Clinicians at the Core: How Smarter Operations Accelerate Impact

Clinicians are the foundation of care delivery, but today’s healthcare environment often impedes rather than supports them. Nurses, physicians, advanced practice providers, pharmacists, and technicians encounter daily frustrations driven by fragmented systems and inefficient operations. These issues can erode morale, contribute to burnout, and ultimately, jeopardize patient care.

Technology has the power to change that. When thoughtfully implemented, it can alleviate operational burdens and restore time to what clinicians value most: spending meaningful time connecting with patients. However, transformation that overlooks the clinician experience can fall flat, or worse, deepen existing pain points.

Forward-thinking hospitals and health systems understand that meaningful change must begin with clinicians at the center. When operational and technological strategies are aligned with frontline insights, transformation becomes a powerful catalyst that amplifies both care quality and workforce well-being.

This imperative was at the heart of the 2025 symplr Healthcare Operations Summit, hosted in partnership with Becker’s Healthcare. The event convened clinical, operational, and IT leaders from across the country to explore how technology can reshape healthcare delivery and ease the path forward for clinicians.

What follows are key takeaways from the discussion.

Staffing and operational complexity demand automation, collaboration

Clinicians face unrelenting pressures in care delivery. While this isn’t new, the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have brought heightened attention to pervasive staffing shortages, burnout, and retention challenges.

“Clinicians are getting directions from everyone, and there is so much administrative burden they 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.). “They don’t have a lot of joy in their job.”

Tracy Gosselin, PhD, RN, senior vice president and chief nurse executive at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, described a healthcare environment defined by growing complexity. She said more patients, increased volume, and higher acuity are now the norm. These mounting pressures are also contributing to a troubling rise in verbal and physical abuse toward clinicians — with healthcare workers now five times more likely to experience a workplace violence injury than the average U.S. worker.

Meanwhile, clinical leaders are navigating fiscal headwinds and highly competitive labor markets. “What’s going to give us increased retention, nurse satisfaction, and the desire to go to work every day?” said Katie Barr, MSN, RN, senior vice president and chief nursing informatics officer at Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health. “We need to find ways to bring the joy back.”

To address these challenges, many healthcare organizations are deploying initiatives to reduce administrative burden. symplr CEO BJ Schaknowski cited the 2024 symplr Compass Survey Report, which shows that clinicians spend about 51 minutes per day (almost five hours per week) on non-value-added administrative tasks. Automating these tasks would give clinicians more room to focus, recharge, and navigate their day with fewer disruptions. It would also enhance their capacity and overall productivity.

Another core tenet guiding healthcare strategy: serving on the front lines is never a solo endeavor. High-quality care depends on deeply coordinated teamwork among physicians, nurses, advanced practice providers, technicians, and other clinical staff.

“We talk about quality and patient safety in the context of being a team sport,” said Omar Hasan, MD, chief quality officer at MaineHealth (Portland).

This cohesive, collaborative team extends well beyond clinicians. Clinical leaders must partner with functions such as IT, finance, and the supply chain. “I have the opportunity to lead the supply improvement work across our system,” said Vi-Anne Antrum, DNP, RN, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Cone Health (Greensboro, N.C.). “We’re looking to pair and integrate our supply chain colleagues with clinical operations. That’s a very important relationship.”

Susan Grant, DNP, RN, chief clinical officer at symplr, emphasized that team success requires alignment and information sharing, along with supportive tools and resources. “It’s about making sure they have what they need when they need it,” she said. “It’s about the right staff with the right stuff.”

Technology that supports clinicians should be a ‘force multiplier’

Mr. Schaknowski suggested that, to date, operational technologies in healthcare have fallen short. “Everyone realizes that technology can be a great enabler, but it hasn’t been,” he said. While clinicians are mission-driven and adaptable, he noted they’re “sick of technology being forced upon them as the next great thing.”

In many cases, healthcare technology has complicated clinicians’ workflows, taking them away from patients and contributing to burnout and low engagement.

“What we’ve done over time is we just keep adding on, but we’ve taken nothing away,” Ms. James of PeaceHealth said, referring to the proliferation of disconnected technologies. The 2024 symplr Compass Survey Report confirms this, indicating that health systems typically use hundreds of different applications.

Mr. Schaknowski reiterated there’s a better way.

“We’ve got to make technology a force multiplier for our people, not a punishment,” he said. “When you look at the technology available, whether it’s in workflow consolidation, application rationalization, some of the generative or large language AI tools. We have a real opportunity to make clinicians more productive and more engaged.”

Clinicians drive innovation or it stalls

Leaders at the summit acknowledged that clinicians generally understand the need for operational transformation, hopeful that it will decrease burden, improve care delivery, and result in better outcomes.

But how clinicians are engaged in operational transformation and IT solutions matters. “It needs to be clinically led and IT enabled,” Ms. James said, underscoring that, at the very least, clinicians need a major voice in the transformation process.

Dr. Gosselin of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center emphasized that successful transformation doesn’t begin with technology; it starts by engaging key stakeholders in problem-solving. “It starts with going to the clinician base and the non-clinician base and asking, ‘What are the processes we need to fix?’ Then, [it requires] engaging people in a dialog.”

True transformation requires standardization and integration

Being motivated to transform clinical operations is not enough. Because of widespread fragmentation and variation in healthcare environments, standardization is a prerequisite to transformation.

“We want every patient across our state, across our footprint, who comes to a MaineHealth facility to have the same quality of care and the exact same experience. But this cannot happen without a measure of standardization,” Dr. Hasan said, highlighting that workforce shortages have often necessitated clinicians work at several different facilities. “We have to standardize. There is no other choice.”

When an enterprise becomes more standardized, it is possible to become more integrated. In terms of operations, Dr. Hasan said well-planned structures and well-designed standardized processes produce the best outcomes.

Dr. Antrum of Cone Health said that operational standardization, combined with tight integration of team members from different disciplines, has yielded significant benefits for the health system. It has reduced silos, improved information sharing, and enhanced care delivery. “It allows us to maximize the efficiency of our staff and our team to ensure a more standardized quality of care for our patients,” Dr. Antrum said.

Change without culture fails: the leadership mandate

Clinical leaders are clear: operational transformation doesn’t mean just implementing technology.

“To accomplish transformation, there are many things we need to do; among them, are change management and stakeholder engagement,” said Tony Seupaul, MD, executive vice president and chief physician executive at Roanoke, Va.-based Carilion Clinic.

Ms. Barr of Advocate Health concurred that change management, including listening to clinicians and helping them understand the reasons for change, is a core trait of operationally driven initiatives. She said the importance of change management is widely understood, but at times, leaders become so focused on driving change that they forget the basic principles of change management and fail to bring front-line team members along.

At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, operational changes and technology investments have corresponded with culture change. Dr. Gosselin mentioned incorporating “humble inquiry” into the organization’s culture, where staff are encouraged to ask questions to understand the “why” behind changes.

How interoperability and automation improve operations

A critical but often overlooked operational responsibility of clinical leaders is overseeing credentialing.

Dr. Seupal shared insights from his own journey toward recognizing credentialing as a foundational element of care delivery, as providers must be credentialed and privileged to deliver care at the bedside and to get reimbursed by payers.

Historically, credentialing and privileging have been slow, manual, and time-consuming processes. “There are opportunities to streamline credentialing,” Dr. Seupal said. “It can be an enabler for better care, better access, and better quality and safety in your health system.”

Nydia Boswell, vice president of product management at symplr, explained how the symplr Operations Platform will tie together multiple solutions to improve the full lifecycle of the provider, from onboarding through offboarding. This begins with symplr Recruiting, which streamlines intake and information gathering about a clinical candidate. When a candidate is hired, their information can be automatically sent to the credentialing team in symplr Provider, without needing to reenter this information, and with no lag time. This ensures the credentialing process is started as quickly as possible.

Once credentialed and privileged, provider information can be sent to the organization’s patient-facing directory to begin marketing providers to patients and to meet compliance and regulatory needs. The newly active provider is then automatically included in the organization’s scheduling system to get them seeing patients as quickly as possible.

Recruiting, credentialing, onboarding, and scheduling are automated and simplified through the symplr Operations Platform, which eliminates waste and reduces administrative burden, Ms. Boswell said. This frees clinicians to focus on patient care and engage in more strategic, high-value work. By improving efficiency, lowering costs, and minimizing risk, the platform supports operational transformation — making care delivery more meaningful and less encumbered for clinicians.

“Operations is the glue and the processes that ensure we have the right people with the right skills at the right time with the right tools to yield the patient outcomes we’re trying to achieve,” Dr. Grant said.

To learn more about symplr visit www.symplr.com.