Dodging the Side Effects of Cloud Provider Support: A Prescription for Health Care IT Flexibility and Efficiency

Health care organizations today are facing increased patient demand, decreased workforce, tightening budgets, and growing pressure to innovate and cooperate in care delivery.

For example, Deloitte’s 2025 US Health Care Outlook revealed that 58% of health system leaders anticipate workforce issues, such as talent shortages and the need for upskilling, influencing their organizational strategies in the near future. This scenario highlights the necessity of innovative solutions in care delivery.

To stay competitive and deliver high-quality outcomes, providers must leverage digital transformation while ensuring operational stability.

Yet many health care systems are still heavily dependent on software vendors whose support models and product roadmaps are rigid, expensive, and misaligned with provider needs. These vendors often dictate upgrade timelines, restrict customizations, mandate costly subscriptions, and offer limited support for systems still delivering value. As a result, the flexibility to innovate is eroding—just when it's needed most.

When Software Strain Delays Patient Care

Unchecked trust of software vendors has introduced significant operational and financial strain. Vendor lock-in forces health care providers to invest in costly, disruptive upgrades, often without a clear return on investment (ROI). On top of this strain, 65% of public health care chief financial officers (CFOs) expect operating margins to decline due to rising medication, equipment and supply costs.

Faced with tightening budgets, health care organizations can’t afford rising licensing fees and declining support services, as they're already scrambling to maintain compliance, security, and continuity. An operational instability in health care can cost lives.

More critically, these constraints affect care delivery. When IT teams are consumed by upgrade cycles and troubleshooting forced changes, they have less bandwidth for initiatives that directly support clinicians or enhance patient experience. What should be a strategic IT environment becomes reactive, expensive, and misaligned with the mission of health care.

Rigid Systems, Real Consequences

The consequences of vendor lock-in are stark. Escalating costs eat into budgets that could otherwise fund patient-facing innovation. Forced upgrades interrupt workflows and risk introducing new issues. Clinical teams, already burdened, must work around IT disruptions rather than being supported by technology.

Most importantly, health care organizations lose the autonomy to define their own IT path. This lack of control limits strategic flexibility and delays the adoption of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), telehealth, interoperability, or predictive analytics. However, these technologies are crucial to transforming patient care. In a sector where lives are on the line, that loss of agility has significant real-world consequences.

From Vendor-Driven to Value-Driven

It's time for health care organizations to break free from vendor-imposed limitations and reclaim ownership of their IT strategies. The future of health care technology must be shaped by priorities, not vendor roadmaps.

Health care providers must rethink the default upgrade-and-support model and instead adopt a business-driven IT strategy—one that allows transformation without disruption, empowering them to decide which systems serve them best.

Through this approach, organizations can extend the life of their critical systems and take back budget freedom. With this new strategy, health care organizations can reduce costs, increase flexibility, and empower their teams to focus on what matters most—delivering better outcomes.

Foundations First: A Smarter Path to Health Care Innovation

To begin this shift, health care chief information officers (CIOs) and IT leaders must take these 3 critical steps:

• Value knowledge over hype. This means assessing the “must-haves” first rather than the “nice-to-haves." For example, many providers are rolling out new AI capabilities but struggle to demonstrate the ROI of these capabilities. While AI offers immense benefits to the health care industry, IT leaders must prioritize building a strong foundation in core AI principles before diving headfirst into complex solutions. AI platforms are also becoming more open to connecting to actual core systems, allowing organizations to use their reliable and stable data as a valuable source for AI.

• Maximize value from existing systems. Stable enterprise resource planning (ERP) and clinical systems shouldn’t be discarded prematurely. Evaluate whether upgrades are truly needed or just vendor-driven. Consider potential risks when changing the hosting model of your core systems to software as a service (SaaS), as these developments often threaten the stability and confidentiality of data—not to mention come with unexpected costs for storage and accessibility. Redirect those saved resources to innovation, like AI diagnostics, telehealth infrastructure, interoperability, or care coordination platforms.

• Prioritize the right IT partnership. Proper management of core IT systems, especially ERPs, is essential to ensuring uptime and business continuity. Align service level agreements with your real business needs, as unresolved issues expose organizations to system downtime. By diversifying support options and partnering with external support professionals, health care organizations can reduce the risk of costly disruptions and improve their ability to respond quickly to potential disruptions.

Organizations that adopt these strategies gain the freedom to innovate on their terms, leading to more effective care delivery and stronger financial performance.

Lead With Mission, Not Mandates

Vendor lock-in is not a technological inevitability; it’s a choice. It’s one that health care leaders can—and should—reject. By taking control of their IT roadmap, avoiding unnecessary upgrades, and prioritizing patient-driven innovation, organizations can better align technology with their mission.

Now is the time to put patients, not vendors, at the center of enterprises' technology strategy.

About the Author

Helio Matsumoto is a senior executive and CTO at Rimini Street with over 20 years of experience leading digital transformation and technology strategy. Helio drives innovation, and promotes operational excellence for enterprises focused on innovation.