Today’s provider organizations face challenges across clinical care, staffing, and shrinking operating margins. Traditional care organizations are also facing a growing surge of consumerism through online empowerment of the individual, increased pressure on care affordability and pricing, and greater competition from retail healthcare entrants such as CVS, Amazon, and a growling list of others.

When the pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020, the entire world went into an era of remote everything. Tech giants like Microsoft achieved two years' worth of digitization in just two months. The biggest reason: maintaining business continuity. C-suite leaders, in every industry, turned to allocate significant budgets for acquiring relevant technology to drive innovation. In the midst of all of this, healthcare was struggling with outdated systems embedded in legacy IT infrastructures.

Healthcare organizations face many challenges as they strive to transform their organizations and remain competitive while managing patient health, complying with evolving regulations, achieving interoperability, and delivering holistic and patient-centric care.

Healthcare costs have been rising consistently and the pandemic has further worsened this trend, especially for healthcare systems. The US spent $4.3 trillion on healthcare in 2021 and this is expected to grow at 5.1% a year, reaching $6.8 trillion by 2030. Spending on healthcare will consume 19.7% of the nation’s GDP on healthcare, much higher than any developed nation. Health systems have faced the consequences, driving many into the red in 2022 and the rest with razor-thin margins between 1-2%.

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Healthcare organizations rely on data to improve clinical, administrative, and financial outcomes. According to Morning Consult’s “Healthcare Data Readiness Crisis: Triage vs Transformation” report, 97% of healthcare leaders believe they have a data readiness challenge---and data readiness is a necessary precursor for digital transformation. And according to Sage Growth Partners’ market report, only 20% of healthcare organizations fully trust their data—this lack of trust is a brake on the acceleration of innovation and digital transformation.

In a 1959 speech, then-Senator John F. Kennedy famously said: “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters—one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”

This year marks the 20th anniversary of “Moneyball,” a radical sabermetrics strategy that transformed the Oakland A’s into a powerhouse contender that went from 10 games behind first to a historic 20-game winning streak—despite having one of the smallest budgets in baseball. Oh, and they finished first in the American League West with a record of 103–59.

When value-based care (VBC) payment models made their first big appearance on the healthcare scene more than 10 years ago, provider executives often described themselves as having their feet in two different canoes—with different directions and paces—per the VBC and fee-for-service (FFS) models of care.