In March 2026, more than 25,000 healthcare leaders gathered in Las Vegas for HIMSS26, the world’s largest health information and technology conference. The dominant theme was unmistakable: agentic AI—systems that don’t just recommend actions but autonomously execute multi-step workflows across clinical, financial, and administrative operations. For Latin America, where healthcare remains less than 10% digitized and reimbursement cycles still stretch 90 to 180 days, the implications are enormous. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape healthcare operations. It is whether Latin America’s $200B+ healthcare economy will adopt these capabilities fast enough to close its infrastructure gap—or fall further behind.
Previous HIMSS conferences centered on the promise of generative AI. HIMSS26 marked a decisive shift toward deployment. Vendors across revenue cycle management, clinical documentation, and patient engagement showcased systems designed to operate autonomously within defined guardrails. Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Connect Health, a purpose-built agentic AI platform that automates patient verification, appointment scheduling, clinical documentation, and medical coding—integrating directly with EHRs. Epic previewed Agent Factory, a no-code builder enabling health systems to deploy custom AI agents across their workflows. Waystar expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate autonomous revenue cycle operations, reporting that its AI platform has helped providers prevent more than $15 billion in denied claims.
PointClickCare introduced Discharge Intel, delivering AI-powered clinical intelligence to health plans within 24 hours of hospital discharge. Meanwhile, Salesforce expanded Agentforce Health with six new agents automating referrals, claims coverage, and hospital operations.
The pattern is clear: the U.S. market is moving from AI-assisted workflows to AI-executed workflows. Administrative tasks that once required human coordination—prior authorizations, denial management, coding, payment reconciliation—are being handed to autonomous agents.
The capital allocation behind this shift is substantial. A February 2026 report from Deloitte’s Center for Health Solutions found that 61% of healthcare technology executives are already building or implementing agentic AI initiatives, and 85% plan to increase investment over the next two to three years. Among early adopters, 59% expect cost savings exceeding 20% within that timeframe. This momentum reflects real financial pressure. Administrative work accounts for up to one-quarter of U.S. healthcare expenditures. The World Bank estimates that 15–20% of healthcare spending in Latin America is lost to inefficiencies and fraud—tens of billions of dollars annually. In a region where over 60% of hospitals still run paper-based workflows, the automation opportunity is not incremental. It is structural.
Critically, the Deloitte report identifies an emerging divide between organizations that are scaling AI strategically and those still watching from the sidelines. That divide is about to become even more pronounced in Latin America, where the gap between infrastructure readiness and market need is wider than anywhere else.
Why Latin America Is Positioned to Leapfrog
Latin America’s healthcare market today resembles the United States roughly two decades ago: fragmented systems, manual workflows, minimal interoperability between payers and providers. But there is a crucial difference. The U.S. spent 20 years moving sequentially from EHR adoption to transaction automation to payments integration. Latin America has the opportunity to compress that timeline by integrating all three layers simultaneously. The region’s digital health market is projected to grow from $17 billion in 2024 to $66 billion by 2033, a 20% compound annual growth rate. Markets like Colombia and Brazil have established EHR foundations, but no player has yet connected those clinical records to end-to-end revenue cycle management and real-time payment settlement at regional scale.
What HIMSS26 demonstrated in Las Vegas—autonomous claims processing, AI-driven coding, intelligent payment orchestration—is precisely the kind of capability that Latin America needs. But building it requires something the U.S. already has and Latin America largely lacks: integrated infrastructure connecting the clinical, transactional, and financial layers of healthcare.
The announcements at HIMSS26 share a common prerequisite: data connectivity. Amazon Connect Health works because it integrates with EHRs. Waystar’s autonomous revenue cycle works because claims data flows seamlessly between providers and payers. Epic’s Agent Factory works because clinical and financial workflows share a unified platform. In Latin America, that foundational connectivity is still being built. The companies that will capture the agentic AI opportunity are not those deploying point solutions, but those constructing the operating system—the infrastructure layer that connects electronic health records, revenue cycle management, and payment rails into a single, interoperable platform. Osigu, for example, is building exactly this kind of integrated infrastructure across five Latin American markets, connecting EHR, RCM, and payments through strategic partnerships with Visa and JPMorgan.
The lesson from the U.S. evolution is clear: those who control the transaction layer ultimately control the market. In Latin America, the race to build that layer is just beginning.
HIMSS26 was not a technology showcase. It was a signal that healthcare operations are entering an era of autonomous execution. For Latin America’s CIOs and CFOs, the imperative is not to wait for the agentic AI wave to arrive. It is to build the infrastructure that makes it possible—now—before the gap between digitized and non-digitized health systems becomes irreversible. The region’s $200B+ healthcare economy is a generational opportunity. The winners will be the platforms that connect the entire ecosystem.
Amazon Web Services. (2026, March 5). Introducing Amazon Connect Health: Agentic AI for healthcare, built for
the people who deliver it. AWS Industries Blog. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/introducing-amazon-connect-health-agentic-ai-for-healthcare-built-for-the-people-who-deliver-it/
Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. (2026, February). Many health care leaders are leaning into agentic AI as adoption hurdles ease. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/health- care/agentic-ai-health-care-operating-model-change.html
Grand View Research. (2024). Latin America digital health market size report, 2024–2033. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/latin-america-digital-health-market
Healthcare Dive. (2026, March 16). Balancing AI innovation and risk: 5 takeaways from HIMSS26.https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/himss-2026-takeaways-ai-innovation-agents-cybersecurity-
governance-interoperability/814812/
Inter-American Development Bank. (2024). Better spending for better lives: How Latin America and the Caribbean
can do more with less. IDB. https://publications.iadb.org/
TechTarget. (2026, March). Agentic AI powers revenue cycle technology news at HIMSS26.
https://www.techtarget.com/revcyclemanagement/news/366639962/Agentic-AI-powers-revenue-cycle- technology-news-at-HIMSS26
World Bank. (2024). Healthcare spending inefficiency in Latin America and the Caribbean.
https://data.worldbank.org/
