Practice-Ready AI: Nurse-Led Implementation, Governance, and Impact
The 2026 NKBDS conference will bring nurse leaders, educators, deans, and informatics executives, directly in charge of making AI an organizational priority, and ensuring safe, useful, and routine implementation. Through an implementation-science lens, this upcoming year’s conference will focus on the leadership imperatives that matter: governance and risk, workforce readiness, legal and regulatory mandates, and workflow redesign for clinical integration. Expect pragmatic sessions on shareable, comparable data and models, model provenance and benchmarking, plus hands-on activities. Attendees will leave the 2026 NKBDS conference with a nurse-led implementation charter and a clear adoption plan for their organization. Workgroups will show what’s working (and what’s not) to make data and models truly shareable and comparable across settings. A pre-conference AI-intensive and hands-on track will connect our long-standing community to the next wave of nursing-led implementation.
Thursday Keynote Leyla Warsame, MD, Associate Chief Medical Information Officer, M Health Fairview
Dr. Leyla Warsame is a physician informaticist and hospitalist committed to advancing equitable, data-driven healthcare. As Associate CMIO at M Health Fairview, she champions enterprise work in clinical decision support, AI implementation, and digital health transformation. She also serves as faculty in the University of Minnesota’s Clinical Informatics/HCMC Fellowship and contributed to the ACGME Clinical Informatics Milestones. Nationally, she contributes to the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) through her service on the DEI Task Force and Governance Committee, helping shape inclusive policies and strategic direction for the field. She also serves as a faculty in the AMIA Clinical Informatics board review course. She is engaged in AI research through the NIH-funded AIM-AHEAD initiative, where she contributes to the development of a federated network/pipeline to conduct ML/AI research. Dr. Warsame’s work reflects a deep belief in the power of technology, analytics and teamwork to transform care.
Friday Keynote Heidi Roop, PhD, Director, University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership
Please check back as we continue to update program information.