Beyond ROI: What Healthcare Leaders Get Wrong About Technology Investment

InnovationBeyond ROI: What Healthcare Leaders Get Wrong About Technology InvestmentByBashir Agboola,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 08, 2026, 09:30am EDTDr. Bashir Agboola, DBA, MBA, CHCIO, CDH-E, FACHDM, Managing Partner, Interdym. getty​Healthcare now accounts for nearly one-fifth of U.S. gross domestic product, yet hospitals allocate a significantly smaller share of their budgets to information technology than comparably sized organizations in banking or retail. That gap reflects something deeper than purely a resource problem: It is indicative of a persistent misunderstanding of what makes healthcare technology investment succeed.For my doctoral research published in the Open Journal of Business and Management, I spent months in conversation with senior healthcare technology executives (CIOs, CTOs and chief digital officers at major health systems) across the New York metropolitan area. My focus was a question I had wrestled with throughout my own career as a technology leader at two of the country's leading academic medical centers: Why do so many well-resourced health systems struggle to generate lasting value from their technology spending?The answer, consistently and clearly, was not about which technologies they chose. It was about how they approached the decision to invest in the first place.The prevailing orthodoxy treats financial return on investment as the primary measure of success. That framework is not wrong, exactly; it is just incomplete. When a health system invests heavily in a new platform and evaluates the outcome purely through a cost lens, it risks missing critical factors such as the clinician burnout the implementation caused, the patient populations the system failed to reach and the organizational trust it quietly eroded. The numbers may look acceptable, but the syste...