Despite remarkable breakthroughs in therapies, medical devices, digital health, and AI, healthcare remains, at its core, a human-driven industry. In the U.S. alone, 22 million people power this industry, making it one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing. Of these, millions serve on the front lines in hospitals, delivering care that technology can enhance but never replace.
Health system leaders charged with managing the workforce — from recruitment, credentialing, and training to scheduling and retention — understand just how challenging this moment is for healthcare professionals. Hospital staff are expected to care for more patients with higher acuity levels. There is greater competition for both patients and talent, rising regulatory demands, more administrative burden, and increased incidents of workplace violence. On top of that, they must juggle a multitude of non-clinical operational tasks daily.
These pressures are fueling workforce stress and dissatisfaction, leading many clinicians to consider leaving their jobs. At the same time, health systems are grappling with financial strain and labor shortages, striving to increase workforce efficiency and productivity. This confluence of disruptive forces is prompting leaders to rethink their operational processes and technologies, seeking solutions that streamline clinicians’ workflows while advancing care delivery.
The urgent need to improve healthcare workers’ experiences by transforming healthcare operations was a central theme of the 2025 symplr Healthcare Operations Summit, held in partnership with Becker’s Healthcare. The event convened HR, clinical, IT, and operational leaders to explore how technology can help health systems transform operations.
Key insights are summarized below.
Non-clinical tasks: essential to care, ripe for optimization
While the clinical aspects of care delivery get tremendous, well-deserved attention, running a hospital or health system entails performing a significant number of non-clinical operational tasks. These tasks encompass hiring and credentialing employees, training, scheduling, supply chain management, facility management, vendor contracts, and much more.
These various operational tasks are performed by people across the organization, often through manual, labor-intensive processes. When organizations deploy technology to streamline these functions, the tools are often point solutions used by one department or team to perform a single task. This results in organizations having a huge number of decentralized point solutions and operating in silos.
“There is so much administrative burden that people are dealing with every day,” said Michelle James, BSN, RN, senior vice president for patient care services and chief nursing officer at PeaceHealth (Vancouver, Wash.).
Ekta Vyas, PhD, chief human resources officer at Keck Medicine of USC (Los Angeles), said fragmentation and a lack of “systemness” are the greatest problems confronting health system leaders and staff. She explained how fragmentation has been exacerbated by the many mergers and acquisitions throughout healthcare in recent years. Oftentimes, when organizations merge, silos multiply, fragmentation increases, and more point solutions are introduced — many of which aren’t integrated. This lack of a unified, cohesive system creates significant frustration for team members as they try to do their jobs effectively.
This pressure-cooker environment can unintentionally increase the burden on frontline staff. It’s something Brad Shaink, executive director of innovation and business applications at Houston Methodist, sees firsthand. “We’re putting in so many new technologies, and we’re asking nurses and everyone to do so much more,” he said. “The entire purpose of adding new technology is to take weight off of an individual who is working in a back office or on the front line.”
Technology as a catalyst for meaningful change
Healthcare organizations are increasingly embracing strategies that center operational transformation, with the aim of increasing efficiency and decreasing burden on team members.
Mr. Shaink believes technology-driven transformation can enable an organization to become more innovative while freeing up staff time and enhancing the human touch. “My entire passion of bringing together people, process, and technology is to make healthcare smarter so it can be more human,” he said.
In the same vein, symplr Chief Marketing Officer Kristin Russel said the company’s vision is about simplifying healthcare operations so caregivers have more time for meaningful patient interactions.
But operational transformation hinges on strong partnerships, particularly when it comes to handling complex, behind-the-scenes processes. BJ Schaknowski, symplr’s CEO, emphasized this point, noting the importance of collaboration in managing critical functions, such as credentialing, scheduling, contract oversight, compliance, and vendor access. “These are the things that have to happen — but it’s not where you want your physicians and nurses spending time,” he said.
The symplr Operations Platform unifies the solutions organizations need to drive greater operational efficiency through increased automation and reduced time and effort. It is designed to eliminate silos, decrease fragmentation, and enhance integration. By fostering a more collaborative, cohesive, and cross-functionally aligned organization with a stronger sense of “systemness,” the platform also helps lighten the burden on the workforce.
For leaders, the platform makes it easier to manage staff and operations by providing greater operational consistency, along with visibility, to centralized data. For frontline staff across functions, the platform saves time and makes it easier to perform operational tasks.
“It’s using technology to enable individuals to do more,” Mr. Shaink added.
The power of listening: best practices in change management
Driving operational transformation across an enterprise demands cross-functional collaboration and alignment. In this context, change management has become a growing focus for hospital and health system leaders. Many are sharpening their ability to foster cohesion and accountability, while also strengthening essential “soft skills” such as relationship-building and effective communication.
As the chief nursing officer at PeaceHealth, Ms. James focuses on breaking silos and improving alignment by partnering with leaders from HR, IT, and finance.
Together, leaders at PeaceHealth have implemented an integrated workforce time-keeping and scheduling system to benefit the organization’s workforce. “In looking at time-keeping and scheduling, we wanted to make sure that whatever we did, we wanted to automate, integrate, and ease the way for our caregivers and frontline managers,” Ms. James said.
In the planning stages of this initiative, Ms. James and her collaborators prioritized listening to frontline workers to understand their needs. The leaders consistently asked, “What are the things we need to do differently to ease your way and give you back time so you can do the important things?” When they implemented the solution, it was essential to communicate frequently and consistently, Ms. James said.
Sandra Johnson, vice president and chief revenue officer at Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health, said leaders must use change management techniques to drive major shifts, even ones that benefit people, like implementing symplr’s Operations Platform.
“Before even starting the process of looking at workflows or anything like that, we get people prepared for the fact that we are going to have change and that change is good,” Ms. Johnson said. “You have to communicate constantly. I’m constantly telling people what’s going to happen, how it’s going to impact them, and how it’s going to benefit them.”
While there is always organizational inertia that makes change difficult, the benefits of operational transformation are significant: organizations can realize improved integration, cross-functional cooperation, and productivity, while people will have easier, more satisfying jobs, engaging in work that matters.
Importantly, change is not a one-time event to simply “set and forget.” Leaders at the summit emphasized that transformation is an ongoing journey, and effective change management must be a continuous, deliberate process embedded into the organization’s culture.
A new era demands operational transformation
Healthcare’s future depends on the ability of organizations to support their people with tools and systems that reduce complexity, not add to it. And the path to operational transformation is not about replacing the human element of care; rather, it’s about enabling it. By investing in integrated, enterprise-wide technologies like symplr’s Operations Platform, health systems can ease administrative burdens, foster collaboration and cohesion, and give caregivers more time to focus on what matters most: their patients.
The insights shared by leaders at the 2025 symplr Healthcare Operations Summit make clear that progress hinges on thoughtful collaboration across departments and a willingness to embrace change. As the industry continues to evolve, those organizations that prioritize operational excellence will be best positioned to thrive, bringing more humanity, efficiency, and sustainability to healthcare deliver
To learn more about symplr, visit www.symplr.com.
