The healthcare space is constantly trying to balance patient care with efficiency. As 2025 presses on, professionals are left asking how to move forward.
Is everyone carrying as heavy of a workload as I am?
Are we able to give patients our best?
Could our technology be better? How do we integrate AI?
What will the future look like if we don’t adapt now?
The most prevalent healthcare workforce challenges today reflect these concerns. Explore the most common trends to plan how your organization can pivot to support clinicians and patients in equal measure.
BURNOUT AND EMPLOYEE WELL-BEING
It's no secret that employee burnout tops the list of workforce challenges. It has been on the list for almost a decade, and rightfully so. Healthcare professionals are the lifeblood of the operation. They work long hours, dealing with fast-paced and emotionally draining situations. Between this and relying on inefficient electronic health records (EHRs), burnout has long been one of the most impactful healthcare workforce challenges.
This negatively impacts both healthcare staff and patients. The 2023-2024 State of Well-Being showed that half of healthcare workers were experiencing burnout, which drives absenteeism, poor productivity, medical errors, and staffing shortages. Patients get the short end of the stick as care quality suffers.
So, how can we fix it? Consider where your EHR falls short and prioritize customization to meet your organization’s specific needs. By implementing an EHR that’s made to be made yours, teams and technology can alleviate:
- Documentation burden
- Electronic messaging overload
- Cognitive fatigue
- Time demands
But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Clinician self-care is also vital—whether that means spending time with loved ones, improving nutrition and exercise, or talking to a mental health professional. Think about how your organization can support clinicians outside of the hospital walls.
Healthcare Labor Shortages
Hospitals and medical organizations are experiencing healthcare shortages, with shortages across roles expected to increase to hundreds of thousands of workers by 2037. Staffers are left to do more with less, and it’s exhausting. More patients to see and more administrative work? Let’s just say recruitment and retention have been tall orders to fill across all roles.
Part of the problem is that baby boomers are on their way to retirement, adding to the many healthcare workforce challenges to monitor. As these workers retire, they create gaps in specialized roles, leaving an aging population scrambling for quality care.
To add insult to injury, the sheer time demands of healthcare roles have actually become a physical threat. Long hours contribute to serious health conditions, such as heart disease. Still, there’s hope. Flexible work schedules can help mitigate the strains of long shifts, while the continuing growth of telemedicine has eased the burden.
Insufficient Time with Patients
You’ve been in patients’ shoes before, and it’s frustrating for both sides to spend mere minutes together. There’s simply too much to do in a day and not enough time—and clinicians must spend a lot of it on documentation.
Much of this burden is attributable to EHRs not being built with clinicians in mind. As staffers navigate software workarounds to accommodate critical workflows, quality patient time, care delivery, and patient satisfaction suffer.
EHR personalization makes it easier to key in updates to existing patient documentation. Make your EHR work for you by integrating alerts and templates for quick data entry and sweeping updates across records—and put patients back in the limelight.
Technological Adaptability
Adaptability is one of the most common healthcare workforce challenges as technology advances and the industry risks getting left behind due to regulatory and compliance red tape. If you can adjust to something new, tech can simplify the way you work, from personalized EHRs to assist with care and administration to AI tools to improve wait times.
For the best results, tailor new technologies to your organization’s needs. If your current infrastructure lacks interoperability, switching to new technology might require creative workarounds. Customization for systems such as your EHR can elevate efficiency and patient experiences and make it that much easier to update key systems.
But don’t forget what they say about old dogs and new tricks. Healthcare staff members who are resistant to change or require a learning curve may be tempted to stick with the “old way” of doing things. Two critical components of successful adoption are to carve out time for proper training on any new tech to streamline the transition and identify a power user to champion its benefits and drive adoption.
Finally, as you get up to speed, keep cybersecurity in mind. An unsecure EHR can invite intruders to take control of or tamper with your data through malware, ransomware, phishing, and more.
Improve EHR safety with a few best practices:
- Use multifactor authentication to log in
- Regularly install security patches for up-to-date protection
- Use passwords with special characters, and update them frequently
- Log out of the EHR after each use
Future Repercussions If We Don’t Adapt Now
According to the American Hospital Association’s most recent research, the time to improve the healthcare workforce is now. And with shifting priorities surrounding science and medicine in the U.S., we have our work cut out for us. Still, failing to act could cause seismic reverberations in just a few years, including:
A Deepening Healthcare Worker Shortage
Data suggests that, by as soon as 2028, the shortage of critical healthcare workers in the U.S. will climb to 100,000. A key component to this is expected to be a shortfall of 73,000 nurse assistants across all but 13 states.
Availability of Registered Nurses and Physicians
Similarly, nurses and physicians are in precarious situations. But what’s interesting to note is that while the U.S. anticipates national surpluses of both registered nurses and doctors, regional healthcare shortages are slated to impact the country disproportionately. East Coast states, such as New York, will feel the sting on the nursing front, while sunshine regions, such as California and Texas, may struggle to fully staff physician roles.
Compensation-Based Worker Movement
Healthcare workers need to find a balance between the stresses and fulfillment of their valuable contributions and fair compensation. As pay disparities across states and regions continue, many healthcare workers could relocate, worsening healthcare shortages in certain areas.
From Overwhelmed to Optimized: Customizing Your EHR for Workforce Success
Improve your staff efficiency and care quality. Juno EHR is made to be made yours, supporting clinicians and patients through personalization and alleviating healthcare workforce challenges.
Optimize workflows to free up time for patient care and to just be human. Juno EHR gives you control to manage daily operations and care delivery with features such as:
- Clinical Content Builder to create and edit personalized note templates, flowsheets, and modules in a no-code/low-code interface
- Build-a-Module to personalize modules no matter your department or specialty
- System-wide customization tools to support clinical teams
Transform patient care and alleviate healthcare shortages. Juno EHR can help by bringing personalization back to streamline everyday tasks. Take our assessment to understand where you are on the road to EHR customization and how Juno EHR can get your organization across the finish line.
