- Congress 2026 Registration Opens Oct. 8
- From Transactions to Transformation: Building Strategic Partnerships
- Be Recognized as a Leader: Volunteer With Your Local ACHE Chapter
Congress 2026 Registration Opens Oct. 8
With this year’s theme of Purpose in Motion, the ACHE 2026 Congress on Healthcare Leadership will be held Monday, March 2, through Wednesday, March 4, at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston.
Congress registration opens Wednesday, Oct. 8—which is also the day that attendees can begin reserving hotel rooms.
As the premier networking event of the year for healthcare leaders, Congress is the place to join over 7,000 of your colleagues, where you can form connections and find solutions to today’s challenges.
The opening session keynote speaker is Adam Grant, PhD, professor, management and psychology, The Wharton School. An organizational psychologist and bestselling author, Grant has been named one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers, focusing on optimizing team performance and unleashing creativity.
Attendees have the opportunity to earn up to 24 ACHE In-Person Education credits. View conference center and venue information here. Learn more about what Houston has to offer visitors here.
From Transactions to Transformation: Building Strategic Partnerships
As health systems face rapid innovation cycles and uncertain financial pressures, executive leaders are redefining partnerships—not as vendor relationships, but as strategic alliances that create shared value. This shift demands more than operational oversight; it requires a leadership mindset grounded in four core capabilities:
- Long-range insights: Looking beyond short-term return on investment to identify where innovation, scale and growth converge.
- Stakeholder alignment: Engaging clinical, operational and financial stakeholders early around shared goals and measurable outcomes.
- Adaptive leadership: Remaining agile amid complexity, co-creating solutions and evolving with market demands.
- Strategic infrastructure: Establishing partnership frameworks that ensure accountability, transparency and aligned performance metrics.
Today’s leaders are also rethinking how they engage with partners. It’s crucial to integrate external collaborators into the core of transformation to shape innovation pipelines and redesign care delivery models.
One example of this is Marcia Gainer, DNP, APRN, quality director, at Evara Health—one of the largest federally qualified health centers in Florida and the U.S., serving nearly 70,000 patients across 19 clinical sites. With more than a decade of experience in quality improvement, health equity, and preventive care, Gainer’s leadership in colorectal cancer screening has led to strategic partnerships, including with Exact Sciences. “Partnerships are more than collaboration—they are the heartbeat of transformation. When we unite with shared purpose and commitment, we can remove barriers, expand access and truly reimagine what health looks like for our communities,” said Gainer.
The most resilient health systems won’t just have advanced technologies or assets. They’ll have strong, deeply integrated partnerships led by executives who know how to make them transformative.
Exact Sciences, an ACHE Premier Corporate Partner, provided the content above.
Be Recognized as a Leader: Volunteer With Your Local ACHE Chapter
Take advantage of volunteer opportunities close to home, where you can develop crucial leadership skills. Local ACHE chapters offer opportunities to serve on committees and task forces.
Two ACHE members share their experiences and the value of serving as chapter leaders in this blog post. Christina G. Carney, FACHE, CEO, Shawnee Health, Carterville, Ill., and LCDR Raben B. Talvo, FACHE, U.S. Navy, relate how they got involved in their local chapters. They found volunteering to be a rewarding experience and a way to give back to the ACHE community. Learn more about benefits of participating in your local chapter and find your local chapter here.
