Survey: Top Concerns Keeping Hospital Executives Awake Amid Internet-Driven Healthcare Transformation

Today’s C-suite hospital executives are grappling with a multitude of challenges, including stringent government regulations, shifting demographic profiles, and ongoing industry consolidation. As the healthcare sector gradually transitions toward value-based care, senior executives are increasingly seeking new avenues to drive value and reduce costs for their healthcare organizations.

Peer 60’s latest report, “An In-Depth Look at C-Suite Executives,” provides insights into the minds of hospital top management, exploring what keeps them up at night (including, of course, the transition to value-based reimbursement), the direction they intend to lead their institutions, which enterprise-level clinical IT vendors dominate market share across hospitals of different sizes, and who executives currently consider the most influential and innovative figures in healthcare.

To compile this report, Peer 60 gathered responses from 336 C-suite executives across the U.S. healthcare sector within a two-week period, spanning organizations ranging from critical access facilities to large integrated delivery networks (IDNs). The key findings of the report are as follows:

Ranking of Challenges Faced by C-Suite Executives in Hospitals

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When asked about the biggest challenges facing their institutions, executives responded:

1. Manage the transition to value-based reimbursement models. (64%)
2. Coordination of Medical Services. (56%)
3. Managing patient populations. (54%)
4. Patient Engagement. (48%)
5. Shortage of healthcare workers. (47%)
6. Manage Data. (36%)
7. Regulatory Compliance (33%)
8. Meaningful Return on Investment (ROI) in IT Procurement. (31%)
9. Reducing iatrogenic infections (18%), mergers and acquisitions (M&A) (11%), others (7%)

When examining the greatest challenges faced by healthcare institutions from the perspective of hospital size (number of beds), the report offers deeper insights for healthcare management.

▶▶▶1-25 Beds (Small Hospital)
10. The smaller the hospital, the greater the challenges in attracting and/or retaining healthcare professionals. There are many reasons for this situation, with remoteness and income disparities being among them.
11. For such small-scale hospitals, the next challenge is to improve the return on investment (ROI) of IT procurement. Admittedly, vendors need to continue striving to develop their solutions to truly scale them to meet the needs of hospitals of varying sizes, and provide best practices for their solutions, particularly in optimizing procurement expenditures for smaller institutions.
12. Another major concern for this category of medical facilities is whether they have the capacity to keep pace with regulatory compliance requirements.

▶▶▶250+ beds (medium-sized hospital)
13. The report found that staffing shortages were more pronounced in hospitals with 250 to 500 beds, whereas the issue was less urgent in larger institutions with 501 to 1,000 beds.

▶▶▶1,001+ Beds (Large Hospital)
14. The report suggests that for large healthcare facilities (with 1,001+ beds), improving information security is their top priority. This is mainly because large hospitals need to manage massive amounts of data and ensure its security. The larger the hospital, the greater the potential security vulnerabilities that could make it a target for attacks, and the more funds will be required.
15. Finally, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have also secured a spot on the list of challenges facing C-suite executives in hospitals. In today’s large-scale economic landscape, it has become commonplace for top-tier institutions to acquire other organizations for profit. M&A no longer appears to be a cutthroat battlefield; rather, it is driven entirely by the pursuit of greater profits.

Compiled by Chen Xin
Editor: Mo Renying