Prepared for
Digital Health
Hero Finding
Financial strength is rated and ranked the most important priority by every cut of the data: roughly a third of executives surface it unaided, and senior executives place it a full rank ahead of every other pillar.
Of the five strategic pillars in the proposed framework, financial strength outperforms on both unaided mention and structured importance rating. A meaningful share of executives surface financial sustainability as a top concern before seeing the framework. On the structured importance rating, financial strength leads access and care delivery, strategic growth and workforce (tied), and organizational resilience. When ranked head-to-head, financial strength sits roughly a full rank ahead of the next pillar.
Top driver
Financial sustainability surfaces unaided as the leading concern
Rank 1
Financial strength leads on structured importance rating
Rising
AI and digital integration expected to become a top priority over the coming years
Enabler
AI most often positioned as an enabler of other priorities, not a standalone pillar
Study Design
N=43 C-suite executives at U.S. health systems and hospitals · AI-moderated mixed-method interviews · IDN, community, and academic settings.
The sample was structured to represent the full C-suite decision-making set the marketing team writes for: financial, operational, clinical, and strategy leaders across the three dominant health system organization types, with revenue bands spanning community hospitals to large IDNs.
Sample segmentation
CFO · 10
COO · 9
CMO · 7
CNO · 6
CEO · 5
CSO/CQO · 6
Interview guide · core topics
- Current strategic priorities: unaided priorities and active focus areas before framework exposure
- Hypothesized framework validation: importance rating and ranking of the five proposed pillars
- Priority language and terminology: keywords executives use to describe each pillar in their own words
- Importance vs. support gap: where stated priority diverges from actual organizational resourcing
- AI orientation: whether leaders treat AI as a standalone strategic priority or an enabler of others
- Emerging priorities: shifts over the past 2-3 years and projections for the next 2 years
- Tool and solution needs: where AI/ML and partner support are required to execute against priorities
- Segmentation signals: how priorities and AI orientation differ by role, organization type, and revenue
Recruit criteria
- C-suite role at a U.S. health system, hospital, or IDN: CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, CNO, CSO, or CQO
- Final decision-maker or heavily involved in strategic decision-making for the organization
- Minimum one year tenure in current role; majority of sample with 3+ years for seasoned perspective
- Geographic and organization-type spread across IDN, community, and academic settings
Key Findings
What the research surfaced for the marketing framework.
Six signals defined the framework verdict, the language refinements, and the AI positioning decision the marketing team carried into the planning cycle.
Top driver
Financial sustainability surfaces unaided as the leading concern
~½
Position AI as an enabler of other priorities
~⅕
Treat AI as a standalone strategic priority
Majority
Expect to need AI/ML tools to accomplish priorities
Top cause
Resource scarcity cited as the leading driver of priority/support gaps
IDN-led
IDNs cite AI/ML as needed materially more than community hospitals
01
The five-pillar framework holds up: four of five pillars match unaided executive language closely; only organizational resilience needs reframing.
Unaided priorities cluster cleanly into four of the five hypothesized pillars. Financial sustainability under reimbursement pressure maps to financial strength. Capacity, access, and throughput optimization plus clinical quality and safety map to access and care delivery performance. Strategic service line and market growth maps to strategic growth. Workforce stabilization maps to workforce and care team capacity. Executives use the same keywords the framework anticipates: margins, capacity management, length of stay, service line expansion, retention, productivity. The framework is validated for four of five pillars without modification.
02
Organizational resilience is a cross-cutting capability, not a standalone pillar: leaders rarely surface it on its own.
Resilience does not show up as its own bucket in unaided responses. It surfaces implicitly through operational excellence and process optimization and through technology and AI as an enabler, and gets framed in terms of stewardship, diversification, culture, wellbeing, and interoperability. It overlaps most with financial strength and workforce. Leaders describe resilience as the through-line that lets them execute against the other four priorities, not as a priority that competes with them. The marketing team should reposition resilience as a capability layer across the framework, not a sixth seat at the table.
03
Financial strength is the dominant priority on every measurement: leading on unaided mention, structured importance rating, and head-to-head ranking.
Financial sustainability sits at the top of every cut. It leads on unaided mention. It rates highest on the structured importance scale. It ranks roughly a full position ahead of the next pillar in head-to-head comparison. A meaningful share say it has become more important over the past 2-3 years, and a smaller cohort expect it to become more of a priority over the next two years. Leaders attribute the elevation to mounting reimbursement pressure, policy uncertainty, and rising operational costs. Marketing materials should lead with financial strength as the entry pillar across most segments.
04
AI is widely seen as important but most often positioned as an enabler, not a standalone pillar.
Roughly half of executives treat AI as an enabler of existing priorities, focused on near-term ROI use cases like revenue cycle efficiency, documentation burden reduction, and patient flow optimization. A smaller share elevate AI to a standalone strategic priority focused on enterprise-wide transformation: ambient documentation, multi-specialty clinical AI, and enterprise operational intelligence. A similar share say it is both. The marketing team should write AI positioning as an enabler across all five pillars in the default framework, with a separate standalone-AI narrative for the IDN and large-revenue segments.
05
Resource scarcity creates a measurable gap between stated priority and organizational support: leaders cite limited capital, staffing, or technology as the leading reason.
Leaders describe a persistent gap between what departments view as most important and what health systems actually resource. Physician partnerships are the most under-supported priority: ranked materially higher in importance than in actual organizational support. Cost optimization is over-supported relative to its stated importance. Leaders cite resource scarcity, using language like limited capital dollars, IT resources, and availability of resources. The advisory positioning opportunity is to lead with the gap and offer a path to close it.
06
Priorities split by role and organization size: senior executives lead with financial strength; clinical and strategy leaders lead with access and care delivery.
Senior executives (CEO, CFO, COO) rate and rank financial strength as their top priority. Clinical and strategy leaders (CMO, CNO, CQO, CSO) rate and rank access and care delivery performance as their top priority and financial strength as second. Larger organizations cite AI/ML tools as needed materially more often: IDNs and higher-revenue systems materially above community and lower-revenue counterparts. The marketing team should run two parallel campaign tracks (financial-led and access-led) and segment AI positioning by organization size.
“Organization resilience to me, and to my organization, right now means diversification. It means that we can weather financial downturns like we are expecting from CMS without having to cut staff, positions, or many resources.”— Chief Operations Officer, Integrated Delivery Network
Crosstab · Priority Importance vs. Organizational Support
Physician partnerships are the most under-supported priority: ranked third in importance but supported like an eighth-priority item.
Average rank by importance (1=most important) and average rank by organizational support (1=most supported), with the resulting gap. Positive gap = under-supported relative to stated importance. The largest under-support gaps are the most defensible white-space for advisory positioning.
| Importance rank | Support rank | Gap | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physician partnerships | 3.0 | 4.0 | +1.0 |
| Margin and revenue | 1.7 | 2.2 | +0.5 |
| Clinical quality and safety | 2.2 | 2.6 | +0.4 |
| Patient experience | 3.0 | 3.0 | 0.0 |
| Operational throughput | 2.9 | 3.1 | +0.2 |
| Volume and market | 2.7 | 2.6 | -0.1 |
| Workforce stability | 3.2 | 3.0 | -0.2 |
| Cost optimization | 3.4 | 2.7 | -0.7 |
N=43 C-suite executivesPhysician partnerships: largest under-support gapCost optimization: most over-supported priority
Voice of Customer
How C-suite leaders describe their priorities and the AI question.
Verbatims from AI-moderated interviews across the sample, selected to represent the range of perspectives on financial sustainability, the resource gap, AI positioning, and the role-based split.
Financial Strength · Foundation
“Financial strength underpins everything else we are trying to do. Without stable margins, cash flow, and cost control, we cannot support our workforce, maintain access, invest in growth, or respond to shocks in the market or operating environment.”
— Chief Executive Officer, Integrated Delivery Network
Access and Care · Clinical Lens
“Without access and care delivery performance, all the rest will suffer. Financial growth, that is not strategic if you are not paying attention to access and care delivery performance. And organizational resilience, that segues from care delivery performance as well.”
— Chief Nursing Officer, Community Hospital
Resource Scarcity · Misalignment
“I think this really boils down to resources. Provider recruitment is a high priority for us, but there is not a lot of support right now because we do not have a lot of resources to support it. So it is really just a matter of resources and not misalignment.”
— Chief Operations Officer, Integrated Delivery Network
AI as Enabler · ROI Lens
“We built an AI algorithm with our EHR vendor that learns a physician's prescribing habits, so the system stops asking for justifications, cutting clicks and reducing burnout. Priority one is embedding AI in the clinical workflow.”
— Chief Strategy Officer, Community Hospital
AI as Standalone · Enterprise Lens
“As a standalone priority, AI is being embedded across our national service lines in ways that materially change how we deliver care and run operations. Clinical AI within our national service lines supports early detection of diseases, risk stratification, and more consistent evidence-based decision making.”
— Chief Operations Officer, Integrated Delivery Network
Resilience · Cross-Cutting
“Organization resilience to me, and to my organization, right now means diversification. We want to be diversifying our offerings to help us with that resilience and being more strategic about the decisions that we make as well.”
— Chief Operations Officer, Integrated Delivery Network
Counter-intuitive
AI is rising fast on the priority horizon, but the path to relevance runs through the other four pillars, not around them.
The prevailing assumption inside the marketing organization was that AI deserved its own pillar in the framework, given how much executive attention the topic gets and how visible it is in board-level conversations. The data does not support a standalone pillar for the default framework. Roughly half of executives explicitly position AI as an enabler of existing priorities, while a smaller share treat it as standalone. A meaningful share expect AI and digital integration to become a top priority over the next two years, but they describe it through the same lens as today: revenue cycle efficiency, documentation burden, throughput, and workforce productivity. The marketing team that wins the AI conversation is the one that embeds AI inside each of the four validated pillars, not the one that builds a sixth pillar around it.
Strategic Implications
Three marketing moves from the research.
What the marketing team carried into the 2026 planning cycle, grounded in the framework validation, the resource-scarcity gap, and the AI positioning data.
01
Keep the four-pillar core; reposition organizational resilience as a cross-cutting capability layer.
Financial strength, access and care delivery, strategic growth, and workforce and care team capacity all hold up against unaided executive language and structured ratings. Organizational resilience does not stand on its own and should be repositioned as a capability layer that runs across the four core pillars, framed through diversification, operational excellence, culture, and interoperability.
02
Lead with financial strength; run a parallel access-and-care track for clinical and strategy buyers.
Senior executives (CEO, CFO, COO) lead with financial strength; clinical and strategy leaders (CMO, CNO, CQO, CSO) lead with access and care delivery. The thought leadership calendar should publish two parallel tracks anchored on each, with shared infrastructure on workforce and growth. Lead messaging on the resource-scarcity gap (cited as the leading cause of misalignment) and physician partnerships as the largest under-support gap.
03
Position AI as an enabler in the default framework; reserve standalone-AI narrative for IDN and large-revenue segments.
The default AI narrative should embed AI inside each of the four pillars, focused on near-term ROI: revenue cycle, documentation burden, throughput, and workforce productivity. A separate standalone-AI track should run against IDN and large-revenue segments, where the vast majority of IDNs and large organizations expect to need AI/ML to accomplish their priorities. Themes for the standalone track: ambient documentation, multi-specialty clinical AI, and enterprise operational intelligence.
Success criteria · 12 months
- Thought leadership calendar published against the four validated pillars with resilience as a capability layer
- Two parallel campaign tracks (financial-led and access-led) live by the start of the planning cycle
- Standalone-AI narrative segmented to IDN and large-revenue lists; enabler-AI narrative to all other lists
Risk register
| AI positioning drifts back to standalone pillar without segmentation discipline | HIGH |
| Resilience reframing confuses partners who built collateral around the old pillar | MED |
| Resource-scarcity messaging reads as advocacy rather than advisory positioning | MED |
| Role-based split fragments the brand voice across too many parallel tracks | LOW |