In this episode

Ingrid Lund, PhD is a healthcare strategy advisor and the former Executive Director of The Health Management Academy. She meets regularly with healthcare leaders across the United States to discuss their priorities, challenges, and opportunities. In mid-2024, Lund looked ahead to the rest of 2024 and into 2025, informed by the following trends:

• Improving margins for health systems, after a 2022 that she calls “the worst year on record in recent history” for health systems’ financial performance.
• A focus on growth, especially in ambulatory service lines.
• “Right-sizing and optimizing” digital health solutions at health systems.

Lund discusses these trends, why health systems are focused in these areas, and how they might play out for the rest of the year in this episode.

“There is certainly no shortage of problems in health care, and there’s no shortage of great solutions. But bringing the two together with the right timing and sort of relationship, that’s really difficult.”

– Ingrid Lund, PhD

Key takeaways

Lund covered trends across the healthcare industry, from priorities for healthcare executives to the growing influence of new decision-makers to changes in strategic priorities for health systems. At a high level, she said, leading health systems shared major priorities and outlooks on 2024 and 2025. These included:

1) Strategic digital health investments, focused on growth in key service lines

“A better margin means better ability to spend,” Lund said, and she argued that health system leaders were willing to invest in digital health solutions that would drive growth — especially for ambulatory service lines. “That doesn’t mean that strategic cost management is off the table,” though. “I think there’s sort of a new normal about careful cost management.”

When health systems do choose digital health solutions, Lund says, they’re focused on driving patient access and convenience in high-value outpatient service lines. “[Health systems] really feel that the growth will be much higher in the outpatient space…where patients have more opportunity to shop around, are a bit choosier, and having a good digital front door and patient convenience pieces is really important.”

2) Health system leadership taking a “systemness” approach

Discussing a survey of health system executives, Lund said: “The number one priority for chief strategy officers was workforce. The number one priority for chief financial officers was access. Not what you would typically predict. That’s a reflection of health system executives becoming more system-minded – really working as a collaborative force to execute on system-level strategic priorities rather than in their own domain. Everybody cares about workforce. Everybody cares about access.”
 

She continued, “This might surprise some folks, but this is a trend we’ve seen for some time…a trend toward systemness.”
 

Lund sees this trend continuing into 2025 and affecting patient access across the health system, with healthcare organizations focusing on centralized scheduling and load-balancing across sites.

3) Growing influence of nursing, business continuity, and security executives

Lund expects three roles to grow in importance in coming months and years: the chief nursing executive, the CISO or cybersecurity officer, and the business continuity officer.

“The person stewarding cybersecurity, I think they probably will traditionally report to the CIO as they have been, but will receive an elevated budget, more staff, and more decision-making authority.”

“Another one I would cite is related –  a chief business continuity officer. You need somebody in charge of scenario planning for cyberattacks, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and to really have a plan in place to make sure that the doors can stay open and that the health system is prepared. I don’t know that a lot of systems have that, but they will start to put those people in place.”

Finally, an executive that Lund sees as “overlooked far too much” is the chief nursing executive. “The chief nursing executive is the one most likely to have come up through the system. They have incredible relationships and probably can get a lot done and have tremendous influence. They also want to  be brought to the table for technology discussions.” Lund advises health systems to bring chief nursing executives to the table for their wealth of knowledge and ability to champion important initiatives.