September 10, 2026 — This October, the International Federation of Healthcare Engineering (IFHE) World Congress brings operational experts from some of the country’s leading health systems to one stage to present solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing healthcare facilities today.
Scheduled presenters represent health systems reporting more than 78 million annual patient visits or encounters.
Taking place October 17-20, 2026, in New Orleans, the event offers a global perspective on what’s working in healthcare facilities today — and what’s coming next. Hosted by the Association of Medical Facility Professionals (AMFP), the U.S. representative to IFHE, co-located with the Healthcare Design (HCD) Conference + Expo, it puts an extraordinary concentration of expertise spanning four continents in one venue.
This mix of perspectives is what makes the IFHE World Congress more than a collection of individual sessions. Healthcare facilities leaders from Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Burundi, and across the Americas will bring perspectives shaped by different healthcare systems, cultures, and environments, creating a genuinely global conversation about where the field is headed.
Among other highlights, the session “Two Hemispheres, One Patient: A Global Conversation on the Future of Healthcare Design” brings respected architects Ray Pentecost and Fabio Bitencourt together to compare insight from North and South America and consider what comes next for healthcare design. Their candid cross-continental dialogue will explore how human-centered design, sustainability, resilience, and emerging technologies are converging to reshape the patient experience worldwide.
The session “$2 Trillion Invested: Why Is the Average Operating Margin Between 1-3%?” reveals how healthcare systems across the world are responding to the pressure to modernize facilities, adopt AI, and transform care while operating on razor-thin margins. Charles Aunger, Group Chief Information Officer at American Hospital Dubai, alongside Jess Langerud, principal program manager with UCI Health, Harvard Senior Executive Fellow Melinda Deholl, and TOCCorp CEO David Tibi will highlight solutions health systems are using to turn transformation into measurable value.
Jen Rodesta, Executive Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, for Children’s Health, will draw on her experience leading development of a transformative pediatric campus in “Future-Ready Healthcare Campuses by Design.” Alongside fellow panelists, Rodesta will explore how flexible, adaptable spaces can respond to new models of care and emerging technologies. Children’s Health leaders Nick Barber and Susan Fowler will extend that conversation in a session focused on simplifying the complexity of mega-project campus development.
The question of how to balance the speed of standardization with the demand for flexibility takes center stage in “Flexibility, Standardization, and the Cost of Overdesign.” Mohammad Alai, Director of Design, AdventHealth; Josh King, Vice President of Facilities Planning and Development, Appalachian Regional Healthcare; and Lynn Murphy, Associate Vice President UK HealthCare Facilities Planning, University of Kentucky Healthcare, will share practical strategies for protecting budgets while creating environments that can adapt to the future of care.
Jonathan Cogswell, Vice President, Design and Construction, Northwell Health, and Curtis Skolnick, System Director, Real Estate Strategy-Portfolio Healthcare Planning, CommonSpirit Health, alongside Melissa Kiefer, Vice President, Strategy with Suffolk Construction, will offer strategies to build trust across teams to navigate construction and operational challenges. “The Infrastructure of Trust: Engineering the ‘Big Blue Chair’ Protocol” explores how to engineer clear escalation pathways into operations to strengthen collaboration between clinical, facilities, and vendor teams.
Together, these voices and others make the IFHE World Congress an opportunity to hear not just from individual experts, but from a global community actively solving the problems healthcare facilities face today. To register, and to learn more about educational sessions, visit AMFP/IFHE.
