The Perfect Storm: Challenges Facing Healthcare IT Leaders
Healthcare CIOs are navigating unprecedented complexity. Between maintaining 24/7 clinical operations, defending against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, and pursuing digital transformation initiatives—all while facing talent shortages and budget constraints—something has to give. The question isn’t whether you need help. It’s how you get the right help.
FIVE CRITICAL DRIVERS FOR MANAGED SERVICES ADOPTION
1 | The Talent Crisis Is Real—and Getting Worse
As the complexity in healthcare grows, the IT talent needed has shifted. Specialized IT skills (cybersecurity, EHR optimization, cloud architecture) are increasingly difficult to find and expensive to retain. While the cost of a bad hire can be substantial in any industry, the lack of progress amplifies the cost to a healthcare provider organization. While AI projects promise relief for strained clinical and IT teams, the reality is that data quality, documentation, and EHR integration are real barriers to realizing those ambitions. Meanwhile, 74% of healthcare organizations report significant cybersecurity staff attrition over the past year. This adds up to wide areas of need as well as risks to the bottom line.
Managed services providers offer immediate access to deep benches of specialized talent without the recruiting burden, retention risk, or benefits overhead of traditional hiring.
2 | Boards are Delaying or Canceling Critical Projects
In one recent survey, 88% of hospital boards required ROI projections for all new IT projects, and more than half of U.S. hospitals (52%) delayed or canceled initiatives with ROI timelines longer than 24 months.
Until funding visibility improves, hospital boards are placing holds on discretionary IT in favor of projects that prioritize ROI. In an ad-hoc provider poll, 60% of Healthcare CIOs report pause directives on platform upgrades, enterprise analytics/data lake expansions, TEFCA onboarding, and non-revenuecritical cutovers, while revenue-protecting modules: denials prevention, eligibility and prior auth automation, patient access, and cybersecurity, continue, often re-sequenced to deliver near-term cash impact.
This dynamic creates a series of impossible choices for CIOs such as upgrade network infrastructure or implementing interoperability improvements when both are needed.
Challenges remain in:
Without the operational foundation to execute on these strategic initiatives, healthcare organizations risk falling further behind. Managed services create the stable operational platform and team capacity that makes innovation possible.
3 | Cybersecurity Is No Longer Optional—It’s Existential
High profile cyberattacks targeting healthcare organizations has moved cybersecurity from the IT department to the boardroom. Hospital executives have seen firsthand how a single breach can halt clinical operations, compromise patient safety, and result in millions in recovery costs and regulatory fines. There’s more to protect than ever with the shift toward advanced technologies such as AI, cloud computing, medical devices and IoT, faces unprecedented risk from a critical shortage of cybersecurity talent. In one survey:
74% | of healthcare organizations report significant cybersecurity staff attrition over the past year.
79% | of healthcare IT executives acknowledge that talent shortages have stalled critical digital cybersecurity projects.
92% | admit existing cybersecurity tools remain severely underutilized due to inadequate staffing, resulting in wasted technology spending and elevated security risks.
That makes cybersecurity everyone’s responsibility and strong alignment is critical. Managed services can support cybersecurity initiatives with well-defined user access protocols, analyzing incidents to identify security gaps, inform remediation, and more.
4 | EHR Systems Have Become More Complex
Epic, MEDITECH, and Oracle Health systems require constant optimization, frequent updates, interface management, and deep technical expertise across multiple domains. For organizations running multiple specialty clinical applications alongside their EHR, the burdens are intensified. Teams are often stretched thin between supporting current systems and innovation.
Managed services can reduce the burden with Application Management, support, access provisioning, and supplement needed expertise and IT talent. This allows the capacity to conquer data quality, documentation, and EHR integration initiatives which are foundational for compliance reporting, revenue cycle processes, and to pave the way for advanced functionality such as AI.
5 | Innovation Requires Operational Excellence as the Foundation
CIOs are being asked to deploy AI-powered clinical tools, ambient documentation, predictive analytics, and advanced patient engagement platforms. But when your team is consumed by keeping the lights on—password resets, system outages, routine maintenance— there’s no capacity left for strategic initiatives.
With hospitals delaying or canceling longterm strategic initiatives due to resource constraints, organizations need a different approach. Managed services create operational stability and team capacity that makes innovation possible.
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