Inside HIMSS26: Conversations Shaping the Future of Care

Mike Brandofino Sr
It’s Mike Brandofino, President and COO of Caregility, and I’m here with Ron Gaboury, our CEO, Kedar Ganta, our Chief Product Engineering Officer, and Sue Kristiniak, our Chief Nursing Officer.
We’re just back from a week in Vegas at HIMSS, and we’re talking through some of the things that we came across that were really important aspects of the event. For ourselves, we focused on the smart hospital, definitely including sensors as a big part of that. Kedar, can you talk about what the feedback from customers was and what’s the sense you got from people walking through our smart room?

Kedar Ganta
Yes, this time there was a lot of activity at HIMSS, and clearly there’s a shift in the language from talking about generative AI to talking about smart hospitals. The language was a little bit bolder.
Sensors play an integral role in the smart hospital space, and customers want insights into various things that are happening in the room. Clearly, customers want to separate signals from noise.
We want to bring those signals, add the contextual layer, and make it meaningful for clinical purposes. Specifically, we are looking at the camera as a sensor, voice as another aspect of sensing, and radar as another one that is playing a big role. Finally, there are other sensors that are getting the sensory aspect into the mix.

Mike Brandofino Sr
One of the ones that is not a sexy technology but got a lot of feedback was the incontinence sensor, with a lot of health systems looking at potential return on investment in saving time, improving patient satisfaction, and addressing incontinence events faster than they can by doing physical checks.
So I think combining all these sensors together really adds great value for customers in getting information from the room.

Kedar Ganta
Mike, there was one statement that was made, which really caught on. They want something in areas where they cannot use cameras.
So radar as a sensor is able to see what is happening in the room. That’s a big wow factor for a number of customers. They really caught on to that idea that radar, as small as a credit card, can actually be insightful.

Mike Brandofino Sr
Right.
The other thing that really popped up is I personally had a number of conversations around behavioral health. It’s becoming a bigger topic.
We showcased our anti-ligature device, but also the sensors were really interesting to folks. I spoke to a gentleman from a Canadian facility who said, “I want to get radar now in a lot of these rooms just so we know where the patient is,” because they can’t afford to put a camera in every room.
So I think sensors are really going to add value.

Kedar Ganta
One last comment here. The underlying theme that I captured from this is they want technology to augment what they’re doing. They are not necessarily looking at something to replace them.
There’s a lot of talk about AI replacing everyone. That’s not the case, definitely not in healthcare. So they want something to help them do their task better.

Mike Brandofino Sr
Right.
And I think we definitely proved—and I got a lot of good feedback from customers—that innovation does not equal AI. Innovation is a lot of things, and we proved that with some of our sensors.
But as it relates to AI, Sue, talking about Caregility AI Assistant with customers really generated a lot of interest. What did you hear from folks about the willingness to use that within workflows, and what type of workflows do they think it would fit into?

Susan Kristiniak
Yeah, we had a lot of customers visit the booth, as we’ve been talking about, but a lot of clinical teams visiting the booth are looking for that single platform of integration, where we have now brought forward a virtual assistant.
The human-like characteristics of those we’re partnering with are profoundly impressive.
In the general format, we’re looking at, to Kedar’s point, not shifting burden, but decreasing burden on the bedside nurse.
So things like those pre-baked education information sessions, depending on the patient’s diagnosis or needs before they leave the hospital, were really a key element.
Because it replaces interruptions that often happen to the bedside nurse, who has to reprioritize an emergency, leave that patient, and then return. We know that disruption in the education process leads to poor sustainability and understanding of the information.
But also thinking about how they can round on a patient, assess patients, and prompt assessment of patients. We’re looking at ways that our virtual assistants can go through an assessment checklist to make sure that the complexity and details of what a nurse has to capture, as well as document, can be offloaded by that virtual nurse prompting the bedside caregiver in completing the assessment.
So there was a lot of good energy around that. Again, our visitors looking for the newest information that we can provide for them was a big win all around.

Mike Brandofino Sr
Interesting. I was talking to Penn Medicine, and they did a session with Microsoft. We were showing our integration with Copilot, and they expressed concern about the accuracy of that out of the gate.
When I talked to them about the potential of using Caregility AI to walk through and ask questions of the nurse in the room, their eyes lit up as potentially a way to improve accuracy and maybe take bite-sized chunks in different workflows.
Where we can map the data that we get through that interaction with Caregility AI to the flowsheet, maybe more accurately than you can in just a free-form conversation.

Susan Kristiniak
Absolutely.
As we think about the complexity of patient care, like in the ICU where there are multiple assessments happening based on all the other technology in the room—lines, ventilators, and things like that—it really collects that information in a comprehensive manner.
That will save that nurse’s time going back and forth to recapture it. So that’s great. Thanks, Mike, for adding.

Mike Brandofino Sr
We have a lot of customers anxious to get going with us, and I’m sure we’re going to be starting that soon.
Another buzz that worked its way through the HIMSS floor mid-show was the shocking announcement of the attack on Stryker and the issues that caused across their entire customer platform.
Ron, what were your thoughts? I think we’re well positioned to help our customers with things like that.

Ron Gaboury
Yeah. Rolling into HIMSS, we knew that the year 2026 was going to be the year of substance—less features, fewer proof-of-concept demos.
What more substance can there be when it relates to security? We’ve been telling everybody that our heritage is security. We’ve taken a stance on security since day one, evident by our CUBE that we have put into certain locations for disaster recovery.
It’s very serendipitous that something like that happened and we were about to announce productizing our CUBE.
It’s not just disaster recovery; it can be an on-prem solution. It’s actually an extension of edge processing for AI. It gives extra muscle, and of course, it’s disaster recovery.
You go to any security council meetings, talk to the biggest banks in the world, and they’ll say it’s not a matter of if there’s a security breach, it’s a matter of when.
While this was mitigated and deemed not to have infiltrated patient care, it’s only a matter of time.
So we want to take that heritage and security, focus as the substance of what we mean with the upcoming release and productization of our CUBE.

Kedar Ganta
Yes, that is actually the uncomfortable truth. A lot of security today is more of a bolt-on experience. I’ve seen that happening across the board. Security is often an afterthought.
Real teams think about security from day one, from the design.
That is the reason why when we started building our own native AI computer vision, we had an explicit guardrail around not sending data outside the four walls of the room.
That is by design. It was purposeful and part of the overall architecture.
That’s where security by design comes into the picture. We’ve seen a lot of point solutions add security by reacting to what is happening in the industry or requirements in RFPs and customer asks.

Mike Brandofino Sr
Our CUBE strategy really started dealing with weather events and other potential disconnections from the cloud. Now it’s taken on such a critical role in keeping eyes on patients if health systems lose access to the cloud.
They can get denial-of-service attacks against their firewalls, which disrupt operations. So we really think the CUBE strategy is going to help customers keep eyes on patients.
Virtual care has become such a critical application, especially as it relates to patient safety and observation. So we’re going to be talking more about that in the coming weeks.

Kedar Ganta
One thing that I did catch on is now it’s not about who can buy the technology. What matters is who can build something that survives.
Hospital systems want systems that can survive long-term. They want continuity of operations.

Mike Brandofino Sr
And I think it’s across both cloud applications and devices. Too often health systems think you can plug in any standard conference room device and it’s going to work. That is not the case.
We actually have a customer that did get attacked, and they tried to penetrate our devices. They were unsuccessful.
Customers have to understand it’s not just the cloud application and data that need to be protected. The edge devices need protection as well.
All in all, it was a really great HIMSS for us. We had great conversations with customers nationally and internationally. I think our brand internationally is growing, as we had conversations with countries all over the world.
I look forward to follow-up conversations and driving these technologies into production with our customers.
Thanks for joining me, everybody.