From Communities to the U.S. Capitol: What NHIT Heard and What We’re Building Next
From Communities to the U.S. Capitol:
What NHIT Heard and What We’re Building Next
Across the 2026 Health Innovation Impact Tour, communities ranked trust first and workforce second. Those priorities are now helping shape a national agenda for health innovation.
By the National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT®)
On July 21, community leaders, clinicians, students, innovators, policymakers, and members of Congress filled the Senator Barbara A. Mikulski Room at the U.S. Capitol to take up the future of health and technology.
Who came mattered as much as how many. Throughout this year, NHIT® has worked to build something as important as the conversations themselves: trusted spaces where people can speak openly about the realities facing their communities and know that what they say will help shape the solutions intended to serve them.
The Legislative Summit was part of the 2026 NHIT Health Innovation Impact Tour, which has convened more than 100 organizations representing over 250,000 members. From Washington and Baltimore to Puerto Rico, NHIT has listened to communities, documented their priorities, and carried those priorities into conversations with national leaders.
The Summit was hosted through the courtesy of the Office of U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, in collaboration with the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
“I was delighted to welcome NHIT to the Capitol for the organization’s Legislative Summit,” said U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA). “As technology continues to transform the health care space, it is crucial that nobody be left behind—which is why conversations like this are so important.”
People came to the Capitol not only to listen, but also to be heard and help determine what comes next.
The Summit’s theme was Reimagining Health. Modernizing Care. It was never meant to be a single day of programming. It was designed to turn months of listening into action and carry community priorities from across the country into the halls of Congress.
Communities Ranked Trust First. Workforce Second.
At the Summit, NHIT released its Mid-Year Impact Report. Its central finding was not the one many people might expect. When asked what determines whether health innovation actually reaches them, communities did not lead with funding, broadband, or devices. They ranked trust first and workforce second.
That ordering should change how this work gets done. Trust and workforce are often treated as soft preconditions, addressed only after the physical and technical infrastructure is in place. The communities we heard from described them as the infrastructure itself. Without trust, tools are not used. Without a workforce drawn from and connected to the community, tools are not understood. Everything else follows.
“Every technology revolution creates two futures. One belongs to those invited to help build. The other happens to everyone else. For eighteen years NHIT has worked to put communities in the first one. That takes more than a pilot program. It takes a framework where data, workforce, and AI work together, and an ecosystem that communities help build, own, and benefit from,” said Luis Belén, Chief Executive Officer of NHIT.
Bringing Community Voices to Congress
Teri Weathers delivered Congressional Remarks on behalf of U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen. Congressman Johnny Olszewski of Maryland stepped away from House votes to address the gathering, reinforcing that equitable access to health innovation is gaining attention among national leaders.
“All Americans must have access to quality, affordable health care – regardless of a person’s ZIP code or resources. Yet too many communities, particularly those that have historically been underserved, continue to face barriers to care. I am grateful for NHIT’s work – helping to ensure communities have a voice from the start – and look forward to continuing to work together to build a health care system that serves all of our communities,” said U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).
Councilwoman Phylicia Porter of Baltimore, who partnered with NHIT on the May Roundtable, moderated the opening fireside conversation and identified the operational question underneath the discussion.
“We cannot talk responsibly about AI in health without first building community trust frameworks with real decision rights. The NHIT Legislative Summit showed that when we listen to rural and urban underserved communities first, the policy solutions become clear. I look forward to returning to Washington, D.C. in November to discuss next steps for our city, our state, and our nation,” said Councilwoman Porter.
The phrase to hold onto is real decision rights. Consultation is not the same as authorship, and communities can tell the difference.
Building the Workforce Communities Need
If communities rank workforce second only to trust, the next question is what NHIT is building in response. The answer is the NHIT INSPIRED AI Academy™.
Launched in 2023, the Academy prepares the next generation of public health leaders to work with AI and data. It connects students and early-career professionals with community health workers, academic institutions, clinicians, and industry mentors. Every Fellow contributes to a Public Health Capstone addressing a challenge identified by communities and NHIT’s collaborating partners. This connects workforce development directly to community priorities.
Two NHIT INSPIRED™ Fellows participated in a panel discussion and shared their hands-on Capstone experience working on the NHIT Data Fusion Center. That was not a classroom exercise. They contributed to NHIT’s own data infrastructure, which is the point of the model: the people being trained are the people building the systems. Standing in a room at the Capitol, describing work they had helped build, they answered the workforce question more directly than any argument about pipelines could.
This fall, a new national cohort of Fellows will work in teams on Capstone projects at the intersection of artificial intelligence, public health, and community innovation.
A National Platform for Action
The Summit brought together public officials, community leaders, academic institutions, healthcare organizations, and industry partners around a shared purpose. Together, these voices demonstrated NHIT’s role as a bridge between communities too often excluded from innovation and the institutions with the power to act.
“The evidence is clear: when research reflects our communities, science moves faster, data gets better, and medicine finally works for everyone,” said Quita Highsmith, Vice President of the Population Health Center of Excellence at Genentech, Lead Sponsor of the 2026 NHIT Health Innovation Impact Tour.
Michael “MJ” Jackson, Vice President and Global Head of Industries at Docusign and an NHIT board member, closed with a charge: “You cannot modernize care without empowering communities. Not studying them. Not just serving them. Empowering them, because communities know what they need. Our job is to hand back the pen. This work will be done with communities.”
Former U.S. Congresswoman Donna M. Christensen, MD, who has participated throughout this year’s work, described the method that connects the Tour to federal action.
“I have watched NHIT do this work for the better part of two decades, and what sets it apart is the order of operations: they go to communities first and come to Washington second. From the Congressional Roundtable in May, to Puerto Rico in June, to this Summit at the Capitol, the discipline holds: listen, document, then legislate. Now a new generation of Fellows is being prepared to carry that work forward. When we return to Congress in November with a Blueprint built from what communities actually said, it will not be one more report on a shelf. It will be a mandate,” said former Congresswoman Christensen.
Taken together, the Impact Tour, the NHIT INSPIRED AI Academy, and the forthcoming Blueprint create a pathway from community voice to trained talent, practical innovation, policy recommendations, and congressional action. Convening is where the work begins, not where it ends.
What Comes Next
The Tour continues with NHIT Community Health Innovation Summits in Memphis on October 8, in collaboration with the UT Health Sciences College of Nursing and the West Cancer Center & Research Institute, followed by Central Florida on October 22 and San Antonio on November 5.
NHIT will then return to Washington, D.C., on November 18, 2026, for the NHIT Congressional Briefing. There, NHIT will release a Blueprint drawn from the 2026 Health Innovation Impact Tour and from the more than 100 organizations, representing over 250,000 members, who informed it. The new cohort of NHIT INSPIRED AI Academy Fellows will present their team Capstone projects.
The findings also inform NHIT’s national policy priorities:
- Closing the clinician AI education gap
- Financing community health workers sustainably
- Designing evaluation into funding from the start
- Including U.S. territories in national health programs
If there is one lesson to take from July 21, it is the sequence: listen first, document what communities say, build the workforce from within the communities carrying the burden, and then go to Congress with priorities communities can recognize as their own. We will see you at one of the upcoming Summits, and in November.
Founded in 2008, NHIT engages underrepresented populations in the development and use of health information technology (HIT) to support and sustain health transformation and economic mobility. NHIT’s work is grounded in five pillars: Workforce, Innovation, Policy, Research, and Community.
#NHITSummit2026 · #ReimaginingHealth · #ModernizingCare
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