Richmond, Indiana-based Reid Health published an innovative technology annual report that’s garnered industry attention. In simple language accompanied by real-life examples, it explains how the IT department does more than provide reliable technology that works. It helps improve patient care, staff morale and saves precious time in emergencies.
The report was published by Muhammad Siddiqui, vice president and chief information officer for Reid Health, which is a comprehensive, non-profit regional health system serving east-central Indiana and west-central Ohio. Reid Health is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
Siddiqui, who presented the report at the CIO Summit in Chicago in July 2026, said he’s aware that every dollar allocated to technology competes with other important clinical and community needs, so he wanted to showcase the ROI driven by Reid’s investment in technology.
The report has also been praised for demonstrating ROI conservatively, including the methodology behind its calculations and focusing on cost avoidance and time efficiency, which gives the numbers greater credibility. Rather than simply declaring Reid’s technology efforts successful, the report’s contents are supported by outside validation, citing six national awards from organizations including CHIME, Epic, KLAS and the American Hospital Association
“This isn’t a marketing report. It’s an accountability report,” Siddiqui declared. “The board trusted us with resources. We have a responsibility to show what we intended to do with those, what we delivered and how we measured the results.”
Seeing the invisible
In February 2026, and for the second year in a row, Becker’s Hospital Review named Siddiqui as one of its hospital and health system CIOs to know. Citing his use of his role to drive innovation that directly benefits caregivers and patients, Becker’s reported that Siddiqui’s “leadership is built on cross-functional collaboration, thoughtful AI [augmented intelligence] governance and clear alignment with rural healthcare realities.”
Reid Health’s report accurately represents the positive consequences of technology through safer patient care, hours returned to physicians and their care teams, less friction and money saved. This work has also led to six national awards, moving ambient AI from pilot to production, saving 25,000 hours of documentation time for care teams and 99% uptime. Ultimately, the report tells IT’s own story in an easy-to-understand way, showcasing what the team did over the course of a year.
One of the reasons Siddiqui created the technology report was that the workings of IT departments tend to go unseen within their organizations. In fact, he said, “the better the technology team performs, the more invisible it becomes.”
Nobody thinks about the technology behind the scenes when the network is up and running, the EHR is available, security controls are in place and information reaches the right physician and care team. But, Siddiqui added, “That invisibility creates a challenge. If we don’t explain the work and what we do, the story can become about IT’s expense instead of its benefits.”
“We are not Cleveland Clinic or the Mayo Clinic with their financial resources or bench, but our mission is just as real,” he added. “In some ways it’s even more urgent. We’re largely rural and semi-rural. If someone in our community has a heart attack or stroke, there isn’t another hospital five minutes away. We want our staff, as well as our patients, to know how technology supports safer and easier care.”
The patient is the measure
Reid Health’s report frames the technology strategy around the patient experience. It opens with “The 3:00 a.m. Promise,” describing a patient with chest pain in rural Indiana arriving at the emergency department in the middle of the night.
“The patient doesn’t care what platform we’re using or where the data is hosted, or how many interfaces are working,” Siddiqui said. “The patient cares that the physician can see the medical history before he arrives, that the diagnostic systems are available, and whether the care team has all the pertinent information at their fingertips so treatment can begin immediately.”
Opening with a patient story instead of a dashboard drives home the premise that every number that follows ultimately serves the patient. And that technology used at 3:00 a.m. is not really about IT, but patient care.
“One of the biggest mistakes I have seen in our industry is measuring success by how much technology goes live and whether it does so on time and within budget,” Siddiqui noted. “But that’s not the measure.”
Instead, the measure should be how technology helped or hindered the people using it throughout the day. Were there more clicks, alerts, work or confusion? If so, the processes may have been successful technically, but not operationally.
“If the old computer took them three minutes to send an e-mail but the new ones take them a half an hour, that is not a success,” Siddiqui stated. “Technology should give back at the moment it matters the most.”
Chasing problems, not AI
As in every industry today, AI is addressed too.
“We should not chase AI. Instead, we should chase the problem that AI may help us solve,” Siddiqui said, noting that technology is only as impressive as its ability to make care safer, easier, more personal and provide more of the human touch for patients.
In support of that, Siddiqui reported that Reid Health’s system has allowed more face-to-face time with patients. Eye contact and genuinely active listening, instead of gazing at a monitor and typing during a visit, allows doctors to focus on the patient more directly.
“That,” said Siddiqui, “was the problem we were trying to solve.”
Reid Health’s use of ambient AI is not to implement flashy new technology for its own sake, but to alleviate the documentation burden that took time away from patients and extended physicians’ workdays to “pajama time,” or evenings at home after dinner with their families, on their laptops and finishing their charting.
“We started with one physician, who also happened to be my own primary care physician, and also our informatics leader,” he said, noting that physician “became a clinical champion for us because she experienced the value herself.”
“Within the first week, other physicians were knocking on my door asking when they could get access to ambient AI so they can start using it,” Siddiqui noted.
They have extended the use of ambient AI to all retail specialties, the emergency department and now the nursing staff. It has been so successful that he even got a call from a physician’s husband who said, “Listen, whatever you have done, she is able to come home on time and is spending time with the kids and we have dinner together.”
“For me, this is what success looks like,” Siddiqui said.
AI has also been brought to bear on the complexities of prior authorization and paperwork overload. Decades of building digital systems of records, while essential, have also created complexity and administrative burden in healthcare. Add to that the complexities of the U.S. payer system, including CMS, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as prior authorization.
AI and automation, however, present opportunities to reduce that burden and remove some of the complexity. Reid Health sees significant opportunities to use the technologies in clinical documentation, patient access, revenue cycle, capacity management, clinical decision support and communication. The health system is also exploring the use of AI agents to perform routine work that might otherwise require two or three people.
“I really encourage other healthcare systems to create similar reports,” Siddiqui advised. “In addition to providing valuable information to the staff, it also promotes satisfaction among the board, who can see that its investment in technology can directly improve patient care and staff satisfaction.
“It also promotes better engagement for the technology team, which, in turn, attracts and helps retain the best people,” he added.
Ask four questions when implementing
“We cannot afford technology that looks good in a board presentation, but does not really change the work,” Siddiqui said.
That is why his team at Reid Health puts four questions in front of every major technology initiative:
- Does it solve a real problem affecting our patients’ access and safety?
- Is the workflow ready to support that AI and is the data reliable?
- Do we have the right governance, security and operation ownership?
- How can we measure the value of the technology?
“Because the secret ingredient for Reid Health has always been our partnership with the operations team to help with all the implementation,” he said, emphasizing that “IT can open the door, a patient has to walk in to adopt that technology.”
From AI implementation to digital health adoption and EHR usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors.
That includes the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI, which works to ensure physicians help shape how AI is developed, implemented and regulated across the healthcare system, with patient safety and physician-led care remaining at the center of those efforts.
