What's Missing from 2026 Healthcare Outlooks
Grounding in the big priorities
Each year, I dive into the many annual articles and reports with outlooks, forecasts, and priorities for the year ahead in healthcare. You probably do too. Taken together, they do a good job of signaling what leaders should be paying attention to. At Spring Street, we’ve come to think of them as signal reports, offering a take on the shared areas of focus and coming challenges for healthcare leaders.
I was struck by the degree of alignment across the reports for 2026. Cost pressure, regulatory uncertainty, workforce constraints, technology acceleration, and expectations of disruption appeared again and again. The signals themselves are clear, and the reports can feel affirming to executives already trying to manage these forces every day.
However, many leaders continue to struggle in prioritizing that broad set of big forces into specific priorities and initiatives. The reports identify what matters but they offer little guidance on how these forces should be weighed against one another or integrated together for a coherent path forward.
This dynamic shows up frequently in my conversations with healthcare executives. When the assumption is that performance must be optimized across all of these dimensions, it can seem as though priorities are constantly competing for resources. While progress is real, it can feel like a treadmill, a run where you will never reach the destination.
The critical path through
At Spring Street Exchange, we define strategy as a source of sustainable differentiation, a way to make focused choices about where to concentrate resources and how to compete. It is literally our answer to the problem of prioritization. It is also one of the most under-tapped capabilities by healthcare organizations. This fact led us to bring the 2026 signal reports together and to add our recommendations on how to navigate them in this article.
We synthesized more than 50 healthcare signal reports for 2026 and explored why the era of seeking broad excellence in all dimensions is giving way to the era of focused differentiation. We look at how the same forces can lead to very different decisions depending on the strategy an organization pursues. Most importantly, we explore why that distinction can be a powerful tool to support decision-making, align investments, preserve resources, and create a greater impact.
Differentiation remains one of the most reliable paths to both competitive strength and strategic focus, bringing both direction and relief. This is why the work is so satisfying -- there are a few steps that can deliver on both of those dimensions at once.
How do you think about these signal reports? How is your organization applying differentiation to support prioritization and decision-making in 2026?
Nancy
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