Summit

Tegria team members recently attended the 2026 KLAS Arch Collaborative Summit in Salt Lake City. The annual event brings together healthcare organizations and industry partners to share practical strategies for improving clinician experience and maximizing the value of healthcare technology.

Across sessions and conversations, one message stood out: Sustainable transformation depends on more than technology. Executive sponsorship, strong governance, mature informatics capabilities, and thoughtful AI adoption increasingly distinguish organizations that achieve lasting results. 

Executive Sponsorship Remains Critical to Success

Executive sponsorship continues to be a leading predictor of successful transformation and adoption. This goes beyond approving an initiative or participating in a steering committee. Leaders must reinforce why the work matters, establish accountability, resolve competing priorities, and ensure teams have the resources and authority to move forward.

Visible executive engagement is especially important when initiatives require clinicians and operational teams to change established workflows. It helps connect individual projects to broader organizational goals and reinforces that adoption and outcomes, not implementation alone, define success.

Strong Organizational Governance Enables Specialized Governance

Healthcare organizations are developing specialized governance structures for areas such as AI, clinical informatics, and value-based care. However, the effectiveness of these efforts depends on the strength of the organization’s broader governance model.

Clear decision rights, accountability, stakeholder representation, and escalation pathways provide the foundation specialized councils need to operate effectively. Without that structure, groups can become disconnected, duplicate work, or struggle to turn recommendations into action.

Strong enterprise governance also helps align priorities across clinical, operational, technology, and financial teams as digital initiatives become more complex.

Ambient AI Is Expanding Across the Clinical Workforce

Adoption of ambient AI is accelerating within nursing workflows, with growing interest in extending these capabilities to allied health professionals.

This signals a shift from viewing ambient technology primarily as a physician documentation tool to considering how it can support a broader range of clinical roles. Because nurses and allied health professionals have distinct workflows and documentation needs, careful workflow design will be essential.

Organizations will need to evaluate not only technical performance, but also workflow fit, clinical involvement, education, governance, and whether the technology meaningfully reduces administrative burden.

Mature Informatics Functions Are a Strategic Differentiator

High-performing healthcare organizations are increasingly distinguishing themselves through mature informatics functions.

Strong informatics teams connect frontline clinicians, operational leaders, technology teams, and executives. They help translate clinical needs into technology priorities, guide workflow design, support adoption, and connect optimization efforts to measurable outcomes.

As organizations expand their use of AI and other emerging technologies, this translation role will become even more important. Informatics leaders can help identify meaningful use cases, anticipate unintended consequences, and ensure the clinician perspective is represented throughout implementation and optimization.

Until Next Year

The 2026 summit made clear that the next phase of digital health work will be less about introducing new tools and more about building the leadership, governance, and informatics practices needed to use them well.

As ambient AI expands and healthcare organizations refine their approaches to governance and adoption, shared learning across roles and organizations will remain essential. We look forward to seeing how these ideas develop over the coming year and to continuing the conversations that began in Salt Lake City.