Can Digital Health Solve the Healthcare Staffing Crisis? Insights from Clinical Leaders

The US healthcare system is approaching breaking point – with projections showing a shortfall of 64,000 physicians by 2025, and 35% of physicians likely to leave their current roles within five years, the status quo is simply unsustainable. Although the solution to this crisis is yet unclear, I believe that digital health technologies will form the infrastructure on which positive change travels, enabling healthcare professionals to make their work go further, reducing administrative loads, and freeing up vital doctor-patient hours.
To explore the issue further, I recently hosted a Team8 webinar featuring two healthcare innovators: Vi-Anne Atrium, Chief Nursing Officer at Cone Health, and Eve Cunningham, Chief Virtual Care & Digital Health Officer at Providence. The knowledge and experiences they shared reveal both the immense potential and practical challenges of healthcare’s digital transformation.
The Hidden Costs of Healthcare’s Labor Shortage
While doctor shortages are taking a devastating toll, today’s healthcare staffing crisis runs deeper than simple headcount. Many physicians are now spending more time on administrative tasks than on patient care. Between managing electronic health records, coordinating with various departments, and navigating insurance protocols, doctors are finding themselves in a balancing act between being caregivers and administrators.
This administrative burden isn’t just frustrating for healthcare workers – it’s actively harmful to patient care. Physicians frequently spend two hours on paperwork for every hour of direct patient care, while nurses lose up to two hours per 12-hour shift to documentation. These administrative demands hasten burnout, further thinning a dwindling pool of healthcare professionals, while coming into direct conflict with rising patient expectations. In today’s digital world, healthcare consumerism is on the rise. Patients expect more convenience, transparency, and control over their healthcare journey.
The situation is made more acute by contemporary demographic trends. The US is aging rapidly, with over-65s set to make up 20% of the population, and the number of centenarians forecasted to quadruple by 2050. This means more patients with complex, chronic conditions requiring ongoing management – ie. more time-consuming and expensive cases that further dilute the efforts of healthcare practitioners on the ground.
At the same time, younger healthcare professionals – millennials and Gen Z – prioritize work-life balance more highly than previous generations, and are sometimes less willing to make the grueling sacrifices on time expected in decades past. These generational shifts, combined with mounting administrative burdens, have contributed to a perfect storm over US healthcare.
Digital Solutions Showing Real Results
Despite these challenges, innovative health systems are demonstrating how digital transformation can dramatically improve both efficiency and care quality. This is partly due to the same factors causing challenges elsewhere. For instance, while the US population is aging, younger and more digital-native patients bring a different set of expectations. Today’s healthcare consumers want to have information and treatment options at their fingertips, in the same way they order food or shop through their mobile devices. Digital technology can enable healthcare to deliver on these expectations.
When Every Second Counts, Automation Saves Lives
During our discussion, Vi-Anne and Eve shared inspiring innovations they’ve implemented in their organizations. At Cone Health, AI-powered optimization of the EPIC electronic health record (EHR) system has shown remarkable results, streamlining processes surrounding flow sheets, medical record reviewing, and clinical notes.
“We were able to give every single nurse in our system 20 minutes back in their shift every single day,” reported Vi-Anne. “That’s 20 more minutes to spend educating patients, to be able to spend at the bedside, making sure our patients are prepared to go home.”
The impact extends beyond individual time savings. Cone Health also implemented AI-powered dispatch prioritization for their ambulance service, allowing non-clinical dispatch staff to optimize transport based on patient acuity and urgency. This seemingly simple change has improved patient outcomes and physician satisfaction by ensuring critical cases reach specialists faster.
Telemedical Progress: Access Made Instant
Providence has similarly used digital health to scale aspects of healthcare beyond what was previously thought possible. Using telemedicine, they can now ‘beam’ practitioners into disparate locations to accommodate patients unwilling or unable to travel. This has huge implications for accessibility – in a nation where 65% of nonmetropolitan areas do not have a resident psychiatrist, Providence can ‘beam’ a psychiatrist and a social worker into 39 hospitals in the course of a single day.
“We might have three neurologists covering 90-plus hospitals across the states,” Eve explained to me. “That is really our way forward in addressing some of the shortages… bringing that expertise there, empowering the team’s boots on the ground so that they can keep the patient in the community.”
Their remote patient monitoring program has shown particularly promising results, demonstrating a threefold increase in guideline-directed medical therapy and significant reductions in emergency department visits and hospital admissions. Using this technology, physicians can easily monitor key indicators such as blood pressure in hypertension patients, so that warning signs are caught early, and care can be continuously allocated to those in need, while critical time is saved on healthy, or improving, patients.
The program has facilitated a vast increase in patient interactions, and is scaling very effectively – the enrollment of 2,500 patients is on target to double before the end of the year, with plans to extend the program’s reach to physical therapy and remote therapeutic monitoring in the near future.
Barriers to Adoption of Digital Health Solutions
Yet despite these successes, digital health innovation faces significant roadblocks. Healthcare systems are drowning in disconnected point solutions – typically solving one small problem but creating integration headaches elsewhere. Limited IT resources make implementation challenging, while clinical staff, already overwhelmed, are often resistant to learning new tools. Furthermore, the lack of standardization across regional healthcare systems often requires complex workarounds, with physicians sometimes forced to log into multiple EMR systems simultaneously.
The fragmentation is particularly acute in virtual care delivery. “At Providence, it takes 17 steps for my neurologist to actually hear about a stroke consult virtually,” Eve explained. “They have to log into multiple applications because across 92 hospitals, we have 45 hospitals that are non-Providence hospitals. They’re logging into five different EMRs, they’re manually trying to orchestrate them to beam them in. Not everything connects.”
This technical complexity extends far beyond EMR integration – providers must also navigate multiple telehealth platforms, documentation systems, and scheduling tools, each with their own workflows and login requirements. “If it’s not going to play with the systems that I currently have, I’m not bringing it,” Eve stated firmly. “I’m not going to ask people to sign into two or three different systems to accomplish things.”
The problem is further compounded by the rapid proliferation of digital health solutions. “The number of different point solutions out there… you have to be really strategic,” Vi-Anne noted. “There are many companies that want to take this one particular niche, and you have to be really intentional, as someone who’s helping to lead these innovations, that you are not overwhelming people with 70 different systems.”
How to Make Tech Implementation Work
Faced with physician shortages and significant barriers to digital health reform, our discussion emphasized the importance of a few key principles for success in digital health implementation.
- Clinical leadership is essential. “Getting the voice of the frontline before you roll something out is huge,” Vi-Anne explained. “When people have their fingerprints on it, they’re more likely to adopt it.” This means involving clinical staff early in technology selection and giving their feedback real weight. For example, Eve attributes Providence’s success with their MedPearl system to extensive collaboration with frontline clinicians during development.
- Simplicity must be prioritized. Every new login or workflow adds friction that can ultimately doom adoption efforts. Solutions need to integrate seamlessly with existing systems and actually reduce, rather than increase, complexity for clinical staff. For these reasons, Providence specifically chose a partner offering cellular-enabled devices requiring no Bluetooth pairing or app downloads for their remote patient monitoring program.
Organizations must be willing to fail fast and learn faster. “You’ve just got to stop the perpetual pilot phenomenon,” Eve argued. “Being able to say ‘this is not going to scale’ or ‘this isn’t going to work’ and just sunsetting it” is crucial for success. With such a wide variety of point solutions available, and limited time to invest in them, this approach lets organizations quickly scale what works, while abandoning what doesn’t.
The Path Forward
As healthcare faces mounting staffing pressures, digital transformation offers a path not just to sustaining current levels of service, but to vastly superior care delivery. Vi-Anne and Eve’s experiences at Cone Health and Providence show that technology, thoughtfully implemented, can help restore the human element to healthcare by freeing clinicians to focus on what matters most: their patients.
At Team8, we’re committed to developing solutions that enhance rather than replace human care. I believe the future of healthcare lies in empowering practitioners with technologies that let them practice at the top of their license, lending compassion and security to the medical field, and to the lives of those they help.
Prof. Varda Shalev, MD, MPA is a medical researcher, active primary care physician, Professor of Medicine at Tel Aviv University School of Public Health, and Managing Partner at Team8.
To learn more about how Team8 is working to transform healthcare delivery through digital innovation, visit https://team8.vc/team8-health/