2026 Chicago Booth Healthcare Conference Leadership Strategy and AI Limits in Healthcare

Healthcare Leadership and Decision-Making

With roles spanning clinical care, government, and private equity, Basu has operated at scale—overseeing billions in profit and loss and care delivery for millions of patients.

In conversation with Scott Meadow, the Kaplan McCormack Family Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Basu’s keynote focused on how leaders navigate complexity by combining domain expertise with structured decision-making.

“Early in your career, you want your domain expertise—be it engineering, medicine, finance, whatever your technical discipline—to be a 10 out of 10,” Basu said. “Success begets success and that gives you the expertise and credibility to expand into a broader interdisciplinary background, which will allow you to be a more effective leader as your career progresses.”

As responsibilities expand, he suggested, leadership increasingly requires deep understanding of how different stakeholders—clinicians, operators, investors, and patients—interact within the healthcare system. Leaders also need to integrate these stakeholders’ collective expertise and experience into a cohesive approach, what he calls “a three-dimensional decision-making apparatus.”

He also highlighted the importance of frameworks in managing complexity. “When I think about leadership, particularly in complex systems like healthcare, I tell all of our CEOs, ‘You don’t have to have my framework, but you do need a framework,’” Basu said. “It adds a level of structure and velocity. In environments like healthcare, where the variables are constantly changing, having that consistency in how you think becomes a real competitive advantage.”

His perspective reinforced a broader theme across the conference: Effective leadership in healthcare is not grounded in a single discipline, but requires the ability to move across domains and make decisions that account for multiple, sometimes competing, priorities.

Healthcare Strategy Amid Uncertainty

Lin closed out the conference with her keynote talk, offering a complementary perspective focused on strategy within large healthcare systems, particularly in environments defined by uncertainty and constraint.

With experience spanning frontline emergency medicine, academic leadership, and public health—including serving as president of the Chicago Board of Health—Lin brings a multidisciplinary perspective to redesigning care delivery in complex, resource-constrained environments. She focuses on improving healthcare access, equity, and long-term sustainability.

Her remarks centered on how organizations establish priorities and maintain alignment over time. “We don’t get to choose the level of certainty, but we do get to choose our principles, our priorities, and our people,” she said. “That is where our pathways forward actually begin.”

That framing underscored a key aspect of her approach to strategy: While external conditions may be unpredictable, organizations should still define how they respond by anchoring decisions in clear principles and priorities.

She also emphasized the discipline required to focus. In complex healthcare environments, where demands are constant and resources are limited, "It's very easy to add,” she said. “It’s very difficult to say no.”

Her remarks highlighted the importance of making deliberate trade-offs—deciding not only what to pursue, but what to deprioritize—in order to maintain strategic clarity.

Lin addressed the need for integrated thinking across healthcare systems. Strategy, she suggested, cannot be developed in isolation within individual functions. Instead, leaders must consider how clinical care, operations, finance, and community needs intersect, and design approaches that align across those dimensions.

In discussing organizational change, she emphasized that execution requires patience and discipline. “Change is very easy to say,” Lin said, “but change is really, really hard.” Still, she left little doubt that it is worth pursuing—and that organizations willing to do the disciplined work of transformation are the ones best positioned to shape the future of healthcare.

Student Takeaways on Healthcare Innovation

For students, the structure of the conference—combining panels, keynotes, and networking—provided a way to engage with multiple facets of the healthcare ecosystem in a single setting.

“The conference’s goal was to bring together leaders with different perspectives, because healthcare is complex—no one part can be understood in isolation, and understanding the nuance of how those moving parts interact is essential for effective leadership,” said Anastasia Kondyukh, a Full-Time MBA student who helped organize the event as a co-chair of the Healthcare Group. Coming to Booth after working as a drug discovery scientist at Eli Lilly, Kondyukh is now pursuing concentrations in healthcare and entrepreneurship.

Perspectives from industry leaders on integrating new technologies, managing cost pressures, and adapting to evolving regulatory and market conditions gave Kondyukh invaluable insights for her own startup, Vidnova Therapeutics, which focuses on advancing a microbiome therapeutic for liver disease.

The annual event is intentionally grounded in practical application, said Blake Dillow, a fellow HCG co-chair and Full-Time MBA student focusing on healthcare and finance. “We aim to have our conference rooted in pragmatic discussion around the problems that healthcare leaders are facing today. Attendees can walk away with a tangible and nuanced understanding of issues that they may face in their careers.”

For Ishaan Dayal, another Full-Time MBA student, the conference aligned closely with his academic and professional interests in healthcare strategy and emerging technologies.

“I learned about how AI is currently regulated and how it may be regulated in the future,” said Dayal, whose studies focus on healthcare, applied AI, and strategy. “It was interesting to hear the panelists discuss its limitations, particularly on the use for strategic problems.”

He also appreciated exposure to different aspects of the healthcare ecosystem, including startup activity and innovation in the Chicago market.

Overall, the conference reflected Booth’s approach to healthcare education—bringing together perspectives from business, medicine, and policy, and creating opportunities for students to engage directly with leaders working at the forefront of the industry.