3 Essential Change Management Strategies in Healthcare

Change is inevitable in healthcare. If not managed properly, these changes can negatively impact patient care quality, disrupt day-to-day operations, and reduce employee morale. Change management strategies in healthcare are the solution.

This article explores three effective change management strategies for your healthcare organization. Discover how tailored strategies can drive successful adaptation and transformation within the healthcare industry, providing resilience and sustainability in a dynamic environment. 

Why Is Effective Change Management Important in Healthcare? 

Effective change management is crucial for change success in any healthcare facility, given the wave of significant changes expected in the coming years. For example, studies show that by 2035, value-based care will become integrated with other care models, gene therapy will be widely adopted, and enterprise technology will be more widespread—requiring staff to adapt to new ways of working.   

Consider implementing a new electronic health record (EHR) system in a hospital. Successfully launching the new system and helping people adopt the changes requires careful planning, coordination and effective communication.

With an effective change management approach, these elements are easier to manage. As a result, you have a structure that enables you to cover key areas, gain stakeholder support, and maintain high levels of patient care. 

Now, let’s look at some of these benefits of change management in healthcare in more detail. These benefits address how a successful change management strategy can lead to improved results. 

• Enables patient safety – Effective change management helps you support a smooth and safe implementation of new processes, technologies and treatments. For example, facilitating proper training, delivering clear communication, and conducting thorough testing to minimize the risk of errors and prioritize patient safety. 
• Maintains quality of care – By systematically managing change, you can minimize disruption. This helps you incorporate new healthcare systems or processes without compromising care quality. 
• Supports healthcare employees – A comprehensive change management process ensures that healthcare employees are fully supported through change. This includes breaking down the reasons behind the change, as well as providing training and resources to implement the change successfully and aligning the people side of change with the technical side. 
• Checks employee understanding of the need for change – For change to be successful, employees must understand why it’s necessary. When they see the value and necessity of change, they’re more likely to support it. Effective change management involves clearly communicating the reasons behind change, its benefits, and how it aligns with the organization’s goals. You can find out more about explaining the "why" of change in the Awareness building block of our Prosci ADKAR® Model. 
• Controls and manages costs – With effective change management, change leaders in healthcare can manage the financial aspects of implementing new processes or technology. By planning and managing changes carefully, you avoid unnecessary costs and stay within budget. Prosci research reveals that projects with excellent change management are nearly five times more likely to stay on or ahead of schedule, and nearly one-and-a-half times more likely to stay within or under budget.

3 Effective Change Management Strategies for Your Healthcare Organization 

An effective change management strategy helps leaders implement change successfully. A comprehensive strategy guides you as you plan each step of the change, ensure employees are supported throughout the change, and track the progress of change initiatives in real time. 

But successfully implementing a change management strategy is more complex than it may seem. You might face resistance, disorganization, or a lack of direction—all of which impact change success. 

Here are three healthcare-specific strategies for addressing challenges that arise with healthcare reform, EHR systems implementations, and other complex changes in healthcare. 

1. Focus on the impact of change

Healthcare leaders have competing priorities because they wear many hats. From delivering patient care to managing the day-to-day operations of a healthcare organization, it’s a lot to juggle.

Focusing on the impact of change can show healthcare workers why the change is so important and how it will improve their work and aid the company’s success. It’s a great way to get their attention and increase change support, improving the chance of success.

Not to mention, Prosci research shows that effectively managing the people side of change increases change success. The more you focus on preparing, equipping and supporting employees through a change, the better chance you have of achieving strong results and outcomes. In fact, organizations are seven times more likely to achieve success when they apply excellent change management.

Correlation of Change Management Effectiveness With Meeting Objectives

Here are some suggestions for focusing on the positive impact of change.

Highlight the positive impact on patient care

People work in healthcare because they care about patient well-being. With this in mind, explain how the change will impact patient care and outcomes for the better. For example, if you’re implementing a new EHR system, you can explain how the system will improve consistency in care and streamline operational processes.

Outline how change benefits each individual in the organization

Show healthcare professionals how the change will improve their day-to-day lives, whether minimizing burnout or removing inefficiencies to make it easier to do their jobs. Focusing on the specific impact on each individual helps them understand how the change is beneficial—not just for the organization and the patients but for them, too.

Get into the right places

To drive change in major healthcare organizations, you need to have the right message to highlight the value of change to everyone.

To do this, create a change management process that incorporates change leaders in the early stages. This way, you create advocates who support the change and will cultivate strategic relationships for you and the change process.

2. Engage front-line workers and clinicians

You need front-line staff and clinicians to support change for it to be successful. After all, they’re the people who will need to change their day-to-day work—and do so for the long term—for the initiative to be successful.

Take a look at some of these strategies to engage front-line staff and clinicians:

Use the right people to deliver messages

Prosci research shows that employees have preferences for change management communication. Front-line employees prefer to receive messages about business impacts of change from the CEO or another executive but prefer personal messages about change from people managers. 

Preferred Senders of Messages

When the right people deliver the right kind of communications at the right times, you engage people and increase their support for the change.

Engage and equip sponsors

Sponsors of change in healthcare institutions can be different types of stakeholders, such as executives, physicians, senior-level clinicians, and other influential leaders. Because of this, it can be difficult to reach sponsors. Despite challenges, it's important to engage them because their support is crucial for engaging staff and clinicians—which is important to change success.

When influential sponsors support a change, staff also find it more credible. Plus, sponsor support helps you overcome resistance among peers at high levels in the institution, which further improves support among staff and other front-line stakeholders.

To increase support and engagement from key sponsors, explain what the change will deliver. Focus on the problems that leaders are facing, and outline how change management is a solution to these problems. For example, if sponsors struggle to engage with employees, show them how upgrading to a new internal HR system will increase employee engagement and satisfaction.

3. Address change saturation to minimize change fatigue

Healthcare is constantly transforming, especially with new technologies disrupting the industry.

Healthcare research suggests that rapid advancements in AI will increase over the next ten years. Advances in diagnostic technology, medical devices and medical procedures will improve the treatment of complex and acute conditions.

As a result, individual departments will deal with constant change, increasing the likelihood of change saturation and change fatigue.

Change saturation occurs when too much change happens simultaneously, so much so that it impacts your ability to incorporate change successfully. This can cause change fatigue in people, which can cause stress, lead to burnout, and negatively impact an individual’s mental health.

The good news is that there are ways to minimize change saturation and prevent change fatigue.

Use the Prosci Change Saturation Model

The Prosci Change Saturation Model breaks down change capacity and change disruption. Here are the two components that drive change saturation:

• Change capacity is an organization’s ability to change based on factors such as the organization's culture, history and structure. 
• Change disruption is the number of changes taking place and the disruptions they cause to employees. 

Comparing these two factors helps you identify ways to increase change capability and decrease change saturation.

Can you reduce the number of changes? Can you minimize the disruptive nature of each change? Perhaps you can stagger changes or combine them? Any of these alterations will minimize disruption and free up capacity for networks to focus on implementing change successfully.

Build a common language to talk about change

In an industry like healthcare where there’s so much medical terminology to understand, creating a standardized language around change gives employees a helping hand. It provides clarity and consistency, making it easier for them to understand the different change terminologies.

A common language also mitigates the risk of incorrect interpretations, increasing efficiency and improving how professionals communicate and discuss change throughout the organization.

One of the best ways to standardize your language about change is to use an established framework. This framework sets predefined terms and clear definitions, making it easy to understand and use.

Look at the Prosci Methodology as an example.

With our standardized methodology, including our Prosci ADKAR Model, you can clearly articulate what change means throughout the change management process. Standardizing across a healthcare institution removes ambiguity and ensures everyone uses the same phrases to describe the same things. 

Prosci ADKAR Model

How To Enable Effective Change Management in Your Healthcare Facility 

In addition to these three strategies, there are also some best practices you can follow to help you navigate change more effectively, ensuring smoother transitions and better outcomes for both staff and patients.

Create a people-first approach to change

Employee support is vital to change success. Without it, you could face resistance, confusion, and damage to morale. 

Here are some of the ways to adopt a people-first approach in your healthcare organization: 

• Provide clear and open communication to ensure everyone in the organization knows exactly why the change is happening, how it will impact their day-to-day responsibilities, and how to prepare for it. Examples include using instant-messaging communication channels, sending emails about the impacts change will have on individual professionals, and hosting face-to-face meetings to provide updates. 
• Offer change support and resources to support employees through change, ensuring they’re confident with new systems, processes or procedures. The more confident employees are with change, the more likely they will incorporate it successfully. 

Prioritize strategic alignment

Strategic alignment is an essential element of successful change. It ensures that change initiatives support the healthcare institution's overall objectives, helping to continually improve the quality of patient care.

Strategic alignment also considers healthcare policies and legal protocols. For example, it aligns innovative patient care models with current health policies to ensure compliance and enhance patient outcomes. 

Once you establish strategic alignment at the start of an initiative, the Prosci 3-Phase Process is a useful tool for maintaining alignment throughout the change lifecycle.

Prosci 3-Phase Process

Here’s how it works:

Phase 1 – Prepare Approach

The first step is creating a change management strategy that outlines how to deliver the desired project outcomes. It involves establishing:

• Exactly what you want to achieve
• How the change impacts individuals
• How you will achieve project success

Phase 2 – Manage Change

The next step brings the change management strategy to life, producing a master change management plan, which acts as the guiding document throughout the process.

The three stages of this phase are:

• Plan and Act – Establishing how to prepare, equip and support people who will be impacted by the change.
• Track Performance – Defining how to track and sustain progress in the change management efforts.
• Adapt Actions – Adjusting your change management strategy based on what you’ve learned so far, such as adjusting training schedules based on feedback and changing key performance indicators (KPIs) to align with more realistic goals. 

Phase 3 – Sustain Outcomes

The final phase focuses on ensuring successful change adoption and that the organization continues to sustain the change. This involves creating a change management closeout, which documents the change performance status and prepares the organization to own and sustain change outcomes.

Here’s what this phase of the process involves: 

• Review Performance – Reflect on performance to confirm desired results.
• Activate Sustainment – Implement actions to sustain change outcomes, like identifying gaps and launching sustainment roles.
• Transfer Ownership – Establish how to carry sustainment efforts forward by transferring knowledge and assets.

Read this article about the change management process to learn more about using the Prosci 3-Phase Process.

Monitor change outcomes

Tracking the impact of your change outcomes is one of the most effective ways to ensure effective change management. Our research shows that measuring the progress and success of change efforts helps organizations meet and exceed project objectives. 

At Prosci, we suggest monitoring change outcomes at three levels of performance: organizational, individual, and overall change management performance. It’s a more holistic approach to monitoring change outcomes, helping you clarify what your change aims to deliver from a wider perspective. 

3 Levels of Performance Metrics for Change Management Projects

Here’s how to measure and monitor the effectiveness of these three levels:

Organizational performance

Different roles are responsible for measuring organizational performance throughout change:

• The primary sponsor identifies and defines change success, ensuring company objectives and organizational benefits are achieved.
• The change practitioner extracts and packages the definition of success by asking clarifying questions of the key stakeholders and ensuring they align with it.
• The project manager ensures that objectives are defined and refined over the project lifecycle.

Individual performance

We measure individual outcomes by assessing three human factors:

• Speed of adoption of the change (how quickly) – This could be the time required for employees to learn and apply new patient skills or the number of people using a new EHR system after launch.
• Ultimate utilization of the change (how many) – For example, tracking the use of a new EHR system by comparing the number of employees using the system to the number of employees impacted by the change.
• Proficiency in applying the change (how well) – Measure how well the change is implemented by comparing individual work performance post-implementation against established KPIs or conducting “show me” testing that requires employees to demonstrate their ability to follow a new procedure or healthcare protocol. These measurements are particularly useful when the change directly impacts patient care, ensuring that employees deliver top-quality care. 

Change management performance

Change management metrics measure the completion, execution and effectiveness of change. They’re typically activity-oriented, like measuring the completeness of the change management strategy.

In healthcare, for example, this could involve tracking the improvement of patient outcomes or the adoption of new healthcare technology. 

Prosci Delivers Successful Change Management Strategies in Healthcare 

The success rate of change in healthcare organizations can be as low as 30%, so change leaders must follow best practices to increase their chances of success.

With the best change management strategies in healthcare in place, healthcare organizations can implement successful change at an individual and organizational level. Use the tactics outlined in this article to get started on the right foot, ensuring you adopt a flexible, people-first approach to change management.