Across the world, healthcare CEOs and COOs are navigating immense pressure — striving to improve operational performance, sustain their workforce, and integrate rapidly evolving technology into daily care. Many now recognize that traditional methods of improvement, built around short-term projects and departmental silos, no longer meet the complexity of today’s challenges. Meaningful change requires something deeper: a proactive redesign of the systems that hold healthcare together.
This was the focus of a recent conversation between Becker’s Healthcare and Dr. Sylvia Trent-Adams, President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Dr. Trent-Adams described how hospitals and health systems are embracing a new era of transformation, one centered not on reacting to problems, but on designing systems that learn, adapt, and enable their people to thrive.
“Technology should never be a burden,” Dr. Trent-Adams noted. “When aligned to human needs and system design, it becomes one of our most powerful enablers of reliability, efficiency, and joy in work.”
IHI helps organizations achieve this alignment by guiding them through the complex change management required to integrate technology, people, and processes. Using practical analytics, informatics, and advanced AI tools, IHI supports leaders in turning data into actionable insights while ensuring that operational design incorporates all aspects of human factors, communication, teamwork, and workflows to drive transformation.
At the heart of this approach is the IHI Care Operating System (CareOS) — a framework that weaves improvement, learning, and safety into the fabric of daily operations. Rather than treating improvement as a series of isolated projects, CareOS creates a connected environment where every leader and clinician contributes to real-time system learning. It helps organizations move from fragmented initiatives to continuous, organization-wide management, embedding safety, patient flow, and experience into core operational practices.
When these principles are applied, health systems become resilient, data-informed, and people-enabled. They evolve from reacting to crises to anticipating them. From chasing metrics to improving what truly matters — the experience and outcomes of patients and staff alike.
IHI’s role is to walk alongside leaders through this evolution: to make the invisible systems visible, to co-design structures that align technology with purpose, and to build the habits that sustain improvement over time. The result is not only greater efficiency and value, but also a stronger sense of shared purpose across teams and disciplines.
“By transforming science into daily operating practice, IHI helps leaders build systems that are both reliable and humane,” said Dr. Trent-Adams. “When that happens, organizations — and the people within them — truly thrive.”
