Ask most healthcare operational leaders what their biggest technology challenge is, and the answer is rarely a missing application. More often, it’s the opposite: an excess of poorly connected applications generating more complexity than any team can reasonably manage. Over the years, health systems have accumulated a sprawling patchwork of operational tools — credentialing, scheduling, workforce management, compliance, contract administration — each with its own data definitions and logic, and none of them particularly aware of the others.
That fragmentation is no longer just an inconvenience; increasingly, it’s a strategic liability. And addressing it, operational leaders are beginning to argue, represents one of the most significant untapped opportunities in healthcare IT.
Theresa Meadows, RN, a health system CIO, put it plainly: “By adding more technology to a problem, we often create even more fragmentation and more operational inefficiency.” The alternative, she argued, is consolidating and integrating operational applications into a single platform, an approach that can fundamentally improve both operations and organizational decision-making.
Ms. Meadows led a session on this theme at the 2026 symplr Healthcare Operations Summit, held in partnership with Becker’s Healthcare. The summit brought together C-suite and healthcare operations leaders from over 100 leading healthcare organizations that collectively oversee more than 2,300 hospitals and 1.6 million employees, and account for $477 billion in revenue.
Insights from the session are summarized below.
Point solutions breed fragmentation and hinder AI
The scale of the problem is larger than most organizations realize. According to Ms. Meadows, most healthcare organizations rely on “100 to 250 or more” different operational applications and systems — and the actual number is often unknown, because few organizations have conducted a comprehensive inventory of their operational ecosystem.
What operational leaders do know is that having a large number of point solutions is problematic. “Point solutions create fragmentation,” Ms. Meadows said. “Having multiple systems increases the administrative burden and overhead costs.” Organizations with large numbers of point solutions frequently contend with duplicate systems and inconsistencies, as every department maintains its own data, definitions, systems and tools. Workflows become disconnected. Teams develop manual workarounds. Shadow IT proliferates. And the downstream effects, like slower onboarding, limited visibility, increased compliance risk and greater security exposure compound over time
That reality resonates broadly across the industry. A February 2026 survey of College of Healthcare Information Management Executives members found that 76% of CIOs consider application rationalization “critical,” yet only 1 in 5 has a formal program in place to pursue it. Meanwhile, 40% of healthcare technology executives report reviewing their application portfolios for consolidation only “as needed,” with governance remaining largely informal.
The stakes are rising as organizations look to AI to drive operational gains. Fragmented operational systems represent a significant barrier to meaningful AI adoption, since scaling AI across an organization requires a foundation of clean, consistent, and integrated data.
“Fragmented systems result in bad data and bad data produce bad AI,” Ms. Meadows said. “As long as health systems have those barriers, it’s hard to get to the next step with AI initiatives.”
The next frontier: a consolidated application platform
Ms. Meadows laid out a vision for what a different operational model could look like. “We think the next frontier is creating a healthcare operations platform with a consolidated approach, where connectivity and integration exist at a fundamental level,” she said. The goal: application consolidation that reduces fragmentation and creates a coherent operational infrastructure.
The practical implications of that shift are significant. An integrated operational platform would mean, for example, that when a new physician contract is executed, it is immediately shared with the credentialing office, flows into provider data management and enables the physician to be scheduled quickly — eliminating the manual handoffs and delays that characterize fragmented systems today. More broadly, consolidation and integration would produce greater operational consistency and scalability, and enable faster, better-informed decisions across the enterprise.
“Better decisions are made with the right data at the right time in the hand of the person who needs it,” Ms. Meadows said. “The more data that a health system has on a single platform, the better its operations will be.”
Ultimately, the argument for operational consolidation is a care delivery argument. Better operational data and better-functioning operations expand a health system’s capacity to deliver care effectively.
Application consolidation in practice: lessons from the clinical side
The concept of application consolidation is not new to healthcare. The clinical transformation of the past two decades offers a useful parallel: as EHR adoption accelerated, health systems moved from a fragmented array of clinical point solutions to more integrated platforms. The EHR became, in effect, the consolidating architecture for clinical operations.
“Regardless of which EHR a health system adopted, health systems went from having a bunch of different clinical point solutions to a single platform,” Ms. Meadows said. “Application consolidation in the clinical space is not new; health systems have been doing it for years.”
The same logic, applied to operations, could yield similar dividends. Renton, Wash.-based Providence, for instance, recently reduced its IT application portfolio by more than a third, saving millions of dollars in the process and demonstrating that the path from consolidation to financial benefit can be relatively direct when organizations commit to the work.
Making a consolidated platform a reality: leadership, vision + governance
Despite the clear operational and financial case for consolidation, the path is rarely straightforward. Individual departments and operational teams, Ms. Meadows explained, tend to champion the tools that solve their specific problems, not the broader organizational interest in a unified platform.
Ms. Meadows reflected back to her time as a CIO at a major health system: application consolidation was important to her but was not important to operational leaders throughout the organization. “They each wanted to keep the applications they had,” she said.
A practical first step, she suggested, is conducting an organization-wide application inventory to give leaders a complete picture of what tools exist, how many there are and what it costs to sustain them.
“The age-old problem in the operations space is not knowing what’s out there,” Ms. Meadows said. She added that when leaders and teams see the full scope — 150 different applications across dozens of departments, each with its own licensing and support costs — they are often more willing to engage seriously with consolidation efforts.
From there, the work becomes organizational as much as technical. C-suite and operations leaders must articulate a clear, compelling vision for what a consolidated platform makes possible and build sustained alignment around it.
“What we need to support application consolidation is communication and alignment and transparency,” a healthcare leader at the summit said. “One guiding principle is that people need to understand the why and the benefits of consolidation.”
Beyond vision and communication, organizations require strong, consistent governance processes to guide application rationalization decisions over time, including clear criteria for evaluating existing tools, onboarding new ones and resolving the inevitable departmental disagreements.
The through-line across these steps is human leadership. For all the focus on technology, and AI in particular, solving today’s most significant operational challenges is not, at its core, a technology problem. It starts with leadership, vision, governance, and the organizational will to make integration a strategic priority.
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