HealthStack, a newly launched B2B platform for clinicians and health leaders, officially debuted its Virtual Summit.
According to a blog post, HealthStack launched with a mission centered on evidence-based insights, professional development, and community-building through curated content, research, and programming. Furthermore, the platform builds on the legacy of AFROTECH™, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary this fall at the AFROTECH™ Conference in Houston. The conference will introduce a “Medical” ticket, granting holders access to the HealthStack Conference while drawing clinicians, healthcare leaders, innovators, and policymakers aligned around advancing equitable healthcare.
During HealthStack’s first virtual summit, Blavity Founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun mentioned that, as AFROTECH™ helped reduce information asymmetry in tech, HealthStack is designed to do the same in healthcare. DeBaun also touched on her mission of equity, which was informed by her father who is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist specializing in sickle cell disease at Washington University in St. Louis. She shared that his work exposed her to disparities in research, clinical trials, and standards of care both in the U.S. and abroad. During his career, he had spent time in Nigeria and Ghana to help countries run blood drives and leverage technology in care, such as blood transfusions for babies.
HealthStack embodies that spirit of inclusive innovation and aims to provide the next generation of clinicians with insights and conversations to inform their daily practice.
“We have the knowhow, the network, the trust from our communities with all of our media brands,” DeBaun told attendees. “HealthStack is designed to help make sure that you all as providers — the ecosystem of people who care about our people — have the resources, the information, the community that you need to leverage things like technology, AI, to use things responsively, and the data sets that are required, thinking about clinical trial diversity and ensuring that our community knows how important it is to participate in these clinical trials and why we should be doing this.”
The inaugural HealthStack Virtual Summit, held Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, gathered more than 500 healthcare leaders who tuned in to hear insights from Anika Gardenhire, RN, CHCIO (Ardent Health); Alani Gregory, MD, FACP (Amazon One Medical); Ian Tong, MD (Foresite Labs); Melynda Barnes, MD (Ro); and Nikole Benders-Hadi, MD (Talkspace).
Key takeaways from the sessions included how technology can reduce administrative burden and improve care delivery. Ardent Health’s Chief Digital & Transformation Officer Gardenhire highlighted the impact of ambient AI on clinical documentation, noting more than 90% bedside adoption and significant improvements in same-day visit closures, allowing clinicians to reclaim time previously spent on documentation while maintaining care quality. In fact, clinicians had previously spent nearly 200 minutes on documentation per eight-hour workday, making a strong case for adoption.
Gregory, head of health equity and belonging at Amazon One Medical, shared that the company builds a health equity review when creating content and clinical guidelines. Additionally, there is a chronic disease management program, which originally targeted those with diagnosed diabetes and hypertension but has expanded its scope to include those at risk as well. The program has showed A1C improvements of 3 points to 5 points and a decrease in cholesterol across all races, ethnicities, and genders.
“We were focused on ensuring that our clinicians, the coaches, the nurses that were involved, focused on the identity and the cultural context of the patients in the lifestyle changes and recommendations…,” Gregory said. “That’s been one of our really successful programs because we designed equity into it.”
Gregory also doubled down on Gardenhire’s note about relieving some administrative tasks and shed light on a newly launched app, Health AI, which has access to patients’ medical records and can answer patient questions, reducing the messaging burden for staff and clinicians, she said.
Discussions around patient safety, trust, and telehealth — led by Gregory and Benders-Hadi, who is chief medical officer at Talkspace — addressed how technology can enhance virtual care. Benders-Hadi mentioned solutions such as crisis mapping, which leverages technology and data resourcing to find information on nearby emergency rooms, the nearest police precinct, and crisis stabilization units. All of this can be verified with the patient’s geographical location or by using software to ensure sessions cannot begin without patients confirming their location at the start of a call.
Additionally, Gregory noted virtual care is not meant to be a replacement for in-person care, but she acknowledged asynchronous care is becoming “a cornerstone of virtual care.” This care allows clinicians and patients to communicate and share information at different times so a real-time visit isn’t always required, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration. Gregory added that clinicians, by computer, can manage a vast amount of data and identify patterns so they can write a structured visit in areas such as obesity, sinus infections, mental health, and more.
That information is all to help address patient safety.
“When you have scale, you can compress time, right? So, if we see 40,000 patients with the same thing, we now have the same experience or more than someone who’s been in practice for 40 years,” Gregory explained during the summit. “We feed that back into our product. So now we know how to recognize when patients might experience side effects faster and give medication to them proactively.”
Stay tuned for future updates.
