Thirty healthcare technology management (HTM) leaders gathered at AAMI’s Center of Excellence on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 for the fourth Future Forum, a two-day working session built around a single question: What does HTM need to become over the next five years, and what must AAMI build, scale or launch to get it there?
The forum’s participants represent all corners of HTM, ranging from inspectors and regulators to service providers and your hospitals’ fix-it professionals. And the answer that emerged from this group was less a single fix and more of a shift in posture toward standardization, clearer data and conveying HTM’s value as a source of go-to experts for modernizing health systems.
Day 1: Naming HTM’s Biggest Challenges
The forum opened with a word exercise that set the tone for the day. Asked to describe HTM today, attendees repeatedly landed on “rewarding” and “essential,” but also “under-resourced,” and, more than any other term, “complex.” When the group looked ahead, they ranked technological innovation, AI, data utilization, cybersecurity and the regulatory environment as the forces most likely to reshape the field over the next five years.
Much of the day’s discussion returned to AAMI’s 2025 State of HTM survey, which drew roughly 1,000 responses and identified workforce issues as the field’s No. 1 challenge. Participants noted a hopeful signal buried in the data: 72% of Gen Z respondents said they entered HTM intentionally, compared with the vast majority of baby boomers who discovered the career path by chance. “This shows our work is having an impact,” noted Danielle McGeary, AAMI vice president of HTM. However, the group also flagged a shrinking pipeline of military veterans entering the field and a continued lack of public awareness about the profession itself.
The conversation grew pointed around HTM’s positioning relative to hospital information technology (IT) departments.
“The role of IT in a hospital is clearly defined. HTM, meanwhile, is a jack of all trades,” one participant said — a framing others linked directly to the field’s chronic “cost center” perception and its difficulty attracting resources.
“We pride ourselves as being that jack of all trades, but that is to our own peril,” another participant added, noting that budgets aren’t built around a department’s ability to efficiently put out fires, no matter how many times HTM pros are celebrated for saving the day. Rather, forum participants called for ways to better highlight the benefits a proficient and well-funded HTM team can offer in addressing and preventing specific challenges faced by modernizing health systems.
Of course, HTM leaders need clear data and common baselines to prove that excellence. Several leaders described HTM as “the wild west,” lacking a shared yardstick for maturity or best practice, while others pointed to rising wages, scope creep and blurred lines with IT as compounding pressures that can get in the way of self-assessment. A recurring line of the day captured the stakes bluntly: “Excellence is not easily scalable.” What is deemed excellent in a health system serving an affluent cityscape may look very different from the kind of excellence sought in a small rural hospital. According to McGeary, these discussions will prove essential as AAMI works to update the field’s HTM Levels Guide and its accompanying online assessment tool.
By afternoon, productive ideation sessions converted voiced frustrations into high-concept solutions including:
- A certification or recognition program to convey modern aptitudes
- Standardized vendor performance and contract templates
- An opt-in collective for anonymized HTM benchmarking data
- AI tools to help the field keep pace with technology no longer built on purely mechanical foundations
Day 2: Building AAMI’s Response
The second day of the HTM Future Forum opened with a comprehensive synthesis of day one and pushed the group toward concrete recommendations for AAMI. These recommendations were organized around several key themes including:
- Modernizing HTM standards
- Building a new efficiency guide
- Establishing clearer guardrails for data collection
On standards, participants called for elevating AAMI’s HTM work internationally through bodies like ISO and IEC — a call-to-action AAMI is well-practiced in as a source of U.S. technical advisory groups for international standards development. Other ideas included an “implementation guide” series to make standards easier to apply within complex hospital environments and an “AAMI Standards University” for shared learning resources, such as webinars and case studies. It was even floated that an AI agentic tool developed and trained by AAMI could theoretically help the field digest and navigate standards more quickly — even helping HTM leadership digest standards within the framing of their existing SOPs.
“A scary future is, if we’re not making standards important to the right people, they’re just going to be forgotten,” one participant warned.
Underlying much of the day’s work was a tension one participant described plainly: “The customer is the healthcare provider. The impact is on the patient. The demands are coming from financial and regulatory considerations.” Reconciling those pressures is where guiding principles — not just guidance documents — come in.
Workforce planning discussions produced a BMET competency framework and a proposed HTM cybersecurity certification developed alongside established AAMI partners such as ECRI.
The forum closed with a call to modernize HTM’s value proposition — through media, standards work and closer alignment between technicians, department leaders and the C-suite — so the field’s impact is understood by hospital leadership before the next crisis more painfully makes the case for it.
AAMI plans to translate the forum’s recommendations into concrete initiatives over the coming months.
