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At Incredible Health, our vision and mission is to help healthcare professionals live better lives, and find and do their best work. That means understanding the conditions shaping their work, not just the bright spots, but the pressure points, the gaps, and the places where the healthcare industry has more work to do.

Today, we’re proud to release our 2026 Executive Report: AI and the Future of the Healthcare Workforce. Drawing on insights from hundreds of healthcare leaders and proprietary data from more than 1,500 healthcare employers and 1.5 million healthcare workers nationwide, this report is our most comprehensive look yet at where the industry stands heading into a pivotal year.

The challenge this year is not AI awareness. It’s execution.  

Healthcare leaders are aligned on the priorities. Retention is the top workforce concern for 67% of organizations. AI is widely understood to be critical, with more than half of leaders saying it will define their team’s success in 2026, and 47% planning to increase AI spending this year.

And yet, 76% of the same leaders say their organizations are not prepared to implement AI at the speed required. Change management is difficult. Ownership is unclear. Role-based adoption has stalled. The result is a widening gap between what leaders believe and what their organizations are able to execute, at a moment when there is very little room for delay.

This is the defining tension of 2026: plenty of vision, and a critical shortage of follow-through.

The technology hasn’t reached the healthcare workers who need it most.

AI momentum in healthcare has largely been concentrated in leadership conversations, recruitment platforms, and back-office systems. On the frontlines, the picture looks very different. Today, 70% of clinicians are not using AI tools in their daily workflows, even as 80% say they want more training on how to use them.

This disconnect is a care delivery problem as much as a technology problem. The workers experiencing the greatest pressure from burnout, staffing shortages, and rising patient demand are the same workers who have benefited least from the AI investment being made around them. Closing that gap is one of the most important things healthcare organizations can do in the year ahead.

Recruiters are overwhelmed, and qualified candidates are disappearing into the void.

The talent challenge extends well beyond the bedside. Only 16% of healthcare recruiters currently use AI in their workflows. Managing an average of 70 open roles per recruiter at a time, most teams are only able to have a live conversation with roughly 10% of applicants. The other 90% of workers who apply to open positions do not speak with anyone.

At the same time, the pool of candidates passing initial screens has dropped from 34% to 29% year over year. Hiring demand is rising, while recruitment capacity is not keeping pace. Over the past 12 months, 55% of teams stayed the same size and 21% shrank. Only 24% grew. Today, 41% of recruitment teams describe themselves as overworked.

This is a system under strain, and it is costing organizations far more than efficiency. Every unanswered application from qualified healthcare workers quietly shapes how an employer is perceived in the market. The hiring experience is an expression of organizational values, and right now, many organizations are leaving a very different impression than they intend.

Retention is the strategic lever hiding in plain sight.

As we look ahead, it is clear that retention and recruitment are not separate challenges. They are deeply connected. Organizations struggling to keep experienced clinicians face constant pressure to rehire, driving up costs and compounding strain on the teams left behind. With 33% of employers reporting that at least a quarter of their nursing workforce is within 5 years of retirement, the pressure will intensify.

The healthcare organizations that lead in 2026 will be the ones that elevate retention from an HR function to a core expression of workforce strategy. That means investing in flexible scheduling, visible career pathways, and day-to-day working conditions that make healthcare workers want to stay.

The path forward is focused action.

This report pairs diagnosis with prescription. Inside, we outline 4 specific areas where healthcare leaders can move from intent to impact: 1) phased AI implementation with clear ownership and measurable outcomes, 2) retention-first workforce design, 3) protecting recruiter capacity as hiring demand rises, and 4) building a candidate experience that earns trust from the very first interaction.

The healthcare organizations that will define this decade are the ones willing to close the gap between their stated priorities and their operational reality. The ones that move with focus this year will not just weather the pressure. They will be the ones everyone else is benchmarking against in 5 years.You can read the full 2026 Executive Report here.

I’m proud to share that Lyn, our AI voice interview agent, now integrates directly with the healthcare industry’s wide range of applicant tracking systems, transforming static candidate databases into active, always-on hiring engines. Incredible Health is also named a Workday Innovation Partner with certified integration status for Workday HCM and Workday Recruiting, and supports other major ATS, including Oracle Recruiting Cloud, iCIMS, Greenhouse, Lever, Jobvite, and many others. Lyn is available to interview applicants regardless of source and is also available to healthcare employers not using the Incredible Health marketplace. 

We’ve been building towards this milestone since we first introduced Lyn in September 2025. Our vision and mission is to help healthcare professionals live better lives, and find and do their best work. Lyn was built in collaboration with the teams at Johns Hopkins, Baylor Scott & White Health, Tenet Health, and Sutter Health, and their hiring and clinical expertise contributed to this integration. We continue to drive towards that vision: every healthcare worker who applies for a role should get a real interview, not an auto-reply, not silence. With direct ATS integration, the goal of a world-class experience for healthcare workers is a reality for every hospital, health system, surgery center, and home health organization, regardless of which ATS they use.

Why This Matters for Healthcare

Healthcare hiring has been fundamentally challenging for decades. In the midst of the largest labor shortage in the country, the first-round phone interview takes an average of 13 days to complete. In that window, in a highly competitive talent market, top candidates accept offers elsewhere, and the health systems left behind turn to overtime, incentive pay, expensive agency, and travel staff to fill the gap. These band-aid solutions exacerbate the risk of employee burnout and turnover, and also put patient care at risk. In healthcare, the first employer to interview a candidate and make hiring decisions often wins, and most health systems simply cannot interview fast enough. Most recruitment teams have limited bandwidth and cannot process 100% of their applicant flow in a timely manner.

Incredible Health built Lyn to change that equation entirely. Lyn proactively sells the employer’s unique value proposition and discusses multiple roles during a single interview, covering clinical qualifications, licensure, shift preferences, years of experience, and more. It operates 24/7, including nights, weekends, and holidays, meeting candidates on their schedule rather than forcing them to wait for a recruiter’s availability. Hospitals, surgery centers, and home health organizations using Incredible Health save an average of $5 million annually per facility by reducing vacancy rates and replacing expensive temporary labor with permanent hires, faster.

The Impact We’re Seeing

Across our employer partners, Lyn is delivering outcomes that fundamentally reshape how health systems hire:

• 87% of candidates who begin an interview with Lyn complete it, 8x higher than the 10% completion rate seen with traditional manual methods.
• 75% of candidates complete their interview within 24 hours of applying, compared to a 13-day industry average for first-round interviews.
• Interviews are completed 6.5x faster (2 days vs. 13 days), ensuring vacancies are filled before they impact patient care, employee turnover, or increased premium labor costs.
• Average hiring times reduced by 30% for permanent healthcare workers, directly reducing reliance on expensive overtime and premium pay, while ensuring quality patient care is maintained.
• 800+ hours reclaimed annually per recruiter by eliminating phone tag, voicemail follow-ups, and manual data entry
• 42% of interviews happen outside of business hours, capturing candidates that traditional methods miss entirely.
• 96% of candidates report positive sentiment, driven by the flexibility of interviewing on their own schedule.

These numbers reflect something deeper than efficiency. They reflect a hiring experience that respects both the healthcare worker’s time and the recruiter’s expertise. Lyn handles the volume and the speed so that hiring teams can focus on what they do best: building relationships, engaging hiring managers, and closing top candidates.

From Static Database to Always-On Hiring Engine

Now, AI voice agent Lyn can live inside the ATS. Here’s how it works:

• Automatic trigger: The moment a candidate reaches a designated ATS stage, Lyn initiates outreach immediately, including nights, weekends, and holidays.
• Multi-job interviews in a single call: In one conversation, Lyn interviews a candidate for multiple open roles, maximizing every touchpoint, expanding opportunities, and increasing match likelihood without additional recruiter coordination.
• Proactive selling and context-aware interviews: Using the candidate’s resume and ATS job descriptions, Lyn asks targeted questions tailored to the role, facility, and required clinical specialties, while proactively selling the employer’s unique attributes, perks, and benefits. 
• Structured write-back: After each interview, Lyn automatically pushes a structured data package to the candidate’s ATS profile: a polished summary, interview recording transcript and audit, and a status update.
• Custom field mapping: Lyn populates the specific fields hiring teams rely on, including years of experience, license status, and shift preference, keeping internal reports accurate without manual entry.
• Zero IT burden and full compliance: Incredible Health’s secure, pre-built connectors are designed for healthcare IT and set up in under one day. Workday customers benefit from Innovation Partner status, meaning pre-vetted connectors that reduce risk and accelerate deployment. The product is fully compliant with local, state, and federal AI hiring regulations nationwide.

Recruiters wake up to decision-ready candidate files instead of a backlog of unreturned calls and unaddressed applicants. There are no new dashboards to learn, no separate logins, and no extra tools.

What This Means for Workday Customers

As part of this expansion, we’re excited to announce that Incredible Health was named a Workday Innovation Partner. This means we’ve been pre-vetted by the Workday Partner Support Team for reliability, security, and fit. Our integration is listed on the Workday Marketplace, and Workday customers benefit from pre-built connectors that reduce risk and accelerate deployment, typically requiring less than one hour of active HRIS team time to set up.

For thousands of health systems, ATS integration and AI voice agents removes one of the last barriers to adopting AI-powered interviewing at scale.

What Comes Next

This integration is a foundation. As Lyn continues to evolve alongside Gale, our AI career partner for healthcare workers, we’re building toward a future where the entire journey of building impactful healthcare careers is more personalized and reliable for both healthcare workers and employers.

We believe when technology removes friction that slows down healthcare hiring, everyone benefits: healthcare workers land in the right roles sooner, recruiters spend their time on high-impact work, health systems reduce their risk of employee burnout and dependence on  premium labor, and most importantly, patients receive consistent care from stable, permanent teams.To learn more about the ways you can use our new AI tools, explore our offerings for employers and healthcare professionals. Whether you are looking to hire or be hired, we are here to help make the experience faster, more personalized, and more reliable for every healthcare worker and employer.