Why Healthcare Isn’t Agile (Yet)
Health system leaders across the country have a new “one-word mantra” in 2025: agility.
Ashwani Bhatia, MD, and CEO of BayCare Clinic in Wisconsin, told Becker’s, “Operational agility is no longer optional – it’s essential. The only way forward is to embrace change, prioritize workforce wellbeing, and strategically leverage technology to support and empower our caregivers.”
Of course, “embracing change” and “strategically leveraging technology” aren’t exactly new ideas. But the urgency is new.
Healthcare organizations are navigating through a perfect storm: workforce shortages, rising patient expectations, cyber supply chain attacks, a reimbursement landscape that punishes inefficiency, and a volatile political environment.
The promise of agility is about surviving the disruption and building systems that can flex without breaking.
And a lot of these systems have been breaking lately.
Last year, Change Healthcare, a hybrid SaaS company whose revenue management software processes about 50% of all U.S. medical claims, was hacked. Providers nationwide faced losses of up to $100 million per day.
It highlighted the risks of relying on centralized systems. Many providers relied solely on Change Healthcare’s infrastructure. When Change went down, there weren’t seamless, interoperable backups that providers could switch to.
That’s not agility, that’s single-point-of-failure fragility.
In 2023, the Veteran Health Administration’s years-long rollout of its modernized EHR system was deemed to be going so poorly that Congress had to step in to cancel the contract with the vendor, Oracle Cerner. By March of that year, only 5 out of 150 VA medical centers were using the new software. And those 5 didn’t even like it.
One user described working with it like this: “You have to click and click and click…maybe you’re supposed to hover over that one and click on a different one…it’s just a lot of additional clicks.”
Again, not very agile-sounding.
The Problem Isn’t Technology. It’s the Model.
It’s not that healthcare isn’t trying to modernize or use the latest technology. Stories like the ones above show it obviously is. But many of the systems being adopted today are still rooted in the old SaaS playbook of centralized infrastructure, rigid licensing, and limited (or zero) customizability.
None of that makes healthcare orgs more agile. It makes them dependent. It limits their flexibility and puts real constraints on their ability to respond to crises or pivot into new strategies.
Hospitals and clinics can’t move fast when they have to file a ticket with a vendor or service provider.
Hospitals and clinics can’t build resilience when their data lives in someone else’s cloud.
The benefit of the old SaaS model is speed to production. But agility has less to do with speed and more to do with sovereignty. And that’s exactly what traditional SaaS takes away.
What should “Agile” look like?
If agility is the goal, then the playbook needs to change. That means moving away from old-model SaaS platforms.
That means full data ownership, not access to your own data “as a service.” It means products that easily integrate with what’s already working, instead of replacing it. It means the ability to add, change, or remove functionality without waiting for a vendor.
Agile healthcare orgs build workflows that reflect the way their teams actually operate, not how a vendor thinks they should. They integrate fast, iterate faster, and never wait for someone else’s roadmap to act.
Healthcare can’t be agile if it can’t adapt. And it can’t adapt if it doesn’t control the software it runs on.
That’s why we built Onymos differently. Our solutions, like DocKnow, our AI document processing platform, deliver the speed you expect from SaaS without the tradeoffs. You control the code. You control the data.
Agility shouldn’t be a buzzword. It should be built in. With Onymos, it is. Reach out to our team, and let us show you how.