Healthcare Operations Summit 2025
Change Management & Technology Can Help Resolve Long-Standing Operational Challenges

Operational Processes Need to Be Enhanced Before Using Technology to Mitigate Challenges

Provider and vendor leaders agree that as organizations focus on strong change management for operational efficiency, operational processes need to be fixed first; technology can be a catalyst for improvement but only when paired with clean data, standardized processes, and cultural alignment. This section highlights where summit attendees see the greatest opportunities to refine operational processes.

Challenges That Inhibit Operational Efficiency & Best Practices for Mitigating Them

Challenge	Best practice
Recruitment of new hires
Factors that greatly limit effective hiring are skill mismatches, candidate no-shows, and overwhelming technology.	Insights from predictive analytics and AI can help organizations forecast staffing needs and ensure they market roles to tech-savvy candidates.
Employee retention
Inconsistent employee recognition and resistance to change often lead to increased turnover rates.	To increase employee retention, people need to feel seen. Creating an engaging work environment with high trust can address employees’ psychological needs, and when effectively rolled out, recognition programs can often improve retention better than just increased compensation. Use employee/peer recognition tools (e.g., Snappy) and transparent scheduling to give staff control over their jobs and encourage them to lift others.
Employee burnout & satisfaction
Burnout is caused by many factors, including a lack of structured recovery time for employees.	Healthcare leadership has a responsibility to step in and create structures to support employee self-care. Provider attendees reported that they successfully reduced burnout by limiting the number of shifts clinicians can take and supporting employees’ long-term goals. Programs like AI-based workload tracking and purpose-driven sabbaticals can help support staff well-being.
Worforce scheduling & HR processes
Scheduling and HR processes can be disjointed or might not account for all relevant factors, leading to employee frustration.	Scheduling processes need to account for patient acuity, discharge timing, and other factors. Effective capacity orchestration also means avoiding conflicts (e.g., overlapping activities, testing, patient intake, discharge) during peak hours. Reducing the number of HR platforms used or moving to a unified HR platform can further streamline the user experience as well as reduce bias and manual data entry errors.

OPERATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Technology Can Provide Strong Outcomes in Key Operational Areas

To support their operational processes, healthcare organizations turn to technology solutions that enhance, not complicate, the human work experience. Many provider attendees say they have seen strong ROI from a few key technologies. Most commonly, they report seeing financial outcomes from RTLS tools, improved efficiency and clinician well-being from ambient speech, automated ordering from RPA, and more appropriate bed utilization from patient intake management.

Key Technology Opportunities & Best Practices to Support Operations

IT stack reduction: Healthcare organizations increasingly prioritize enterprise-first strategies to reduce integration complexity and achieve cost savings; however, they also recognize that no single platform can do everything. The most successful technology strategies focus on platform standardization and selectively include third-party solutions that can (1) offer key innovations, (2) be rolled out quickly, and (3) drive a concrete ROI.

Continuity of care: Being able to track the whole patient journey is key to delivering quality care. While some healthcare organizations can acquire primary care and post–acute care settings to better facilitate continuity of care, that is not an option for most. Using tools that leverage TEFCA or other networks is a more realistic option for organizations to achieve care continuity. These tools can help by sending event-driven notifications (e.g., for admission, transfer, or discharge) and providing handoff templates. AI can help predict future needs regarding staff and bed capacity.

Hardware/asset tracking: Healthcare organizations need to have visibility into where hardware and other assets are, and establishing a unified tracking feed will help reduce losses. Summit attendees also suggested implementing RFID for high-value items (over $25) and creating a master item list to further increase transparency.

Materials management: Several summit attendees, especially those from larger organizations, noted that using technology to streamline materials management is the biggest near-term opportunity for cost savings. By integrating supply chain data into a single ERP solution, healthcare organizations could better identify waste and make needed changes. Many also see materials management as a good use case for AI as it can eliminate preference card variations and compare contract terms year over year.

Compliance management: Workforce compliance processes are a strength for most healthcare organizations. Looking toward the future, summit attendees see compliance as a low-visibility, high-impact opportunity for automation and are considering AI-enabled systems that can further streamline regulatory complexity.

AI & Operational Efficiency

AI tools have a lot of potential to reduce friction, streamline repetitive tasks, and foster connection within operational processes—especially scheduling, patient intake, documentation, and discharge workflows. Summit attendees emphasized that AI tools need to be grounded in clean data and strong governance and that organizations should prioritize high-impact and high-value use cases.

For example, some attendees reported seeing a very clear ROI from using AI for supply chain. KLAS Arch Collaborative data also shows that ambient speech is very effective at increasing documentation efficiency and reducing clinician burnout (see the following chart).

Despite its potential, AI is still inconsistently adopted, emphasizing the importance of cultural adoption and leadership readiness. Healthcare leaders must be brought into AI pilots early to build consensus, examine the current state, and ensure long-term scalability.

Healthcare Organizations Want Prescriptive Support from EHR Vendors to Address Technology Challenges & Improve Operational Efficiency

Healthcare organizations need EHR vendors that provide not only strong operational technology but also structured best practices for reducing solution complexity and user burden. Summit attendees emphasized that vendors should focus on helping their customers in the following ways:

Standardize data fields and workflows: Standardization is becoming more of a priority for healthcare organizations, as customized solutions can delay upgrades, hinder user adoption, and complicate data sharing. EHR vendors should partner with their healthcare customers and other vendors to standardize data fields and workflows so that different systems can still use the same language.

Design for workflow efficiency and time savings: Build solutions with a focus on clinician time reduction and task completion rather than clicks or features; eliminate the need for after-hours documentation.

Establish open, practical interoperability: Provide robust and well-documented APIs, support computable data (not just CCD dumps), and enable safe bolt-in partner ecosystems. Ensure data export and import processes are simple and won’t lose data.

Provide best-practice playbooks and benchmarking: Deliver prescriptive configurations, adoption scorecards, and variance insights out of the box and prior to the implementation.

Develop agentic AI with guardrails: Create order-entry, coding, and scheduling automations equipped with audit trails, human controls, and measurable ROI instrumentation.

FEDERAL IMPACTS ON HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS