Hospitals Are Becoming Tech Companies — Impact for IT Consultants

In a meeting I had just a couple of weeks ago with a Chief Innovation Officer of a healthcare system, I learned of their internal development of a new AI solution. It made me wonder who else might be doing this, and after just a few articles, I found there was a big trend in AI and overall technology development happening internally, vs hospitals going out to buy the solution needed. I wanted to share just a few examples here and my thoughts on potential impact to consultants.

Organizations including Mass General Brigham, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Stanford Medicine are all building platforms inside their clinical environments, validating them on real patient data, and then exploring commercialization pathways, whether through spinouts, licensing, or joint ventures. These new tools are proving valuable enough that they can scale beyond their home hospital. The common theme I found appears to be that newly internally developed technology is being treated as strategic intellectual property, not just an internal tool.

These systems also share a similar pattern where they build a solution that solves deeply operational problems. In reading multiple articles, the focus appears to be on workflow automation, unstructured‑note extraction, population health risk stratification, and care‑pathway optimization. Before any commercialization step, the tools are deployed internally at scale, stress‑tested across multiple specialties, and integrated into clinical workflows before turning it into a company with a product.

For those of us in Healthcare IT consulting, this shift is going to reshape the landscape in a pretty fundamental way. As more health systems start building and commercializing their own products, we won’t just be advising on technology adoption; we’ll be helping organizations evaluate, integrate, and even compete with tools that originate inside other hospitals. It changes the mentality of just supporting Epic or Oracle because the clients we support may now be both buyers and creators in the AI/technical marketplace.

Hospitals spinning out tech companies will expect consultants who understand not just EHR integration, but IP strategy, go‑to‑market planning, interoperability standards, and the operational realities of scaling technology safely. In other words, the consulting value proposition shifts from implementing tools to helping health systems become technology-driven organizations, or in this case, even an AI/technology vendor.

Regardless of your area of focus as a consultant, we’ll all need to adjust to a broader capability of support.  All these changes imply that hospitals are becoming product creators, not just adopters. I just wrote about continued learning as my new year’s resolution, so hearing about all these hospitals taking on development of their own technologies only reinforces the need to keep up on all these great new tools being developed. 2026 is going to be an interesting year in Healthcare IT!  

Anyone working with a client that this is a priority? Please feel free to share in the comments area below.

Here is the Mass General Brigham Press Release – Mass General Brigham Announces New AI Company to Accelerate Clinical Trial Screening and Patient Recruitment | Mass General Brigham