Health systems must navigate constant change. Consolidation, transformation, staffing shortages, administrative headaches and much more. It’s a lot.
Add to this the disparate operational technologies that bog down clinicians and increase cybersecurity risks. While there is no magic fix, standardization is a game changer for operational efficiency and caregiver satisfaction. To achieve standardization, organizations are moving toward a unified platform strategy, streamlining their IT infrastructure to cut through the chaos.
These were the themes that emerged during a roundtable session hosted in collaboration with symplr at Becker’s Hospital Review 15th Annual Meeting. BJ Schaknowski, symplr CEO, and Amy Olson, Group Vice President Business Applications at Advocate Health, facilitated the conversation.
Three key takeaways:
- Having hundreds of technologies is burdensome to providers. According to the 2024 symplr Compass Study, 85% of clinicians report wasting at least one hour per day on tasks that could be reduced or eliminated with software. But at the same time, IT leaders report using at least 150 solutions for healthcare operations.
As a result, 80% of health systems see an opportunity to consolidate existing operations solutions. “Think about all of those different systems, and then something as mundane as logging in,” Ms. Olson said. “What is that burden on our clinicians?”
- Each solution is a cybersecurity risk. “We’ve got lots of bad actors knocking on our door,” Ms. Olson said. “Every system is a potential point of failure.”
- The next wave of healthcare technology platforms has arrived. Healthcare technology systems have evolved over time. They now include systems that are commonplace at health systems —EHRs, revenue cycle management systems among others — and emerging operational platforms that provide solutions for credentialing and risk assessment, patient data quality, access management, compliance management, spend management and more. A healthcare operations platform connects systems, solutions and processes in an interoperable way to drive efficiency.
As health systems continue to evolve amid growing complexity and uncertainty, they will increasingly need to rely on more unified platforms. To do this effectively, roundtable attendees highlighted the need to embrace continuous change management using key functional stakeholders to align people, processes, and technology – turning disruption into sustained improvement.
“This whole concept of platform evolution and standardization is not new to healthcare IT,” Mr. Schaknowski said. “We’ve seen it in the EMR, RCM and ERP. We believe the consolidation of nonclinical or operational workflows has created the opportunity for a healthcare operations platform.”
Learn more at symplr.com.
