2026 Healthcare Trends Pt. 1: Crossroads, Courage and Core Questions

Healthcare is always changing, of course. When I started in the industry in the early 1990s, people would tell me, “What’s happening here is unprecedented. This is a revolution! Healthcare is finally being disrupted.”  But in most cases, it was evolution, not revolution.

What seems different today is that the changes feel existential. Not whether healthcare will be delivered (though even that can be disputed), but whether the great legacy organizations will be the ones delivering it. And in a broader sense, even the definition of healthcare itself is under scrutiny.

For leaders, this moment requires courage. It means more risk and less comfort. If we once rested on our organization’s history and reputation to see us through challenging business environments, that moment has passed.

Risk-taking is the antithesis of what healthcare is – lives are on the line when care is delivered and so it’s appropriately conservative.

But when it comes to the business and structure of healthcare, the future will not be defined by the careful. Courage is needed within and across organizations: a courageous CEO working with a courageous board and a courageous C-suite and even courageous competitors who are aligned and stepping forward in partnership.

In this consequential season, each strategic decision has a real effect on individuals and relationships today and in a decade from today. In an era of AI and accelerating automation, recognizing this human dimension becomes ever more essential to success.

As some of the tasks humans can do become replaceable, what only humans can do rises in value. Honoring the human touch may be the place by which a healthcare organization – and our industry – grasps a new future.

This courage to act requires hope, of course, and a vision for an organization that is more expansive than only assuring its viability over the next 12 months. Sometimes creating and staying true to a vision is its own act of courage. That feels like the challenge of 2026.

We’re living today in a healthcare environment defined by accelerating transformation. That’s particularly true when it comes to AI, rising consumer expectations and uncertainty about healthcare policy.

At Jarrard, we’ve been talking about the power of story in healthcare since the firm’s founding 20 years ago. Why is storytelling so important in our industry? Because healthcare is uniquely essential. It’s personal. It’s political. But mostly, it’s human – people taking care of people. And storytelling provides stability when everything else feels uncertain.

It helps people understand what’s happening and make sense of change. It builds trust; it aligns stakeholders.

So today, as always, storytelling is core leadership work.

Leaders have a lot of competing priorities to manage, and this is one that should never be deprioritized or offloaded to somebody else. The truth is: You must be the chief storyteller. CEOs ought to be “CSTs”. Because in a void of communication, people hear, believe and say what they want. And your organization can become victim to the noise and chaos of others who are framing who you are. Instead of you owning your narrative.

 Staying on offense requires courage. It takes leadership and the intentionality of cascading the story across everyone who represents the organization. Test your narrative by asking:

• Do we have a clear, unchanging center of gravity?
• Are we telling one story or competing stories?
• If I ask different leaders within my organization to describe who we are and where we’re headed, are they going to give me the same answer?
• Does our story reflect the world as it actually is?

Delivery matters too:

• Are we using the right messengers?
• Are we meeting people where they are and delivering information when and how they can receive it?
• Are we telling them repeatedly – are we observing the seven-times rule?

None of this is rocket science…it’s a matter of prioritization.

Change management is table stakes. It’s happening in every project, every day – or should be, because without it, you won’t achieve the outcome you want.

Guiding a team through continual, complex change requires intentional, talented leadership. Reposition your thinking from “change management” to “change leadership.” It’s a slight change in vocabulary but one that has important implications. It allows you slow down and ask critical questions that will help your team through the process… instead of just trying to control as many variables as possible: Questions such as:

• Does my team of deputies understand why we must do this?
• How do I explain to everyone the “why” of what we’re doing and the connection to our strategy and our mission…before we launch into the next steps of whatever imperative is on the list?
• “Have I created an ecosystem to support this culture of continual change that I’m asking my team to move through?”
• Have I asked those affected by and involved in the change whether they have what they need?

One area requiring massive change leadership is the development of your enterprise mindset on artificial intelligence. AI at its best is a thought partner, not a tool to be plugged in. Because of that, evaluating and implementing AI is a learning journey, not a singular destination. Embracing AI will require a daily willingness to learn something new. Which for leaders means asking, “Are we positioning our team and giving them permission to reimagine how we work, to ask better questions, to experiment?”

Whether AI or any other change, it’s important to be realistic. Sometimes decisions come from, “We can’t afford to keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it. Financially and operationally, the system is going to break.” Yet even in those moments, when it comes down to having the margin to fund the mission. Regardless of driver, you need an answer for the question, “Do we have a clear articulation of what’s evolving and why it has to evolve for us to continue?”

Also, be mindful that we so often get fixated on what’s broken and that we forget to ask what’s working and how to do more of that. We would all do well to remember that this upcoming year.

Healthcare policy finds itself today at the forefront of public consciousness, the focus of media coverage and the central political issue in our country in a way we haven’t seen since the genesis of the Affordable Care Act. That’s not going to change any time soon as we head into what is sure to be a heated, midterm election year with tremendous noise around the issues of affordability and access to healthcare.

That political reality will put everyone in the healthcare industry in an interesting and challenging place in 2026. In this environment, providers need to continue making their case to the public that they’re trusted and doing everything they can to meet the calling of their mission and to be there for people.

Of course, the challenge will be doing that without getting pulled into a political storm. Trying to avoid political fire can lead to the temptation to say nothing. But that’s not the answer. Each leader and leadership team needs to find the right path for their organization to convey its value in the communities that it serves. And, to strengthen and use the many relationships they have with leaders in their community and across the industry to extend that message of positive, material impact and making a local difference.

This takes focused effort and coordination internally between communications, government relations and C-suite leaders. Courage will be needed…the easy thing to do to is say, “We’re going to hunker down and talk about our service lines.”

Marketing is critical, of course, and must be done, but it’s not sufficient in today’s reality. It’s necessary to talk in the right way about the broader issues putting pressure on healthcare.

The question for leaders then becomes, “How do we communicate and engage in ways that are true to who we are, leaning on our strengths and building public trust in a time of scant confidence?”

As we head into another politically charged year, with affordability of care a dominant issue, the temptation will be to follow the headlines. But the only way to really reinforce your political strength is to avoid playing that reactive game. Instead, shore up your support locally.

That starts with knowing and measuring what the landscape is locally, so you can make decisions that are guided by clear strategy, rather than by guessing and acting based on a political lens. That means talking to stakeholders across your community, doing the research, asking these critical questions:

• What does our community think of us?
• What do they expect from us?

At the front end of this year, healthcare organizations should have a 2026 strategy session across government relations, communications, marketing and other C-suite leaders. Use the time to map out the year’s likely local and state level issues that will affect your institution and its patients. This lets you move from being reactive to being anchored.

The core question for this session is: “If these are the three issues that we think are most important, how do we move forward on them, even if they’re not being talked about on Twitter or not hot-button national issues?”

Ideally, for each of these issues you build a public-facing narrative connected to your mission and your patients. It comes down to advocating for things rather than against certain policies or politicians. It’s also important to talk squarely about the things that are within your sphere of influence.

This is why this work is practical and strategic. Doing that weighted scenario planning exercise means you can establish a central focus to refer  to when things get noisy. Find that focus by asking:

• Where do we want to be this year?
• What (and who) do we want to influence, knowing we can’t do everything or influence every conversation we want to?

You can’t do everything, but with this investment early in the year you, your team and your organization will be anchored to your priorities throughout 2026.