Change Management in Healthcare: Strategies and Examples

LJ Acallar

December 2, 2025•16 min read

Fact checked by Dr. Maxwell Beresford

What is Change Management in Healthcare?

Change management in healthcare is a structured approach for a system-wide transition that impacts systems and people. Changes in daily operational workflows will follow suit once this change is implemented.

Said change can involve a change in tools, product, objectives, or values that mean different things to various care providers and teams. In this process, minimizing workflow disruption is crucial, especially when healthcare teams have standardized steps in carrying out plans. But with systemic changes, the goal is to always improve rather than disrupt.

Clinicians constantly juggle tasks from the bedside to the clinic and the boardroom. That reality makes change in some workflows unavoidable. This is where innovative solutions like Heidi come to support.

In this article, we’ll explore how care providers act responsibly in carefully implementing these institutional changes, and how AI care partner Heidi helps teams undergo best practices during this period of transition.

Change Management in Healthcare, with labels Owner, Admin, Clinician, Assistant.

Why is Change Management Important in Healthcare?

Change management is crucial as care operations must continue uninterrupted, regardless of the changes to be brought about. Clinicians face increased workloads during implementation, and therefore, sufficient guidance is essential to help them maintain their focus on patient care.

The process requires care leaders to accurately identify problems before initiating any changes. They must also prioritize the prevention of burnout, as those responsible for encouraging adaptation can become exhausted or lose confidence. Given that burnout is a prevalent issue in healthcare, leaders should foster an open environment for discussions, bringing together physicians and medical administrators.

For effective change management within care teams, it's important to establish a shared definition of success. This alignment ensures that the team can collaborate efficiently and concentrate on a unified objective. That way, diverse perspectives among team members are encouraged, and this maintains respect and sustains productivity.

Who Benefits from Change Management in Healthcare?

When change is well-managed, each care proponent experiences less fatigue throughout the transitional journey. With minimal disruption, its impact expands in the following ways:

It empowers clinicians to practice what they studied and prepared to do, and at the same time, they help overcome resistance by sharing the new vision with confidence.
It benefits the overarching care system when institutional changes apply. As the organization forms new habits and leave outdated values, the cultural transformation involves a sustainable way for the new system to hire, train, and retain employees.
When all care providers are aligned, patients experience a better care journey that is more high-touch and thoughtful, especially when they see how care teams work together to help achieve desired outcomes.

Equal importance must be placed on relationships and processes in achieving positive results that impact each care proponent. Ultimately, all these components aim to increase the likelihood of successful care.

But how exactly do healthcare systems execute the organizational steps to achieve such goals? Let’s find out.

Change Management Strategies in Healthcare

Change in healthcare is complex, but its foundations are universal across theories and models. Regardless of the framework, successful transformation relies on a shared understanding that enables a lasting impact among those driving and receiving the change. When these principles are applied consistently, care organizations create meaningful progress that endures beyond phases of implementation.

Here are change management strategies that are commonly found to underpin the popular models typically employed in healthcare, and the ways in which the leading AI care partner, Heidi, serves as a valuable resource through momentous parts of change.

Identifying Needs and Goals for Change

Effective change management begins with a clear determination of clinical and business objectives. Identifying core goals for the next chapter of the company will largely help in setting expectations and action plans to proceed with. For clinicians, this means that the goal is to ensure that their primary priorities remain central, and existing workflows must be enhanced rather than disrupted with the forthcoming change.

Heidi supports this process by providing an AI care partner that shapes and refines frontline clinicians’ general and specialty processes. This empowers them to take ownership of improvements in practice. Once all clinicians feel this way, employee engagement grows, and change feels rather collaborative, not imposed.

Communicate and Engage

Innovators are those who believe that new ideas will bring forth new opportunities to improve and achieve care goals. This includes care leaders and primary stakeholders who must consistently exemplify the positive influence the change has brought during implementation, and ensure that new processes are being followed.

Educating primary stakeholders makes it easy to persuade other team members who are more conservative to adopt innovation. For instance, introducing Heidi as a tool that streamlines administrative tasks without interrupting clinicians' care delivery can help them feel more at ease and confident using new technology that will improve their work lives.

Training and Empowerment

To facilitate adoption, education should be combined with hands-on training for team members. As the change unfolds, some clinical staff may experience learning curves or knowledge gaps that impede progress. Key facilitators must also regularly solicit feedback to ensure everyone is fully aligned throughout the process.

For smoother transitions during periods of change, Heidi serves as a copilot for clinicians across various practices. It allows healthcare teams to focus on direct care by alleviating administrative burden, which makes daily operations more efficient.

Heidi does not require a sophisticated process for onboarding. It offers multi-modal training through patient explainers, step-by-step walkthroughs, and informational guides. In the demo below, we show how easy it is to onboard with Heidi AI and how seamlessly it helps clinicians like you stay focused on patient care.

Phased Implementation

A spaced implementation process is a slow but surefire way to achieve clinical systemic shifts. This approach helps departments adapt accordingly while fostering widespread acceptance. In this step, several key persons practice leadership in establishing baseline metrics and targets, and map current versus future states of the overall medical system.

With Heidi, this can be performed through incremental optimization, starting with a small cohort first. Later on, you may expand to adjacent workflows as per specialty needs.

This is what the team at Divergence UK has precisely done upon discovering Heidi. The team gained efficiencies in patient care, documentation, and time savings. But they are now considering expanding Heidi’s use across other services within their organization.

“It’s creating a standardised output, which for me as a manager is incredibly valuable. Being able to quickly add new clinical information directly into the templates, and have it seamlessly appear in reports, is amazing. It means we're essentially auditing our quality even before the work gets done.”

You might be wondering how the team achieved workflow success with Heidi. Let’s take a closer look at more specific examples.

Change Management in Healthcare Examples

With Heidi integrated into care workflows of companies regardless of size, change management wouldn’t be as much of a burden. In various clinical operations, overloaded physicians don’t have to render overtime hours. No more ineffective routine scheduling for receptionists, and no more excessive discharge delays for billing specialists.

Below are more granular ways showing how Heidi doubles capacity for your practice as your AI care partner.

Discharge to Follow-Up without Bottlenecks

Imagine a world where a patient's discharge automatically generates a bundled follow-up for their upcoming appointments, tasks, and instructions. It would be a dream to standardize these outputs, all within the same workspace, based on a patient summary from a single consultation. The good news is that this is made possible in a more efficient manner with Heidi.

For example, it generates a task list based on the notes it structures directly from the encounter’s transcript. You can then “Ask Heidi” to go into research mode to look for further medical Evidence.
To reduce missed steps, Heidi also provides a built-in checklist for you to easily tick off or customize. This is accessible for your specialty team, complete with the owner of the task and due dates. Details like these, including med, labs, and referrals, can be included in these assignments that surface automatically in your workspace.

Reception Relief without Disruption

Heidi is designed for fast-paced reception environments, and it facilitates data-driven decision-making with capabilities ensured to be compliant. This way, patient safety is intact in every step before, during, and after the Change phase. Through each complicated admin workflow, tasks are streamlined and designed to be more collaborative, which reduces friction throughout the patient journey.

Clinicians can work more effectively when patients can self-serve with AI-powered intake workflows. With the help of AI features, like Heidi Calls, appointments can automatically be booked after a patient call. Heidi is also highly configurable, so you can leave medication reviews, queries, and front desk queries on autopilot.

Compliance-First Rollouts

Every rollout must align with strict regulatory standards for compliance to help care organizations avoid potential risks.
Heidi is built for audit transparency and adapts to evolving coding rules so care teams stay compliant without the need for retraining or rework. Through intuitive design, Heidi enables change and supports smooth adoption rather than making disruptions. Clinicians are also assured that every action is traceable and comes with enterprise-grade security.

For instance, when Heidi suggests codes, it provides contextual evidence from the transcript and suggests (not replaces) clinically relevant recommendations. Each suggestion corresponds to the required fields, so documentation stays accurate. Clinicians, then, are left to simply confirm, edit, add, or remove codes, significantly speeding up the review process.

This proactive approach is what drove Heidi’s real adoption rates of 60-80% without incentives, far exceeding the 20-40% activation rate typically achieved by other products.

Resistance to change is somewhat inevitable, but when the benefits and reasons as to why the shift is bound to happen are clearly communicated, it can be minimized. Team participation is then reinforced, and trust in the process and the management fuels everyone’s sense of purpose.

At Heidi, we not only offer a medical scribe. We purpose-built our tool to be your copilot in practice so it can augment your teams, especially during transitions. Tens of thousands of clinicians trust Heidi to expand capacity, returning more than 18 million hours to care teams in just 18 months.

Change Management in Healthcare Made Easier with Your AI Care Partner, Heidi

Heidi is committed to support AI-driven healthcare for every clinician, and the journey to creating the best AI care partner was a pursuit of excellence with a deep understanding of healthcare's unique challenges.

Accessible innovation: Our free AI platform reflects our belief that progress in healthcare should be inclusive by providing a tool that balances innovation with integrity.
Clinician empowerment: Heidi frees clinicians, the true field experts, to focus on care. The first step is embracing AI to streamline administrative tasks and reduce patient waiting times in the process.
Sustainable future in care: At Heidi, we’re shaping the future of AI in healthcare one consult at a time.

Heidi ensures the secure handling of Protected Health Information (PHI) by redacting it from prompts and outputs, and by implementing guardrails to prevent its transmission to unauthorized recipients or channels. Additionally, Heidi adheres to strict data retention policies such as GDPR, HIPAA, NHS, PIPEDA, the APPs, and others, guaranteeing that no audio recordings are ever stored.

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Frequently Asked Questions about Change Management in Healthcare

How do I make a healthcare change management plan?

To make a healthcare change management plan, the first step is to select one primary model and map it out according to the existing clinical operations of your organization. Next, the roles and clinical pathways for stakeholders like clinicians, managers, IT, patients, and others must be defined clearly so communication also cadences per group. Lastly, tie the adoption plan with training schedules and metrics to be reviewed at fixed intervals, making sure to protect patient safety during the transition.

What are the 5 principles of change management in healthcare?

The five core principles of change management in healthcare generally encompass purpose, people, process, projects, and performance. Altogether, these principles are forwarded through popular change management models to drive adoption and remove barriers. Aligned to upholding these principles is Heidi’s AI platform, built to simplify change management in enterprise systems without disrupting care plans.

What is the typical healthcare change management process flow?

The change management process in healthcare generally involves three distinct stages: pre-implementation, implementation, and post-implementation.

Before the initial implementation, readiness is assessed, with primary adopters playing a crucial role. They actively influence members into active adoption through behavior reinforcement and training. The final stage involves sustainment and continuous learning, where the project transitions from being a project to operational waves, requiring regular optimizations to prevent lags.

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