11 Questions Every Healthcare Leader Should Be Asking Now

Healthcare leaders are constantly being asked to do more: adopt new technology, improve efficiency, expand access and deliver better outcomes. But what if the better question is what they should stop doing, rethink or redesign?

Members of the Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank are challenging leaders to look beyond the usual measures of progress. Their perspectives examine whether healthcare processes are designed around patients, whether technology is actually reducing burden, whether clinicians are spending time on work that matters and whether organizations are willing to question structures and practices that no longer serve their purpose.

Taken together, their answers make a compelling case for a different approach to healthcare leadership: Before asking how to do more, ask what is worth doing at all. Below, they offer up 11 questions they think healthcare leaders need to be asking, and how those questions could fundamentally improve care.

“Are we designing our processes around what works for the organization, or what works for the patient?”

– Vikas Gupta, Technical Manager for HCL Tech

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Design Around the Patient, Not the Organization

Healthcare organizations naturally measure what they can control: operational efficiency, compliance, financial performance, utilization and productivity. Those measures matter. But Vikas Gupta, Technical Manager for HCL Tech, argues that leaders should periodically step outside the organizational view and examine the experience from the patient’s perspective.

The question, Gupta says, is straightforward: “Are we designing our processes around what works for the organization, or what works for the patient?”

That distinction can fundamentally change how an organization evaluates a process. A workflow may be efficient internally yet frustrating for patients. A policy may satisfy a compliance requirement while creating unnecessary administrative steps. A digital tool may improve reporting while making access more complicated.

Gupta says healthcare leaders should consistently ask whether patient needs are truly at the center of decision-making.

“Healthcare organizations frequently focus on operational efficiency, compliance and financial performance, all of which are important,” he says. “But if patient needs are not at the center of decision-making, even well-intentioned initiatives can create friction and dissatisfaction.”

The question also provides a practical test for strategic initiatives. If leaders make patient outcomes and experience the starting point, Gupta says organizations can “simplify processes, improve access, reduce administrative burden and design more patient-centered experiences, ultimately strengthening both trust and long-term organizational performance.”

Make Patient Outcomes the Technology Test

Jason Foodman, Managing Director at Archetype Growth, approaches the question from the technology investment side: “How can new technology directly improve patient outcomes and the patient experience?”

Healthcare organizations have plenty of reasons to adopt new technology. Competitive pressure is one. Fear of missing out on AI developments is another. Financial projections can also create compelling business cases. But Foodman argues that those factors should never become the primary reason for adoption.

“Healthcare organizations adopt new technologies for all kinds of reasons,” he says. “But the driving force behind adopting new technologies should always be improving patient outcomes.”

That standard can make technology decisions more disciplined. Rather than beginning with a technology and searching for a healthcare application, leaders can begin with a patient problem and determine whether technology is the best solution. Foodman says leaders can reinforce the discipline by returning to a deceptively powerful source: the organization’s mission statement.

“Revisiting the organization’s mission statement and letting that be the strategic driving force behind decision-making related to technology adoption can ensure that new technologies are implemented first and foremost in the service of patients,” he says.

The question, therefore, becomes a filter. If a proposed technology cannot demonstrate a credible connection to better outcomes or a better patient experience, leaders should be willing to ask whether it belongs on the roadmap at all.

Ask Whether the Organization Still Needs to Exist

For Mark Francis, Founder and CEO of CaregiverZone, Inc., the question becomes even more fundamental: Does the organization—or the way it is structured—still make sense?

“Healthcare leaders should be asking if their organization needs to exist or if their mission and work could be best served by other parties,” Francis says.

That question challenges one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in healthcare: that every organization should continue doing everything it currently does.

Francis points to specialization as an example. 

“Many parts of the world have specialty hospitals and hospitals which provide all services,” he says. “Outcomes indicate the specialization yields better patient and clinical outcomes.”

Strategic planning is often framed around expansion—more services, more locations, more capabilities, more technology. Francis introduces a different possibility: focus. Sometimes better performance does not come from adding another capability. It comes from narrowing the mission, specializing where an organization has a genuine advantage and allowing another organization to handle work it can perform better.

Stop Buying Technology Before Preparing People

For Rajani Kumar Sindavalam, Systems Engineering Leader for HCL America Inc., the question is less about whether healthcare organizations should adopt new technology and more about whether they are preparing their people to use it successfully.

His question is: “Are we structurally training and incentivizing our workforce to adapt to new technology, or just forcing tools upon them?”

Sindavalam argues that healthcare organizations too often emphasize procurement and implementation while treating adoption as something employees are simply expected to accept.

“This disconnect breeds frustration and drives severe employee attrition,” he says.

The stakes extend beyond employee satisfaction, however.

“When exhausted staff quit due to poor tech rollouts, their irreplaceable native knowledge and institutional wisdom vanish forever,” Sindavalam says.

That makes workforce fluency a strategic metric rather than a training-program afterthought. His recommendation is to move away from defining success primarily through implementation milestones and toward measuring whether employees have actually developed confidence and competence with the new technology.

“True innovation requires motivating teams through incentivized learning and intuitive design, ensuring technology serves as an elevator of human capability instead of a burden that drains vital talent.”

“Organizations that remove low-value administrative work improve clinician satisfaction, patient access and operational performance simultaneously.”

– Asaad Hakeem of SARC MedIQ Inc.

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Eliminate Work That Does Not Improve Care

Asaad Hakeem of SARC MedIQ Inc. brings the question down to one of the most consequential realities facing healthcare organizations: Clinicians have too much to do, and not all of it contributes to patient care.

“What work are we asking clinicians to do that doesn’t improve patient outcomes?” he asks.

That framing is important because many organizations respond to operational problems by adding another process, approval, form, meeting or technology layer. The result can be a system in which each individual task seems reasonable while the cumulative workload becomes unreasonable. Hakeem says the better approach is to use the question as a filter for eliminating unnecessary work.

“That shifts decisions from adding processes to eliminating unnecessary ones,” he says.

The distinction is especially relevant as healthcare organizations continue searching for ways to address workforce strain. The American Medical Association reported in April 2026 that 41.9% of physicians experienced at least one symptom of burnout in 2025. While that represented an improvement from 43.2% in 2024 and 48.2% in 2023, the AMA noted that workload, administrative burden and the clinical environment remain important drivers.

The opportunity, then, is not simply to make clinicians more resilient. It is to make their work more rational.

“Organizations that remove low-value administrative work improve clinician satisfaction, patient access and operational performance simultaneously,” Hakeem says.

Make Every New Initiative Carry a Subtraction

Donna P. Mitchell, CEO of Mitchell Universal Network LLC, takes Hakeem’s idea one step further.

“What work are we stopping?” she asks.

Not which software is being retired. Not which system is being replaced. What work actually comes off the plate of the people expected to absorb the next change?

“Organizations approve new initiatives continuously and subtract almost nothing,” Mitchell says. “Each one lands on staff already carrying everything approved before it.”

That observation challenges a common assumption in transformation programs: that organizational capacity can continually expand. Mitchell argues that it cannot.

“Capacity gets treated as infinite because no one is required to name what stops,” she says.

The issue becomes particularly acute with artificial intelligence. AI projects are frequently justified with projections of hours saved, productivity gains and efficiency improvements. But those benefits can be difficult to realize if the organization never eliminates the underlying work.

“AI sharpens this rather than settling it,” Mitchell says. “Time savings are projected before deployment and rarely verified after.”

Her proposed test is simple. If leaders cannot identify the work that actually disappeared, they should be cautious about claiming that time was saved.

“Asking the question changes decisions concretely. Every approval carries a named subtraction, decided before signing and owned by someone,” Mitchell says.

Instead of asking only what an initiative will deliver, executives must identify what employees will no longer be required to do.

“What is not stopped is not adopted,” Mitchell says. “It is accumulated.”

Ask What Patients and Staff Should Not Have to Tolerate

Jordan Henry, Founder and Chief AI Ethicist of Veritas AI Consulting, approaches the issue through the lens of responsible innovation: “What are we asking patients, clinicians and front-line staff to tolerate that we should instead be fixing?”

The question forces leaders to examine the friction that has become normalized. A long wait may be treated as an operational reality. A confusing referral process may be considered unavoidable. A clinician’s after-hours documentation may become part of the job. A workaround may be interpreted as employee resistance. Henry argues that these conditions should instead be viewed as signals.

“It surfaces hidden burnout, waste and safety risks before they become crises,” he says. “It changes decision-making by shifting the default from ‘Can we do this?’ to ‘Should we?’”

That distinction is central to responsible AI adoption. A healthcare organization can use sophisticated technology to optimize a process that never should have existed in the first place. Henry says leaders should instead use data to identify friction and remove it.

“This question pushes organizations to stop funding low-value work, redesign processes around real friction and use data to remove burden rather than just report it,” he says.

Eliminate the Work Created by Broken Systems

Tirumala Ashish Kumar Manne, Principal Cloud Architect at Optum, asks a question that exposes a different source of administrative burden: “How much of the work our people do every day exists only because our systems cannot communicate with one another?”

A manual review may appear to be a staffing issue, or a repetitive approval may look like an administrative requirement. A duplicate data entry task may be accepted as part of a workflow. But if those tasks exist because information is trapped in disconnected systems, then adding more staff may treat the symptom rather than the cause.

“Too much of healthcare still depends on manual reviews, repetitive approvals and fragmented workflows that delay care and increase administrative costs,” Manne says.

Manne says asking his question fundamentally changes how leaders approach technology investments.

“Instead of funding another interface or dashboard, leaders begin eliminating the conditions that created the work,” he says.

That is a meaningful distinction. Digitizing a manual reconciliation process may make it faster. Eliminating the need for reconciliation is a more ambitious goal.

“The future is not about replacing clinicians with AI,” he says. “It is about removing operational burden so clinicians can focus on complex decisions. Organizations that redesign care around intelligent automation, interoperable data and measurable outcomes will outperform those that simply digitize legacy processes.”

Invest in Prevention, Not Just Treatment

Dorothy Riviere, CEO and Founder of Work Resilience, argues that healthcare leaders should ask a question that moves the system upstream: “Are we building this to treat illness, or to keep people well?”

“We have much more of an illness management system than a caring for the healthy system,” Riviere says. “Care generally starts after symptoms or pain, after surgery or after the injury has already happened.”

Her experience in physical therapy made that gap particularly visible.

“We are trained to treat once something is already wrong,” she says. “There is almost no focus on catching movement dysfunction before it becomes a real problem.”

Riviere argues that healthcare leaders need to think differently about where resources go.

“Musculoskeletal disorders alone cost employers an estimated $45 to $54 billion a year, much of it preventable if caught earlier,” she says.

The broader lesson extends beyond physical therapy. Preventive care can require leaders to fund activities whose benefits may not appear as an immediate clinical intervention or revenue event. Education, early screening, wellness programs, behavioral interventions and proactive monitoring can all compete for resources against services that address problems after they have become acute.

Riviere says the question should influence more than clinical services. It should affect “what gets funded, how we think about what is educated, promoted, marketed and more.”

“We have made progress toward the caring for the healthy side of the system,” she says, “but much more needs to happen.”

“We constantly invest in new digital tools, yet clinician burnout and inbox fatigue keep rising.”

– Mahendran Chinnaiah, Digital Healthcare Architect for a major U.S. healthcare and pharmacy services firm

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Measure Whether Technology Gives Clinicians Time Back

Mahendran Chinnaiah, Digital Healthcare Architect for a major U.S. healthcare and pharmacy services firm, focuses on another hidden metric in healthcare technology: cognitive relief. His concern is that healthcare leaders often measure what technology can easily report while overlooking what matters most to the people using it.

“We constantly invest in new digital tools, yet clinician burnout and inbox fatigue keep rising,” Chinnaiah says. “That’s because many IT initiatives automate back-office documentation or compliance checks rather than giving doctors and nurses time back with patients.”

The problem is not necessarily that organizations are measuring too much. It is that they may be measuring the wrong things.

“We measure software adoption and system uptime,” he says, “but we rarely measure cognitive relief for clinicians.”

Chinnaiah says leaders should therefore establish a different hurdle for technology investment.

“Every tech proposal—from ambient AI to remote monitoring—would have to prove it directly removes friction from the daily clinical workflow before getting funded,” he says.

That would fundamentally shift the technology conversation.

“It shifts the focus from buying tools to protecting human time,” Chinnaiah says.

Treat Workarounds as System Warnings

Sriharsha Chavali, Enterprise Technology Leader at The Aspen Group, offers perhaps the most operationally revealing question in the collection: “What is this workaround telling us?”

His question challenges a common leadership response to workarounds: blame the employee.

“The shadow spreadsheet, manual reconciliation, extra undocumented steps or informal processes people rely on are rarely signs of resistance,” he says.

More often, Chavali says, they indicate that “friction in workflows, technology, communication or policies” has accumulated beneath the formal process.

Chavali says asking about workarounds changes the organizational posture from compliance enforcement to system improvement.

“Asking this question shifts the focus from judging people to improving systems, and from fixing symptoms to addressing root causes,” he says.

That can have a direct impact on safety and quality. A workaround may represent an employee’s attempt to compensate for a system limitation, but it may also introduce an unmonitored variation in how care is delivered. Treating it as a signal gives leaders an opportunity to identify the underlying defect before it becomes a safety problem.

The question is particularly useful because workarounds are often visible to front-line employees long before they appear on an executive dashboard.

“It helps leaders simplify processes, reduce burden, strengthen patient safety and support clinicians and staff more effectively so they can focus on delivering high-quality care.”

From Rethinking to Action

• Design processes around patients, not organizational convenience. Ask whether a process improves the patient experience or merely makes internal operations easier.
• Tie every technology investment to patient outcomes. Use the organization’s mission as the strategic filter for deciding whether a new technology genuinely improves outcomes or patient experience.
• Challenge whether the organization should do everything it currently does. Examine whether specialization, partnerships or a more focused mission could produce better outcomes.
• Measure workforce fluency, not just technology deployment. Organizations should treat training, adoption and employee confidence as core measures of technology success rather than stopping at implementation.
• Remove work that does not improve patient outcomes. Identify administrative tasks that can be eliminated rather than optimized.
• Require every new initiative to name what will stop. Identify the work that comes off employees’ plates before approving another initiative.
• Replace “Can we?” with “Should we?” Use patient, clinician and front-line friction as a trigger for redesign rather than automatically funding another solution.
• Look for work created by disconnected systems. Identify manual tasks that exist only because information cannot move efficiently between systems.
• Fund prevention alongside treatment. Consider whether resources are being directed toward keeping people healthy rather than waiting until illness requires intervention.
• Measure cognitive relief as a technology outcome. Technology proposals should demonstrate that they remove friction and return meaningful time and attention to clinicians.
• Treat workarounds as intelligence, not insubordination. Investigate shadow processes and manual fixes as evidence of system problems that leadership needs to solve.

Better Questions, Better Healthcare

The most important question healthcare leaders may be missing is not necessarily one specific sentence. It is a habit of questioning: What are we doing, why are we doing it and does it still serve patients and the people responsible for caring for them?

Healthcare organizations will continue to face pressure to adopt AI, modernize infrastructure, control costs and improve access. But success won’t necessarily come from implementing the most technology or launching the most initiatives. It will come from the discipline to ask what should disappear before deciding what comes next.