At Caregility’s 2026 Customer Summit, held Oct. 1-2, 2026, with UMass Memorial Health in Worcester, MA, keynote speaker Micheline Nader challenged healthcare leaders to look beyond what artificial intelligence can do and consider what it should make possible for the people delivering and receiving care.
Her central question was about responsibility: “As AI scales, how do we protect, optimize, and strengthen what is most human in healthcare?” Nader called that capacity “the human edge”—the judgment, compassion, accountability, and connection that must guide technology as it becomes more deeply embedded in clinical workflows.
For leaders building virtual care and AI programs, her message offered a practical test: Does the technology create more capacity to care?
Watch the 2026 Caregility Customer Summit Keynote presentation
Who Governs the Room
Nader opened with a story from her time at the American University of Beirut Medical Center during the war in Lebanon. At 23, pregnant and serving as an assistant director, she faced a gunman who threatened her life if his cousin died. In that moment, she recalled, she had to remain present, exercise judgment, and decide. The experience shaped a lesson she carried into her discussion of AI: “If we do not govern power, power governs us.”
Today, health AI can help determine what clinicians see, what gets prioritized, and what happens next. Those capabilities bring leadership responsibilities that extend beyond choosing a tool. “So the question is no longer simply what can AI do,” Nader said. “But the question is what should it do?”
Leaders must understand why a system is in place, when its recommendations should be questioned, who can override it, and who owns the consequences. As she put it: “Technology can inform the decision, but we have to own the consequence.”
Giving Time Back Is Only the Beginning
Nader asked leaders to treat clinician strain as evidence about how well technology serves its intended users. “Does it give time back or take more attention away? Does it remove work or simply move it? Does it strengthen the clinical judgment or compete with it?”
These questions shift the evaluation of AI from technical capability to its effects on daily care. A tool may save typing time while creating another inbox. A monitoring system may generate alerts without establishing a reliable human validation. Neither result fulfills the promise of reducing burden or improving safety.
Nader illustrated the difference with a nurse who gains 20 minutes during a shift. The value lies in what those minutes make possible: sitting with a frightened patient, listening, explaining, and reassuring. “Efficiency is not the finish line, but presence is,” she said.
A Leadership Practice for AI Enabled Care
To help leaders act on these priorities, Nader introduced LEAP, her framework for approaching disruption with intention. She described it as a leadership practice rather than a technical implementation model.
Lean and Lead: Begin with the care problem that needs solving. Avoidable documentation burden and geographic barriers to expertise should prompt leaders to reconsider how care is delivered.
“Leaning into disruption does not mean chasing every new technology,” Nader said. “It means refusing to normalize problems that should be solved.” She urged organizations to involve clinicians early, protect their ability to question and override AI, and preserve human accountability. The starting point should always be the care they want to create.
Execute and Empower: Nader’s “quadruple win” asks whether patients, clinicians, organizations, and communities all benefit from a change. Virtual nursing, for example, may support more consistent patient education, relieve bedside workload, create new opportunities for experienced nurses, strengthen organizational capacity, and extend expertise to underserved communities. Leaders should evaluate those benefits together.
Execution also requires a learning cycle: define the problem, co-design with people in the workflow, pilot safely, measure the benefits, and expand when outcomes and confidence support it. “Do not scale technology just because it’s available,” Nader cautioned. “Adjust it and scale what makes care better.”
Align Around Human Capacity: Technology can operate continuously. People need attention, recovery, and room to adapt. Nader described three invisible loads clinicians carry: cognitive demands from clicks, alerts, and interruptions; emotional demands from suffering and responsibility; and the demands of ongoing change.
“We should not use technology to help people endure a broken system,” she said. “We should use it to redesign the system.” That means assessing where saved time actually goes. Does it become more work, or does it return to patients and caregivers? “Because time saved is not the outcome. Care restored is the outcome that we will all strive for.”
Practice Human Judgment: The final element of LEAP focuses on practicing discernment, connection, and imagination. Leaders and clinicians must question what data misses, listen to what people need, and decide which possibilities deserve pursuit.
“The human edge is not automatic,” Nader said. “It is a discipline.” She called for standards that keep people accountable, require understanding of consequential decisions, and protect privacy, agency, and dignity.
Human Presence Without Walls
Nader connected these principles to the purpose of virtual care: making expertise and human connection more available. A daughter living three states away can participate in her mother’s care. An experienced nurse who can no longer manage the physical demands of bedside shifts can still support patients and colleagues across a health system. A specialist can remotely consult a rural patient with travel limitations.
“Virtual care should never make care feel more distant,” she said. “It should make human presence more available.” For health systems, that is a meaningful standard for progress: whether technology helps people reach one another, exercise better judgment, and deliver more attentive care.
Nader closed with a reminder of what must guide that work: “The human edge is not what remains after technology does everything else. The human edge is what must guide everything technology does.”
