During a time of extreme scrutiny, nursing's commitment to diversity and health equity remains, but how do healthcare leaders preserve the spirit of DEI when the very terminology has been weaponized?
Welcome to the HealthLeaders July 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It's all about diversity, equity, and inclusion's (DEI) role in healthcare.
Seems like a no-brainer in healthcare (and especially nursing) right?
Well, since the beginning of the year, stark criticism and negative connotations of the concept of DEI has swept throughout the country, pushed largely by the Trump Administration and their constituents.
In fact, multiple executive orders on the topic have sparked chaos across hospitals and health systems, many of which rely on federal funds to support community-based DEI initiatives, training, and leadership pathways. Now, pending legal challenges to the EOs and some key provisions, legal teams scramble to determine the line between compliance and conscience.
But here’s the truth no one can scrub from a statute: nurses still show up every day to care for patients from every walk of life. They see the disparities. They feel the gaps. They know that representation, cultural humility, and inclusive environments aren’t political—they’re essential.
So, if the playbook has been stripped away, what’s next? How do nurse leaders preserve the spirit of DEI when the very terminology has been weaponized?
As federal efforts to limit AI oversight falter, healthcare leaders must prepare for a new regulatory landscape. Here's what hospital and health system executives need to know.
As we know, the U.S. Senate just voted 99–1 to remove a 10-year federal moratorium on state-level AI regulation from a sweeping legislative package.
The provision, part of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” would have blocked states from crafting their own rules for AI, handing regulatory authority solely to the federal government.
The Senate's decision ensures that individual states retain the authority to regulate AI technologies, rather than deferring exclusively to federal oversight. This outcome is particularly significant for healthcare organizations that operate across multiple states.
Without a national regulatory framework, hospitals and health systems will now need to track a growing patchwork of rules, each with unique compliance requirements, privacy implications, and risk considerations. For large integrated systems, the burden of managing this complexity will increase.
At the same time, the ruling may empower some states to respond more quickly and locally to the evolving risks and opportunities of AI in healthcare. State legislatures could, for example, address specific regional concerns around bias in algorithms, data privacy, and workforce displacement.
But the benefits of responsiveness come with new responsibilities for healthcare leaders.
They must proactively monitor state-by-state developments, engage with policymakers where appropriate, and tailor their AI deployment strategies accordingly.
Eric Poon, MD, MPH, Chief Health Information Officer at Duke Health, underscored this responsibility in a recent interview with HealthLeaders: “We openly tell our clinicians that AI is not perfect and AI is capable of making mistakes, so we as clinicians need to be responsible for everything that we take advantage of out of these products.”
In other words, AI is a tool—not a decision-maker. Human oversight remains essential.
Now more than ever, hospitals and health systems should continue to invest in building their governance structure. This includes formalizing internal review boards, establishing clear accountability structures, and providing targeted education to frontline clinicians who will interact with AI tools daily.
The Senate's decision has opened the door to a more decentralized regulatory environment. To succeed in this new reality, hospital and health system executives will need to be nimble, informed, and proactive while ensuring that innovation proceeds with responsibility.
Staffing is collapsing, risk is rising, and clinical leaders are on the hook. Patient safety demands bold workflows, tech-enabled care, and the courage to rethink everything. Fast.
Welcome to the HealthLeaders June 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
This month, it's all about clinical leadership.
Nobody says it out loud, but in hospital C-suites across the country, the message is clear: if something in the clinical space goes wrong, clinical leadership is on the hook.
As care teams shrink and patient acuity rises, the safety net is fraying, and patients are slipping through. Virtual nurses, AI scribes, cross-trained teams, and reimagined care environments are no longer innovative, they’re triage.
CMOs and other clinical leaders must walk a tightrope between fiscal responsibility and clinical reality, knowing that when the inevitable safety incident occurs, accountability stops at their desk.
But what if the real crisis isn’t the staffing shortage itself, but the belief that the work must be done the same way it always has been?
In this cover story, our CMO editor Chris Cheney shows clinical leaders how to lead the charge on change.
Healthcare innovators are walking a fine line between big, disruptive ideas and practical, problem-specific solutions. Is true transformation still possible in a system under relentless financial and operational pressure?
Welcome to the HealthLeaders May 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It's all about taking a hard look at innovation and understanding if it's even truly possible in healthcare.
Everyone talks about innovation like it’s an inevitable, shiny fix to healthcare’s most painful problems. But in today’s brutal financial climate, where margins are razor-thin and burnout runs high, is real innovation even possible? For all the talk of transformation, health systems are shackled by practicality.
C-Suite executives say innovation is imperative, but the journey from that lightbulb-over-the-head moment to broad clinical acceptance is tricky, and good ideas don’t necessarily work out just because they’re good.
While many would have described the pace of healthcare innovation as slow and steady during the first two decades of this century, the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything in a blender and pressed puree.
Ideas that would normally take a few years to develop were put to the test in months, if not weeks. And while that era saw incredible growth, it also put the healthcare industry on notice, highlighting the shortcomings: Stress and burnout, leading to dwindling workforce numbers, unsustainable costs, and questionable value.
Large hospital consolidations have always had consequences for the public, but they've started to overburden acquiring health systems as well, making scale no longer the foolproof answer.
Welcome to the HealthLeaders April 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It's all about the potential downfall of mega-mergers.
There's a shift happening within healthcare consolidation. Becoming the biggest health system on the block is no longer the slam dunk strategy for long-term sustainability that it may have once been.
Now, achieving growth is better served through thoughtful, strategic partnerships, rather than chasing sheer size and scale.
In a post-COVID world, the reality for providers is that the margins, both for error and for the bottom line, are slim. Expenses are outpacing revenue gains in many areas, making efficiency the name of the game. The 'too big to fail' mindset for hospitals is of a bygone era.
A look at the balance sheets of some of the largest health systems in the country illustrates how size doesn't necessarily translate to success.
In fact, there's a growing trend of bloated systems struggling to find their footing, but they're indicative of why the tide is turning, if it hasn't already, against mega-mergers.
This month, CEO editor Jay Asser writes about how CEOs are adjusting their strategies.
The payer-provider war is entering a new phase, and the financial fallout is devastating. CFOs are no longer just balancing budgets—they are the last line of defense against aggressive payer tactics.
Welcome to the HealthLeaders March 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It’s all about the escalation of the payer/provider war.
Seventy percent. That’s how much payer-provider disputes have surged in just the last two years.
Contract terminations, lawsuits, and drawn-out reimbursement battles have become the new normal, and hospitals are bleeding cash as a result.
Providers now spend nearly $20 billion annually on claim denials—half of it wasted on disputes that should never have happened. That’s $10 billion that could have gone toward patient care, medical innovation, or staff retention. Instead, it’s being siphoned away in an endless cycle of bureaucratic gridlock.
But this war is evolving. Payers are using AI-driven denials to reject claims at unprecedented rates. Legal battles over reimbursement are intensifying. Patients, caught in the crossfire, are angrier than ever. And yet, policymakers remain largely disconnected from the financial devastation unraveling in hospitals across the country.
If this battle remains an “I win, you lose” game, providers will continue losing billions, patients will suffer, and health systems will collapse under the weight of financial instability. The system is unsustainable—but it’s not unfixable.
CFOs are in a rare position to rewrite the rules of engagement. By standing at the intersection of finance, operations, and policy, they can wield hard data to expose payer tactics, drive regulatory changes, and force a shift in how contracts are negotiated. But to do that, they must step beyond the walls of their own health systems and enter the policy arena.
This month, CFO editor Marie Defreitas writes about how CFOs can stop reacting and start leading.
The frontier of clinical AI isn't just emerging—it's exploding, reshaping the very fabric of healthcare with both exhilarating promise and perilous uncertainty.
Picture a landscape as uncharted and volatile as the Wild West, where the stakes are nothing less than patient lives, clinical integrity, and the future of medical practice. Here, algorithms are the new outlaws and innovators, disrupting traditional workflows, challenging the sanctity of clinical decision-making, and daring to redefine the doctor-patient dynamic.
While AI has comfortably nestled into administrative corners, trimming inefficiencies and enhancing operational flow, its march into clinical territories is met with a starkly different reality. This isn’t about automating paperwork; it’s about influencing diagnoses, treatment plans, and even patient trust. What happens when AI crosses the line from assistant to authority? When it prescribes medication or becomes the voice patients heed over their own physicians?
The HealthLeaders 2024 AI in Clinical Care Mastermind program, sponsored by Ambience, Microsoft, and Rapid AI, convened clinical trailblazers from 10 health systems to grapple with these very questions. Their candid discussions reveal not just early victories in radiology and patient communication, but also the raw, unvarnished struggles: navigating governance without stifling innovation, integrating AI without alienating clinicians, and chasing ROI amidst ethical gray zones.
This report distills their hard-won insights, offering a compass for healthcare leaders navigating their own AI frontiers. Here, you'll find not just lessons learned, but survival strategies for thriving in an era where clinical AI isn’t a distant future—it’s the reality unfolding in exam rooms, operating theaters, and patient portals today.
During these uncertain times, health systems won't embrace new technology unless there's a firm understanding of ROI attached. Here's how to find it.
When it comes to new technology, healthcare leaders need a good, sound business plan to move forward.
This is especially true with virtual care, which was the sweetheart of the rodeo during the pandemic, when providers needed to reduce pressure on hospitals and patients wanted to access care from home. Federal and state regulators even reduced telehealth restrictions to allow more access, and payers like CMS relaxed their rules to reimburse for more virtual care services.
But now that the pandemic has passed, the pendulum has swung back. Many COVID-era waivers have expired, patients are expressing a desire to see their doctors in person, and healthcare executives are tasked with revising or even redefining how virtual care services can be sustained and scaled.
So how do health systems and hospitals define the ROI of a telehealth platform or digital health tool in this day and age? Clinical outcomes, provider workflows and workforce shortages are all part of the recipe, but there also has to be a financial benefit. Can all of these interests co-exist in a business plan?
In this webinar, HealthLeaders takes a deep dive into this issue with David Higginson, EVP and Chief Innovation Officer at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, and Stephen Hunter, VP of Digital Strategy and Innovation for the Allegheny Health Network, part of Highmark Health.
The healthcare workforce is in crisis, and revenue cycle leaders are feeling the pain too.
Across hospitals and health systems, staffing shortages, high turnover rates, and an increasingly fickle workforce are making it harder than ever to maintain financial stability.
The revenue cycle is the backbone of a hospital’s financial health—if billing, coding, and patient access teams aren’t fully staffed and engaged, the entire operation suffers. Leaders are in a fight for talent, and the battle is getting tougher by the day.
This was a huge topic of conversation for more than the two dozen revenue cycle leaders from hospitals and health systems across the country that gathered for this year’s Revenue Cycle Exchange.
Here’s how the revenue cycle leaders at this year’s February event in San Antionio, Texas, are striving to make a difference in their organizations’ workforce.
Why Is It So Hard to Fill Revenue Cycle Jobs?
Hiring in healthcare has always been challenging, but the current environment is unprecedented. Despite aggressive recruitment efforts and increased advertising, revenue cycle leaders are struggling to get qualified candidates through the door. And when they do? Many candidates ghost them before the first day or leave after just a few months, the attendees said.
Is it salary? Is it generational differences? The answers aren’t clear-cut.
While competitive wages are always a factor, today’s workforce also prioritizes flexibility, work-life balance, and remote opportunities.
Revenue cycle leaders at the event said they are now competing not just with local hospitals but with systems across the country that can offer fully remote positions. If a coder in a small town can make the same or more money working for a large hospital system in another state without ever leaving their home, why wouldn’t they take that opportunity?
To combat this, some leaders at the event are considering alternative pay structures, including performance-based benefits and increased incentives for hard-to-fill roles.
Keeping Staff from Walking Out the Door
Hiring is only half the battle—keeping employees engaged is proving just as difficult.
Hospital leaders at the event say they are spending enormous amounts of time and resources on training, only to see staff leave within months. The cycle is exhausting and costly.
One major issue is a lack of commitment, one executive said. Some employees jump at the first better offer, while others disengage due to a lack of appreciation. Employee engagement is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a survival strategy. Revenue cycle leaders are pushing for more meaningful recognition programs, ensuring staff feel valued beyond just a paycheck.
However, there’s a fine line to walk.
Leaders stressed that while it’s important to communicate appreciation, discussing bonuses openly can backfire. Expectations can spiral out of control, and if employees feel entitled to rewards rather than motivated by them, the entire system collapses.
Instead, transparency about performance metrics and incentives is proving to be a more effective approach.
Pictured: Revenue cycle execs talk shop at the 2025 Revenue Cycle Exchange in San Antonio, TX.
Preparing for the Inevitable
Even the best employees won’t stay forever.
Without a strong succession plan, revenue cycle teams are at risk of collapsing when key leaders move on. The industry is seeing a wave of retirements, and younger professionals aren’t always ready to step up.
Forward-thinking revenue cycle leaders are proactively identifying future managers and equipping them with the skills they need before a leadership vacuum emerges. Training programs, mentorship, and leadership development initiatives are becoming essential tools in preventing chaos when experienced leaders leave.
Another strategy is focusing on hiring candidates with both technical experience and soft skills.
“While technical proficiency can be taught, emotional intelligence, communication, and adaptability are harder to instill,” one leader said.
Hospitals are prioritizing well-rounded candidates who not only understand the numbers but can also lead teams effectively.
The Remote Work Debate: Solution or Setback?
Remote work has changed the game for revenue cycle leaders, they say.
While it offers a solution to staffing shortages by allowing hospitals to hire beyond their immediate geographic area, it also introduces new challenges. Some leaders argue that remote work has made employees less engaged, while others see it as the key to long-term retention.
The reality is that remote work is here to stay, and revenue cycle teams must adapt.
The focus now is on measuring productivity transparently and setting clear expectations for remote employees. Leaders who find ways to balance flexibility with accountability will have the best shot at retaining top talent.
But for hospitals in small markets, the competition is brutal. It’s no longer just about catching “epic talent” in a local area—now they have to compete with national systems that can offer fully remote roles.
The playing field has changed, and leaders are forced to rethink their entire approach to staffing.
Are We Meeting the Needs of a Changing Generation?
A generational shift is shaking up the revenue cycle workforce.
Younger employees are demanding different work environments, often pushing for higher wages, shorter hours, and more flexibility. Some leaders question whether hospitals should meet these demands or push back against what they see as unrealistic expectations.
One thing is certain: the workforce has changed, and hospitals must evolve with it. Some revenue cycle leaders are experimenting with alternative work schedules and flexible hours to accommodate different needs.
The challenge is finding the right balance between meeting employee expectations and maintaining financial stability.
What else?
Well, social media and the internet have also reshaped how employees view work, they say.
Many younger professionals have a skewed perception of salaries and job expectations, leading to difficult negotiations. Revenue cycle leaders must be strategic about compensation—offering competitive packages without getting caught in expensive bidding wars over minor salary differences.
How to fight for a Stronger Revenue Cycle Workforce
The healthcare revenue cycle workforce crisis isn’t going away anytime soon, but top-performing leaders are proving that it can be managed.
By pushing innovative recruitment strategies, prioritizing retention efforts, and rethinking workforce expectations, they are slowly turning the tide.
The fight for talent is fierce, but the solution isn’t just throwing more money at the problem.
True success lies in creating an engaged, motivated workforce that sees the revenue cycle as a career, not just a job. Leaders who embrace change, invest in their teams, and remain flexible in
their approach will be the ones who come out on top. For hospitals and health systems, the time to act is now—because without a strong revenue cycle team, the entire operation is at risk.
The HealthLeaders Exchange is an executive community for sharing ideas, solutions, and insights. Please join the community at our LinkedIn page.
To inquire about attending a HealthLeaders Exchange event, email us at exchange@healthleadersmedia.com.
In a social media landscape shaped by hashtags, algorithms, and viral posts, nurse leaders must decide: Will they let the narrative spiral, or can they adapt and join the conversation?
Welcome to the HealthLeaders February 2025 cover story. Each month, our editors dive into the topics that matter most—such as healthcare innovation, leadership strategies, payer/provider wars, and patient care—delivered in a dynamic, engaging format.
What did we look at this month? It’s all about "NurseTok."
“I saw that on TikTok.”
Those five words have become an anthem of our times, sparking debates in boardrooms, breakrooms, and hospital corridors.
In an era where nurses and healthcare workers are not just caregivers but content creators, social media has become a double-edged sword—an unfiltered window into the world of healthcare, wielded with equal parts power and peril.
From frontline chronicles during the chaos of COVID-19 to viral dance trends and raw stories of burnout, the rise of “nurse influencers” has given the public unprecedented access to the heart of America’s most trusted profession.
But while this digital shift offers opportunities to amplify nursing’s voice and redefine its narrative, it also raises urgent questions: Is it possible for nurse leaders to regain control of the story when some posts expose cracks in the system? How can hospitals address growing dissatisfaction shared online without alienating their workforce or losing public trust?
With nursing’s reputation as the gold standard of ethics slipping, CNOs must step into a new role: social media strategist. The same platforms that spark division can also inspire collaboration if approached with transparency and purpose.
Nurse leaders who embrace these digital spaces can rebuild bridges, champion their teams, and reframe the conversation. Our CNO editor G Hatfield finds out how.
Pictured: Revenue cycle execs talk shop at the 2025 Revenue Cycle Exchange in San Antonio, TX.
