Imagine being a patient with a chronic condition seeing multiple specialists. Your cardiologist doesn’t know what your endocrinologist prescribed. Your primary care physician orders a test you already had done six months ago at a different hospital system. You end up repeating work, delaying care, and rightfully wondering whether anyone is actually coordinating on your behalf.
Healthcare’s technology crisis isn’t confined to hospital IT departments or clinical break rooms anymore. It has rippled outward, and patients are noticing. When electronic health records (EHR) fail to load, when providers lack real-time access to patient records, when clinicians turn to unsanctioned tools to move faster — the consequences reach both sides of the care equation.
A frontline clinician frustrated by slow systems becomes a clinician under pressure. A patient who experiences disrupted care becomes a patient who worries about whether their provider truly has their information and their best interest in mind.
Presidio’s latest research reveals something critical: healthcare’s technology crisis is a patient experience story, a trust story, and increasingly, a patient safety story.
By surveying both 1,000 frontline healthcare professionals across the U.S., U.K., and Ireland, as well as 1,000 U.S. consumers separately, we discovered a striking alignment to the clinician patient perspective — both are living through the same broken systems, just from different vantage points.
Understanding that convergence is essential for any healthcare leader ready to modernize with intention and urgency.
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When Technology Fails, Everyone Feels It: Patient Safety in the Balance
The stakes of outdated healthcare technology have always been high. And now, we can measure the impact from both sides.
From the clinician perspective, the threat is visceral and constant. In Presidio’s research, 95% of healthcare professionals report that patients are negatively affected when technology fails or data cannot be accessed easily.
Even more alarming, on average, healthcare professionals face 11 incidents per month where outdated systems slow or endanger care. For nearly one-quarter of them (24%), these incidents occur at least once every shift.
The evidence is clear about which patient populations suffer most. When technology breaks down, critical care patients are most vulnerable (36%), followed closely by emergency department patients (34%) and those with chronic conditions (33%).
These aren’t abstract statistics. A patient in the ICU awaiting a medication order that the EHR can’t process fast enough. An ED patient whose allergy information is locked in a system that won’t load. A chronically ill person whose care coordination falls apart because three providers aren’t connected to the same data.
And what’s happening inside hospital walls is visible to patients on the outside. In a separate Presidio consumer survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, 25% of patients reported experiencing issues with digital health tools that impacted their care or appointment experience in the last 12 months. That’s one in four patients experiencing disrupted appointments, delayed care, or confusion about their own health status. These experiences underscore how closely technology and care delivery are now intertwined.
A clinician frustrated by a slow EHR loses both time and the opportunity to focus on the patient sitting in front of them. A patient waiting for an appointment experiences that clinician’s frustration, even if they never see the system that’s causing it. Healthcare’s technology crisis isn’t siloed to IT, it’s embedded in the care experience itself.
The Patient clinician perspective: A Safety Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
What makes this especially troubling is that many healthcare leaders may not fully grasp how visible this crisis is becoming to patients. Historically, technology failures were internal problems that affected clinician morale, workflow, and efficiency. Today, they’re also consumer-facing problems. Patients are forming opinions about their healthcare providers based on whether that provider has their information at hand, whether appointments run on time, and whether their care feels coordinated or fragmented.
When 95% of clinicians say patients are negatively affected by tech failures, but only 25% of consumers report experiencing problems, it suggests one of two things: either patients aren’t always aware of the tech failures happening behind the scenes, or the failures are widespread enough that patients are beginning to normalize disruption. Neither is reassuring.
The Interoperability Gap Patients Can’t Ignore
One of the clearest signals emerging from both datasets is the power (and the underuse) of real-time, connected data.
Healthcare professionals understand this intuitively. Over 90% of clinicians believe that access to real-time data would improve nearly every aspect of care: tracking outcomes, reducing duplicate work, understanding staffing needs in real time, reducing care coordination delays, improving documentation accuracy, and routing patients to the right care setting sooner.
The demand is nearly universal. The gap is that only 34% of U.S. healthcare organizations are actually using real-time data at scale. Nearly half (49%) are stuck in pilots, and the rest are still planning. It’s a massive chasm between what clinicians know they need and what they actually have.
But here’s where the consumer perspective adds urgency: patients are feeling the downstream effects of that gap. In the consumer survey, 45% of patients reported experiencing problems because one of their healthcare providers didn’t have records from another office.
The same missing, incomplete, or delayed data that frustrates clinicians shows up for patients as repeated questions, redundant tests, and care that feels disconnected.
From the patient perspective, interoperability isn’t a technical problem — it’s a care coordination problem. It’s the difference between feeling like you’re being treated as a whole person versus feeling subjected to a series of disconnected encounters. Faster access to appointments (58% of consumers say this is important or very important) and more personalized care (57%) both depend on providers having real-time, integrated data. Without interoperability, personalization is impossible.
Related Read: Healthcare Data Fragmentation: The Patient Experience Problem Nobody Talks About
The Trust Implication of Missing Data
What’s particularly important to note is that patients see fragmented data as a reflection of fragmented care. They may not know the technical term “interoperability,” but they know what it feels like when their provider doesn’t have their information.
That experience, repeated across multiple visits and multiple providers, erodes confidence and ultimately, patient trust. It raises a quiet question in a patient’s mind: “If my provider doesn’t have my records, what else might they be missing?”
Patients are having the opposite experiences as consumers in other industries where data is rarely missing. I’ll order something on Amazon, and throughout the day I get precise updates: “Out for delivery,” “Your package is 8 stops away,” “Photo of your delivery.” The integration between the warehouse system, the delivery driver’s app, my doorbell camera, and my phone creates confidence that my package isn’t lost in some void. Instead, I think: “They know exactly where my stuff is every single moment.” I have a similar experience for airline travel: I book a flight, and when I arrive at the airport, the gate agent already knows about my checked bag, my seat preference, my frequent flyer status, and that I have a tight connection. If my first flight is delayed, they’ve already rebooked me on the next available flight and sent the new boarding pass to my phone: “They’re managing this for me. They can see my whole journey.”
Contrast that with retail, where data is rarely missing. Banana Republic, for example, knows which jeans I prefer, remembers what I’ve purchased in the past, and uses that information to recommend shirts and sweaters that complete the look. A seamless, confidence-building experience. In healthcare, those gaps do the opposite: they erode trust with every encounter.
Where AI Meets Acceptance: The Admin-First Playbook
If there’s a silver lining in this crisis, it’s that clinicians and patients are surprisingly aligned on where AI should start.
From the clinician side, the alignment is striking: if technical barriers were removed, 99% of healthcare professionals believe AI would have an immediate positive impact on their organizations. When asked which processes they’d most like to automate, the top priorities are: data entry (52%), transcription and dictation (41%), EHR navigation (40%), prescription entries (39%), and insurance validation (36%). These are all administrative tasks that pull clinicians away from direct patient care.
From the consumer side, the story is almost identical, with an important caveat. In the consumer survey, 57% of patients are on board with automation for administrative tasks such as billing, scheduling, and data entry. This is one of the areas where patients feel most comfortable with AI. They understand that a machine can schedule an appointment or process a bill. They see the value. They trust it for this purpose.
The comfort level, however, drops sharply when AI moves closer to diagnosis or clinical judgment, with just 17% reporting comfortability with clinicians using AI to diagnose health issues or monitor symptoms. Patients draw a clear distinction: streamlining paperwork and scheduling is one thing; influencing their diagnosis or treatment is another.
This alignment creates a powerful strategic opportunity for healthcare leaders. By starting AI implementation where both clinicians and patients agree it makes sense (i.e., automating admin work) organizations can achieve quick wins that free up clinician time, improve satisfaction on both sides, and build trust in the broader AI strategy. It’s the lowest-friction entry point to transformation.
Building Confidence Through Appropriate Use Cases
The reason this matters is that patient acceptance of AI in healthcare isn’t a given. It must be earned through transparency, appropriateness, and visible benefit. By deploying AI first in areas where both clinicians and patients see clear value (and minimal risk), organizations can build a track record. They can prove that AI augments care without replacing clinical judgment, and that it does so in ways patients actually benefit from — shorter wait times, more accurate scheduling, cleaner billing interactions.
This approach also aligns with what’s already showing positive results. In organizations that have deployed AI, healthcare professionals consistently report improvements in clinical documentation (58%), data analysis and reporting (57%), administrative workflows (55%), billing and coding (52%), patient monitoring (51%), and clinical decision support (51%).
The evidence base for AI’s value is real. Starting where patients and clinicians agree, with administrative automation, allows organizations to build that evidence base in plain view.
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The Trust Equation: Privacy, Shadow IT, and Patient Confidence
But modernization comes with a profound paradox. At the moment when healthcare organizations are most vulnerable — systems are outdated, clinicians are burned out, and pressure to move fast is intense — the risks of doing things wrong are equally high.
The clinician side of this story is one of desperation. Outdated systems create pressure. Pressure drives workarounds. Workarounds lead clinicians to use unsanctioned apps, personal cloud storage, or external AI tools to fill the gaps left by legacy infrastructure. Nearly a quarter of healthcare professionals (23%) report using workarounds for basic tasks. These shortcuts feel necessary in the moment. They help a clinician move faster. But each workaround is a blind spot for security and compliance. Sensitive patient data flows into tools that lack encryption, role-based access controls, and audit trails.
The patient side of this story is one of growing anxiety. When asked what would worry them most if their healthcare provider adopted new AI tools, data privacy and security ranked near the top (32% expressed significant concern). Only 32% of consumers say they are very confident that their provider protects their personal information from cyber threats.
And here’s the sobering part: nearly 1 in 4 consumers are uncomfortable with AI in any role in their healthcare — not because they’ve thought deeply about it, but because they’ve heard enough about data breaches, surveillance, and algorithmic bias to be genuinely concerned.
This creates a widening trust gap. Clinicians are using unsanctioned tools because they have to. Patients are worried about data privacy because they should be. And healthcare leaders are caught in the middle, trying to modernize while managing escalating risk.
The Governance Imperative
What’s essential to understand is that without thoughtful governance, modernization actually makes this worse. Moving quickly without guardrails, deploying AI without transparency about what it does and how it protects data, or allowing shadow IT to proliferate unchecked, are all choices that compound the trust problem. They validate patient fears. They give clinicians more workarounds rather than solving the problems that drive workarounds.
The path forward requires simultaneous action on multiple fronts: investing in modern systems that eliminate the need for workarounds, defining clear governance for AI use and data handling, building transparency so patients understand how their data is used and protected, and communicating that modernization is happening with intention and safeguards in place.
Bridging the Divide: What Healthcare Leaders Must Do Now
These four themes — patient safety, data connectivity, appropriate AI deployment, and robust governance — aren’t separate problems. They’re interconnected pieces of a single crisis that healthcare leaders must address as a system, not in isolation.
The research points to a clear mandate: Modernization is no longer optional. It’s a patient safety imperative, a patient experience imperative, and a trust imperative. But modernization done hastily or without strategy will backfire. It will erode trust further, introduce new vulnerabilities, and fail to deliver the returns that justify the investment.
For leaders ready to move, the evidence suggests a phased approach:
- Prioritize investments that address the highest-pain, highest-impact areas. Real-time data connectivity. Interoperability between systems. Automation of administrative tasks that consume clinician time. These aren’t nice-to-haves; they’re foundational. When clinicians aren’t waiting for EHRs to load, when data flows seamlessly between providers, when scheduling and billing happen automatically—clinicians have time to focus on patients, and patients experience more coordinated, seamless care.
- Establish clear governance for AI and data handling before widespread deployment. This means defining what AI is and isn’t appropriate for, creating transparency about how patient data is used, implementing safeguards that protect privacy and security, and communicating these choices to patients. Governance isn’t a barrier to innovation; it’s a prerequisite for trust-based innovation.
- Address clinician burnout as a root cause, not a symptom. When clinicians are under pressure and systems are failing, they find workarounds. When systems are modern, responsive, and aligned with clinical workflows, workarounds disappear. This is where real-time data and thoughtful AI deployment deliver outsized ROI — not just operationally, but culturally.
- Make the patient experience visible in every modernization decision. Ask: How does this change affect the patient? Does it make care faster, more coordinated, more personalized? Does it protect their data? Does it increase their confidence in the provider? If the answer isn’t clear, the decision isn’t ready.
The healthcare leaders who move fastest and most intentionally on these fronts will be the ones who capture the opportunity ahead: organizations that are faster, safer, more trusted, and more prepared for whatever comes next. Those who delay will continue absorbing the costs of outdated systems, managing escalating clinician burnout, and watching patients lose confidence in their ability to coordinate care.
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CONCLUSION
Presidio’s research reveals a healthcare system at an inflection point. Clinicians and patients are both signaling the same thing: the current state is unsustainable.
The good news is that the path forward is becoming clearer. It starts with understanding that modernization is about safety, experience, and trust — not just technology. It requires simultaneous action across multiple fronts. And it demands a willingness to move with speed and intention.
The full Presidio Healthcare AI Report offers deeper insights into where different organizations stand, how adoption varies by region and care setting, which use cases are delivering measurable ROI, and what governance frameworks are helping leaders navigate this transition responsibly. For healthcare executives ready to move from awareness to action, those details can help translate research into strategy.
The moment to act is now. Download the full report to access the benchmarks, regional data, and implementation roadmap that can help your organization chart a path forward.
