Katie Adams , 2025-04-29 22:38:00
Amid market shifts and shallower pockets, health system leaders are restrategizing. Hospitals across the country are juggling new and ongoing financial pressures, increasing digital health initiatives and the need to provide high-quality care.
On Monday during a session at the symplr Healthcare Operations Summit in Chicago, hospital leaders discussed how they approach the balancing act between innovation and financial sustainability. They shared tactics such as reassessing vendor contracts, leaning into existing tech capabilities and finding creative ways to support patients without compromising margins.
Hospitals’ shaky margins are becoming even more unstable than usual thanks to the flurry of policy changes made during President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, noted Sandra Johnson, chief revenue officer at Maryland-based MedStar Health.
For instance, hospital leaders are strategizing how to best address supply chain issues and the ongoing uncertainties surrounding tariffs.
MedStar recently had a meeting going over the health system’s plans to stockpile critical supplies, as well as how to account for expiration and practical limitations, Johnson said.
She also pointed out that the federal government’s massive wave of layoffs has led to thousands of patients losing their insurance mid-treatment.
Many of those laid-off individuals were patients in the middle of receiving critical treatments, such as cancer care. Patients who were already on payment plans have been calling MedStar and asking the health system to pause or defer the payments while they search for new employment or coverage, Johnson stated.
“We just had a meeting to try to strategize around how we can possibly help them and still keep some kind of margin,” she remarked.
Hospitals often find themselves caught up in a tricky set of circumstances in which they must balance compassion and fiscal responsibility. MedStar is working with vendors to explore assistance programs for insurance premiums, as well as copay support to help patients continue care — at the same time, the health system is managing tight margins and can’t jeopardize financial stability, Johnson explained.
Another panelist — Taylor Hamilton, chief consumer officer at Tennessee-based Ballad Health — noted that her organization is currently in the midst of budgeting, and it’s feeling the squeeze just like its peers.
“I went back to my team and said let’s look back at all of our vendor partners that we have. Everyone’s evolving constantly. I mean, symplr has this new wonderful product, and Epic is rolling out all these new things with MyChart from the consumerism side. And we’re already paying for these — it’s already in our contract. Let’s go back to a clean slate — like we’ve never had an engagement with this vendor before, even though we have a contract — and figure out what we have, what we need, and where the gap is,” Hamilton remarked.
On the marketing and consumerism side of things, Ballad is planning to bring on zero new vendor partners for the next two years, she stated.
“[The plan] is to leverage our existing partnerships and optimize those current contracts, because there’s all of these tools that we’re just not using,” Hamilton declared.
Katie Barr, chief nursing informatics officer at North Carolina-based Advocate Health, also highlighted this type of strategy as a way that hospitals can control costs. She said that Advocate favors Epic’s native capabilities over other vendors as a way to keep its spending in check.
“If Epic can do it or do it at least 80-90% as well as a niche vendor, we should go with that,” Barr said.
When it comes to managing vendor relationships and new technologies, it can sometimes be difficult to prove that a tool is worth its cost, She added.
For instance, the value of initiatives like virtual nursing or ambient listening don’t always show up in the form of a direct financial ROI figure, such as the amount of dollars saved.
“We need to find ways to bring the joy back, and that doesn’t always make for dollars and cents,” Barr noted.
Metrics like clinician retention or reduced length of stay might help prove the tool’s impact, but causality is often murky, she said.
Amid tightening budgets and rapidly changing policy headwinds, health systems are finding new ways to save money, as well as being forced to rethink what value really means, not just in dollars, but in true impact.
Photo: claudenakagawa, Getty Images
