Healthcare Change Management for Success & Engagement

Key Takeaways 

• Change management is the process of guiding people, teams, and organizations through a transition to achieve desired outcomes.
• Everyone is a leader of change, regardless of title or role.
• To engage team members who may resist change, listening without judgment is critical.
• Measuring success means tracking change experience, adoption, and business impact—not just go-live metrics.
• True adoption means users understand and derive value from the new solution, not just that it was successfully implemented.

What is Change Management in Healthcare? 

Rolling out new technology at the hospital? Kicking off some other major transformation? Sounds like a job for change management. Without it, even the smartest ideas can stall out, whether it’s due to tepid leadership buy-in or confusion and resistance from end users. 

Put simply, change management is about using the right tools and strategies to help people adapt—especially during large, transformational projects. 

It’s what Pooja Solanki, Vice President of Enterprise Change Management and Deployment at DaVita Kidney Care, focuses on every day. 

“In healthcare, where everything centers around people and care delivery, it’s essential to bring your teams along as you introduce new innovations or investments,” she said. “It helps reduce risk, improves adoption, and increases your chances of success. We also think about change capacity—how much change the organization can realistically handle—so we don’t overload teams or create burnout.”

Why Change Management Matters in Healthcare 

Effective change management is critical to successful business innovation. In fact, according to recent PROSCI data, organizations with strong change management programs are seven times more likely to achieve business innovation goals, up from six times in previous reports.¹ 

Why is that? First, we need to understand the factors that can make it so hard to effect change in healthcare. 

Pooja says it comes down to the capacity and willingness to implement change. A 2022 Gartner survey found that 38% of employees were willing to get behind an organizational change; in 2016, that number was 74%. It’s not that organizations don’t have the desire to change—they’re just coming face to face with change fatigue.² 

“I believe the pace of change, especially since COVID, that has come to [healthcare workers] both in their personal and professional lives is part of the issue,” Pooja said. “With the emergence of AI and new technology, change has become a constant versus something more planned.” 

TL;DR? Healthcare orgs and the people who staff them are tired. Even when change is necessary—like, “we’re still scheduling in Excel” necessary—it can feel overwhelming to shift away from what’s familiar. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right? 😅 

That’s exactly why change management matters. It brings structure, clarity, and support to help teams navigate change thoughtfully, efficiently, and with as little disruption as possible.

Change Management Strategies in Healthcare  

Understand Why Projects Fail 

So why do these healthcare projects fail in the first place? According to Pooja, it often comes down to one word: misalignment. 

It’s common for healthcare workers to have personal motivations for wanting—or not wanting—change. A nurse might be tired of using pagers. A surgeon might prefer to stick with printed schedules. And while these preferences matter, they can sometimes obscure the bigger picture. 

To stay focused, teams need a clear sense of a project’s true north—a shared understanding of the who, what, when, where, and most importantly, the why behind the change.

Equip Leaders to be Agents of Change 

Successful change relies heavily on a steady and consistent hand from influential people. This is especially important for leadership and financial stakeholders.

With so many competing priorities, it’s understandable that leaders aren’t always in the weeds with every project. But Pooja says this can be addressed by encouraging leadership to think differently about their role. 

 “There’s a myth out there that change management is about the end user—just get them to adopt something and we’re done,” Pooja said. “A lot of what change management is about is activating the sponsors, activating the leaders, because change is ultimately leader-led.” 

The hard truth? Leaders need to reframe their role in change. As Pooja puts it, “Change is the new constant.” With that, leaders must take on more than just sign-off or oversight duties. They need to be visible champions of the change. 

New tools and workflows should feel personal to leaders so they stay engaged in the process and act as direct motivators for their teams. When leadership owns the change, it sends a clear message that the changes being made actually matter. 

“Really, we’re equipping them to be the best people leaders they can be by being deliverers themselves, so that they can then scale and personalize that change management that they’re going to have to do,” Pooja said. 

It’s one thing to talk about change obliquely, but if you’re in the trenches talking to people, explaining the benefits and the rationale, and listening to their concerns, you become a vector of change yourself.

Get Stakeholder Buy-In 

Leadership involvement often serves as the financial and strategic backbone of any project. When leaders aren’t actively engaged, Pooja says it can create “dilution or a barrier down the line” that slows progress or derails implementation. 

But stakeholder buy-in goes beyond just executives and department heads. In the context of change management, we need to expand the definition of “stakeholder” to include our end users. They are, after all, the people who will feel the day-to-day change the most. 

Every care team member touched by change projects should have a voice. For example, nurses are constantly working in the EHR. If an organization is evaluating new EHRs, nurses shouldn’t just be informed—they should be encouraged to weigh in. Their feedback on workflows, usability, and potential challenges can make or break the success of a rollout. 

Getting true buy-in means building change alongside your teams, not just signing a check and expecting everything to go smoothly from there. If that’s your approach, you’re setting yourself up for failure. 

Find the Right Sponsor to Remove Roadblocks 

There will be times when leaders are juggling too much to give change management the attention it needs. That’s where the sponsor comes in.

A sponsor is often a senior leader of some kind, but no matter their title, this person owns the success of the change effort. They’re typically responsible for approving resources and budget, making high-level decisions, and rallying other leaders around the initiative. 

Identifying this person early—and making sure they’re the right person—is important. Pooja notes that sponsors are uniquely positioned to help remove roadblocks caused by leadership gaps or misalignment, but only if they’re fully informed and supported. 

“Make sure you get the right sponsor and make sure they’re onboarded well to the type of barriers you’re going to see in this project,” Pooja says. “They also have a day job, so what is it that you expect from them? What kind of barriers should they be removing for you?” 

Choosing the right sponsor is essential to make space for critical conversations at the beginning of the project. Everyone affected or involved should have a seat at the table so things like goals, concerns, setbacks, finances, regulations, and expectations are clear and aligned before anything is set in motion.

Change Management Strategies for Care Team Engagement 

It’s natural for healthcare workers to feel overwhelmed or fatigued when change happens. 

In a 2018 survey of US healthcare workers, 49% indicated that work-related stress was one of the biggest stressors in their life.³ The top culprits for work stress? Organizational shakeups, shifting responsibilities, and frequent policy and role changes.  

In other words: change itself is stressful. And it seems to happen a lot more these days.

“We underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes for adoption in the enterprise world,” Pooja said. With the right change management strategy—one that is deliberate, proactive, and inclusive—you can mitigate some of the stress of adoption.

Build User Ability  

One way to mitigate adoption stress is to “build the ability” for providers to not just use, but understand new tech and workflows. But first, you need to understand the barriers at play. 

Let’s say your radiology department is replacing an Excel-based schedule with a new automated healthcare scheduling system. To uncover potential barriers, ask questions like: 

• Is the team aware a new scheduling system is being installed? 
• Which team members will be most impacted by this change? 
• Do they understand how automation will make life easier for admins and end users? 
• Do they understand the project scope and deadlines? 
• Perhaps most importantly, do they understand and agree with the reason(s) for implementing this new scheduling tool? 

Pooja recommends using change champions—trusted team members who can regularly share progress updates and keep the change visible. As she points out, care teams are more likely to engage when the message comes from someone they know and trust, not a vendor they barely interact with. 

Another key part of ability-building? Purposeful, practical training. Don’t just roll out generic onboarding. Make it specific to the roles and real-world use cases of your teams. That’s what helps people connect the dots and see value right away. 

“If [end users] start to lose confidence, they’re going to resist and find excuses not to use it,” Pooja said. “If we can support them through that change curve through awareness, desire, knowledge, and ability building, usually they can come up the change curve.”

Take a Role-Based Approach 

Pooja and her team have adopted a role-based change management approach, which means they closely evaluate how each role is impacted by a proposed change and map the intensity of that impact. This can help organizations make better decisions on what changes need to be made.

For example, if a health system needs to update its clinical communication system and evaluates vendors with a broad lens, it may choose a solution that checks the most boxes and seems to work for a wide range of people. But if the org zooms in on who’s likely to use the new solution the most—nurses, for example—it can go several steps further to understand the specific workflows, communication patterns, and pain points that role faces every day. 

With that clarity, the organization is better equipped to choose a solution that not only meets enterprise needs but also works intuitively for frontline staff. Nothing is certain, but this approach is very likely to lead to higher adoption, fewer implementation setbacks, and more meaningful long-term impact.

Engaging the Change-Averse Team Member 

No matter the size of the organization—it could be a multi-state health system with dozens of hospitals or a small community hospital—there will always be team members who are averse to change. Instead of viewing these people as negative forces trying to drag the project down, try asking one question: What would be necessary for them to feel heard, supported, and empowered to engage with the change? 

Pooja says we all have to be leaders of change, no matter the role we’re in. 

“Part of leadership is listening, and if they don’t see that you’re listening to their feedback and giving them that space without judgment to hear them out, it’s not likely to yield a fruitful adoption,” she said. 

In many cases, the most reluctant team member can transform into one of your strongest advocates if you give them space to fully express their concerns and even become part of the process.

Measuring Change Management Success in Healthcare 

Success with change management can be measured across 3 primary metrics, Pooja says: change experience, adoption, and typical business results. 

Change Experience

Pooja and her team track the experience of the change management process through the Prosci ADKAR^® Model framework. ADKAR stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. 

By evaluating each stage, they get a sense of how well-supported people feel as they progress through change. Teams are also asked to reflect on their overall experience after a deployment to help identify what went well and where there’s room for improvement. 

Adoption 

After tracking experience measures, healthcare organizations should closely track adoption metrics and product utilization, including how many people are using the new solution and for what purpose. 

But Pooja cautions that adoption should go beyond surface-level metrics. It’s critical to assess whether users truly understand the solution and are tapping into its most valuable features. 

“A lot of people are still using workarounds is what we’re finding, because they’re used to their paper or they’re used to their old methods,” Pooja said. “And if they’re not using [the new solutions], then we shouldn’t call it a success.” 

In other words, that shiny new system you successfully switched on won’t be worth much in reality if nobody uses it (or if people only utilize 10% of its capabilities).

Business Results 

The third area of success focuses on traditional KPIs, and these should align with metrics the health system already tracks. These could include:  

• User adoption rate: Percentage of users actively engaging with the tool beyond an initial rollout period. 
• System usage: Frequency or depth of use compared to previous solutions. 
• Training completion rate: Number of users who’ve completed required or optional training. 
• Time to proficiency: Average time it takes users to become confident and capable with the new solution. 

Tracking these metrics over time helps organizations validate their change efforts and identify where additional support or communication may be needed. 

Learn More About Change Management 

Change management isn’t easy, but with the right approach, it doesn’t have to feel impossible. By listening to those most affected by change and measuring success beyond surface implementation metrics, health systems can effect change that makes a tangible difference and even excites people about future projects.

But managing change effectively is a lot more than checking boxes on a rollout plan. It requires creating awareness, building desire, enabling ability, reinforcing behaviors across the organization, and a lot of listening. When leaders take a structured, thoughtful approach to change management, they can drive stronger engagement, reduce friction, and ensure lasting impact. 

For more from Pooja, check out the full replay of her discussion with PerfectServe at the top of this page. You can also learn more about change management and the ADKAR^® Model on the PROSCI website.

Sources

1. Best Practices in Change Management,12^th Edition. PROSCI: https://empower.prosci.com/best-practices-change-management-executive-summary 
2. This New Strategy Could Be Your Ticket to Change Management Success. Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/this-new-strategy-could-be-your-ticket-to-change-management-success 
3. Stressors Among Healthcare Workers: A Summative Content Analysis. National Library of Medicine: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10068501/