By: Rhonda Gibler, Chief Growth Officer, Carenet Health
*Article originally published on Healthcare IT Business Today
Health IT adoption has never moved faster. CIOs and COOs are steering multimillion-dollar investments in AI, cloud platforms, and digital front doors — all with the promise of efficiency, engagement, and ROI. Yet, in conversations with healthcare leaders, one theme rises again and again: despite the speed of adoption, the returns seem elusive. And perhaps the biggest challenge executives cite today is speed to value — the ability to turn technology investments into meaningful impact now, not years down the road.
That gap isn’t just a frustration. It’s a hidden cost that compounds with every siloed platform, underused feature, or poorly integrated workflow. And unlike traditional line items, these costs don’t appear neatly on a balance sheet. They surface in wasted staff time, disengaged patients, and transformation efforts that stall before they start.
When Technology Becomes a Hidden Cost
For CIOs and COOs, technology misalignment often shows up in four ways:
- Fragmentation: Too many systems that don’t talk to one another, creating duplication and blind spots.
- Adoption Gaps: Expensive platforms rolled out without alignment, training, culture shift, or workflow redesign needed to use them effectively.
- Workflow Friction: Tools that add wasted effort with clicks, screens, and steps — making life harder, not easier, for frontline staff.
- Eroded Confidence: Teams seeing technology as a burden rather than an enabler, accelerating burnout and eroding trust in leadership.
The ripple effect is significant. What began as an IT challenge quickly becomes an organizational one, draining ROI, creating turnover costs, and leaving patients caught in the friction. Every delay in integration, every tool that adds friction instead of removing it, pushes leaders further from the speed to value they need to demonstrate to boards and stakeholders.
A Bigger Web of Hidden Costs
Technology misalignment is only one part of a larger ecosystem of hidden costs. Across our work with health systems, payers, and health tech organizations, we see the same forces emerge:
- Workforce strain and burnout that depletes energy, knowledge, and capacity.
- Operational inefficiencies that waste resources and slow down transformation.
- Poor experiences and eroded trust that drive patient churn and disengagement.
- Quality breakdowns that lead to missed prevention, worsening outcomes, and readmissions.
These hidden costs work together, compounding one another. A poorly integrated technology system can increase administrative load, which drives burnout, which worsens patient experience.
For CIOs and COOs, the challenge isn’t just managing IT budgets — it’s navigating a cost structure that is increasingly invisible, interconnected, and urgent.
The Leadership Imperative for CIOs and COOs
So how can CIOs and COOs lead differently? The answer isn’t more technology. It’s orchestration: aligning people, process, and technology around outcomes that matter.
Three priorities stand out:
- Focus on outcomes, not features. Too often, ROI is defined by uptime, speed, or utilization metrics. Real ROI should be measured in staff hours reclaimed, patient experiences improved, and outcomes advanced — all delivered with speed to value as the benchmark.
- Simplify and align the environment. Leaders must cut through noise, consolidate platforms, and design workflows that feel intuitive. Simplicity builds adoption and reduces friction.
- Rebuild trust in technology. This means engaging teams early, listening to frontline feedback, and ensuring every tool genuinely supports (rather than competes with) human judgment.
This is not easy work. But it is essential if technology is going to fulfill its promise rather than deepen the very problems it was meant to solve.
The Time for Change Is Now
At Carenet, we’ve called attention to these challenges in our industry Declaration: The Costs of Healthcare Are Too Great to Ignore. The message is simple: hidden costs are eroding healthcare’s ability to drive change — and they demand immediate action.
For CIOs and COOs, this is a moment of opportunity. By reframing technology as an orchestrated enabler, not a standalone solution, leaders can unlock real ROI, rebuild trust, and restore focus across their organizations. And perhaps most importantly, they can create an environment where humans in healthcare get to be more human — where staff can work at the top of their license, patients feel seen and supported, and leadership can focus on meaningful transformation.
Technology is not the enemy of progress. But when it is misaligned, it becomes one of the most expensive costs a healthcare organization can carry. The leaders who confront that reality head-on will be the ones who not only control costs but also achieve speed to value — powering change that is both immediate and enduring.
About the Author
Rhonda Gibler is Chief Growth Officer at Carenet Health, where she leads enterprise growth, marketing, and revenue development. With over 30 years of experience, she has built digital-first consumer engagement solutions and orchestrated complex programs for some of the world’s leading healthcare and technology brands. Rhonda is a recognized authority in CX analytics and clinical transformation, with a focus on scaling solutions that deliver measurable outcomes and lasting impact.
