📋 IN THIS EDITION
🏥 IGS Healthcare Edition: who's speaking and how members get in free
🩺 NYU Langone puts clinical AI inside Epic
🔬 GE HealthCare brings FDA-cleared AI to handheld ultrasound
💰 Enterprise AI spend hits about $177B
🧠 Snowflake gives agents shared definitions
🔐 Johns Hopkins Bayview and the cost of shadow AI
👋 NATHAN'S TAKE
NYU Langone is putting clinical AI inside Epic across its system, while Johns Hopkins Bayview is notifying patients after a spreadsheet went into an unapproved AI tool. The question now is how to deploy AI in ways you can measure and defend. That's why we're bringing the people doing this work to San Francisco on December 8-9. - Nathan Pettyjohn, Founder & President, Applied AI Association - Connect with me on LinkedIn
🏥 THE FEATURE: IGS HEALTHCARE EDITION
Immerse Global Summit, Healthcare Edition
Tuesday-Wednesday, December 8-9, 2026 | Verizon Innovation Lab, San Francisco
Produced by the VR/AR Association (VRARA) and the Applied AI Association (AAIA)
No hype. Real deployments. Measurable ROI.
Two days of proven, practical answers on clinical decisions, triage, physical AI and on-device AI. Three tracks: an XR Track, an AI Track, and a Convergence Track, "The Intelligent Care Continuum," where AI makes clinical decisions smarter and XR makes them visible, trainable and actionable.
Join a curated room of 175+ Director and VP-level leaders from health systems, hospitals, clinical education and the teams building AI and XR for them. All 9 exhibit booths sit inside the main session room, so demos run all day. Our April Enterprise Edition at the same venue drew 200 attendees, 45 speakers and a sold-out exhibit floor.
Headliners (session titles are working titles)
Harvey Castro, MD, MBA, former ER physician and healthcare AI strategist: AI-driven triage at the bedside, from someone who has worked the ER.
Lauren Marble, Worldwide Tech Lead, Physical AI, AWS, "From Spatial Computing to Physical AI": for leaders planning where physical AI fits in care.
Greg Barbone, Senior Manager, XR Product Management & Partnerships, NVIDIA: a product and partnership view from NVIDIA's XR team.
Kabir Kasargod, Senior Director, Qualcomm, "Wearables at the Bedside: Smart Glasses, Sensors and On-Device AI for Care Teams": on-device AI at the point of care.
Cristina Dobrin, Product Manager, XR and Wearables, Qualcomm, "The Next Clinical Interface: Designing XR and AI Wearables Clinicians Will Actually Use": adoption depends on design.
Walter Greenleaf, PhD, Stanford Medical Mixed Reality Center: Stanford's view of mixed reality in medicine.
Dr. Thomas Caruso and Dr. Ellen Wang, Stanford Chariot Program, "The Stanford Chariot Roadmap: Making VR and AR Accessible in Pediatric Care": a roadmap for pediatric teams.
Bruce N. Walker, PhD, Director, Center for Human-AI-Robot Teaming (CHART), Georgia Tech: Motion ID for touchless authentication and patient monitoring.
Dax Leepart, Senior Director, Robotics, Healthcare and Employee Training, Pico (ByteDance): one view across robotics, healthcare and training.
Dan Setterby, Verizon Innovation Lab: our venue host.
Also speaking: Joanne Chun (UCSF), Thomas Merrick (University of Miami), Lance Baily (HealthySimulation.com), Mark Zhang (AMXRA), Cory Heizenrader (EducationXR), Ray Freiwirth (The Commons XR), Hector Mondragon (Simtryx), Rick Beberman (Sira Medical), Julia Scott, PhD (Gambit Labs), Laura Kusumoto (IterationZero), Ryan Wang (Solaris Venture Partners), Thomas Suarez (Raven Resonance), Jason Marsh (Flow Immersive), Nicole Lazzaro (XEODesign), Sidhant Khadanga (Sonata Software). Host: Nathan Pettyjohn, President, VRARA and AAIA. That's 26 speakers confirmed so far, with 35-40 expected and more announcing soon.
Who's in the room: Kaiser Permanente, Canon U.S.A., Stanford Medicine Children's Health, SofMedica Ventures, Santa Casa Hospital (Brazil), SIGGRAPH, plus health system, medtech and XR/AI teams.
Tickets
General Admission, $149: both days, all sessions, expo, happy hour
VIP, $399: adds lunch, drink tickets and VIP happy hour access
Student, $49: requires approval and a student email
AAIA and VRARA members: free GA ticket (allocated by membership tier across IGS events) plus 30% off VIP and additional tickets. Reply to this email to request your code.
🗞️ THIS WEEK IN AI
NYU Langone puts clinical AI where decisions happen OpenEvidence is going into NYU Langone's Epic EHR systemwide, so 6,000+ physicians and faculty can get answers tied to published evidence and the patient's record. Why it matters: Clinical AI is moving into the workflow, which raises the bar for governance. Read more → (NYU Langone, Oct 29, 2026)
GE HealthCare brings FDA-cleared AI guidance to handheld ultrasound New Vscan Air features guide lung scans in real time and estimate whether findings suggest moderate-to-severe aortic stenosis. In validation, non-experts completed lung exams with 95.2% success, against 96.8% for experts. Why it matters: Measurable guidance can widen who captures a usable scan. Read more → (GE HealthCare via StockTitan, Nov 3, 2026)
Enterprise AI spend hits about $177B, and budgets can't keep up Menlo Ventures, which invests in AI companies, estimates spending reached $176.8B by September, up 5.4x from $33B in 2025. Companies spent 2.5 times what they budgeted, and healthcare is the largest vertical at $3.7B. Why it matters: Put cost controls in place before agents scale. Read more → (National Law Review, Nov 4, 2026)
Snowflake wants every agent working from the same definitions Its new Business Ontology, in private preview, sets approved business definitions so agents stop giving conflicting answers. Cortex AI Gateway also adds abuse detection, tracing and cost governance. Why it matters: Two agents with two definitions of the same metric is a governance problem, not a model problem. Read more → (SiliconANGLE, Nov 3, 2026)
One spreadsheet, about 3,182 patients: a shadow AI wake-up call Johns Hopkins Bayview says a staff member uploaded patient information to an AI platform it hadn't approved for that use. Why it matters: Your AI policy only works if approved tools are easier to reach than unapproved ones. Read more → (WMAR-2 News, Oct 23, 2026)
🌐 INSIDE AAIA
🤝 Want your brand in the room? A few exhibit tables remain at the IGS Healthcare Edition, all inside the main session room. Sponsorship and exhibit packages run from $3K to $30K, members save 10%, and commitments are due Friday, November 13. See the prospectus →
🚀 JOIN THE MOVEMENT
Join 80,000+ professionals who've connected through AAIA and VRARA events, programs and communities worldwide. Members get event access, industry committees and curated introductions between AI providers and enterprise buyers. See member benefits →
⚡ QUICK HITS
📊 Shareable stat: In some tests, nearly 10% of patients were wrongly downgraded when stigmatizing details were added to AI triage prompts. Still relevant → (UT Southwestern, Oct 20)
👓 Qualcomm's Personal AI Health Alliance is betting on on-device AI for clinical guidance and elder care. Still relevant → (Digital Today, Sep 24)
👋 THE CLOSER
Forward AI Beat to one colleague navigating the AI landscape.
Got AI news, events or a story for the community? Email us at [email protected]
P.S. Sponsors: a few exhibit tables remain, and commitments are due Friday, November 13. See the prospectus →