The Top 6 Healthcare Operational Challenges to Watch in 2026 and How to Solve Them
ServiceChannel
Healthcare leaders can’t afford surprises anymore. Every operational decision now affects growth, access, and patient experience. For instance, clinics in retail settings must maintain the quality of patient care while balancing extended hours, limited space, limited resources, and rising patient volume.
That’s part of why, for many healthcare organizations, what once felt manageable through incremental fixes now demands a more coordinated approach. Costs, workforce shortages, and compliance risks are continually intensifying. Now is the time for facility leaders to think ahead before their organizations face significant challenges.
Facilities and operations teams, not just healthcare leaders, are central to navigating these pressures. They manage the physical environments, assets, and service workflows that keep healthcare operations open, compliant, and ready for patients each day.
To help you implement strategic initiatives that promote peak performance at your healthcare facility, this article will explore 6 key challenges facing the healthcare industry and what you can do about them.
Key Takeaways:
- Healthcare facilities face increasing pressure to support more locations, longer hours, and higher patient volumes, with limited space, aging systems, and fewer resources.
- Staff shortages and rising costs limit the capacity for preventive maintenance in healthcare facilities.
- A lack of centralized visibility into assets, providers, and spending can increase operational and financial risks by making it harder to detect the underlying causes of inconsistencies or deviations.
- Leaders must prioritize centralized data, standardized workflows, and proactive maintenance to reduce emergencies, support compliance, and remain competitive.
1. Rising Costs
Rising costs are affecting every industry, but the healthcare industry faces added pressure due to the need for high-cost medical equipment. This advanced technology drives higher purchase, maintenance, and repair costs, especially because many of these assets require specialized service providers. The more complex equipment your organization has, the more difficult it is to manage costs without clear visibility and consistent oversight.
Additionally, underfunding public programs is making it more difficult to cover the cost of medical equipment. This challenge is occurring alongside an increase in declined insurance reimbursements. More financial pressures mean that healthcare organizations must find more efficient ways to reduce costs and extend asset lifecycles without compromising high-quality patient care.
Without disciplined asset tracking and performance data, cost control becomes reactive. Planned investments are replaced by emergency repairs, capital forecasts become less accurate, and leaders struggle to explain why they should replace something rather than keep it up. Financial pressure doesn’t just tighten budgets. It demands stronger operational visibility and lifecycle management to protect both margins and service continuity.
2. Staffing Shortages
Healthcare delivery is increasingly shifting into retail settings. Ironically, this is partly a response to hospital staffing shortages, yet it’s contributing to labor shortages affecting retail healthcare facilities management. Many organizations must cover more sites with fewer resources. This shortage may also cause leaders to take on more administrative burden than they should.
Healthcare workforce shortages also push facility leaders to rely more on external partners for HVAC, electrical, and custodial services. Although outsourcing can help fill gaps, it also complicates coordination and makes visibility across operations more important. Additionally, healthcare providers often call in outsourced personnel only when something goes wrong, potentially leading them to neglect preventive maintenance.
Without clear oversight of internal teams and external providers, reactive work begins to crowd out planned maintenance. Over time, that imbalance increases downtime, drives up emergency spend, and creates inconsistent standards across locations. Labor shortages don’t just stretch teams thin. They weaken operational consistency and make scalable growth harder to sustain.
3. Compliance Risks
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services require all healthcare services to maintain safe building conditions that support care delivery. These regulatory requirements apply to retail clinics, pharmacy services, urgent care, and outpatient settings, not just hospitals.
Your healthcare facility management team is responsible for maintaining these standards. For example, you must maintain HVAC systems to ensure infection control and comfort and remain compliant. Another example is refrigeration maintenance. Keeping your refrigeration units operating at peak performance is essential to preserving the integrity of certain prescription drugs and vaccines.
The biggest risk to maintaining compliance in these areas is manual documentation. Incomplete records can lead to missed inspections that result in compliance risks. Furthermore, manual recordkeeping lacks the agility you need to make real-time adjustments.
Without centralized visibility into inspections, certifications, and equipment performance, small documentation gaps can quickly escalate into failed audits, disrupted operations, or temporary service interruptions. Compliance, in this context, becomes an operational vulnerability — not just a regulatory requirement.
4. Aging Infrastructure
Many retail healthcare locations operate in older buildings or retrofitted commercial spaces that were not originally designed for clinical services. Over time, HVAC units, electrical systems, plumbing, and refrigeration equipment begin to outpace their intended service life — and performance becomes less predictable.
When infrastructure breaks down, more work is needed to fix it. Facilities teams spend more time responding to breakdowns, temperature fluctuations, airflow inconsistencies, and equipment failures instead of executing planned preventive maintenance. That shift creates operational drag across the entire portfolio.
Aging assets also complicate capital planning. Without clear lifecycle visibility, it becomes difficult to determine whether repeated repairs justify replacement or whether systems can reliably support expanded services. As organizations grow into new retail locations or modernize existing ones, outdated infrastructure can slow timelines and increase retrofit costs.
Healthcare leaders need a clear view of asset conditions and lifecycle risks across every site. With centralized tracking and performance benchmarking, facilities teams can strategically prioritize upgrades, reduce emergency spend, and support predictable expansion — rather than reacting to infrastructure failures one location at a time.
5. Cybersecurity and Interoperability
Healthcare systems rely on a range of technological tools beyond electronic health records (EHRs). These may include facilities management systems, building automation controls, refrigeration monitoring, and energy management tools.
For example, if a refrigeration unit fails or an IoT sensor goes offline, product loss, compliance issues, and patient disruption can happen quickly. Preventing such a situation requires applying the same level of management and security to these assets as you do to your databases.
When IT or OT systems fail, sites lose the ability to operate safely and consistently, which directly affects patient care and clinical decision-making. Predictive analytics is an effective way to anticipate failures and prevent their impact on operational efficiency.
Two more of the biggest healthcare challenges related to new technologies involve cybersecurity risks and interoperability concerns. Operational technology often lacks the same level of protection as core IT systems. Your patient data records may be highly secure, but that doesn’t mean your whole health system truly is. As a result, a cyberattack could put your OT offline, and you’ll be left with similar issues you would face from a maintenance failure.
Also, work orders, asset data, and provider costs often sit in separate IT systems from scheduling, revenue, and budgeting tools. When systems don’t talk to each other, leaders lose sight of what’s driving downtime and spend. This potential lack of visibility is why you should prioritize interoperable systems.
6. Multi-site Management
Running a multi-site healthcare operation without centralized visibility creates blind spots. When asset data, provider performance, and service history live in separate systems — or separate spreadsheets — it becomes harder to prioritize preventive maintenance, control spend, and spot systemic issues before they escalate.
Healthcare leaders need a direct line of sight in every location to protect patient experience and budget predictability. With a single source of truth for assets, work orders, and provider activity, facilities teams can benchmark performance, identify repeat repairs, and ensure consistent standards across every clinic.
That kind of visibility doesn’t just reduce emergencies. It enables agility as you expand into new retail sites or retrofit existing spaces.
How Do Facilities Operations Impact Patient Experience and Revenue in Retail Healthcare?
When facilities systems perform reliably, clinical teams can focus on care delivery. Giving healthcare professionals more time to focus on patient outcomes will help your organization be associated with high-quality care delivery. That reputation will draw more patients to your locations.
Convenience is a top reason many people choose retail healthcare facilities over traditional clinics. However, when HVAC systems fail, rooms may need to be closed. When check-in systems go down, lines get longer. When lighting or power issues arise, same-day appointments must often be postponed or canceled. All of these incidents will affect patron convenience, but keeping your equipment running at peak performance reduces these risks.
Of course, every organization leader wants to increase revenue by attracting more clients, but this isn’t the only reason revenue growth matters. More paying clients mean that you can put more money toward resolving some of the financial pressures you may face. You can also hire additional staff to address personnel shortages and implement new systems that enhance visibility and agility.
How Can Facilities Leaders Overcome These Challenges in 2026?
| What to Do | |
| Increase visibility into assets, providers, and spending | Maintain a single source of truth for equipment, service history, provider activity, and costs across all locations. This way, leaders can see which assets drive repeat repairs, which providers perform consistently, and where spending trends indicate possible issues. |
| Improve agility and scalability with limited resources | Standardizing administrative workflows and provider coordination can help you support more sites without increasing workloads. When work orders, approvals, and provider communication follow consistent processes across locations, you can make decisions faster, and there is less room for human error. |
| Use data to reduce emergencies and improve performance | Utilize historical and real-time data to inform maintenance decisions and minimize reactive maintenance. Monitoring this data helps you pinpoint early warning signs that an asset is about to fail so you can schedule early interventions. The result is fewer emergency repairs and less unplanned downtime, which means better operational performance. |
The best way to achieve all the goals outlined in the table above is to adopt a modern facility management platform, such as ServiceChannel. These tools help facilities teams improve visibility, reduce manual processes, and stay ahead of issues that could affect patient access, experience, and operational efficiency.
Improve Visibility Across Your Organization With ServiceChannel
ServiceChannel centralizes work orders, assets, service providers, and facility spend in a single system. Facilities teams get a clear view of maintenance activity across locations without relying on manual tracking.
Our platform also provides reporting and analytics features that support better planning. You can use this data to prioritize preventive maintenance, evaluate provider performance, and streamline operations.
With stronger visibility comes greater control. Leaders gain more predictable maintenance budgets, fewer emergency disruptions, and clearer documentation to support audit readiness. Centralized oversight also helps stabilize provider networks, reinforce consistent service standards, and reduce reactive spend across all sites.
Instead of managing issues one location at a time, your team can operate with confidence, knowing assets are tracked, providers are accountable, and compliance workflows are supported by reliable data. That clarity delivers peace of mind across your entire retail healthcare portfolio.
Book a demo today to see how it works!
Frequently Asked Questions About Facility Management For Healthcare Organizations
An example of an operational risk in healthcare is a staffing shortage that leads to missed preventive maintenance on clinical equipment. A lack of preventive maintenance increases the risk of equipment failure. Equipment failures can directly affect clinical outcomes and cause patient dissatisfaction.
As the population ages, demand for accessible, community-based care options increases. Additionally, policy and market pressure around price transparency emphasize more shoppable care for common services, which aligns with the business models of most retail-based care facilities.
While this is partially the result of an aging population, 42% of Americans have two or more chronic conditions. These individuals need convenient access to sites that support ongoing checks, basic testing, and follow-up care.
Many value-based payment contracts depend on quality metrics, risk adjustment, and audit-ready documentation. As a result, healthcare providers face more administrative tasks than before. Facilities already facing staff shortages may need to further stretch their resources.
Additionally, when organizations link payment to outcomes, they assume greater responsibility for managing care variation, preventing unnecessary hospital visits, and improving patient outcomes. That necessitates changes to budgeting, staffing, and management strategies, as operational performance has a more direct impact on revenue.
