Cybersecurity and staffing are among the top challenges facing health system CIOs in 2025.
Becker’s recently asked four healthcare CIOs who were recognized with CIO 100 Awards for IT innovation: “What is the biggest challenge in health IT nowadays?” Here are their responses:
Sunil Dadlani. Executive Vice President and Chief Information, Digital and Cybersecurity Officer of Atlantic Health System (Morristown, N.J.): Cybersecurity remains one of the top challenges as we become more digitalized, as we have more patients, more systems, as we expand our geographical footprint. As we expand our technology footprint, the attack surface becomes more so. The volume, the velocity and the variety and the sophistication of cyber threats are always exponentially increasing.
Jason Joseph. Chief Digital and Information Officer of Corewell Health (Grand Rapids and Southfield, Mich.): The economic pressures and uncertainty within government programs for healthcare are impactful on our industry and our organization. We have been fortunate that our leadership has recognized the value of technology in transforming care and continues to invest at a high level. Our constant challenge is to reduce our cost on delivering the same services so that we can invest in new capabilities.
Luke Olenoski. Senior Vice President and CIO of Main Line Health (Radnor Township, Pa.): It feels like we experienced a decade’s worth of change from 2020 to 2022, and now we understand what the playing field looks like moving forward. The biggest challenge I see today is the need to balance supporting a complex set of legacy infrastructure and modernizing our technology stack amid increased expectations from all stakeholders — employees, patients, partners and our communities — and continued resource pressures.
Tom Osteen. CIO of Enloe Health (Chico, Calif.): One is workforce management. Building and maintaining and growing your IT team is a critical challenge in healthcare; the IT team is just as important as the technology you deploy. Here, we like to focus on the team as much as we do on delivering ambient [AI] or delivering a new enterprise imaging system, because at the end of the day, your team is what makes that technology work and happen. So maintaining a quality IT team can be a bit of a challenge in an environment where there’s a lot of movement in IT and a lot of demand for skilled resources.
