2026 healthcare trends: Trust, AI, and the workforce 

They’ve been digital.

Patient portals, virtual care, AI triage, remote monitoring, and wearable tech have become core to how people access and understand care. 

But this acceleration has exposed cracks:

• Digital products aren’t connected
• Clinicians are drowning in workflows that weren’t designed for them
• AI is everywhere, but trust is not
• The data that should power personalization is locked inside legacy systems

Growth in the healthcare industry is no longer about adding more, but about making what you already have work smarter. In 2026, the advantage will go to systems that can design trustworthy experiences, orchestrate intelligence across silos, and rebuild the workforce around human + AI collaboration.

Inspired by our recently published Now & Next 2026 Trends Report, these are the three trends that will matter most for health leaders working to repair the internal systems that shape external care.

Studies show that patients are surprisingly comfortable engaging with AI… when the interaction feels nonjudgmental.

For example, a 2023 JAMA Network Open study found patients disclosed sensitive information (such as alcohol use or medication non-adherence) more frequently to conversational AI than to clinicians, citing reduced fear of judgment.

But that trust is fragile. As soon as an AI moves from “listening” to advising, patients want to understand why the system is recommending a specific action.

That’s where explainable UX becomes essential. This UX preserves the sense of safety that made patients candid in the first place. Without explainability, the trust advantage quickly evaporates.

What trust-centered UX looks like

For patients:

• Care recommendations that explain why they’re being made
• Risk alerts that reference lab trends, symptoms, or wearable data
• Transparent reasoning embedded in patient-facing tools

For clinicians:

• Clinical decision support that highlights the exact data points behind a recommendation
• Audit trails that make AI outputs reviewable and defensible in documentation
• Tools that supplement—not replace—clinical judgment

Industries everywhere are moving away from monolithic technology toward composable architectures: modular layers where APIs, data services, and AI agents interoperate.

Healthcare’s interoperability challenges are well-documented and expensive. US administrative complexity across payers and providers is estimated to cost $600 billion to $1 trillion annually.

A composable intelligence stack can reduce this complexity by acting as the connective tissue between systems that weren’t designed to work together.

This enables:

• Unified patient views integrating labs, imaging, chart notes, wearables, and social determinants.
• Smarter AI models that can draw from broader, higher-quality data.
• Real-time operational optimization, from predicting throughput bottlenecks to forecasting staffing needs.

Most importantly, this isn’t a rip-and-replace strategy. It’s an orchestration layer that sits on top of the systems you already have, unlocking their potential without destabilizing operations.

The next decade belongs not to the organizations with the biggest teams, but the ones that reconfigure roles around human + AI collaboration.

Burnout is healthcare’s most pressing operational threat. Its leading source? Administrative overload. Physicians spend nearly two hours on EHR/desk work for every hour of direct patient care. Nurses devote more than a quarter of their shift to documentation. And administratively driven waste is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the United States.

AI can meaningfully reduce this burden.

Early pilots of AI-powered ambient clinical documentation tools have demonstrated a notable impact. For example, an American Academy of Family Physicians Innovation Lab study showed most clinicians experienced a 72% reduction in time spent on documentation when using AI assistants. While results vary by specialty and system, the time savings potential is clear.

In addition, automated administrative agents can now support tasks such as prescription refills, prior authorization preparation, referral routing, chart summarization, and inbox triage. 

In one notable pilot, The Permanente Medical Group’s AI scribes saved 1,794 working days in one year across their medical teams.  This trend is not about replacing clinicians. It’s about returning time to the humans who deliver care, enabling them to work at the top of their license.

The systems that will define healthcare in 2026 aren’t the ones adding more dashboards, tools, or workflows, but the ones making their existing ecosystems intelligent, interoperable, and humane.

Trust-centered UX will become essential for both patients and clinicians navigating AI-driven care decisions. Composable intelligence layers will determine whether organizations can finally break through decades of data fragmentation. And workforce transformation will hinge not on replacing clinicians, but on giving them back the time and clarity they’ve been losing to administrative drag for years.

Health systems that modernize their data infrastructure, apply AI responsibly, and redesign work around human–technology partnership will deliver safer, more connected, and more sustainable care. 

Our full 2026 Trends Report goes deeper into the forces accelerating this shift, from synthetic data for safe experimentation to the governance models required for clinician-built AI tools. For leaders shaping the next era of healthcare and wellness, it’s a roadmap for transforming the systems that define the experience.