Healthcare organizations are facing increasing pressure to cope with ongoing workforce shortages, budget constraints, an unpredictable regulatory environment, and changing models of care. Amidst all this uncertainty, Generative AI (GenAI) has quickly become a digital lifeline with its rapidly maturing abilities to automate repetitive manual processes, extract insights from large volumes of data, and augment the potential of human cognitive capacity.
If deployed correctly, GenAI can support a truly visionary, holistic reinvention of the way that organizations interact with their data, with their patients, and with the community at large.
But are organizations on the right track to meaningfully reinvent the healthcare experience for both patients and staff? Or are they simply using GenAI as a temporary patch to keep everything together for as long as possible in a challenging marketplace?
To gain real-world insight into how organizations are approaching the GenAI revolution, Wolters Kluwer conducted the 2025 Future Ready Healthcare Survey. In collaboration with the independent marketing research firm Ipsos, we queried a panel of health professionals, including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals, administrators, and medical librarians about their organizations’ activities and expectations as the industry moves into the GenAI era. Here are some of the most notable results.
Focusing on the basics of operational sustainability
With administrative complexities and rising costs of care threatening the fundamentals of running a healthcare organization, leaders are laser focused on leveraging technology, including GenAI, to mitigate these high-priority concerns.
For example, 80% of respondents are looking to GenAI for help with optimizing workflows within departments and across practices. GenAI-driven technologies are also likely to be part of the solution for longstanding workflow barriers, such as the burdens of prior authorizations (67%) and electronic health record (EHR) management (62%).
In addition, leaders are seeking easier and more effective ways to manage tasks such as maintaining cybersecurity preparedness (68%) and supporting telehealth/virtual care programs (65%) and will be exploring ways to leverage GenAI in these areas over the next three to five years.
These business-oriented priorities are taking precedence over some of the more advanced capabilities that GenAI has to offer, despite strong interest from clinical and administrative staff in solutions such as ambient listening, clinical decision support leveraging GenAI, and tools to improve the patient experience.
While the close attention to immediate sustainability may be imperative for many organizations, leaders who fail to consider how quick-win, one-off projects will roll up into larger innovation strategies may be at risk of perpetuating concerns with fragmentation and poor governance across the enterprise.
GenAI as a tool for shoring up staffing
The workforce crisis is ongoing, both on the clinical and administrative sides of the healthcare industry. For example, more than two-thirds (68%) of participants stated that staffing costs will be a top challenge for the foreseeable future. And when asked to rate the severity of the nursing shortage in their organizations, 53% of respondents said lack of qualified nursing staff was a notable issue. Not surprisingly, that number jumped to 67% of nurses themselves.
With staff in short supply, GenAI could maximize productivity in existing teams and reduce the need for additional staff in the future. Respondents are exploring a variety of ways to make this happen, including leveraging AI to recruit and retain staff, support decision making, and reduce administrative burdens.
- 85% of nurses cited “recruiting/retaining nursing staff” as a top priority, while more than three-quarters (76%) of all respondents identified “reducing clinician burnout” as a main concern.
- 74% will be using technology to enhance professional development and training over the next few years.
- 41% of pharmacists and 47% of allied health professionals believe that new technologies like GenAI will bring a reduction in administrative staffing needs, while similar numbers of nurses (49%) and pharmacists (48%), said GenAI can be used to expand collaboration with universities to boost the educational pipeline for young professionals to enter clinical fields.
However, not all respondents are convinced that GenAI will have a major impact on retaining staff who are experiencing burnout. Just 41% of participants said that GenAI will be suitable for addressing the emotional and mental toll of burnout, with slightly higher numbers among nurses (45%) and pharmacists (52%).
To truly reduce the burdens of burnout, organizations will need to look beyond GenAI as a silver bullet and instead view the technology as one component of a more holistic plan for supporting staff wellness.
A need for governance to reach the next level of innovation
Creating an ideal future state for both staff and patients will require GenAI to be safely and seamlessly infused across the enterprise. But organizations may not yet have the tools and strategies in place to make the leap from optimizing current workflows to fostering wholesale innovation.
While the majority of leaders (80%) are hoping to use GenAI to optimize workflows and achieve efficiencies, only 63% believe they are truly prepared to do so.
A lack of foundational governance could be contributing to this sense of unreadiness. For example, only 18% of respondents were aware of formal organizational policies governing GenAI use, and only 42% said their organizations have clear processes for integrating GenAI into existing workflows.
As a result, 56% said they have ongoing concerns around data privacy and security and a similar number (55%) said they’re worried about biased results related to inadequate training of GenAI models.
Interestingly, 57% of participants stated that an overreliance on GenAI may erode clinical decision-making skills. Meanwhile, more than half (55%) are concerned that lack of transparency around GenAI’s potential role in making diagnoses could contribute to unclear reasoning behind patient-facing decisions.
With stronger governance in place, leaders will be able to identify GenAI use cases that produce meaningful ROI in the short term with a strategic vision for longer-term innovation that lifts the organization to the next level of digitally driven success.
Balancing the needs of the here and now with the needs of the future is not easy. Organizations will need to develop more comprehensive strategic roadmaps that include clear policies, an eye toward seamless integration across solutions, and a step-by-step approach to making improvements to the current state while preparing for how GenAI could support ongoing innovation.
