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K2 Collaborative Summit 2026
Aligning Payers, Providers & Technology Partners Around Measurable Healthcare Impact
Author
Mac Boyter
Author
Aurene Wilford
The goal of KLAS’s K2 Collaborative is to drive meaningful change in healthcare by facilitating collaboration between payer organizations, healthcare organizations, and technology vendors. In May 2026, the K2 Collaborative hosted its sixth annual Payer/Provider Summit, in which 189 industry leaders from payer, healthcare, and vendor organizations came together to align on strategy, develop shared accountability, and highlight innovation success stories. This report provides an overview of the summit’s highlights.
"The question is how we bring more value to the patient . . . in new and innovative ways and stop doing things we have done for a long time that don’t make sense anymore in the current paradigm, like things we are doing in patient check-in, patient engagement, revenue cycle management, or claims processing. . . . [We must] consider the patient perspective. With rules evolving and policies evolving, we can make things better.” —David Lee, summit panelist/attendee, Leavitt Partners
The Current Reality: Systemic Fragmentation Is Now a Strategic Risk
The summit framed 2026 as a year of margin compression, staffing constraints, rising drug and medical costs, quality pressures, consumer dissatisfaction, and expanding federal requirements. Payers and providers are under converging pressure but often respond through disconnected strategies. The result is an operating environment where both sides need efficiency. Yet, rather than reducing administrative burden, many technology investments just create new queues, portals, exceptions, and reconciliation work.
In other words, the core issue payer organizations and healthcare delivery systems face is systemic fragmentation:
Clinical data is fragmented across EHRs, HIEs, labs, proprietary extracts, and chart-retrieval workflows
Prior authorization and denials remain fragmented across payer-specific rules and provider-specific workarounds
AI investment is fragmented across competing financial objectives, which can escalate distrust if not governed around shared use cases
The question is therefore not whether to digitalize, but whether each investment actually reduces friction at the point of care and creates a measurable operating model that earns trust across the healthcare value chain. Facing these challenges requires payers and providers to understand their strategic challenges (operational, administrative, and financial), standardize processes, and operationally align on solutions that realize an ROI for both parties.
“Operational alignment isn’t something payers and providers can achieve alone. It requires transforming together and bringing patients along as partners in achieving better outcomes.” —Anna Taylor, VP Population Health and VBC, MultiCare Health System
What Is Working in 2026: Collaboration Models That Reduce Burden & Build Trust
Summit attendees discussed what is working in 2026 and the implications for healthcare leaders
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Examples include care gaps surfaced before and during visits, prior authorization guidance provided at ordering, decision letters returned digitally, and clinical evidence sent back without duplicate portal work. |
View this as an operating-design principle, not a technology preference. Workflows that require staff to leave the EHR, rekey data, chase faxes, or reconcile delayed reports will underperform even if they are technically digital. Success should be measured by avoided touches, cycle-time reduction, staff confidence, and faster patient care. |
Streamlined/automated workflows that reduce shared administrative burden and embed payer intelligence into native provider workflows
Strategic context
Implications for leadership
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Successful initiatives do not treat data quality as a one-time cleanup or an IT-only task. They use recurring payer-provider-vendor meetings, shared local dashboards, standardized validation, escalation paths, EHR vendor engagement, and continuous monitoring to build trust in the data—providers disengage when payer guidance appears unreliable, and payers hesitate to automate when evidence is incomplete. |
Focus more on governance that addresses and aligns on standardization and data quality by assigning accountable owners for attribution, gap logic, sensitive-data suppression, measure validation, and exception handling before scaling any data-exchange program. |
Treating data quality as a shared business discipline
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Begin with a limited geography, service line, member cohort, or workflow before moving to broader rollout. This discipline allows teams to validate performance, iterate, gather frontline feedback, correct data defects, and build a repeatable playbook before expanding. |
Scale only after the workflow has earned minimum viable trust, then move courageously. Executive sponsors should require clear exit criteria for pilots, including reliability, adoption, administrative savings, user satisfaction, clinical impact, and a plan for expanding without re-creating custom workstreams. |
Ensuring scalability by starting small, proving value, then moving courageously
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Delayed annual incentives (HEDIS, etc.) rarely change daily behavior, especially when staff are already managing multiple payer portals, gap lists, and manual outreach tasks. Stronger models tie compensation, shared savings, or micro-incentives to discrete clinical actions that can be completed in workflow and tracked transparently. |
Payers could fund programs that reduce provider burden, while providers could use incentives to reinforce consistent care-gap closure, documentation, transitions, and patient outreach. Both sides should report ROI in operational, administrative, and financial terms that executives can manage (e.g., cost per avoided authorization touch, reduced chart chase, faster decision-making, readmission reduction, and member/patient retention). |
Aligning incentives to near-term actions
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Payer and provider AI investments can become adversarial if one side uses automation primarily to deny, appeal, code, or optimize revenue against the other. |
Target AI first at shared pain points, such as policy retrieval, authorization preparation, discharge education, member navigation, denials root-cause analysis, contract clarity, and documentation completeness. AI should make rules easier to understand and workflows easier to complete. Human oversight is still required (e.g., to review for adverse decisions, auditability, explainability, and outcome monitoring). |
Using AI to de-escalate payer-provider friction and the AI arms race and use it for mutual ROI
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Culture, workforce, and change management are not nice-to-haves; they are prerequisites for adoption. Even the best data exchange or prior authorization solution will fail if frontline users do not trust it. |
Communicate the why. Adoption will be an issue if teams cannot see how new workflows reduce work. Change management should include early shadowing, frontline feedback loops, role-based training, visible executive sponsorship, and rapid issue resolution. Measure adoption with the same discipline applied to technical go-lives. |
Treating governance, change management, and associated training and empowerment as infrastructureWhat Must Happen Next: Executive Actions for Payers, Providers & Policymakers
Payer & Provider Action Items for the Next 12 Months
Priority for Healthcare Executives: Build a Clinical-Data Operating Foundation
- Create a centralized approach to clinical data, documentation, care gaps, and evidence exchange so payer collaboration is not rebuilt practice by practice or contract by contract
- Assign operational owners for data quality and embed payer-facing tasks in the EHR wherever possible
- Make frontline adoption a design requirement; the best executive strategy will fail if it increases clicks, duplicate entries, or after-visit cleanup
Priority for Payer Executives: Make Rules Computable, Timely & Usable
- Publish benefit, network, policy, and authorization requirements in formats that can be consumed directly in provider workflows
- Reduce payer-specific exceptions that create extra provider work, and fund shared data feeds where the payer benefits from better quality, risk, or utilization outcomes
- Prioritize transparency around gap closure, authorization status, denial rationale, and ROI so provider partners can trust the signal and act on it quickly
Payers & Providers Must Govern the Work as a Shared Business Process
- Create payer-provider governance councils for attribution, data quality, workflow design, sensitive-data handling, AI use, and performance measurement
- Focus on use cases where both sides can win, including prior authorization, digital quality reporting, transitions of care, preventable ED utilization, medication workflows, and denials prevention
- Use shared dashboards and explicit escalation paths so the partnership is managed as an operating model, not a collection of disconnected projects
Technology Partners Must Act as Strategic Enablers of Shared ROI
KLAS recognizes technology partners as essential contributors to the healthcare ecosystem. By leveraging their domain knowledge and technical expertise, these partners are well positioned to serve as strategic advisors to payers and providers, supporting regulatory compliance, advancing best practices, sharing peer-driven success insights, optimizing workflows, and helping organizations achieve measurable progress and tangible ROI.
Potential Action Items for Regulators, Congress & Other Government Entities: Policy Priorities That Could Accelerate Operational Impact
Move from compliance to measurable operational value
CMS, ASTP/ONC, and other federal leaders could continue to build upon and clarify current TEFCA and QHIN rules in order to standardize APIs and interoperability requirements, but success should be judged by whether they reduce chart chasing, accelerate quality reporting, shorten authorization cycle times, and improve care coordination. Requirements should emphasize reliability, conformance testing, attribution standards, and real-world usability rather than technical availability alone. Congress can strengthen this transition by supporting oversight and funding that ties digital infrastructure to administrative simplification and patient access outcomes.
Reduce variation in prior authorization and documentation burden
Federal and state policy can help by establishing clearer baseline expectations for response timelines, criteria transparency, digital submission, evidence requirements, and status visibility. Policymakers should avoid reforms that simply create new payer-specific exceptions or narrow gold-card carveouts that are hard for providers to operationalize. The goal should be fewer workstreams, not just faster versions of the same fragmented process.
Set guardrails for AI in payment, access, and utilization management
Government can help prevent an AI arms race by requiring transparency, human oversight, and auditability and by monitoring for bias and inappropriate denial patterns in high-stakes workflows. Policy should encourage AI use cases that clarify rules, reduce administrative burden, and improve navigation while limiting opaque automation that shifts cost or work to the other side. A practical federal governance framework would give executives confidence to invest while protecting patients, members, and clinicians.
Support smaller providers, safety-net organizations, and smaller regional payers with fewer resources
Many of the most promising models require data infrastructure, analytics talent, workflow redesign, and vendor coordination that smaller organizations may not be able to fund alone. Grants, technical assistance, multipayer collaboratives, and safe-harbor guidance could help scale proven models beyond large integrated systems. This is especially important for Medicaid, rural, behavioral health, FQHC, and post–acute care settings, where fragmentation often has the greatest patient impact.
Building the 2027 K2 Summit Platform: Executive Forums, Peer Learning & Scalable Playbooks
There is opportunity to expand the K2 summit’s role as a safe place for payer-provider executive alignment:
- For providers, the summit can be a mutual safe meeting ground for CEO-to-CEO collaboration and executive-level discussion.
- For payers, KLAS hopes to establish a payer consortium where peers can compare pressures and strategies, share what is working, and discuss operational decisions tied directly to their roles. This forum should help payer leaders learn from peers, benchmark their approaches, and leave with practical ideas they can apply to cost management, member experience, provider collaboration, pharmacy strategy, quality performance, and operational effectiveness.
Summit attendees have demonstrated that collaboration works best when participants choose concrete use cases, create shared accountability, and measure results that matter to both sides. The next step for KLAS is to convert the K2 Points of Light† collaborations into repeatable playbooks—for example, standard implementation patterns, a BULK FHIR playbook, a prior authorization guide, executive scorecards, governance templates, and policy recommendations that can be used by organizations beyond the summit community.
Executive Questions That Should Shape the 2027 Agenda: Questions Every Payer & Provider Executive Should Be Asking
- Are our interoperability investments reducing abrasion, streamlining processes, and realizing ROI, or are they merely satisfying mandates?
- Are payer signals visible at the point of care, or do they still arrive after the opportunity has passed?
- Are AI tools clarifying decisions and reducing disputes, or are they increasing churn and distrust?
- Are pilots designed with the governance, data quality, and change-management discipline required to scale?
- Are we doing all we can to align with payers/providers for overall improvement in patient care?
The organizations that answer these questions honestly will be best positioned to improve efficiency, access, quality, ROI, and trust across the payer-provider relationship.
† KLAS’s annual K2 Collaborative Points of Light awards celebrate successes—or “points of light”—that payers, providers, and healthcare IT vendors have achieved by working together in collaboration to lower costs, streamline administrative processes, and enhance the patient, provider, and payer experience. In 2026, 24 partnerships were awarded a Points of Light award. A case study on each is available in the full Points of Light report.
Writer
Elizabeth Pew
Designer
Natalie Jamison
Project Manager
Amanda Wind
This material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2026 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.