July 10, 2026
Clinical Workflow Redesign Drives Healthcare Optimization
Healthcare organizations that align clinical workflows with actual care delivery, using technology in a supporting role, reduce friction and fragmentation and set the stage for automation and artificial intelligence.
Efforts to modernize clinical workflows have become a hurdle for many healthcare organizations. These initiatives frequently involve implementing new technologies to address issues such as fragmented systems, duplicative documentation and workflow friction. However, IT modernization must also include redesigned workflows, or healthcare organizations risk automating broken processes and reinforcing inefficiencies. This requires an intentional reimagining of care delivery: What would processes look like if we designed them today?
Many clinical workflows are driven by technology and, as a result, are structurally misaligned with how clinicians deliver care. When organizations start instead by designing better workflows — informed by human-centered design and process mapping — they can layer in technologies that support those workflows effectively. By focusing on end-to-end workflows, healthcare organizations can shift away from siloed and incremental fixes in favor of intentional designs that allow for meaningful transformation.
CDW helps healthcare organizations design with intention, aligning care delivery, clinical workflows and supporting technologies.
Efforts to modernize clinical workflows have become a hurdle for many healthcare organizations. These initiatives frequently involve implementing new technologies to address issues such as fragmented systems, duplicative documentation and workflow friction. However, IT modernization must also include redesigned workflows, or healthcare organizations risk automating broken processes and reinforcing inefficiencies. This requires an intentional reimagining of care delivery: What would processes look like if we designed them today?
Many clinical workflows are driven by technology and, as a result, are structurally misaligned with how clinicians deliver care. When organizations start instead by designing better workflows — informed by human-centered design and process mapping — they can layer in technologies that support those workflows effectively. By focusing on end-to-end workflows, healthcare organizations can shift away from siloed and incremental fixes in favor of intentional designs that allow for meaningful transformation.
CDW helps healthcare organizations design with intention, aligning care delivery, clinical workflows and supporting technologies.
Healthcare organizations have invested significant resources in modernizing clinical workflows, only to see these efforts fall short of the desired outcomes. As a result, many organizations continue to struggle with fragmented systems, duplicative documentation and workflow friction, which compels employees to adopt manual work-arounds. Leaders often attempt to manage these symptoms by introducing even more technology solutions. However, when healthcare systems invest in modernization without redesigning workflows, they essentially automate broken processes, reinforcing inefficiencies instead of fixing them.
For most providers, workflows have evolved reactively in response to technology advances, regulatory pressures and operational demands. In the process, however, digital workflows have retained the shape of their analog prototypes. What’s missing is an intentional reimagining of care delivery. That is, what would healthcare processes look like if we were designing them today from the ground up? Almost certainly, they would look quite different.
Optimization is often seen as the solution for inefficient workflows. However, optimization assumes the original design is worth keeping. In fact, many clinical workflows are structurally misaligned with how clinicians actually deliver care. The cumulative effect of legacy infrastructure, disconnected systems and fragmented applications is that clinicians must navigate complexity instead of focusing on care.
When organizations start with workflow redesign, they can leverage artificial intelligence and automation to simplify and improve workflows in ways that truly enhance care. For example, excessive documentation is a persistent factor in clinician burnout, and various attempts at fixing it have delivered minor improvements. By contrast, ambient artificial intelligence scribes virtually eliminate the manual process, creating an opportunity for providers to reimagine patient-clinician interactions.
The question today isn’t “How do we optimize existing workflows?” but rather “What would workflows look like if they were designed today?” This reframing helps organizations shift away from siloed and incremental fixes toward intentional design that sets the stage for meaningful transformation.
34%
The percentage of providers citing clinical workflow optimization as a top-three priority for IT investment
Source: bain.com, “Healthcare IT Investment: AI Moves from Pilot to Production,” Oct. 9, 2025
CDW helps healthcare organizations reimagine workflows to transform care delivery.
Healthcare organizations have invested significant resources in modernizing clinical workflows, only to see these efforts fall short of the desired outcomes. As a result, many organizations continue to struggle with fragmented systems, duplicative documentation and workflow friction, which compels employees to adopt manual work-arounds. Leaders often attempt to manage these symptoms by introducing even more technology solutions. However, when healthcare systems invest in modernization without redesigning workflows, they essentially automate broken processes, reinforcing inefficiencies instead of fixing them.
For most providers, workflows have evolved reactively in response to technology advances, regulatory pressures and operational demands. In the process, however, digital workflows have retained the shape of their analog prototypes. What’s missing is an intentional reimagining of care delivery. That is, what would healthcare processes look like if we were designing them today from the ground up? Almost certainly, they would look quite different.
Optimization is often seen as the solution for inefficient workflows. However, optimization assumes the original design is worth keeping. In fact, many clinical workflows are structurally misaligned with how clinicians actually deliver care. The cumulative effect of legacy infrastructure, disconnected systems and fragmented applications is that clinicians must navigate complexity instead of focusing on care.
When organizations start with workflow redesign, they can leverage artificial intelligence and automation to simplify and improve workflows in ways that truly enhance care. For example, excessive documentation is a persistent factor in clinician burnout, and various attempts at fixing it have delivered minor improvements. By contrast, ambient artificial intelligence scribes virtually eliminate the manual process, creating an opportunity for providers to reimagine patient-clinician interactions.
The question today isn’t “How do we optimize existing workflows?” but rather “What would workflows look like if they were designed today?” This reframing helps organizations shift away from siloed and incremental fixes toward intentional design that sets the stage for meaningful transformation.
CDW helps healthcare organizations reimagine workflows to transform care delivery.
Workflow Optimization: By the Numbers
91%
The percentage of healthcare executives who say health systems must fundamentally change how they operate to overcome challenges and thrive in the next five years
Source: chartis.com, “From Reactive to Proactive: Health Systems Look to AI and Digital to Flip the Healthcare Delivery Paradigm Within 5 Years,” Nov. 3, 2025
60%
The percentage of nurses who say duplication and redundancy are their most common documentation issues
Source: KLAS Research, “Reducing Nursing Documentation Burden 2025,” December 2025
49%
The percentage of healthcare organizations whose AI use cases are focused on operational efficiency and automation
Source: Cisco, “Realizing the Value of AI: Cisco AI Readiness Index 2025,” October 2025
Workflow Optimization: By the Numbers
91%
The percentage of healthcare executives who say health systems must fundamentally change how they operate to overcome challenges and thrive in the next five years
Source: chartis.com, “From Reactive to Proactive: Health Systems Look to AI and Digital to Flip the Healthcare Delivery Paradigm Within 5 Years,” Nov. 3, 2025
60%
The percentage of nurses who say duplication and redundancy are their most common documentation issues
Source: KLAS Research, “Reducing Nursing Documentation Burden 2025,” December 2025
49%
The percentage of healthcare organizations whose AI use cases are focused on operational efficiency and automation
Source: Cisco, “Realizing the Value of AI: Cisco AI Readiness Index 2025,” October 2025
- WORKFLOW FRAGMENTATION
- END-TO-END RATIONALIZATION
- BENEFITS OF BETTER WORKFLOWS
Fragmentation exists at the organizational level with siloed departments and lack of enterprisewide coordination, in technologies characterized by interoperability and lack of data integration, and in workflows that are manual and inconsistent. Many hospitals have accumulated disparate systems that create operational friction when users attempt to navigate real-world workflows.
CARE DELIVERY RISKS: Fragmentation affects every layer of care delivery. In patchwork environments defined by disparate systems and poorly conceived workflows, clinicians cannot deliver care consistently. When facilities use multiple communication platforms or call systems, care teams may receive differing information or encounter delays in accessing correct information. Communication issues are a primary cause of medication errors and sentinel events that can pose serious harm to patients and financial consequences to providers. Moreover, fragmentation builds frustration, which contributes to clinician burnout and decreases patient safety.
SECURITY AND RESILIENCE: Risks that are cumbersome under normal conditions can become dangerous in downtime or disaster recovery scenarios. On average, healthcare organizations experienced 17 days of downtime after a ransomware attack. Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity. When these events occur, hospitals may need to revert to paper-based workflows, which is difficult when multiple systems and inconsistent workflows exist. Fragmentation also slows recovery time, with tool sprawl impeding IT visibility and making it difficult to establish isolated recovery environments. As organizations adopt AI and other technologies to reduce workflow frictions, they must also consider how these tools will affect operations under adverse conditions.
SPRAWL AND BLIND SPOTS: Healthcare organizations maintain dozens of systems, with more than one-third using upward of 100 applications, and 76% of leaders say excess tools make operational management more difficult. Clinicians must toggle between systems to gather patient information, reconcile conflicting data sources and manually bridge communication gaps. Administrative teams juggle processes that should be streamlined, and leaders struggle to gain a unified view of operations. When visibility and data integration are impaired, decision-making is adversely affected and leaders are unable to access the insights they need to guide their organizations strategically. With medical costs projected to increase 9% in 2027, organizations need unified data that can support accurate planning.
TECHNICAL DEBT: Introducing new tools into legacy environments may address one source of friction while adding complexity elsewhere. Siloed deployments often fail to consider downtime and disaster recovery scenarios, making processes less resilient. Moreover, it is harder to advance enterprise initiatives and scale new solutions across fragmented environments. Pilots, rollouts and change management processes become less efficient and harder to measure. These issues are pervasive, with 71% of healthcare IT leaders citing legacy system consolidation and data archiving as a priority; interoperability enhancements are close behind, at 57%.
BARRIERS TO INNOVATION: Fragmented data is the primary barrier to scaling AI, according to 62% of healthcare professionals. AI and automation require clean, integrated workflows. They also need strong security and governance, which are difficult to establish in fragmented environments. Inconsistent workflows make it harder to prioritize AI use cases and to scale AI deployments. Gartner has predicted that by the end of 2027, organizations will jettison more than 40% of agentic AI initiatives because of cost, unmanaged risk or uncertain business value. Organizations that adopt AI tools without rethinking end-to-end workflows risk introducing new friction points and failing to achieve the intended ROI.
Click Below To Continue Reading
Misalignment between workflows and care delivery is a growing problem. Operational silos and fragmented systems are one culprit, but more often, misalignment stems from an effort to improve workflows through new technologies. However, when clinicians are asked to adapt to technology, instead of technology being used to support clinicians, inefficiencies compound and care teams’ frustration may worsen. Here are four signs that a workflow redesign may be in order.
System sprawl: Clinicians frequently encounter different systems and workflows across departments and facilities. This increases burnout and makes it difficult to obtain a centralized, consistent view of patient data.
Technology imbalance: When organizations defer to technology rather than human-centered design, they inadvertently force clinicians to adapt to the latest tools, even when that doesn’t make sense for care workflows.
Shadow IT and AI: When workflows are inefficient and obtaining new technologies is cumbersome, employees often turn to unsanctioned tools as a work-around, a risk that AI is likely to exacerbate.
Limited-scope innovations: Workflow optimizations that are narrow in scope, targeting a single layer, often overlook the downstream effects and potential consequences across clinical, IT, business and operational units.
Fragmentation cannot be solved by technology alone. Before deploying new tools, organizations must establish a strong operational foundation informed by human-centered design and patient-clinician journey mapping. By redesigning workflows first, organizations can reduce complexity and align systems and processes with how clinicians actually deliver care.
OPTIMIZE VS. REDESIGN: Traditional workflow initiatives focus on optimization, making incremental improvements to existing processes. However, when those processes are fundamentally flawed, optimization delivers limited value. Many organizations need rationalization, a process that requires objective analysis, collaborative input and a willingness to question assumptions so that organizations can honestly determine why current processes exist and how they should be changed. This involves mapping processes end to end to identify redundancies and eliminate unnecessary steps. As organizations reduce silos and fragmentation, they move away from piecemeal improvements that fail to deliver consistent, enterprisewide benefits.
START WITH WORKFLOWS: Many healthcare initiatives fail because technology leads and best practices follow (if they follow at all). Rationalization puts workflow design first, with four key objectives: assess how care teams actually work versus how workflows are documented; identify points of friction, duplication and misalignment; simplify processes to reduce variability and complexity; and align stakeholders on a shared operational model. Organizations should introduce enabling technologies such as AI and automation only after establishing this foundation. Starting with workflow design reduces the likelihood of reinforcing inefficiencies and accelerates adoption by aligning technology investments with clinical realities.
APPLICATION INTELLIGENCE: CHIME research shows a disconnect between recognizing the value of application rationalization (76% of healthcare CIOs) and having a fully implemented rationalization program (20%). Silos are a common barrier: When clinical, IT, business and operational groups aren’t aligned on workflow optimization goals, it seems easier to maintain multiple tools — the very problem that optimization seeks to address. Application intelligence can help organizations overcome these hurdles. AI tooling, for example, can assess license use enterprisewide. This data is a key input for workflow redesign and ensures that decisions are based on objective information rather than individual stakeholder preferences.
SECURITY ADVANTAGES: Rationalization and consolidation improve security by reducing the number of systems potentially at risk. Rationalization can also provide opportunities to delegate risk through Software as a Service models and properly secured agreements with trusted vendors. Consolidation also improves data correlation, minimizing blind spots and giving security teams a clearer picture of an organization’s overall risk posture. Many security platforms are designed to address data correlation challenges by enabling visibility across systems. However, such solutions may not extend to legacy tools or shadow IT. Accordingly, while they can complement a rationalization strategy, they don’t replace the inherent security advantages of systems consolidation.
END-TO-END ROI: Siloed approaches to optimization reduce ROI, often resolving a localized pain point while maintaining or increasing fragmentation. By contrast, end-to-end analyses consider workflows and the organization as a whole, ensuring organizations derive maximum benefit from technology investments. Holistic analyses also improve ROI measurement. For example, an ambient AI solution may reduce clinicians’ documentation time, but its full ROI will also reflect user experience, staff retention and patient sentiment. Some providers have equipped clinicians with mobility devices, for instance, only to see them unused because of a poor user experience. Measuring ROI holistically ensures that technology deployments advance strategic objectives instead of delivering incremental improvements with limited impact.
Workflow rationalization helps organizations move from reactive change to intentional design. It leads to workflows that are integrated, scalable and sustainable rather than becoming patched and divergent across teams or locations. Rationalization is about doing the right things, in the right way, supported by the right systems.
BUILDING THE FOUNDATION: Redesigning clinical workflows isn’t a one-time initiative, nor is it rationalizing for its own sake. Well-designed workflows establish a foundation for long-term transformation, positioning organizations to leverage technology with an intentional, clearly defined strategy. When workflows are rationalized, organizations can confidently layer in advanced capabilities, effectively automating routine tasks and seamlessly integrating AI-driven insights. This foundation also ensures that workflows and technologies work in concert to reduce clinicians’ administrative burden and increase collaboration across clinical and administrative teams.
CLINICAL AND IT BENEFITS: When organizations address underlying complexity, they create conditions where technology can deliver its full value, leading to higher adoption rates, more consistent outcomes and stronger ROI. Redesigned workflows improve the clinician experience by reducing manual work-arounds, inconsistent communication and fragmented data access. When systems align with how care teams operate, cognitive load decreases and clinicians have more time for care. Finally, intentional design supports scalability. As new technologies emerge, organizations can integrate them into a coherent framework rather than adding them in isolation. Adoption and change management are simpler, and workflow improvements are sustainable.
FOUNDATION FOR AI: Rationalized workflows and consolidated systems make it easier to implement advanced technologies and support them with appropriate governance. For instance, a majority of healthcare organizations have partially or fully adopted AI or analytics for patient bed management, including predictive bed forecasting and automated allocation. To effectively leverage AI for systemwide applications, however, organizations need integrated systems and consistent workflows. Similarly, ambient AI clinical documentation is expanding, yet often without proper governance for privacy and security. As a result, ambient AI documentation tools may be deployed in silos or as shadow IT, creating risks and limiting their impact. Organizations that have eliminated silos and fragmentation have a stronger foundation for AI adoption and governance.
EXPERT PERSPECTIVES: When healthcare organizations embrace intentional workflow design, they reduce operational complexity, build foundational readiness for automation and AI, and create care environments that support clinicians and patients. Even when organizations have a clear picture of their desired state, they may struggle to close the gap due to current-state complexity, lack of internal resources or cultural dynamics. Partners such as CDW can help organizations assess workflows, identify opportunities for rationalization and consolidation, and design integrated environments that support modernization.
CDW SERVICES: CDW’s experts understand the unique challenges of today’s healthcare landscape and have helped customers of all sizes shift from reactive, fragmented and ad hoc approaches to intentional, cohesive and proactive environments.
CDW’s Clinical Care Continuity Workshop focuses on systems outages and disaster recovery strategies to ensure organizations can operate during periods of disruption. This involves analyzing end-to-end workflows and developing alternatives for safe, sustainable care delivery.
CDW Healthcare Transformation Centers bring clinicians and IT teams together to explore technology solutions in collaboration with CDW’s experts.
AI-driven rationalization services provide a complete accounting of platforms in use to inform decision-making and facilitate data-driven conversations among leadership teams.
CDW’s workshops in mobility, AI and the data center can help organizations resolve specific challenges in these areas.
- WORKFLOW FRAGMENTATION
- END-TO-END RATIONALIZATION
- BENEFITS OF BETTER WORKFLOWS
Fragmentation exists at the organizational level with siloed departments and lack of enterprisewide coordination, in technologies characterized by interoperability and lack of data integration, and in workflows that are manual and inconsistent. Many hospitals have accumulated disparate systems that create operational friction when users attempt to navigate real-world workflows.
CARE DELIVERY RISKS: Fragmentation affects every layer of care delivery. In patchwork environments defined by disparate systems and poorly conceived workflows, clinicians cannot deliver care consistently. When facilities use multiple communication platforms or call systems, care teams may receive differing information or encounter delays in accessing correct information. Communication issues are a primary cause of medication errors and sentinel events that can pose serious harm to patients and financial consequences to providers. Moreover, fragmentation builds frustration, which contributes to clinician burnout and decreases patient safety.
SECURITY AND RESILIENCE: Risks that are cumbersome under normal conditions can become dangerous in downtime or disaster recovery scenarios. On average, healthcare organizations experienced 17 days of downtime after a ransomware attack. Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity. When these events occur, hospitals may need to revert to paper-based workflows, which is difficult when multiple systems and inconsistent workflows exist. Fragmentation also slows recovery time, with tool sprawl impeding IT visibility and making it difficult to establish isolated recovery environments. As organizations adopt AI and other technologies to reduce workflow frictions, they must also consider how these tools will affect operations under adverse conditions.
SPRAWL AND BLIND SPOTS: Healthcare organizations maintain dozens of systems, with more than one-third using upward of 100 applications, and 76% of leaders say excess tools make operational management more difficult. Clinicians must toggle between systems to gather patient information, reconcile conflicting data sources and manually bridge communication gaps. Administrative teams juggle processes that should be streamlined, and leaders struggle to gain a unified view of operations. When visibility and data integration are impaired, decision-making is adversely affected and leaders are unable to access the insights they need to guide their organizations strategically. With medical costs projected to increase 9% in 2027, organizations need unified data that can support accurate planning.
TECHNICAL DEBT: Introducing new tools into legacy environments may address one source of friction while adding complexity elsewhere. Siloed deployments often fail to consider downtime and disaster recovery scenarios, making processes less resilient. Moreover, it is harder to advance enterprise initiatives and scale new solutions across fragmented environments. Pilots, rollouts and change management processes become less efficient and harder to measure. These issues are pervasive, with 71% of healthcare IT leaders citing legacy system consolidation and data archiving as a priority; interoperability enhancements are close behind, at 57%.
BARRIERS TO INNOVATION: Fragmented data is the primary barrier to scaling AI, according to 62% of healthcare professionals. AI and automation require clean, integrated workflows. They also need strong security and governance, which are difficult to establish in fragmented environments. Inconsistent workflows make it harder to prioritize AI use cases and to scale AI deployments. Gartner has predicted that by the end of 2027, organizations will jettison more than 40% of agentic AI initiatives because of cost, unmanaged risk or uncertain business value. Organizations that adopt AI tools without rethinking end-to-end workflows risk introducing new friction points and failing to achieve the intended ROI.
Click Below To Continue Reading
Misalignment between workflows and care delivery is a growing problem. Operational silos and fragmented systems are one culprit, but more often, misalignment stems from an effort to improve workflows through new technologies. However, when clinicians are asked to adapt to technology, instead of technology being used to support clinicians, inefficiencies compound and care teams’ frustration may worsen. Here are four signs that a workflow redesign may be in order.
System sprawl: Clinicians frequently encounter different systems and workflows across departments and facilities. This increases burnout and makes it difficult to obtain a centralized, consistent view of patient data.
Technology imbalance: When organizations defer to technology rather than human-centered design, they inadvertently force clinicians to adapt to the latest tools, even when that doesn’t make sense for care workflows.
Shadow IT and AI: When workflows are inefficient and obtaining new technologies is cumbersome, employees often turn to unsanctioned tools as a work-around, a risk that AI is likely to exacerbate.
Limited-scope innovations: Workflow optimizations that are narrow in scope, targeting a single layer, often overlook the downstream effects and potential consequences across clinical, IT, business and operational units.
Fragmentation cannot be solved by technology alone. Before deploying new tools, organizations must establish a strong operational foundation informed by human-centered design and patient-clinician journey mapping. By redesigning workflows first, organizations can reduce complexity and align systems and processes with how clinicians actually deliver care.
OPTIMIZE VS. REDESIGN: Traditional workflow initiatives focus on optimization, making incremental improvements to existing processes. However, when those processes are fundamentally flawed, optimization delivers limited value. Many organizations need rationalization, a process that requires objective analysis, collaborative input and a willingness to question assumptions so that organizations can honestly determine why current processes exist and how they should be changed. This involves mapping processes end to end to identify redundancies and eliminate unnecessary steps. As organizations reduce silos and fragmentation, they move away from piecemeal improvements that fail to deliver consistent, enterprisewide benefits.
START WITH WORKFLOWS: Many healthcare initiatives fail because technology leads and best practices follow (if they follow at all). Rationalization puts workflow design first, with four key objectives: assess how care teams actually work versus how workflows are documented; identify points of friction, duplication and misalignment; simplify processes to reduce variability and complexity; and align stakeholders on a shared operational model. Organizations should introduce enabling technologies such as AI and automation only after establishing this foundation. Starting with workflow design reduces the likelihood of reinforcing inefficiencies and accelerates adoption by aligning technology investments with clinical realities.
APPLICATION INTELLIGENCE: CHIME research shows a disconnect between recognizing the value of application rationalization (76% of healthcare CIOs) and having a fully implemented rationalization program (20%). Silos are a common barrier: When clinical, IT, business and operational groups aren’t aligned on workflow optimization goals, it seems easier to maintain multiple tools — the very problem that optimization seeks to address. Application intelligence can help organizations overcome these hurdles. AI tooling, for example, can assess license use enterprisewide. This data is a key input for workflow redesign and ensures that decisions are based on objective information rather than individual stakeholder preferences.
SECURITY ADVANTAGES: Rationalization and consolidation improve security by reducing the number of systems potentially at risk. Rationalization can also provide opportunities to delegate risk through Software as a Service models and properly secured agreements with trusted vendors. Consolidation also improves data correlation, minimizing blind spots and giving security teams a clearer picture of an organization’s overall risk posture. Many security platforms are designed to address data correlation challenges by enabling visibility across systems. However, such solutions may not extend to legacy tools or shadow IT. Accordingly, while they can complement a rationalization strategy, they don’t replace the inherent security advantages of systems consolidation.
END-TO-END ROI: Siloed approaches to optimization reduce ROI, often resolving a localized pain point while maintaining or increasing fragmentation. By contrast, end-to-end analyses consider workflows and the organization as a whole, ensuring organizations derive maximum benefit from technology investments. Holistic analyses also improve ROI measurement. For example, an ambient AI solution may reduce clinicians’ documentation time, but its full ROI will also reflect user experience, staff retention and patient sentiment. Some providers have equipped clinicians with mobility devices, for instance, only to see them unused because of a poor user experience. Measuring ROI holistically ensures that technology deployments advance strategic objectives instead of delivering incremental improvements with limited impact.
Workflow rationalization helps organizations move from reactive change to intentional design. It leads to workflows that are integrated, scalable and sustainable rather than becoming patched and divergent across teams or locations. Rationalization is about doing the right things, in the right way, supported by the right systems.
BUILDING THE FOUNDATION: Redesigning clinical workflows isn’t a one-time initiative, nor is it rationalizing for its own sake. Well-designed workflows establish a foundation for long-term transformation, positioning organizations to leverage technology with an intentional, clearly defined strategy. When workflows are rationalized, organizations can confidently layer in advanced capabilities, effectively automating routine tasks and seamlessly integrating AI-driven insights. This foundation also ensures that workflows and technologies work in concert to reduce clinicians’ administrative burden and increase collaboration across clinical and administrative teams.
CLINICAL AND IT BENEFITS: When organizations address underlying complexity, they create conditions where technology can deliver its full value, leading to higher adoption rates, more consistent outcomes and stronger ROI. Redesigned workflows improve the clinician experience by reducing manual work-arounds, inconsistent communication and fragmented data access. When systems align with how care teams operate, cognitive load decreases and clinicians have more time for care. Finally, intentional design supports scalability. As new technologies emerge, organizations can integrate them into a coherent framework rather than adding them in isolation. Adoption and change management are simpler, and workflow improvements are sustainable.
FOUNDATION FOR AI: Rationalized workflows and consolidated systems make it easier to implement advanced technologies and support them with appropriate governance. For instance, a majority of healthcare organizations have partially or fully adopted AI or analytics for patient bed management, including predictive bed forecasting and automated allocation. To effectively leverage AI for systemwide applications, however, organizations need integrated systems and consistent workflows. Similarly, ambient AI clinical documentation is expanding, yet often without proper governance for privacy and security. As a result, ambient AI documentation tools may be deployed in silos or as shadow IT, creating risks and limiting their impact. Organizations that have eliminated silos and fragmentation have a stronger foundation for AI adoption and governance.
EXPERT PERSPECTIVES: When healthcare organizations embrace intentional workflow design, they reduce operational complexity, build foundational readiness for automation and AI, and create care environments that support clinicians and patients. Even when organizations have a clear picture of their desired state, they may struggle to close the gap due to current-state complexity, lack of internal resources or cultural dynamics. Partners such as CDW can help organizations assess workflows, identify opportunities for rationalization and consolidation, and design integrated environments that support modernization.
CDW SERVICES: CDW’s experts understand the unique challenges of today’s healthcare landscape and have helped customers of all sizes shift from reactive, fragmented and ad hoc approaches to intentional, cohesive and proactive environments.
CDW’s Clinical Care Continuity Workshop focuses on systems outages and disaster recovery strategies to ensure organizations can operate during periods of disruption. This involves analyzing end-to-end workflows and developing alternatives for safe, sustainable care delivery.
CDW Healthcare Transformation Centers bring clinicians and IT teams together to explore technology solutions in collaboration with CDW’s experts.
AI-driven rationalization services provide a complete accounting of platforms in use to inform decision-making and facilitate data-driven conversations among leadership teams.
CDW’s workshops in mobility, AI and the data center can help organizations resolve specific challenges in these areas.
CDW helps healthcare organizations design workflows that are integrated, scalable and sustainable.
Mike Larsen
CDW Expert
Scott Hillberg
Industry Strategist