The State of Technology in Value-Based Care Report 2026

AI adoption is accelerating across value-based care, but governance, workflows, and readiness continue to lag.

Every organization surveyed now uses AI, but only 35% can document how they would catch an incorrect output, and just 13% of health plans describe themselves as well-prepared for current CMS audit conditions. Adoption has outpaced the governance, trusted data, and audit-ready workflows required to defend it. This second annual report, based on a Harris Poll survey of 200 payer and provider decision-makers with independent analysis by Mathematica, benchmarks value-based care technology maturity and identifies what separates organizations prepared for increasing regulatory scrutiny from those still closing the gap.

A sneak peek of what’s inside:

• Why value-based care contract volume keeps growing even as payers' mean VBC business share fell from 55.1% to 47.5%
• Why 98% of providers report having the right infrastructure while 94% still rely on manual VBC workflows
• Why data security has overtaken data quality as the top investment priority, and the 69-point gap it exposes on real-time data access
• What 93% of organizations now say about vendors overpromising on value-based care performance
• What separates the 13% of health plans that describe themselves as audit-ready as Payment Year 2020 RADV audits begin