Think about how many different areas of expertise are now required to support a modern healthcare technology environment.

There are the capabilities healthcare IT teams have managed for years: Clinical applications, databases, infrastructure, networking and end-user support. Today, that same organization may also need expertise in cloud architecture, cybersecurity, identity and access management, advanced monitoring, automation, disaster recovery, data engineering and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Many of those capabilities need to be available around the clock, and the technology behind them continues to change.

Healthcare organizations have incredibly talented IT professionals supporting these environments every day. The challenge isn’t whether those teams are capable. It’s that the range of specialized expertise we’re asking them to maintain continues to expand.

At some point, that raises a reasonable question: Does every healthcare organization really need to build and maintain all of this expertise internally?

I don’t think the answer is automatically yes.

The technology mandate keeps expanding

The responsibilities of healthcare IT haven’t simply shifted over the years. They’ve accumulated.

The traditional responsibilities haven’t gone away. Applications still need to be supported. Databases still need to be managed. Networks have to perform. Clinicians need assistance, systems need to remain available and infrastructure needs to be maintained.

We’ve simply added more responsibilities on top of them.

Cybersecurity is perhaps the clearest example. Protecting a modern healthcare environment now involves far more than firewalls and antivirus software. Organizations are investing in identity management, endpoint protection, threat detection, security monitoring, vulnerability management, privileged access controls and incident response, among many other capabilities.

Cloud introduces another set of specialized skills. Artificial intelligence and automation are adding more. And each new technology brings its own requirements around security, governance, integration and support.

Industry research reflects the same challenge. KLAS Research’s 2025 HIT Staffing report found that demand for skilled healthcare IT professionals continues to increase as organizations invest in technologies such as cloud and AI. Organizations expecting to increase their use of external staffing resources identified those same areas among those where additional expertise will be needed.

For an individual healthcare organization, maintaining deep expertise across every one of these areas is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.

Not all expertise lives inside the hospital

For a long time, owning technology also meant employing most of the people required to operate it. That model is changing.

Healthcare organizations already rely on specialized partners throughout their operations, both clinical and non-clinical. Technology doesn’t necessarily need to be different.

The important distinction is between maintaining accountability for technology and personally operating every component of it.

A CIO doesn’t give up responsibility for cybersecurity because part of the security operation is provided by a specialized partner. Nor does an organization lose control of its technology strategy because infrastructure is managed elsewhere. What changes is where the expertise resides.

Some expertise belongs close to the organization

None of this suggests healthcare organizations should outsource their technology strategy.

There are capabilities that are difficult to replicate outside the organization because they depend on understanding the people, workflows and priorities of that specific health system.

Internal IT teams understand how clinicians actually use technology. They know where workflows struggle, which projects have organizational support, how departments interact, and where technology can make a meaningful difference. They build relationships with clinical and operational leaders that an outside technology provider simply cannot replace.

Those are incredibly valuable skills.

As technology becomes more important to healthcare delivery, I believe that knowledge becomes more valuable, not less. The opportunity is to create more capacity for internal teams to use it.

Rethinking what a strong IT organization looks like

As healthcare organizations plan for the next several years, the answer to the talent challenge probably isn’t simply hiring more people.

There will always be roles that need to be added internally, just as there will always be skills worth developing within the existing team. But trying to internally build every capability required by an increasingly complex technology environment may no longer be the most practical model.

The better approach may be determining where internal expertise creates a unique advantage and where specialized partners can extend the team’s capabilities.

At Altera Cloud, that’s a part of how we view our role.

Our teams aren’t intended to replace the expertise that exists within a healthcare organization. They’re there to complement it. By providing specialized capabilities around cloud infrastructure operations, monitoring, platform management, security, resiliency and technology lifecycle management, we can take responsibility for areas where scale and specialization matter while the healthcare organization’s own technology leaders remain focused on their strategic priorities.

That relationship works best when it feels less like outsourcing and more like extending the team.

Healthcare will always need great IT people. Let’s use their talent on the problems that matter most.