The healthcare industry has been historically cautious and slow in adopting new technologies. Today, it faces a critical need for reinvention as patients expect more personalized, tech-enabled care and as digital-first players enter the market. Rising costs, talent shortages, and tightening regulations add to this urgency. Healthcare organizations are at risk of falling behind if they fail to evolve – adopting a SaaS mindset is essential to ensure that they do not.
A SaaS mindset is a way of thinking that’s focused on delivering continuous value to customers through software – not as a one-time product, but as an ongoing service. In traditional software, a company builds a product, sells it, and moves on. In SaaS, there is a long-term relationship with the users, underscoring the importance of thinking differently about the product, the team, and the customers altogether.
The SaaS mindset is not just about using SaaS tools, but thinking and building like a vertical SaaS company. It’s a shift from one-off solutions to scalable, repeatable, and healthcare-native platforms. Executed correctly, this mindset frees up teams to focus on differentiation to deliver better care, smarter operations, and a more personalized experience.
The Reality of Inaction
According to Deloitte, accelerated digital transformation is the issue most likely to impact global health systems in 2025.
Failing to adopt a SaaS mindset can leave healthcare organizations lagging in this transformation and struggling to meet the evolving expectations of patients and providers. They risk wasting valuable development resources on rebuilding tools that don’t offer a competitive edge, while also becoming more vulnerable to security threats due to outdated platforms. Without the agility provided by SaaS, maintaining compliance becomes harder, increasing the risk of regulatory penalties. Additionally, these organizations can fall behind competitors already using SaaS to scale and operate smarter and faster.
Put simply, those who don’t adopt a SaaS-first approach risk being outpaced, not just by startups and disruptors, but by traditional peers who’ve made this mindset shift.
What It Takes to Adopt Vertical SaaS – And Why It’s Worth It
Adopting a vertical SaaS solution in healthcare often means rethinking legacy systems and enabling interoperability across platforms like EHRs, billing systems, and lab infrastructures. While this integration can be complex, it is essential.
To address integration challenges, many organizations turn to third-party vendors or solutions. This can accelerate implementation while ensuring compliance with critical regulations such as HIPAA and HITECH. Additionally, while concerns around data privacy, security, and system downtime are valid, modern SaaS platforms are designed with these challenges in mind, offering robust encryption, redundancy, and failover mechanisms. Rather than being a roadblock, these considerations are part of building a future-ready healthcare environment.
For organizations willing to make the shift, the payoff is significant: scalable infrastructure, lower operational overhead, improved patient experience, and the ability to innovate faster than ever before.
Healthcare Organizations Can Win If They Adopt a SaaS Mindset
When a healthcare organization decides that it wants to adopt a SaaS mindset, it can put itself in a strategic position – from better security and user experience to overall technology maintenance. For example, with a vertical SaaS structure, integrations across various systems (e.g., external systems, API-based platform integrations, etc.) become easier. Additionally, with the deployment of an AI-based solution, automation becomes more efficient.
In one instance, our customer – a healthcare organization – wanted to deploy an AI agent to help its patients schedule doctor appointments. To do so, the agent needed to seamlessly retrieve personal information from the doctor’s office’s database, offer tailored recommendations to the patient for doctors across different departments, and automatically dispatch confirmation emails to patients.
Using Azure Copilot studio integrated with various platforms such as Microsoft Teams and web portals, the AI agent could update the database in runtime and pull the necessary information for the patient. Instead of using resources to build an app or platform independent of other technology, the utilization of Azure Copilot studio, Microsoft Teams, and others enabled this healthcare organization to utilize already-built solutions that they were able to tailor to their own needs. This resulted in a 60% reduction in manual effort for appointment scheduling. It also enhanced user experience by providing quick and accurate doctor recommendations, leading to a 40% increase in patient satisfaction. The automated confirmation process reduced administrative workload by 50%, allowing the healthcare organization to focus on higher-priority tasks.
As another example, we helped a healthcare software technology company provide cloud-based EHR, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement tools, which can be used by healthcare organizations and are specifically built for the healthcare industry.
While the benefits of adopting a SaaS mindset can be profound, if a healthcare organization chooses to forgo this option, its digital adoption efforts will lag. Maintaining legacy technology systems can adversely affect performance and scalability, and can also be expensive to maintain. What’s more, it can be difficult to integrate legacy systems with AI and machine learning strategies, as these technologies require modern infrastructures and high levels of compute power to operate. Lastly, newer SaaS products largely encapsulate features that allow businesses to operate with regulatory compliance and in secure formats, enabling them to truly provide unmatched user experiences (for patients, staff, and any other users).
Sanjeev Dhawan
Sanjeev Dhawan is Vice President of Healthcare for R Systems.
