How Clinicians Can Become the Ultimate Ambassador in Transforming Healthcare Operations 

Imagine this: you’re the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Information Officer, or even the hospital president and you can’t count how many software solutions your healthcare system is contracted for or budgeting for each year. Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. Now, take it a step further. That uneasy feeling creeps in because you have no idea if you’re fully protected against cybersecurity threats across all these unknown, recurring services. 

I recently heard about a small practice that held onto a legacy electronic medical record (EMR) to keep old patient records while already running a new EMR platform. It sounded harmless – until no one managed the outdated system, and they experienced a data breach. It’s a stark reminder that even the software we forget about can become a serious risk.  Indeed, the average healthcare organization harbors more than 150 software solutions to run a hospital’s day-to-day operations. This ever-expanding software catalog leads to fragmentation across all sides of the organization, hindering alignment between clinical, IT, and operational leaders, and ultimately prevents clinicians from providing timely, efficient care. 

However, there is a path forward from these challenges, and clinical leaders are at the center. Here’s how clinicians can help their organizations overcome operational silos and become a true ambassador for technology-driven operational excellence in healthcare. 

Identifying Breakdowns

According to the 2024 Compass survey, 85% of clinicians spend over an hour daily on administrative tasks that could be reduced with workflow software. This shows that, even though organizations have many technology options, clinicians don’t always have access to the tools they need to lighten their workloads. Additionally, just 57% of clinicians feel their hospital’s software helps them provide the best possible patient care, suggesting that when they do get software, it often doesn’t fully improve their workflows. 

Based on these findings, two conclusions are apparent: 

1. Clinicians should be more involved in an organization’s technology strategy from the onset  
2. Healthcare organizations require greater synergy across clinical, operational, and IT functions, but herein lies additional challenges

While 72% of clinicians want to be more involved in software purchasing decisions, 60% of IT leaders and 51% of operational leaders are cautious about involving clinicians in their organization’s software strategy, acknowledging the demands of their busy schedules. Without insight into each function’s technology needs, system fragmentation is only set to expand as each stakeholder prioritizes the challenges that most directly impact their role. 

The first step to remedying the situation is acknowledging that healthcare professionals are busy. Everyone is juggling multiple tasks daily, and it’s important to recognize this. Too often, we default to asking why others didn’t reach out for help. But we need to turn that around and ask ourselves why we’re not proactively reaching out to the IT team to offer our expertise in clinical IT, implementation, and adoption. When you see an opportunity to help, raise your hand. IT teams are always looking for subject matter experts to assist with making decisions that drive adoption—one of the most challenging aspects of implementing new technology.

That said, we also need to work harder from the IT side to engage the right clinicians in the decision-making process. It’s essential to get the right people involved to make the best decisions about new solutions. After all, no one will drive technology adoption better than the clinicians themselves. Clinicians need to be involved early, not just at the tail end of the process, to ensure that the technology chosen aligns with their needs and workflows.

Assessing Priorities

It’s fascinating what we’ve learned from staffing shortages in healthcare. Everyone wants flexibility – no night calls, no holidays, no weekends. That’s completely understandable, but it raises big questions about how we train and maintain the quality of care, especially for our nursing staff. 

Think about it: physicians go through years of training under direct and indirect supervision before they practice independently. Nurses, on the other hand, are often expected to jump straight into full-throttle care with minimal oversight. It’s not that nursing education isn’t strong – it absolutely is – but both doctors and nurses need time and experience to truly develop their skills. 

Have you ever chatted with a night hospitalist or an on-call nephrologist about the frustration of getting calls for non-urgent issues? It’s a common complaint and a clear driver of burnout. That said, I always encourage physicians to approach every call with kindness. If a nurse is reaching out, it’s because they need help. That moment of understanding can make a big difference. 

At the end of the day, we need to figure out how to better engage and retain our nursing teams while also attracting more physicians to the profession. The long-term success of our healthcare system depends on it. As expected, this multi-year battle to maintain high quality patient care among limited staff remains a key priority, with 51% of clinicians and 43% of operational respondents denoting burnout and staffing challenges as their top organizational threat. However, while staffing shortages remain at the forefront of organizational priorities, a more sinister trend is evolving in the background, and this issue is commanding the full attention of IT leaders. 

Cybersecurity experts denote 2023 as the worst year for ransomware attacks in healthcare, as a total of 725 large security breaches marked an unprecedented record. This trend appears to maintain trajectory, with 2024 marking cyber incidents of historic magnitude. Given the increased sophistication and complexity of healthcare cyberattacks, IT leaders find most of their attention (and understandably so) focused on security and detection, with 40% of IT leaders noting cybersecurity as the greatest threat to their organization. 

Split across priorities, here marks the beginning of a growing internal divide that may influence healthcare leaders to question which operational technology challenges should be called into focus, and which issues may be afforded lower rank. Ultimately, as both staffing shortages and cybersecurity threats have the potential to greatly impact patient care, healthcare leaders must adopt a balanced solution that addresses each challenge effectively. Thankfully, the data suggests this comprehensive solution is not only feasible, but highly effective. 

The Action Plan

With insight into where healthcare operations software underperforms for clinicians’ daily workloads and a better understanding of how organizational priorities are divided among teams, healthcare leaders can take steps in the right direction to bridge gaps, recalibrate software buying decisions, and realign teams. 

As an overwhelming majority of IT leaders surveyed (80%) agree, consolidating disparate systems and removing ineffective solutions is the first step to reducing operational inefficiencies. Clinicians have an integral role to play in this effort as many of the platforms requiring a “scrub down” are involved in patient care, such as patient messaging systems, EHRs, and billing/revenue cycle management technologies. Consequently, clinicians are often the first to know if patients are receiving multiple notifications from a variety of automated platforms or if patient intake systems are uploading incomplete medical data to EHRs and can flag these solutions to IT and operational teams for further investigation. 

To the benefit of IT leaders, this consolidation effort is also a valuable practice to help pinpoint system vulnerabilities found in outdated platforms and even discover unauthorized or shadow IT solutions that team members have downloaded to work around system inefficiencies. Lastly, given the high expense that numerous software solutions garner, consolidation will give operations leaders a reason to smile as teams consult vendors for more cost-effective options or elect to remove redundant systems altogether. 

While system consolidation is a tool to address immediate operational silos, a more extensive collaboration strategy is necessary for long-term operational excellence. The key to this is leveraging clinicians’ dual involvement in both external and internal tasks, for a bottom-up view of how systems impact internal teams and, ultimately, patients. A few months ago, I sat in on a demonstration for a scheduling solution, and something stood out to me. The conversation turned to the interactions between a nocturnist and an ED physician trying to manage the workflow of admitting a patient during the night shift. It struck me—only this particular combination of physicians truly understands the unique challenges of that process. 

Getting them in a room together to talk about a scheduling tool that helps identify who’s on call, a communication platform for relaying admission messages, or even the process for activating a rapid response team was incredibly valuable. Their insights are key to designing tools that actually work in real-world scenarios. In addition, as the near future invokes more complex considerations regarding the ethical use of advanced technology, such as AI in healthcare, clinicians’ deep understanding of patient autonomy and informed consent will help IT and operational leaders ensure that systems are secure, equitable, and transparent. 

New organizational demands in healthcare have placed the priorities of clinical, operational, and IT teams at a critical juncture. Instead of viewing these priorities as opposed, healthcare leaders have an opportunity to ensure organizational stability by embracing cross-functional collaboration and engaging clinicians in operations software decisions early on. This new approach to collaboration not only expands the role of clinicians to technology ambassadors but improves their ability to achieve optimal patient outcomes. 

Image: ID 343528794 © Atcharapun Samorn | Dreamstime.com