Health systems are notching big wins with their IT investments
Having gained some hard-won wisdom about the dos and don'ts of information technology investments in recent years, healthcare providers are getting bolder in their digital transformation spending. And many forward-thinking hospitals and health systems are finding significant clinical, financial and operational ROI for their efforts.
As they roll out new leading-edge technologies – AI and automation, telehealth and remote monitoring, EHR optimization and patient engagement – they're realizing lasting positive outcomes for their patients and their bottom lines. Here is a regularly updated list of deep-dive case studies showing how providers of all shapes and sizes are making their tech spend work for them.
When assessing ROI, "it's not just about improving care quality, it's also about strengthening the sustainability of the service line," says a physician expert from the Illinois health system.
Dr. Ryan M. Trowbridge, owner of Bridge Dermatology, explains how he has used one vendor's technology and model to build his solo tele-dermatology practice as a complement to his full-time, in-person role with another healthcare group.
76% of active, schedulable employed provider profiles are now well-configured, 79% of employed providers are configured with clinical keywords for improved search relevance, and the platform has led to streamlined workflows and operational efficiency.
Physicians, nurses and patients have embraced the health system's smart rooms, which, along with virtual nursing, have helped slash nursing turnover at one hospital from 23% in July 2024 to 14% this month.
This precision medicine approach, driven by granular, real-world evidence, is critical for reshaping clinical guidelines and driving more personalized, less invasive oncology care, says Dr. Adrian Lee.
Additional results include a 30% improvement in MRI imaging turnaround time, an 83% reduction in patient placement time and a 28% decrease in post-anesthesia care unit holds, among other successes.
The health system has seen big improvements in how it engages, retains and serves its consumers, including more than 200,000 re-engaged patients, full-funnel visibility into campaign performance, and more precise, preference-based outreach.
The Illinois-based health system has, among many wins, retained 2,400 clinicians and staff who, by traditional patterns, it would not have expected to stay. And it has seen more than a 200% return on every dollar spent on employee tuition.
The app – with features galore and other apps intertwined – has seen a fivefold increase in daily use, with data showing that it meets the goal of being a central part of how patients and families interact with the health system.
Taking a patient history upfront via telemedicine has been very fruitful for the high-demand specialty provider. By combining history via virtual care with a then more limited in-person visit, care can be delivered more efficiently – and more patients can be seen.
The 51-hospital health system improved patient throughput in the ED for behavioral health patients, reduced door-to-needle times for stroke patients and enabled rural hospitals to retain more patients through increased specialist access.
The health systems' MyCare Anywhere app fuses the Epic EHR, MyChart, telemedicine, expert health content, self-guided health journeys and more. MetroHealth has done 27,000 virtual visits with thousands of referrals in the first year.
Heart to Heart Hospice has achieved three of its top priorities, including reducing documentation time by almost 30 minutes and improving care planning – which speaks to the operational and compliance impact the technology has delivered.
Billing time at Mountain Laurel Medical Center dropped by 19%, going from 4.2 days down to 3.4 days. Collections increased by 20%. Analytics helped with tracking value-based contracts and optimizing workflows. And no one is working 80-hour weeks anymore.
Clinicians are seeing a reduction in time spent on chart prep by up to 2.5 hours per day. And the organization has achieved an 84% addressed rate for all coding suggestions given to a provider within a patient encounter to enhance documentation.
The Oregon health system's coder workload has been reduced by nearly 28%, while coding-related denials for autonomously coded radiology cases are now 70% lower than those managed manually. The automated denial rate is also substantially lower.
Clinical decision support technology has enabled automatic inclusion of risk results in the health system's reports. Among many other improvements, the ability to stratify patients earlier and more accurately allows staff to provide additional care before cancer is detected.
The technology it's using to reach patients has not only improved clinical outcomes but is also providing tangible financial benefits, while ensuring patients can easily access the care they need.
Compared with patients not using virtual care, patients using telehealth for knee replacement rehabilitation recover faster, report significantly less pain, show greater improvements in range of motion – and incur $2,460 less in total care costs.
The health system's cloud migration team took learnings from the effort and spun them out into OptaFi, which offers best practices and technical capabilities for moving Epic EHR workloads from on-premise to the cloud. Sentara's CTO gives an inside look.
The qualified health information network has shrunk the time it takes for providers to access patient data from hours to seconds. Its query volume has grown from about 200,000 to more than 66 million in one year.
The Montreal health system is focused on helping its leaders drive care transformation and giving them the tools to do so. Access to data is essential, and self-service analytics are key to that goal.
The Ohio health system has so far used the technology to reduce its readmission rate from 25% to 18% and its average length of stay from 25 days to 18.
Physicians at all eight of its hospitals can use one viewer to see almost all clinical imagery. Patients can view images in the patient portal, too – and 11,000 do so each month.
With the EHR technology, the health system achieved a new patient acquisition boost of 19% through its website and has quadrupled its online booking completion rate.
The new telemedicine site offers extremely short wait times and enables providers to see nearly twice as many patients as they would in the same period for in-person visits. And it beats the overhead and infrastructure costs of a new physical location.
The 13-hospital network's CDS system also maintained stable patient experience scores – and data validated that cost reduction was achieved without compromising quality of care.
Sherene Schlegel, RN, chief operating officer and chief nursing officer for virtual care and digital health at the 51-hospital health system, offers a tour of its comprehensive telemedicine offering. She explains the program's evolution and highlights big results.
The provider organization has seen an increase in clinically appropriate interventions, a reduction in time to treatment, and increased efficiency in radiology workflows. The AI chief offers a deep dive into this AI technology success.
UCHealth Yampa Valley Medical Center needed to help patients feel more ready for surgery. With new automated workflows, it was able to achieve 100% positive patient satisfaction scores.
Its Adams Data Center platform has reduced time to insights, improved patient outcomes and enhanced operational efficiency. The right tech, empowered users and a commitment to improvement leads to success, says the data center director.
Perinatal Associates has grown by implementing both telehealth consults and tele-ultrasound, aiding mothers through nearly 9,000 pregnancies statewide this past year.
Artificial intelligence forecasts scheduling changes and improves resource productivity and team coordination to increase case volumes without compromising quality and decrease staff burden. The result for Houston? A 15% increase in OR capacity.
Albany ENT & Allergy Services projects its providers could achieve an 11-13% increase in efficiency with the ambient medical scribe system. And a decrease in reliance on scribes could reduce overhead costs and enable strategic resource reallocation.
Mayo Clinic's decentralized trials are investigating how to best integrate the clinical trial experience into a patient’s life and routine care, say researchers ahead of their HIMSS25 presentation.
Impower therapists love the ambient listening technology, its COO reports. Artificial intelligence is helping them produce more clinically detailed notes, better comply with documentation submission and be more present with clients.
For complete emergency telehealth services with multiple specialties for 365 days, Chase County Community Hospital pays the equivalent of having one backup physician by phone for approximately 45 to 60 days.
The St. Louis pediatric hospital has fully integrated its in-house behavioral health team with vendor tele-psychiatrists – including in its Epic EHR. The percentage of new patients scheduled within 14 days has jumped from 14% to more than 60%.
For seven years, the cardiac surgical team has leveraged computational fluid dynamics software to provide consistent preoperative planning for pediatric congenital heart disease patients and improve outcomes. Sharing workflows is reaching more patients.
The health system's chief digital officer has the numbers to prove it. DTx have helped patients relearn driving after car accidents, manage the grief of losing a spouse and gain confidence to leave a career that's not working, he says.
The University of Oklahoma College of Medicine did a controlled test and showed the odds of infection-related readmissions were decreased in the RTM group by 76% at 30 days, 80% at 60 days and 68% at 90 days.
The tools have helped the health system grow demand for data-driven healthcare services, measure member attribution, and gain significant cost savings from identifying and acting on key healthcare utilization patterns.
With automation, turnaround times are now 40-45 days – way down from 90-120, previously. And before the tools were in place, the team was credentialing eight applicants per month – now that number is 35.
POCUS has proven itself a cost-effective diagnostic tool that enhances the physical exam, says one Jefferson Healthcare physician. Money is not wasted on excessive testing and patients avoid the hospital because their disease is recognized quickly.
Once they're found, "we can systematically improve processes," says the health system's patient experience lead, helping move the needle on quality improvement, team member engagement and more.
The organization is using cell phones, data plans and telemedicine to help low-income families with technology and equity disparities get the high-quality healthcare they need.
A maternal fetal medicine physician at Children's Hospital Colorado shares a virtual care success story, with telemedicine delivering critical care for high-risk pregnancies across a vast region of the state and beyond.
For one clinic with Baylor Scott & White Institute for Rehabilitation, using this technology has promoted better functional outcomes, patient compliance and increased attendance rates. Gross revenue per visit is up 4.3%.
The chair of clinical pharmacy practice details how the organization got, for example, racial/ethnic minorities receiving chemotherapy two times higher likelihood in reporting pain compared with non-Hispanic whites.
With a shortage of emergency medical service workers in the state, one telehealth service brings a virtual EMT into the ambulance to help the technician who is alone. That offers a wealth of medical expertise from physicians while en route to the hospital.
Therapists at the mental health provider are quite happy with the results – mean time to complete documentation has improved by 75%. Some therapists say they would think twice about leaving WellPower because of the AI technology.
Cerebral has decreased time spent on audits by 78% and has seen an even bigger improvement in meeting critical insurance criteria. The technology offers precise data feedback that could be missed in manual auditing, an exec says.
With the digital intake process, 70% of patients now complete their intake forms within 10 minutes. This efficiency has saved staff approximately 10 minutes per appointment, allowing them to focus more on patient care rather than paperwork.
The health system deployed comprehensive virtual care devices in all of its urgent care clinics, vastly improving the patient and provider experiences and boosting the bottom line.
With help from Oracle, Innovaccer and Salesforce, the South Florida provider is scoring big population health wins, including a 7% increase in coding gap closure rate and a 17% increase in annual wellness visit completion rates.
Further, the health system's cardiac MRI services grew by 42% – which significantly improved access to specialized care for patients, says AdventHealth's VP of imaging services.
AmeriPro Health says its homegrown artificial intelligence-enabled predictive modeling technology is driving everything it does – and helping its hospital partners significantly increase their patient throughput.
"By relying on the AI technology to convert information into discrete data elements in our Epic EHR, we have significantly reduced the amount of manual entry required by our staff," an inpatient pharmacy operations supervisor reports.
Harmony Park Family Medicine also saw turnaround times decrease significantly, with more than half of monthly determinations requiring no authorization – and 70% of prior auth requests sent to Humana being approved instantly.
As more health systems merge, making smart and strategic use of datasets drawn from disparate systems is essential to clinical and operational success, says Advocate Health Chief Data Officer Tina Esposito.
Nearly 75% of its clinicians now spend less time working outside of work hours, which has improved provider satisfaction. There's also been a reduction in documentation errors.
The technology enables end-to-end order and staff pool management, fulfillment, compliance, invoicing and reporting to allow for the management of all flexible labor on one unified platform.
Patients who otherwise wouldn't have used the health system's physical therapy services because of geographic distance are now staying in-network. The technology also has boosted Emory's value-based care efforts.
A 50% reduction in nurse-created discrepancies at medication cabinets and a 20% decrease in the time nurses spend dispensing meds have been two big wins. A 30% increase in storage capacity on the floors is another.
Using the technology can be daunting because it involves considerable time and careful results management – but augmenting it with AI image enhancement software has made a big difference for its radiologists.
Getting to the unique root cause for each patient has enabled the healthcare organization to reduce hospitalizations, improve medication adherence, reduce healthcare costs, reduce medications and help patients lose weight.
Many patients who had 40% medication adherence rates now take their medication 90% of the time. And the organization has seen a 29% reduction in inpatient utilization and a 24% reduction in ER utilization.
The clinical analytics tool is improving engagement metrics at Tennessee-based Psychiatric Medical Care, helping report aggregate data to the board and The Joint Commission, informing performance evaluations – and offering something quantifiable to show patients and families.
Officers in Oklahoma can contact mental health professionals from their vehicles, avoiding ER visits and other risks. In the counties served by the virtual care program, there has been a 93.1% reduction in hospitalizations for mental health crises.
Launching telemedicine from within the patient portal – which enables the health system to get electronic signoff on certain documents – is a big boon for compliance and efficiency.
The system provides the data insights that enable the organization to close underutilized clinics and redirect patients to others nearby. Additionally, the finance teams have whittled down rent reporting from two months to a week.
So says Dr. Vinay Vaidya, CMIO at Phoenix Children's, who shows how he and his team successfully changed the documentation perceptions of the hospital's clinicians – ultimately improving patient outcomes.
The group practice's SVP of digital health reveals how she and her team have created new care models, integrated artificial intelligence-enabled clinical decision support and used other emerging technologies to power better care journeys.
The clinician-informed data model answers more than 70% of patient questions correctly, reducing the number of routine questions clinicians need to answer so they can focus on more complex patient concerns. The tool also is helping boost health equity for new mothers.
This new scalability is possible because spinoff Praia Health's Consumer Platform does the heavy lifting associated with creating new features and capabilities within the health system's logged-in experiences, explains Providence's SVP of product and tech innovation.
The center created the Charisma Virtual Social Coaching platform. To date, 90% of participants have reported gains in recognizing and managing emotions. The center now is adding generative AI capabilities.
Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Center now relies on videos as part of its virtual care program to educate patients. One of many benefits: It has reduced inbound patient questions – for every 15 questions nurses used to get, now they get only one.
And the telemedicine technology has increased the number of surgeries. It has enabled surgeons to feel comfortable performing more surgeries knowing they have available the clinical expertise to care for those patients in recovery in the ICU.
And technology is key, as the health system's new Consumer Data Hub provides a secure 360-degree view of the patient, while its new Enterprise Data Fabric unifies diverse data sources – offering immediate access and enabling advanced AI-powered analytics.
The provider saw a 22% decrease in one type of denial and an 18% decrease in another. Those improvements have resulted in more than 30 hours per week in eliminated work for follow-up staff.
The Eye Care Center of Northern Colorado's new EHR/PM was painful – so it switched again. The result? A dozen clicks down to one. Two-and-a-half minutes down to just 30 seconds. More data sharing between physicians and specialists. And a biggie: correct bills.
The massive public health system now has wait times down to 10 minutes, has decreased low-acuity visits going to valuable office or emergency room slots – and now boasts a net promoter score of 87 for virtual care.
The health system's CMIO says technology has enabled an array of operational efficiencies with quicker, automated schedule generation – and happier doctors.
2017 saw Houston Methodist Coordinated Care Medicare Accountable Care Organization in the 40th percentile in some of the CMS ACO quality metrics. Today it's in the 90th. Physicians also have received CMS shared savings based on their quality percentile performance.
It's also helped decrease the amount of time spent documenting care by about two hours per provider each day, the health system's medical director reports.
The provider group acquired a practice with a different electronic health record. Today, everyone "speaks the same language," staff satisfaction is way up, operational costs are down – and it's launching new services such as self-check-in.
The health system's behavioral health team is measuring a 40% order-to-enrollment rate, with many patients using the digital tools for more than two hours.
With waits for individual psychotherapy as long as several months and several thousand outstanding orders, the mostly rural health system needed a solution. Combining group therapy and telemedicine was the answer.
With telemedicine, the time for patients coming out of the ER or a convenience clinic to see a primary care provider has gone from weeks to 24-72 hours. And virtual care has helped the health system achieve a 72% completion rate of Medicare annual wellness visits.
Today, 91% of patients have logged into their account within three months of an encounter, says its VP of digital health, showing the results that "actively engaging" can accomplish, especially for Medicaid patients.
The chief innovation officer at Phoenix Children’s lived up to his title when he enabled inexpensive, ubiquitous, hands-free virtual care using devices meant for the home in his 750 exam rooms – with no new FTEs to support them.
The New York health system also successfully migrated, consolidated and shut down data centers and servers, achieving monetary savings and remediating security risks.
The practice's optimal start rate – when a patient begins dialysis at home, receives a preemptive transplant or begins in-center hemodialysis – had been 40%. With the new electronic health record, it's now 90%.
Its use of a special tool to connect patients with aid is an "excellent example of applying technology to value creation," says the health system's CFO. "Trying to access such programs manually, or not at all, is suboptimal for providers and patients alike."
That's an approximately 30% decrease in data center cost, coming from reductions in labor costs, software maintenance, data center equipment and maintenance, and utilities. Further, the cloud migration has boosted the recovery posture.
The nurse stroke program manager offers an in-depth look at the virtual care initiative, which brings neurologists from other sites into critical decision-making.
Critical patient insights were missing in more than 13% of Denver Health electronic health records. A new methodology has helped reduce this to less than 1%.
Mountain Region CommonSpirit Health's CMIO outlines novel ways RTLS is being used in finding everything from staff and patients to equipment and patients' personal items – and how it all adds up to the quadruple aim.
Yes, RTLS. Mountain Region CommonSpirit Health's CMIO offers a deep dive into some novel uses of the tracking technology, showing how it can fulfill its long-touted promise of improving care quality, patient and provider experience and the bottom line.
EHR-linked virtual care "allows us to expand our capabilities, creating opportunities to build trust," says the health system's chief information and digital officer.
The orthopedics and spine practice has conducted 4,759 pre-collections estimates and is up to $898,000 in pre-collections. Patient AR on the back end has improved significantly, as well.
The technology also helps care teams to standardize patient education and care pathways, while more consistently collecting patient-reported outcomes and other data across its spine, joint and sports medicine service lines, says its orthopedic surgery chief.
The initiative also provides savings in the form of signing bonuses the hospital would have had to pay out for new staff. And it saved $7 million on travel nurses. Further, nurse satisfaction has improved significantly, its chief digital officer says.
The system, built as part of the organization's digital front door, has achieved both clinical and financial ROI and helped earn a Net Promoter Score of 72.
The use of telemedicine technology that lends itself well to combination with in-person care is bringing many benefits to the family clinic of Dr. Richard Tytus.
Teams of clinicians, researchers and educators worked to find artificial intelligence-enabled approaches to healthcare challenges using real-world, de-identified patient data.
The outreach program is showing serious clinical ROI by relying on patient-reported blood pressure data linked to the Epic MyChart-based interactive digital health assistant, Care Companion.
The HR team at the health system expanded its family leave program and launched a new recognition initiative using feedback from the technology, among other projects. It's "helped us create a culture of excellence and gratitude," says one VP.
Among its success stories, the health system built an app that identifies more than 10 patients each week with potential malnutrition who then are referred to nutritionists.
One of the New Jersey health system's interventional pulmonologists tells the story of how an artificial intelligence-aided detection system is offering significant clinical ROI.
By reducing the number of flowsheets and their content, they've made documentation more than 10 minutes faster. Across two years, the number of best practice alerts for nursing was reduced by 86%.
More than two-thirds of the health system's abdominal CTs, chest MRIs and PET-CTs now have interactive links to key findings – and radiologists are finding that capability hugely useful, its associate CMIO reports.
That's been in med-surg and the ICU. In the ED, the health system has discharged 63% of its patients to outpatient plans with the help of telepsychiatry.
In a partnership with the Denver Housing Authority, the health system has installed on-site equipment and held monthly workshops – increasing patient portal activation to 63% from 58% across five DHA communities.
At One Brooklyn Health System, tools such as the Brooklyn Health Equity Index survey are helping serve up valuable real-time insights to help develop training, policies and procedures that address racial disparities and social determinants.
Remote patient monitoring has helped the health system boost patient engagement, improve patient care quality through evidence-based therapies and reduce clinicians' workloads.
The New York hospital's vice chairman of urology and robotics operations explains how a new surgical intelligence platform digs into surgery video to help understand outcomes and improve care.
The Louisiana health system is using the technology to help meet other Quadruple Aim goals of improving care quality, boosting patient access and reducing costs.
Virtual care provider Ophelia found 56% of its OUD patients remained in treatment for six months and 48% stayed for one year, with retention rates significantly higher than traditional in-person care.
Further, when using this nurse-facilitated technology in patients’ homes, the percentages of men and people of color were higher than national averages for ACP completion, the SVP of pop health and primary care reports.
The behavioral health provider's virtual care visits now have higher satisfaction rates and offer an improved patient experience, its CIO says. Further, there's been a big reduction in technical support tickets and general staff burden.
The San Diego-based provider sees around 30 readings per patient per month, showing a high level of compliance – and is better able to identify white coat hypertension in doctors' offices.
The Florida health system has converted more than 7.3 million medication instructions without clinician intervention. The prescribing technology was able to infer missing instructions for subsets and identify high-risk medications, improving patient safety.
Since implementing discovery, navigation and merchandising tools, the health system achieved a 300% increase in virtual care capacity and a 12% boost in net new patients acquired. Now 30% of patients are returning within six months of their first visit.
The all-in-one practice management system reduced the amount of time a patient needs to spend in physical therapy, allowing therapists to see more patients without sacrificing the quality of treatment.
Dr. Kendell Cannon describes how her primary care practice sifted through the hype of artificial intelligence and found a scribe that does what it promises.
Nearly 4,000 medication-related text messages were exchanged between patients and Penny – and approximately 93% were accurately interpreted. Patient engagement for symptom assessment increased from 25% to 70%.
Through its virtual care and remote monitoring programs, University of Alabama at Birmingham has increased the census and case-mix index of rural hospitals, among other successes.
That's for coronary artery bypass grafting patients at Atrium Health's Sanger Heart and Vascular Institute, compared with a national average of 2.5%. Remote patient monitoring also has reduced 30-day readmissions by 40%.
Combined practice management tools have also helped the applied behavioral analysis clinic, which serves a healthcare desert, increase client progress and enhance staff efficiency.
In two years following 100 new-start opioid use disorder patients, Bill Farr says 94% remained in the medication-assisted treatment program – attrition rates had previously hovered around 54%.
"The more efficient we are and the faster we turn around the equipment, the more equipment is available for the patient, which decreases length of stay and increases patient satisfaction," says its system director of clinical engineering.
By improving use of its data, the behavioral health agency has been able to help patients obtain employment and GEDs – all while connecting seamlessly to its health information exchange to drive improved care coordination.
What's more, data work surrounding the early warning system helped spur physician use of evidence-based order sets to greater than 70% – which greatly reduces overall mortality.
Further, the Pennsylvania health system has seen a reduction in the percentage of patients who leave the emergency department without being seen, thanks to its telehealth program.
The University of Kansas Health System has boosted overall block utilization by 20% total, prime time by almost 5% total and overall volume by 8% – all with a 7% reduction in available room.