In recent conversations with healthcare executives about their evolving priorities, one theme keeps surfacing: Application rationalization is more than just a cleanup exercise—it’s a strategic measure providing valuable insights that can jumpstart broader initiatives across the organization.
Whether you’re tackling OpEx reductions, IT spend validation, archiving, cloud migration, or cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it comes down to these simple questions: What’s in your application environment—and why? And is paying for cloud storage or archiving solutions for redundant or barely used applications a smart solution?
Here are three numbers that illustrate why every healthcare leader should be wrestling with those questions:
- 11-20% – the “legacy operating system footprint” in nearly a quarter (23%) of healthcare organizations, according to a HIMSS survey. (Another 50% report a footprint of up to 10%.) In many cases, this represents IT that’s costing hospitals money to support or maintain while adding to their cyber risk—especially if protective patches are no longer available.
- 7.42 million – average cost of a healthcare data breach in 2025, with a 279-day average breach lifecycle. Healthcare remains the most expensive industry for data breaches, due to severe penalties mandated by HIPAA as well as catastrophic disruption to operations, including delays to patient care and interruptions to revenue cycle management.
- Up to 30% – the reduction in software costs that could be achieved by safely consolidating or decommissioning redundant applications and following best practices, according to Gartner. When you consider that application costs make up 80% of the entire IT budget, that adds up to impressive savings that could be redirected to new technologies
In today’s climate of reimbursement uncertainty and financial pressure, a thorough “fall cleaning” of your application landscape could reduce your risk and deliver immediate and long-term financial benefits that clear the way for new strategic priorities.
And here’s more good news: Application rationalization doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out process. At Innovative, we’ve developed technology that streamlines manual assessments, allowing us to surface actionable insights in just a few weeks. From there, our team builds a roadmap to drive execution and support the tough conversations that lead to lasting change.
If application rationalization is on your radar but you’re unsure where to begin, we’d welcome the opportunity to talk. It could be the foundational step that unlocks strategic progress across your health system.