The 2025 symplr Compass Survey offers a clear view into how healthcare leaders are responding to today’s toughest operational pressures. Now in its fourth year, the research highlights where priorities align, where progress stalls, and where leaders see opportunities to move forward together.
You don’t need another white paper—you need insights. This year’s Compass Survey distills crowded priorities into a practical sequence: where governance helps, when consolidation pays off, and how to reduce administrative drag without adding more tools. More than 75% of leaders agree that a consolidated healthcare operations platform could reduce administrative burden indicating clear evidence that the path forward is optimization, not more complexity.
Financial pressure and clinician burnout remain the top two threats in healthcare operations for 2025, showing little progress since 2022.
Burnout has shifted from crisis to chronic condition, affecting 41% of clinicians and 33% of operations leaders, with little improvement since 2023.
Cybersecurity remains a persistent concern (34%), especially for IT leaders, despite dipping slightly in ranking due to competing priorities.
Administrative burden continues to climb, with clinicians now spending an average of 88 minutes per day on admin tasks, up steadily year over year.
See why platform strategies and smarter automation are rising to the top.
Here are a few highlights from this year’s data. Get the full story and role-by-role impact by downloading the report.
Hospitals serving high areas of Medicaid patients and rural communities are already under financial strain, with rural and high Medicaid hospitals more likely to be in the red, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that OBBBA’s Medicare and Affordable Care (ACA) changes will leave 10 million more people uninsured. As changes under OBBBA will undoubtedly equate to lost revenue, health systems must look for other areas where they can cut budgets to prepare and accommodate for what is ahead.
According to a recent survey by the American Medical Association, nearly two-thirds of physicians reported using healthcare AI in 2024, a 78% jump from the 38% of physicians who said they used it in 2023. Additionally, more than half of physicians (57%) said reducing administrative burdens through automation was the biggest area of opportunity for AI.
Although many organizations have put thoughtful cybersecurity roadmaps together in recent years, the sophistication and risk of digital attacks on the healthcare system have not abated. Virtually all healthcare organizations have experienced at least one cyberattack in the past 12 months, according to a Fall 2024 survey by the Ponemon Institute.
More than 75% of leaders agree that a consolidated healthcare operations platform could reduce administrative burden. AI also offers near-term promise, especially in automating non-clinical workflows like scheduling and billing—but only if layered on top of clean data and trusted processes.
The average time wasted jumped 6% year-over-year, from 83 minutes to 88 minutes – that’s nearly a full workday per employee lost to inefficiency.
Whether your priority is improving efficiency, returning time to clinicians, or navigating ongoing regulatory shifts, the data shows that alignment and platform strategies are gaining momentum across the industry. This report is built for cross-functional teams making trade-offs under pressure.
Evidence to support consolidation, integration, and risk-aware governance
Practical ways to return time to care and reduce non-clinical work
Where to fund efficiency first—and how to measure it
Playbook items that reduce friction in day-to-day work
Each section starts with a plain-language readout, then moves quickly to what to do next.
Discover how leaders are moving from crisis to clarity, and why consolidation and AI are now seen as the clearest path forward.
Prioritizing one workflow to fix first (e.g., onboarding or scheduling) and setting a simple governance cadence to unblock decisions.
Crisis culture, where organizations operate in a reactive mode, prevents progress and fractures even the best-intentioned teams, and has the potential to negatively impact patient outcomes.
It tracks four years of comparable trendlines and presents findings segmented by IT, clinical, and operations—so teams see the same problem from their seat.
Use it to benchmark sequencing (what to tackle first) and how to avoid common rollout snags that stall adoption.
Cycle time, admin minutes per task, and duplicate data touches—clean, comparable metrics you can capture quickly.
AI’s appeal is pragmatic, not futuristic: workflow agents, scheduling, claims management, and supply chain optimization are the top use cases leaders believe will make an immediate impact. Nearly 70% of IT leaders and 64% of executives are already exploring these applications.
An IT–clinical–ops triad: one accountable lead with a clinical champion and an operations owner of the targeted workflow.
About 20 minutes for the executive takeaways; the deeper cuts are there when you’re ready.
Discover where healthcare leaders align—and where progress stalls—so you can prioritize what to fix first in your organization.
