While digital health continues to change rapidly, the top concern for many leaders remains the same: narrow margins and the ongoing workforce crisis. Over the past few months, we conducted interviews with healthcare leaders to learn what's top of mind for them. Without fail, every conversation came down to the same two topics.

Narrow margins and workforce are the biggest challenges

1. Workforce is a problem for everybody

Every organization is experiencing a workforce crisis — rising administrative burden, unprecedent levels of clinician burnout, and workforce shortages. Leaders feel a sense of urgency to address these problems and are turning to technology to help bridge gaps in the workforce and make clinical workflows more efficient.

2. Healthcare organizations are lucky if they're narrowly in the black

At best, leaders are struggling with narrow margins. Most organizations are in the red, so leaders consider themselves lucky if they're in the black, even if they're only narrowly in the black. The tough financial conditions make it increasingly difficult for leaders to justify and find funding for competing priorities, and there a lot of competing priorities.

Leaders have been tasked with improving patient experience, managing the workforce crisis, keeping up with a fast-paced competitive environment, all while dealing with the aftermath of COVID. While not the only answer, technology is crucial to the progress of these priorities.

This presents a unique predicament: the need to invest in technology at a time when finances are tighter than ever.

Revisiting existing solutions is a win-win for healthcare leaders and the users of technology

In response to these market challenges, leaders told us they're dedicating time and resources to optimize past investments instead of investing in new solutions. They're restructuring workflows to make the most of technology they already have in place and doubling down on change management to ensure that clinicians and patients are comfortable using existing digital health solutions.

This approach has a few benefits for leaders and other users of these solutions:

1. Organizations have gone through a lot of change and need some time to catch their breath

A lot of technology (virtual visits, chatbots for triage) was stood up rapidly over the pandemic. Hasty implementations resulted in technology being targeted towards very specific pain points instead of supporting broader organizational goals. Revisiting prior investments is an opportunity for leaders to reassess and make sure that their digital health solutions are targeting problems that have been identified as priorities and that support the organization's overall mission.

Clinicians also need time to adjust to new technology. Learning the ins and outs of new systems can be burdensome. The training requirements of constant new technology adds to clinician burnout — the opposite effect we hope to have. Giving clinicians time to learn will help them become comfortable with existing technology and could improve their willingness to try other technology when the time is right to invest in new solutions.

2. Reduce redundancies in investments and improve interoperability

The rapid implementation of technology made it tough for organizations to achieve the full potential of one solution before they were forced to move on to another. This created an environment ripe for redundancies — we heard from leaders that reviewed their digital portfolio, only to find that they had multiple solutions across departments that all served the same purpose.

Leaders are taking the time to index the full state of their technology capabilities so they can build out future investments in a complimentary way rather than mimicking existing functions. Not only does this help leaders reap the full potential of their current solutions, but it ensures that future solutions will work better with each other.

Giorgio Piatti also contributed to this blog