Hospital IT adoption lags as new tools pile up on staff
MAINE, UNITED STATES — Hospitals are pouring millions into healthcare technology that frontline clinicians and operations teams aren’t fully using, and the gap between what’s installed and what’s actually adopted is becoming the industry’s most expensive blind spot.
According to a report from Healthcare IT News, at Broward Health, a four-hospital system in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, CIO Steven Travers said the volume of change hitting end users is outpacing their ability to keep up.
Two Epic electronic health records (EHR) upgrades a year, ongoing Workday changes, UKG scheduling shifts and constant Microsoft 365 updates are arriving faster than staff can absorb them.
The real IT crisis isn’t implementation anymore
Hospitals have largely solved the technical side of rolling out enterprise software. The bottleneck has moved to the humans expected to use it, and that shift is reshaping how chief information officers (CIOs) think about return on investment.
“The difficulty I see a lot of organizations having is getting the operations people and clinical people to adopt the new technologies IT is putting out, because it’s coming at them at a very fast pace and in several different areas,” Travers said.
The financial damage is quiet but real. When staff don’t fully learn an existing platform, knowledge gaps form — and hospitals end up buying point solutions to fill problems their current systems already solve.
For health system chief financial officers (CFOs), that means duplicate licensing fees, fragmented data and IT budgets stretched across redundant tools.
People and process beat technology every time
Travers’ fix isn’t a new platform. It’s more trainers on the floor, more workflow observation, and more attention to how clinicians actually do their jobs before a tool gets deployed.
“Focusing more on people and process is the key because organizations are filled with people and the technology is just one component,” Travers said, adding that staff have to see new tools as making work easier — not piling on more.
That’s where outsourcing partners are gaining traction with United States health systems.
Specialized vendors are taking on training delivery, change management, clinical documentation support, IT help desk operations and back-office workflow design — freeing internal teams to focus on patient care and strategic priorities.
With software-as-a-service blurring the line between vendors and operations, hospitals that outsource the human-side work of adoption are getting more value from the technology they’ve already paid for.
As Travers put it, the question is no longer what hospitals buy. It’s whether their people and processes are built to use it.
