Large Group Council Executive Summit 2026

In today's rapidly shifting environment, the biggest threat to an integrated health system isn't financial pressure or workforce shortages — it's misalignment. When hospitals and physician groups operate in silos, communication breaks down, culture fractures, and system-wide performance stalls. This high-energy keynote dives into what the most innovative health systems are doing to bridge the divide. Amy Perry leads one of the nation's largest nonprofit health systems — 33 hospitals across six states, more than 2,000 employed physicians and advanced practitioners in Banner Medical Group, an academic medicine partnership with the University of Arizona, and a provider-sponsored health plan covering 1.2 million members. With more than 30 years of experience building integrated delivery at Banner, Atlantic Health, LifeBridge, and Mount Sinai, Perry has spent her career on the seam between hospitals and physician enterprise. In this session, she'll share how Banner's 'One Team' operating model is rethinking inpatient–ambulatory communication, building real trust between administrators and clinicians, and creating a unified culture that accelerates quality, efficiency, and growth.

The 2026 midterm elections will reshape the federal policy landscape at a pivotal moment for healthcare. With debates intensifying around Medicare payment stability, Medicaid financing, workforce shortages, site-of-care shifts, value-based care, and regulatory reform, medical groups face both uncertainty and opportunity. The decisions made in Washington over the next two years will directly influence care delivery, reimbursement, integration strategies, and the economics of physician enterprise operations. In this AMGA-led general session, speakers will break down the key drivers shaping the pre-election environment and what medical groups should be doing now to prepare. This conversation will explore the emerging legislative priorities, expected regulatory pressure points, and the bipartisan issues that remain in play regardless of election outcomes. Attendees will gain clear, actionable insight into how to strengthen organizational readiness, position their medical group for policy shifts, and engage proactively in advocacy efforts that support sustainable, high-quality care. Designed for C-suite and senior physician enterprise leaders, this session provides an indispensable roadmap for navigating the policy implications of the 2026 election cycle with confidence, clarity, and strategic foresight.

What if 'home' became the default discharge destination — not the exception? The Why Not Home initiative at Valley Medical Center is a scalable, interdisciplinary framework that challenges traditional discharge patterns and embeds proactive planning earlier in the inpatient stay. By aligning hospitalists, care management, primary care, patients, families, and community partners around a shared goal of safely returning more patients home, Valley achieved a 37% increase in home discharges, a 28% decrease in SNF discharges, a 7.3% improvement in length of stay index, and a reduction in ED median boarding time from 6.9 to 3.8 hours. In this session, leaders will learn how to operationalize a 'home-first' mindset across the care continuum, identify the workflow and culture changes that drive measurable throughput gains, and walk away with practical strategies to improve length of stay, patient safety, and total cost of care — without sacrificing patient-centered outcomes.

What if 'home' became the default discharge destination — not the exception? The Why Not Home initiative at Valley Medical Center is a scalable, interdisciplinary framework that challenges traditional discharge patterns and embeds proactive planning earlier in the inpatient stay. By aligning hospitalists, care management, primary care, patients, families, and community partners around a shared goal of safely returning more patients home, Valley achieved a 37% increase in home discharges, a 28% decrease in SNF discharges, a 7.3% improvement in length of stay index, and a reduction in ED median boarding time from 6.9 to 3.8 hours. In this session, leaders will learn how to operationalize a 'home-first' mindset across the care continuum, identify the workflow and culture changes that drive measurable throughput gains, and walk away with practical strategies to improve length of stay, patient safety, and total cost of care — without sacrificing patient-centered outcomes.

Emergency department overutilization and avoidable admissions remain among the most stubborn drains on margin, capacity, and patient experience and the hardest to solve through point solutions. UC Davis Health took a different path: a deliberate, system-level redesign that embedded care management across clinical and community touchpoints, closing the gaps where patients typically fall through. The result is a coordinated model that meets patients before crises escalate and the numbers prove it works: an 18% reduction in ED visits and a 25% reduction in hospitalizations. In this session, presenters will share the architecture behind the model, the operational decisions that made integration stick, and the lessons that translate to any health system under pressure to do more with less.

Emergency department overutilization and avoidable admissions remain among the most stubborn drains on margin, capacity, and patient experience and the hardest to solve through point solutions. UC Davis Health took a different path: a deliberate, system-level redesign that embedded care management across clinical and community touchpoints, closing the gaps where patients typically fall through. The result is a coordinated model that meets patients before crises escalate and the numbers prove it works: an 18% reduction in ED visits and a 25% reduction in hospitalizations. In this session, presenters will share the architecture behind the model, the operational decisions that made integration stick, and the lessons that translate to any health system under pressure to do more with less.

Care management programs often fail not because the clinical model is wrong, but because the financial model never caught up. Contracts get signed in one room, care gets redesigned in another, and the economics quietly erode the impact. Cleveland Clinic took on that disconnect directly by building a model where value-based contracting and care management implementation are designed, deployed, and measured as a single system rather than parallel workstreams. In this session, Dr. Michelle Medina will walk through how Cleveland Clinic structures the handoff between contract terms and operational execution, the governance that keeps finance and care delivery accountable to the same outcomes, and the decisions that determine whether a value-based arrangement generates value. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of what it takes to move care management from a cost center to a sustainable, scalable engine of performance.

As artificial intelligence moves from experimentation to enterprise-scale implementation, health system leaders face a new set of questions: What's working? What's not? And how do we lead responsibly through continued transformation? Eric Williamson, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Mayo Clinic, will bring a fresh perspective on where AI strategy stands today. This session will explore how Mayo Health System has evolved their approaches to AI governance, clinical integration, and change leadership — reflecting on lessons learned and emerging priorities heading into the next phase of adoption.

Call coverage is one of the most persistent and complex operational challenges facing health systems today and the solutions look very different depending on geography, scale, and available resources. This session brings together two organizations navigating coverage demands in a dense, high-acuity environment, and community based system. Together, they will explore the strategies, tradeoffs, and innovations shaping how health systems ensure physician availability across service lines, from scheduling models and telehealth integration to recruitment, retention, and partnership approaches.

Clinical and administrative requirements from payors are amongst the biggest pain points in surveys of medical group/integrated delivery system leaders. Quality reporting, records requests, prior authorizations and insurance coverage determinations drive practice inefficiency and provider frustration. This presentation will demonstrate how medical groups and integrated care systems are using bidirectional data exchange with their payors to reduce costs and administrative complexity that improve outcomes and the healthcare experience.