Health UnaBASHEd: Before the Data, Know the Question: with Cheryl Pammer & Mikhail Golovnya

On this special LIVE from HIMSS 2026 Gil is joined on the conference floor for a conversation that cuts against the conference's AI hype cycle. His guests Cheryl Pammer, Head of Insights, and Mikhail Golovnya, Senior Advisory Data Scientist, both of Minitab, bring something rare to a floor dominated by new entrants: fifty years of institutional memory in applied analytics. From their origins powering the Six Sigma quality revolution at GE and Motorola, to their 2017 acquisition of Salford Systems and its machine learning expertise, Minitab has been doing what the industry just started calling AI long before the term took hold. The conversation covers how the same disciplined, data-first thinking that optimized turbines and financial services workflows is now being applied to hospital operations, predicting patient falls, ranking post-surgical care providers, modeling ER throughput, and reducing readmissions. The throughline is a warning as much as a promise: the tools are mature, the opportunity is enormous, and the single biggest obstacle remains what it has always been, organizations that collect the wrong data, for the wrong reasons, before they have ever defined the problem they are trying to solve. To stream our Station live 24/7 visit www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com or ask your Smart Device to “….Play Healthcare NOW Radio”. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen