Despite recent digitalization efforts within the healthcare sector, many organizations are still facing a paradox: they work hard with routines, checklists, and follow-ups —yet the work often feels heavy, fragmented, and difficult to get an overview of. Systems don’t communicate, reporting is complicated, and each new regulation or audit adds yet another layer to an already complex and often stressful workday.
Digitalization in healthcare should not create more stress — it should create safety, structure, and learning. In this article, we explore the most common challenges the healthcare sector faces in its digital transformation, what drives them, and what opportunities exist to overcome them.
Digitalization in healthcare refers to using digital technology to enable more accessible, efficient, and patient-centered care. This includes digital appointments, chat functions, remote monitoring, and smarter information flows — all contributing to the development of “digiphysical” care, where digital and physical interventions complement each other and create greater flexibility for both patients and staff.
Equally important is the digitalization that focuses on streamlining and securing the administrative work that enables safe and high-quality care, including:
Although development is progressing quickly, significant obstacles remain. Many healthcare organizations work with older IT systems that don’t communicate with each other, and the lack of common standards makes information-sharing difficult between regions, municipalities, and private providers. Digitalization also increases demands on security, privacy, and training so staff can use new tools in a safe and efficient way.
In conversations with healthcare managers and quality leads, the same challenges come up again and again:
Healthcare handles vast amounts of critical information: local instructions, medical guidelines, personal information, deviations, risk assessments, and improvement work. In many organizations, this information is spread across multiple systems — sometimes combined with binders, intranets, email threads, or personal folders.
This fragmentation makes it difficult to govern the organization consistently, and it’s common for different units within the same organization to work in entirely different ways. When documents and deviations are separated, it becomes harder to see connections, identify risk patterns, or follow up on changes systematically.
The result is duplicated work, inconsistent quality assurance, and increased risk that important information falls through the cracks.
New guidelines, updated routines, revised treatment recommendations, and clarified responsibilities must reach the right people at the right time — which is often a challenge. In many organizations, documents are stored in various file structures, old versions remain in circulation, and employees are unsure which version is actually correct. This causes frustration, lost time, and in the worst cases, incorrect decisions.
In high-pressure care environments, this becomes even more evident: staff who need quick answers must navigate several systems or ask colleagues, creating a reliance on verbal knowledge transfer. This reduces stability and risks creating unequal care depending on what information individual employees happen to have access to.
Many essential routines in healthcare still rely on experience-based knowledge passed down through people rather than through systematic processes. This means that critical work steps, assessments, and “this is how we do it here” knowledge risk disappearing due to absence, illness, or staff turnover.
It is also not always clear who is responsible for updating documents, conducting risk assessments, or following up on deviations. Unclear roles create bottlenecks and inefficiencies, which can result in important tasks not being completed at all. This creates vulnerability and makes it difficult to build long-term, structured quality.
Even though healthcare organizations are required to report, investigate, and address deviations, under-reporting is a widespread problem. Causes vary, but common reasons include time pressure, high workload, and the perception that reporting is complicated or time-consuming.
As a result, important risks are not captured, which also makes it hard for organizations to learn from mistakes. Instead, problems are handled informally — or not at all — negatively affecting both the work environment and patient safety. Under-reporting also leads to weak decision-making data for leadership and prevents early identification of patterns indicating systemic risks.
Healthcare organizations work with many parallel quality processes: deviations, risk analyses, self-checks, medical indicators, and much more. When these are managed in different systems, such as Excel files, or local solutions, it becomes difficult to gather everything into a single overview that supports systematic improvement.
In practice, this means leaders lack clear answers to questions such as:
Without a unified view, it becomes difficult to prioritize. There is a risk of focusing on isolated incidents instead of addressing the areas where risks are actually highest. Follow-up becomes reactive instead of proactive — and the organization misses the opportunity for long-term, continuous improvement.
When summarizing these common challenges, one thing becomes clear: the problem is rarely a lack of systems, processes, or routines — but a lack of overview. Information is scattered, systems are disconnected, and follow-ups take place in different formats, making it difficult to leverage the valuable work already being done.
The way forward isn’t more systems, but structure, coordination, and clarity within the systems already in place. When documentation, routines, deviations, and follow-up are gathered in one location, the overview needed for safety, learning, and proactive improvements becomes possible.
Digitalization in healthcare doesn’t have to add complexity — when done right, it frees up time, improves quality, and strengthens the organization. The organizations that succeed do three things:
Want to learn how Centuri can help your organization move from digital stress to clarity and structure? With extensive experience supporting healthcare organizations, we offer tailored solutions for document management, quality, and regulatory compliance. 📩 Contact us for an introductory meeting.