RISE National 2026 brought together some of the sharpest minds in health plan strategy, value-based care, and healthcare technology, and this year, the conversations felt different. Less exploratory, more urgent. The industry still hasn’t figured out what it wants, and it’s getting impatient about not having it yet.
The Vim team was on the ground for all three days, listening and taking in the lessons. Across the sessions, the exhibit hall, and the hallways, four themes kept surfacing.
Here are the takeaways we’re still thinking about.
1. Providers want optionality, not constant change management
One of the most consistent themes from provider-facing conversations at RISE: care teams want freedom of choice without the operational chaos that usually comes with it.
Every time a health plan changes data partners, analytics tools, or clinical programs, someone has to absorb that change at the practice level. New training, new workflows, and new logins, it’s a tax on clinical time that compounds over the years. Care teams aren’t opposed to better tools. They’re opposed to the relentless disruption that comes with swapping them in and out.
The ask was clear: give us the ability to work with different solutions and data partners without making that our problem to manage. Flexibility at the health plan level shouldn’t mean instability at the practice level. Until that tension gets resolved, adoption will likely lag behind intent.
2. Workflow consistency is the killer feature nobody talks about enough
Related to the above, and one of the sharpest insights we took away from RISE this year: the consistency of the provider experience matters as much as the quality of the underlying data.
Whether a health plan is using one data source or five, whether they’re running a gap closure program or defining a condition assessment, providers should see the same interface and follow the same steps. The workflow shouldn’t change based on what’s powering it under the hood if the goal is maximizing adoption, and provider networks and organizations are pushing for this more now than ever.
Behavioral consistency drives habit formation. When the workflow stays the same regardless of the data source behind it, providers don’t need to re-learn anything. They can just use the tool. That’s when compliance tends to go up, engagement rates improve, and health plans finally start seeing the outcomes they’ve been investing in.
3. AI is only valuable if it fits inside the workflow
There’s no shortage of enthusiasm for AI in healthcare. But the conversation at RISE has matured significantly. Attendees weren’t asking whether to adopt AI, but rather how to do it without blowing up everything that already works.
The loudest demand wasn’t for smarter algorithms. It was for AI that integrates seamlessly into existing clinical and administrative workflows, rather than requiring care teams to adopt entirely new systems on top of an already overloaded stack.
This resonated with us deeply. Vim has always believed that the best technology is the kind you barely notice, because it’s seamlessly there, surfacing the right information at the right moment inside the tools care teams already use every day. AI that requires a new login, a separate portal, or a behavior change isn’t AI that sticks. Embedded intelligence is the only kind that delivers real impact at scale.
4. Buyers are overwhelmed, and the evaluation process is part of the problem
Here’s something that came up again and again: payer buyers are exhausted from vendor evaluations. The health plan market is flooded with point solutions, and the process of assessing them one by one–pulling information manually, sitting through demos, issuing RFPs–is painful. Decision fatigue is real, and it’s slowing down innovation adoption across the board.
What’s interesting is that the problem isn’t a lack of good options, but the friction embedded in the selection process itself. Buyers want a smarter path to “yes”, one that lets them compare solutions without the operational burden of a months-long procurement cycle, followed by months of implementation to validate value, for each one.
The common thread
What tied every one of these conversations together was a gap between ambition and execution. The intent for better payer-provider alignment, smarter technology adoption, and less administrative drag is consistent across the industry. What’s harder to find is the infrastructure to actually deliver on it.
RISE made clear that buyers, care teams, and health tech leaders are done waiting for the industry to catch up on its own. The demand is real, the urgency is growing, and the organizations that solve for workflow are the ones that will likely move first.
If you were at RISE and want to keep the conversation going, we’d love to connect.
