New Mexico occupies a singular position in the U.S. health data landscape: a single state government sharing geography with 23 sovereign tribal nations — 19 Pueblos, three Apache Tribes, and the Navajo Nation — each with its own laws, health authorities, and expectations for how information about its people is collected, shared, and protected. This session treats that complexity as a working laboratory for trust-building across jurisdictional lines. The host state for ADAPT 2026 will serve as a case study that challenges assumptions about who gets to define trust in health data systems.

Speakers: Yolandra Gomez, MD, MPH, Jicarilla Apache Nation; Terri Stewart, SYNCRONYS; Tony Lucero, Picuris Health Center; Stetson Berg, UnitedHealthcare (moderator)

At ADAPT 2025, Mark Savage and Lucia Savage chatted onstage about whether there was sufficient structure for private and secure handling of health data outside HIPAA for consumers to trust the recipient when the consumer’s data migrates out of a health system or health plan to an app of the consumer’s choosing. This year, they return to look at developments in the past 12 months and talk about whether Mark thinks there is more basis for trust, or Lucia thinks there is less, than there was last year.

Speakers: Lucia Savage; Mark Savage, JD, Managing Director, Digital Health Strategy & Policy, Savage & Savage LLC

For decades, public health programs have operated on a “pay first, chase fraud later” model. Kimberly Brandt, COO of CMS, is helping change that in real time.

In this session, Brandt will detail how CMS’s new Fraud Detection Operations Center — internally nicknamed the “fraud war room” — uses what she calls a “Netflix-type” algorithm to flag high-risk claims and applicants as they come in, rather than after payments have already gone out. The results so far: a 90 percent reduction in identified bad actors within the tool’s first year and $2 billion in savings since last March.

But Brandt is candid that AI doesn’t replace judgment: Every flagged anomaly still goes through a human analyst before any action is taken. She’ll walk through that “trust but verify” approach and what it takes to scale AI responsibly across one of the largest program integrity operations in the country.

Speaker: Kimberly Brandt, Deputy Administrator & Chief Operating Officer, U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Three of the agencies writing the rules of American health data rarely share a stage — this session puts them there. Senior policymakers from CMS, ONC, and OCR lay out where patient information access, information blocking enforcement, interoperability standards, and privacy and security protections are headed next, then trade the podium for armchairs in a fireside chat that gets past the talking points. The real question on the table: Can the federal government actually foster the trust that nationwide health information sharing depends on, or is that trust something only the industry itself should build? Attendees get a rare, unscripted look at how these agencies are aligning their priorities to shape the next chapter of federal health IT policy.

Speakers: Kimberly Brandt, CMS; Amy Gleason, US DOGE Service; Tom Keane, ONC; Tim Noonan, OCR/HHS; Tina Grande, Healthcare Trust Institute (moderator)

Hear lessons learned from Wednesday’s Executive Workshop on Cybersecurity as participants stepped into a fictitious cyber-physical health system collapse and scrambled to deliver care and keep resources moving when normal channels failed.

In the wake of warnings that some of the latest AI models can autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities, learn the workshop’s hard-won insights. One thing is clear: Defining your organization’s “minimum viable ecosystem” can’t wait — not when AI is closing the gap between discovery and disaster.

Speakers: Connor Walsh, Siemens Healthineers; Ron Mehring, Texas Health Resources; Philip Truesdale, Mayo Clinic; Greg Garcia, Health Sector Coordinating Council Cybersecurity Working Group (moderator)

In 2024, Utah created the nation’s first Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy and, with it, an AI Learning Laboratory (colloquially known as the AI sandbox) that lets companies pilot AI tools under temporary regulatory relief in exchange for data sharing and safety commitments. Healthcare was the first industry through the door.

Learn what it actually takes to build a sandbox — public or private — that lets innovation move at the speed of AI without outrunning safety.

Speakers: Zach Boyd, PhD, State of Utah; Suresh Balu, Duke University; Timi Leslie, Bluepath Health; Mark Sendak, Vega Health (moderator)

After discovering a Facebook vulnerability exposing her BRCA support group’s private data, Andrea Downing co-founded The Light Collective and authored the first “AI Rights for Patients.” At ADAPT, she will bring the patient voice to AI and privacy in health data: No aggregation without representation.

Speaker: Andrea Downing, The Light Collective

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for clinical evidence — but they’re slow, costly, and not always practical, especially in rare disease and oncology. Researchers are now using AI-generated “digital twins” as synthetic control arms in single-arm trials, predicting individual disease progression instead of enrolling a placebo group. Meanwhile, the FDA has issued draft guidance on how AI-generated data can support regulatory decisions on drug safety and efficacy.

This panel brings together voices from clinical research, real-world data, and regulatory strategy to unpack how AI is reshaping trial design, what regulators will accept, and where human judgment still has to hold the line.

Speakers: Adam Aten, Verily Health; Donna Cryer, The Light Collective; Anthony Corso, Veeva Health; Brad Hirsch, Highlander Health (moderator)