At ICD, we are passionate about creating events that connect healthcare professionals from around the world to share knowledge, expertise, and best practices. Through education, collaboration, and innovation, we can collectively elevate the quality of healthcare for all.

Peter Drucker famously wrote, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday’s logic.”

The U.S. healthcare ecosystem, across providers, health plans, employers, policymakers, and life sciences, is undeniably operating in a period of unprecedented transformation, uncertainty, and structural change.

These conditions are not isolated. They are systemic, interconnected, and reshaping how care is financed, delivered, regulated, and experienced.
Some of the most visible signals of this transformation include:

• More than one trillion dollars expected to be removed from the healthcare industry over the next decade through the H.R.1 (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act)
• Employers are facing double-digit increases in their healthcare costs
• More than two-thirds of U.S. employees cannot pay their deductibles, effectively leaving them and their families without insurance until deductibles are met
• Over 40% of large employers and 20% of smaller employers have turned to direct contracting, disintermediating healthcare systems and health plans
• Federal agencies like the CDC and NIH have been gutted, creating a brain drain and vulnerability to the public health of every American
• Artificial intelligence is evolving faster than any technology in human history, changing how healthcare is taught, delivered, regulated, and managed across the entire value chain
• The primary care workforce in the US, the cornerstone of public health, has been decimated, leaving primary care deserts in cities, towns and rural America
  
  

Together, these shifts signal not simply disruption, but a need for new ways of thinking, leading, and collaborating. What will be required is not only new logic, but new capabilities. Healthcare leaders across all constituencies will need the ability to:

1. Recreate professional and organizational identities as clinicians, administrators, staff and leaders, to recreate purpose and meaning in a world that seems less personal and more mercenary
2. Deepen engagement between patients and providers, to place a primacy on relationships rather than the transactional corporatization that is occurring within healthcare
3. Strengthen personal and professional communities by maintaining, if not expanding, our connection to our personal and professional communities because in an environment this complex and fast-moving, isolation is not only lonely, it is dangerous.
   
   

ICD’s Role in 2026
In 2026, ICD will place identity, engagement, and community at the center of our mission and across all our forums.

Within every ICD program we convene, we will focus not only on content, but on experience, intentionally designing environments that help leaders build these capabilities in practical, durable ways. Our forums will continue to feature respected, cutting-edge voices from across healthcare. At the same time, we will create more space for:

• Authentic dialogue (straight talk), enabled through the adoption of Chatham House rules
• Openness and transparency about challenges, not just success stories
• Practical insight drawn from lived experience, not polished theory
• Constructive discomfort, pushing ourselves and our peers beyond outdated assumptions and familiar ways of thinking and being
  
  

How ICD Is Different
ICD’s conferences are intentionally designed for this level of engagement and community formation.They are smaller and more personal by design. Participants are not passive listeners, they are contributors, discussants, and collaborators.Consistently, the strongest feedback we hear from attendees is not only about what they learned, but about the relationships they formed that continue to support decision-making, leadership, and resilience long after the symposium concludes.
We are not just convening events. We are building communities that empower better care.