By August Calhoun, President and General Manager, RLDatix North America
LinkedIn: August Calhoun
LinkedIn: RLDatix
Healthcare is at an inflection point. As leaders navigate financial constraints, evolving regulations and patient expectations, the need to deliver safer, more efficient care has never been greater. In the current climate, three key areas are rising to the top of every executive’s agenda: improving care quality, strengthening the workforce and making data more actionable.
These focus areas reflect the realities of running a health system today. Reputation is key; it’s why providers want to work at an organization and why patients come to see you specifically and, hopefully, return. Workforce represents over 50% of the annual spend for hospitals and health systems. And data plays an increasingly key role in decision-making across an organization – but how can we use it effectively?
These priorities are shaping three mission critical themes across the industry:
1. The reputation of your organization will always be driven by safety and satisfaction.
Leadership is increasingly placing a strong emphasis on patient safety and care quality — and for good reason. Reputation is still the #1 asset for hospitals and health systems — it’s how providers decide where to work and how patients determine where they want to go for care. Today, nearly one in four hospitalized patients experience a harm event, 25% of which are preventable. The impact of medical harm, of course, is significant on both mission and reputation, making improving quality of care and patient safety imperative.
Last year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized a Patient Safety Structural Measure (PSSM), which mandates the implementation of a culture of safety within hospitals and health systems nationwide — marking significant progress towards safer care and enhanced support for healthcare workers.
As organizations work to meet these new requirements and elevate safety culture, they’re also turning to patient feedback as a powerful tool for improvement. The automation of patient experience tools enables hospitals and health systems to integrate feedback more seamlessly into their clinical and operational workflows. Improved automation of the CAHPS Hospital Survey, for example, is allowing hospitals to better collect standardized, nationally benchmarked data to identify improvement opportunities for care delivery and drive both patient satisfaction and overall quality.
But satisfaction is more than a patient experience metric; it’s a powerful business driver tied to reputation. Patients receiving consistent, high-quality care are more likely to return to that same hospital or health system to manage their future healthcare needs. This loyalty reinforces a health system’s reputation, fostering long-lasting trust and preference for both individual patients as well as communities. In other words, patient safety and satisfaction are core drivers of top-line growth and bottom-line results.
2. Your workforce is the top area of both spend and concern.
With over 50% of spend for hospitals and health systems being on their workforce, productivity, performance and engagement have become major areas of concern for every leader. Industry discussion place a lot of focus on how to drive operational excellence and simplify processes.
But how can we accomplish this? Improving the efficiency and wellbeing of the healthcare workforce requires actionable data — and the right technology. Tools that help health systems maintain compliance and uphold standards of care not only improve clinical quality but also have a direct impact on workforce optimization and financial outcomes.
Take credentialing, for example. For health systems managing credentials for thousands of practitioners, an automated system that provides a quick turnaround and maintains accurate information is a must. With 46% of healthcare professionals reporting that they’ve faced revenue impacts due to unoptimized workflows, using manual systems for credentialing is a roadblock that can prevent health systems from achieving true compliance and alignment with industry best practices. Automating this process helps health systems streamline workflows and prevent revenue loss by reducing delays, enabling progress tracking and maintaining tight quality control to minimize clerical errors.
Clear, accessible and up-to-date Instructions for Use (IFUs) are also a critical but often overlooked element in supporting frontline healthcare workers. When documentation is scattered or outdated, clinicians can unintentionally deviate from protocol — raising the risk of preventable harm such as healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). With the direct annual cost of treating HAIs in the U.S. estimated to be as high as $45 billion, this gap presents both a clinical and financial challenge. Centralizing IFUs and making them easily accessible through intuitive, integrated platforms can reduce uncertainty at the point of care and ensure providers are equipped with the most up-to-date protocols for treating their patients.
Together, solutions like automated credentialing and centralized documentation support a more resilient, responsive workforce. By upholding consistent standards across the continuum of care, health systems can not only improve staff well-being and retention but also enhance patient safety. Optimizing these processes is essential for health systems to free up administrative staff and empower clinicians to practice at the top of their licenses.
3. Your data and insights are now center stage of your go-forward strategy.
There is a collective understanding that healthcare is a data business, but most organizations still struggle to make it available and actionable. This information is the key to advancing the quality, safety and productivity of every health system. In other words, we can’t effectively address care quality and workforce efficiency without data.
Today, the healthcare industry generates 30% of the world’s data, but 97% of it is trapped in silos and ultimately goes unused. Health systems lack access to a wealth of information that could be the gateway to better, safer care. Working with an excess of siloed data and disconnected technology solutions also creates a large administrative burden on healthcare staff, which can drive turnover, emotional exhaustion, inefficiency and financial losses.
Healthcare leaders today are placing emphasis on data availability and findings, not just analytics. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have given industry leaders the ability to turn raw data into a timely, actionable plan by unlocking real-time insight that wasn’t available before, enabling an industrywide shift from retrospective analysis to proactive patient intervention. Pairing this technology with reliable, interoperable information can surface intelligence faster to support better clinical and operational decision-making.
A smarter, safer, and more efficient healthcare system for all
To advance the future of healthcare, leaders need to be laser-focused on what matters most: doubling down on care quality, investing meaningfully in our workforce and breaking down silos to unlock the full power of data-backed insights. These themes are deeply interconnected – empowered staff, supported by real-time data, are better equipped to deliver safer, higher-quality care. As we look ahead, collaboration across the industry will be essential to building smarter, more sustainable systems that truly put patients and providers first.