The 2026 ACC Quality Summit brought cardiovascular quality professionals from across the country to Orlando to share insights, strategies, and innovations for advancing cardiovascular care. AI was a major topic throughout the event, from the opening keynote to the sessions and conversations that followed. This post shares some reflections from the event, including how AI can ease workforce strain and support rural communities, and why thoughtful oversight is essential to using it well.
Easing the Strain of a Growing Physician Shortage
With an expected shortfall of about 7,000 cardiovascular physicians in the next decade, AI can play a valuable role in filling a critical gap on cardiovascular care teams that may be understaffed, helping to reduce administrative burdens, increase efficiency, improve outcomes, and give clinical staff more time to spend on providing direct patient care. For example, ambient listening tools have the potential to boost clinician efficiency and reduce burnout, and an FDA-approved ECG tool has proven safe in taking on the role of spotting hidden structural heart disease on ECGs, freeing up cardiologists to focus their care and knowledge on complex patient cases and helping patients get treatment sooner.
But presenters also underscored that AI has limits. It can struggle to piece together what happened and when, miss important context, or produce flawed reasoning. As researchers at Stanford recently found, even the best AI agents completed less than half of realistic clinical and administrative tasks, often because they lost track of information. As it stands, AI’s promise lies in supporting care teams, not in standing in for them. When AI is incorporated in the right way, that support can ease administrative demands and help care teams navigate the shortages ahead with greater efficiency.
AI’s Potential to Support Rural Communities
A session on rural cardiovascular care put a spotlight on how much geography shapes a patient’s access to treatment. Almost half of U.S. counties—and 86% of rural counties—have no cardiologist. For many rural patients, that means specialty care isn’t available close to home, and getting it can require travel that not everyone can manage. Transportation limitations, workforce shortages, and social drivers of health compound the problem, contributing to gaps in care and poorer outcomes.
AI is already helping some rural hospitals expand access to care by bringing services closer to patients in geographically isolated communities. Tools like automated documentation and remote supervision allow small teams to run services across multiple sites and serve more patients with fewer staff. Patients are also turning to AI on their own: OpenAI reports that more than 40 million people ask ChatGPT for health advice every day, and people in underserved rural communities send an average of 600,000 healthcare-related messages each week. As AI use continues to grow, health systems will need to think carefully about how AI fits into care for rural patients and the providers who serve them.
Why Thoughtful Incorporation Matters
One of the biggest takeaways was that AI must be implemented carefully. That came through clearly in discussions about registry abstraction. Quality teams are being asked to do more with less: more registries, more data requirements, and higher expectations for timely reporting, often with fewer staff. It’s no wonder that more teams are looking to AI for relief. But it’s important to keep in mind that while AI can augment abstractors’ work by taking certain tasks off their plates, it can’t replace them outright. AI can’t bring the clinical context and judgment that this work depends on. Clinical data is often messy and unstructured, and interpreting it correctly requires clinical expertise.
That perspective aligns well with MRO’s approach to AI. Prodigy™, MRO’s AI engine, is an excellent example of how AI can augment the work of abstractors while keeping human judgment at the center of the process. Prodigy automates a significant portion of abstraction work, surfacing only the answers it has high or very high confidence in, along with the source evidence behind them. Clinical experts handle the rest, applying registry knowledge and clinical judgment and reviewing the work to keep the data accurate and defensible. The technology takes on the repetitive searching, and the people stay responsible for the judgment calls. The result is a process that reduces operating burdens and helps hospitals achieve better outcomes with greater efficiency—which is exactly the kind of value AI can deliver when it’s built around the people doing the work.
AI’s Place in Cardiovascular Care
AI came up again and again at the summit, and it’s easy to see why. With workforce shortages ahead and rural patients facing real barriers to care, cardiovascular teams could use the support. When AI is brought into existing workflows thoughtfully, it can enhance quality, expand capacity, and improve patient-centered care while keeping accountability and safety front and center.
It’s likely that future summits will feature even more presentations and discussions on how facilities are putting AI to work in care, from supporting rural communities to improving outcomes. For any attendees who may have arrived with initial hesitations about AI, the summit undoubtedly gave them plenty to build on as they start thinking about how to put AI to use.