Healthcare organizations face constant challenges: rising costs, staffing shortages, regulatory pressures, patient safety concerns, rapid technological innovation, and even public health crises. Change isn’t optional. It’s the only way to keep up.
But making change stick in healthcare is uniquely challenging. Resistance, overwhelmed staff, and the sheer complexity of coordinating across departments can stall even the best ideas. Enter change management in healthcare.
A structured approach to planning, communication, support, and reinforcement helps organizations implement change smoothly and sustain it over time. Done right, healthcare change management leads to better outcomes for patients, staff, and entire organizations.
How Effective Change Management Improves Care and Operations
Change management in healthcare is the process of helping people and organizations adapt to new systems and policies successfully. Effective change management ensures teams understand, embrace, and sustain new ways of working. Without it, even the best-designed initiatives risk falling short due to resistance, confusion, or lack of alignment.
Why does it matter?
Change management offers a framework to navigate these challenges effectively. With it, organizations can:
- Maximize resource usage: Change management helps organizations effectively prioritize time, staff, funds, and other resources.
- Boost Compliance and Strengthen Safety: With proper change management, organizations can ensure updates to processes, documentation, and technology meet legal and industry safety standards, protecting patients and staff.
- Improve patient care and outcomes: Smooth transitions mean patients benefit faster from new processes, technologies, or practices.
- Build resilience: Organizations that embrace change management are better equipped to adapt to new technologies, regulations, or emergencies.
Turning Change Management Theory Into Healthcare Results
Every lasting transformation starts with a clear framework. Change management models give healthcare leaders a structured way to guide teams through transition and increase the odds that improvements will stick.
Some of the most widely used models help organizations understand how to prepare for change, put it into motion, and make new behaviors part of everyday operations.
Lewin’s Three-Stage Model
The Kurt Lewin change management model breaks change into three stages:
- Unfreeze: This prepares people for change by helping them understand why the change is necessary and getting them to the point where they want the change and are willing to step away from their comfort zone.
- Change: As people are making changes and transitioning to the new way of doing things, it’s important to provide everyone with support, whether that’s training, coaching, access to role models, or simply more time to adjust.
- Refreeze: Here, the change is solidified, usually through policy updates, reinforcement, and additional training, and becomes the new normal.
Kotter’s 8-Step Model
This model has eight steps designed to build and sustain momentum to achieve change. Kotter’s steps include:
- Creating Urgency: Creating a sense of urgency can excite and inspire people to act, starting change processes on the right foot.
- Building a Guiding Coalition: Having a group that is 100% committed to the change and willing to help coordinate and communicate is invaluable.
- Forming a Strategic Vision: Developing a solid understanding of how this change will improve the current system and benefit staff and patients helps create clear direction and generate widespread buy-in.
- Enlisting a Volunteer Army: A guiding coalition is great, but only a handful of committed people won’t result in large-scale change. It’s essential to get everyone on board.
- Removing Barriers to Enable Employees to Act: Even if everyone is motivated, obstacles like limited resources, a lack of authority, or outdated policies can stand in the way. Removing these barriers involves providing people with the tools, training, and freedom they need to implement change.
- Generating Short-Term Wins: Celebrating early successes not only energizes and builds confidence among staff but also helps the change pick up momentum.
- Sustaining Acceleration: Once you get your first taste of success, don’t let up. Push even harder to maintain momentum, keep staff motivated, and turn progress into widespread, permanent change.
- Instituting Change: Finally, organizations must embed these new changes into policies, processes, and everyday behaviors, making them the new normal.
Prosci ADKAR Model
In the Prosci ADKAR® model, individual change is the building block for organizational transformation — and it makes sense. Many organizational changes fail not because the idea was flawed but because employees either didn’t buy in or weren’t equipped to carry it out effectively.
This model aims to change that by focusing on five elements:
- Awareness: People must be aware of the need for change. Without understanding the “why,” staff are unlikely to support or sustain new initiatives.
- Desire: Next, they need to want to participate in and support the change. This requires strong communication and a clear understanding of the benefits the change offers.
- Knowledge: People also need to know how to change. That comes through training and resources.
- Ability: Staff need the ability to apply what they’ve learned in practice. They can gain this through mentorship, hands-on training, or simply additional time to adapt and gain confidence.
- Reinforcement: Recognition, feedback, and ongoing support prevent people from slipping back into their old habits and ensure the change sticks.
Start Strong and Follow Through
A well-structured plan builds buy-in, ensures everyone is on the same page, and ensures changes stick.
To set yourself up for success:
1. Take a Good Look At Your Current Set Up
Think of it like a road trip: before you hit the highway, you need to know your current location on the map. Otherwise, you’ll wind up driving in circles or heading in the wrong direction entirely.
In healthcare, this means stepping back and diving in to understand current processes, resources, workflows, and pain points. Ask yourself:
- What’s working?
- Which systems or processes are falling short?
- Where are the bottlenecks?
- What are patients’ common complaints?
- What are staff’s pain points?
Answering these questions gives you a clear baseline, making it easier to spot urgent priorities and direct your efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact.
2. Define Clear Goals and Priorities
Some changes, even if they meet every target and exceed expectations, will only create modest improvements. Others have the power to completely transform your organization.
Even if you’re fortunate enough to have a generous budget, there are still only 24 hours a day. To decide what changes to prioritize, consider the outcomes you want to see.
→ If your top goal is to reduce costs or cut efficiencies, target process improvements like streamlining the patient intake process, reducing redundant paperwork, and optimizing staffing models.
→ If your priority is improving patient outcomes, identify what’s holding them back now and address those barriers. Are they facing long wait times and gaps in follow-up care? Or do they have limited access to specialists that they need?
→ If you’re aiming to adopt new technology, funnel more of your resources into system upgrades, EHR integration, and telehealth platforms, and provide staff with training.
→ If you want to increase staff satisfaction and retention, invest in training, professional development, and wellness initiatives.
→ If compliance and safety are top concerns, channel efforts into ensuring adherence to regulations, upgrading safety protocols, and creating systems for continuous monitoring to prevent errors.
3. Get Stakeholders Involved at Every Step
Change impacts patients, staff, and administrators alike. Communicate openly, involve stakeholders in decisions, and build trust through transparency.
By communicating what’s happening, why, and how things are unfolding, you can develop healthier, enduring relationships. It will also go a long way toward reducing any resistance against proposed changes.
Plus, you’ll be able to hear perspectives from some of the most important people’s voices are heard — those who are impacted most by the changes you’re making.
4. Offer Adequate Support
Just like building a house without the right tools will leave you with a shaky foundation, you can’t enact effective, lasting change without preparing staff with training, resources, mentoring programs, and Q&A sessions.
Support shouldn’t end after the rollout. Reinforcement through feedback, continued education, and recognition helps staff feel confident, valued, and capable.
5. Monitor, Measure, and Adapt
No plan is perfect, so it’s important to track performance metrics, gather feedback, and make course corrections along the way. You can:
- Review performance metrics like patient wait times, readmission rates, and staff satisfaction scores.
- Conduct surveys and focus groups to gather feedback from staff and patients.
- Compare current results against the baseline established before the change.
- Collect feedback from stakeholders and make adjustments as needed.
- Make course corrections when any issues or unintended consequences surface.
Driving Change That Lasts in Healthcare
Change in healthcare is inevitable. But without a structured approach and careful change management in healthcare, it can quickly lead to wasted resources, frustrated staff, and compromised patient care.
At SEI, we want the best for our partners. That’s why we go beyond simply making tool and technology recommendations and help organizations design healthcare change management strategies that allow for effective and long-lasting change.
