Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, global CMO for Aidoc and former president of the AMA, will give the opening keynote address at the Physicians' Forum during HIMSS26.
Photo: Courtesy Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld
Dr. Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, board certified in anesthesiology and clinical informatics, is the former president of the American Medical Association and is the global chief medical officer for Aidoc, a clinical AI company.
Ehrenfeld will kick off the AMDIS/HIMSS Physicians' Forum at the HIMSS 2026 Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas with the talk, “Opening Keynote Session: From Hype to Healing: Real-World AI Integration in Clinical Practice.”
“There’s a lot of hype out there,” Ehrenfeld said to Healthcare Finance News on Monday. “There’s so much massive stuff happening with agentic AI, foundation models – our heads are spinning.”
Ehrenfeld was calling from a Milwaukee hospital where he was working.
“I’m seeing patients,” he said. “Everybody rolls up their sleeves. We are just drowning. There are not enough people to go around. The reality is people are exhausted.”
The technology that’s needed has to help make clinician lives easier and must inform clinical decision support.
Ehrenfeld said he spent 20 years building clinical decision support systems.
“We don’t want just a red flag on a computer screen,” Ehrenfeld said.
AI needs to be an asset and not a burden for staff, he said.
Questions remain as to implementation.
“How do we implement these things, so our leaders, CIOs, chief AI officers are getting the most bang for the buck?” he asked.
Ehrenfeld believes Aidoc is one answer. It helps process, on average, more than 200,000 CT scans per day, he said. It’s in more than 1,600 hospitals in 19 countries.
The system also provides triage alerts to physicians and care teams.
A patient suffering from a stroke loses millions of neurons per second, he said. A fast intervention can make the difference between a patient being rolled out or walking out, he said.
“We want to alert the stroke team on their phones, with the key images attached,” Ehrenfeld said.
The real magic comes down to closing the loop using AI as an orchestrator in real time, enabling care teams when there’s a critical finding, he said.
“I see AI becoming an essential care coordinator,” Ehrenfeld said.
Email the writer: SMorse@himss.org