The Health Information Technology Special Issue: Tracking Expansion Across Settings, Technologies, and Stakeholders

Am J Manag Care. 2026;32(1):8-9. https://doi.org/10.37765/ajmc.2026.89865

For the past 15 years, The American Journal of Managed Care’s Health Information Technology (IT) special issue has chronicled the evolving technological landscape in US health care. In the early and mid-2010s, studies tracked and analyzed the growth of digital infrastructure in the wake of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act; this evolved into a focus on interoperability and health information exchange (HIE) using these digital pipes in the later 2010s. In the past 5 years, the Health IT special issue has included innovative technology-enabled responses to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and helped usher in emerging evidence on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care. In keeping with this continual focus on the evolving clinical and managerial issues in health IT and managed care, this year’s special issue adopts a theme of expansion: across care settings and patient populations, technologies, and stakeholder groups.

First, Bucy et al explore health IT and care management in the realm of postacute care transitions to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) for older adults with Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD). This care transition is both common and consequential, yet the evidence base exploring how HIE can support high-quality transitions is still nascent. This study represents an important step forward in this evidence base, using linked Medicare claims and national survey data to show that SNFs caring for higher concentrations of patients with ADRD report lower information exchange capacity. The authors also illustrate that these SNFs and their hospital partners do not appear to be making special investment in technology to support these frequent, significant care transitions but do see returns on HIE quality derived from informal, nontechnological integration practices. Their findings underscore that just as digitization is insufficient for interoperability, interoperability is insufficient for high-quality care transitions. Technology investments must be paired with organizational relationships that support timely, usable, and complete information exchange.

Second, 3 articles in this issue reflect the rapid adoption of AI tools in clinical care and the implications these tools have for clinicians, delivery organizations, and patients. Adler-Milstein et al offer a holistic evaluation of AI scribes in ambulatory care, illustrating that physicians’ perceived documentation time savings and actual time savings—as measured by metadata on electronic health record (EHR) use—were uncorrelated. Their analysis reveals both a dose-response relationship between scribe use and documentation time and larger time savings for physicians who had the greatest documentation time at baseline, suggesting that return on investment for these tools may vary by extant levels of documentation efficiency. The authors also suggest subjective measures as a route for return on investment, as these may reflect cognitive burden more readily than EHR use metadata. Complementing this user-level perspective, Yang et al explore the burgeoning market for third-party EHR-integrated ambient AI applications available to hospitals, illustrating broad but uneven adoption of these tools. Finally, Sielaff et al turn the AI questions to patients, exploring what aspects of these tools patients want to see in consumer-facing information. They find that patients are supportive of transparent “AI labels” that highlight organizations’ considerations of patient privacy and security, among other important dimensions. These studies approach AI from 3 distinct stakeholder perspectives, and all show important variation in the expectations for and impact of AI both within and across these groups.

Third, 4 articles in this issue advance the evidence on telehealth, demonstrating how this now-ubiquitous care modality continues to be refined for specific populations and care contexts. Mandal uses the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to examine telehealth use among food-insecure individuals, finding that although food insecurity is associated with fewer overall primary and preventive care visits, the visits that do occur are more likely to be conducted via telehealth. Consistent with this, Cullen et al examine telemedicine use in rural populations, finding that individuals who used telemedicine were more likely than nonusers to utilize preventive services. Wolverton et al focus on telehealth in the context of team-based chronic disease management, evaluating a pharmacist-led hypertension program integrating home blood pressure monitoring with virtual visits, and Haney et al evaluate a separate intervention to integrate pharmacists into pediatric telehealth visits. Together, these studies illustrate that telehealth can be deployed to address general access challenges and configured and used to support specific care management needs.

Finally, 3 articles in this issue pivot the vantage point from organizations’ and clinicians’ use of health IT to patients and families as health IT users. Atefeh offers a commentary exploring digital platforms designed for children and parents, emphasizing the importance of developmentally appropriate, child-centered design in pediatric digital health. The article provides concrete guidance to developers on how to ensure usability and equity. Shepherd et al evaluate an employer-sponsored digital digestive care management program, adding to a growing body of evidence on patient-facing digital care programs and the condition-specific intricacies and design considerations necessary for success. Ali et al examine patient portal engagement among more than 250,000 older adults with chronic conditions, identifying persistent disparities in use by age, race, language, and education. Their work, like that of Bucy et al, underscores that building digital infrastructure is insufficient and that for health IT to support improvements on cost, quality, and access, organizational and personal relationships are essential.