SurgeryAI at InterSystems READY 2026

Anna Hlédiková, co-founder of SurgeryAI, spent the last week of April in Washington D.C. for InterSystems READY 2026.

What is InterSystems?

InterSystems was founded in 1978 in Boston and has since grown into one of the more quietly significant companies in healthcare technology, surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue. They build the data infrastructure that a lot of healthcare systems run on, things like InterSystems IRIS (a data platform used across healthcare, finance, and supply chain), HealthShare (for interoperability and shared care records), IRIS for Health (a FHIR-native platform), and TrakCare (a clinical and administrative system deployed in hospitals across more than 25 countries). If patient data is flowing reliably between systems somewhere, there's a reasonable chance InterSystems is involved.

What is READY?

READY is InterSystems' annual conference for its global technology community: developers, healthcare leaders, technology partners, and the people building products on top of InterSystems platforms. This year it ran April 27–30 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, with over 80 sessions covering agentic AI, RAG, vector search, Python, embedded development, and more.

The keynote this year came from Garry Kasparov, who spoke about his 1997 match against IBM's Deep Blue and what the shift from "man vs. machine" to human-AI collaboration actually looks like in practice. A refreshingly candid perspective, as it turned out.

The week wrapped with dinner at the National Air and Space Museum, where the President of InterSystems got behind a drum kit. Not something you see at most conferences.

SurgeryAI at the Startup Showcase

SurgeryAI was invited to present as part of the READY 2026 Startup Showcase, a programme for companies building on InterSystems technology.

The event also featured a mini agentic AI hackathon, where in three hours Anna and her team built a chatbot that helped patients prep for their upcoming surgical procedures by checking patient status against medical guidelines.

Why it was worth the trip

SurgeryAI is building tools that sit inside the same ecosystem InterSystems helps power - scheduling, EHRs, clinical workflows. Being in the room with the people shaping that infrastructure, and being invited to show what can be built on top of it, mattered. The connections made at READY 2026 are ones to be talking about for a while.