Healthcare rarely grows in straight lines. Most of the growth I’ve lived through as a CIO – and now as a CTO partner – came through mergers, acquisitions, affiliations, and joint ventures. The reasons varied – helping a struggling community hospital; broadening market presence; enhancing service offerings; or strengthening bargaining power with payers. On paper, these deals made sense. However, the hardest work always started after the ink dried.
What I learned over the years is that M&A is never just about a financial and clinical integration. Ultimately, M&A is a technology and culture integration. And IT becomes the connective tissue holding everything together.
To help navigate the uncertainty of M&A, I’m sharing three common pressures we face as IT leaders, along with my perspective on why stabilizing platforms like Citrix are the key to protecting your teams, and your sanity, during the integration process.
The complexity that arrives overnight
During an M&A, IT teams inherit complexity. Different EHRs, identity systems, security postures, endpoint strategies, cloud philosophies, and cultures must be merged. From Day 1, clinicians expect easy access to patient data; leaders expect security, productivity, and reporting continuity; and boards expect synergies to show quickly. There is rarely patience for long integration timelines, especially when patient safety, cybersecurity, and regulatory risk are in play. In nearly every M&A I’ve worked on, IT wasn’t simply tasked with linking systems; its role was also to help the business operate as a unified entity while acknowledging the organizational differences.
The hidden talent strain
There’s a side of M&A that rarely gets discussed openly: secrecy. Due diligence is quiet and tightly controlled. Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are strict. Information is compartmentalized. Only a handful of individuals are privy to the transaction. And while that is necessary, it puts IT leaders in an incredibly difficult position. You cannot assess risk, plan integrations, or protect the organization without technical discovery; yet you can’t always be fully transparent with your own teams about their work. I’ve lived in that tension. You involve your best engineers, identity leads, and infrastructure and security architects – but you can’t tell them the full story. They know something is happening, but when answers are limited, anxiety fills the gap. As a leader, you’re responsible for protecting the organization, respecting legal boundaries, and maintaining trust with your team.
Layer on the reality that many of us face – the “Silver Tsunami”. This term refers to the significant portion of our current workforce nearing retirement – including our most experienced IT talent. These are the people who know why things were built the way they were, remember previous integrations, and can troubleshoot in minutes what takes others days. They’re also the people we lean on hardest during M&A. Integration depends on their knowledge, but they’re tired. They’ve worked through years of cost-cutting, restructuring, go-lives, and leadership changes. Burning them out is not just a morale issue; it’s an operational risk.
The financial reality driving most M&A
Another truth that deserves to be said out loud is that many hospital mergers aren’t happening because organizations are thriving. They’re happening because margins are thin, reimbursement is tight, labor is expensive, and many community and rural hospitals are struggling. M&A is often about survival, not dominance. And when you acquire or are acquired, the financial pressure does not disappear. In many cases, it intensifies. Integration costs money. Standardization takes time. Redundancies are scrutinized. Executives require rapid organizational synergies. And those pressures almost always land heavily on IT. Budgets get cut, hiring gets frozen, upgrades are delayed, and teams are told to do more with less at the exact moment expectations are rising. That contradiction is one of the hardest parts of being an IT leader in healthcare today.
Then there’s the calendar reality. Most major go-lives are scheduled during so-called slow periods — summer, holidays, year-end. From a business standpoint, it makes sense. From a human standpoint, it’s brutal. I’ve watched employees cancel vacations, miss family events, and push through exhaustion because systems had to be live, clinics had to open, and acquisitions had to convert. Repeatedly doing this prompts tough questions about personal sustainability, leading to attrition. Not because people don’t care, but because they’ve cared for a long time without much relief.
The role of technology platforms
This is the context people need to understand when we talk about technology platforms in M&A scenarios. This is not about features listed on a slide or checkboxes on an RFP. This is about reducing the number of late nights, minimizing disruption for clinicians, limiting how many systems staff must touch, and avoiding massive rip-and-replace projects under impossible timelines. It’s about giving teams space to breathe while the business evolves. This is where I’ve seen Citrix make a real difference.
The Citrix platform has consistently helped healthcare organizations like Atlantic Health System create stability in the middle of chaos. When you can unify access across disparate environments; quickly and securely onboard acquired staff; standardize the user experience; and protect security posture during high-risk transition periods, you remove pressure on the people responsible for integration success. And removing pressure is one of the most valuable things you can do during M&A.
How to become “acquisition-ready”
In my experience, having this layer in place allows you to solve the Day 1 problems that usually keep IT leaders up at night:
- Unify the experience, not the infrastructure: Instead of rushing to consolidate EHRs, you can give clinicians a single place to log in where they see everything they need – whether it’s Epic, Oracle (Cerner), MEDITECH, PACS, or legacy systems. It buys you time to integrate the back-end without the clinicians ever feeling the friction.
- Meet the staff where they are: We don’t always have the luxury of handing out new, managed laptops to every person in an acquired entity on Day 1. With a platform approach, it doesn’t matter if they’re on an old thin client or their own tablet – the performance stays the same, and your team isn’t stuck troubleshooting hardware they didn’t buy.
- Solve for security anxiety: One of the biggest stressors in M&A is the “unknown” on newly acquired devices. By keeping data in a central location and never letting PHI sit at the actual endpoint, you remove massive security risk. You can sleep better knowing that even if a new device is compromised, your patient data isn’t on it.
The goal is to never start from zero when the ink dries. By having this layer in place early, Day 1 becomes about extension rather than invention. You’re taking an operating model that has already proven its value and scaling it, which takes the “emergency” out of the integration.
Stability across the M&A lifecycle
When we look at the high-pressure timeline of M&A, the value of a platform approach isn’t just technical; it’s emotional and operational. It’s about creating stability when everything else feels like it’s in flux. From my seat, here’s how that looks in practice:
- Pre-deal and diligence: Before the ink is dry, both sides need to collaborate. Use Citrix workspaces to provide locked-down access to data rooms and shared planning environments, ensuring sensitive financial info is protected without exposing the broader network.
- Day 0 and Day 1: The hardest ask from a CEO is “no disruption.” Citrix allows IT leaders to present applications from both organizations in a single workspace on Day 1 – even before the back-end systems are consolidated. You can onboard staff on their existing endpoints while enforcing your security policies, effectively isolating traffic and reducing the “blast radius” of any potential breach.
- Respecting the clinician’s pace: As the long-term work of EHR consolidation begins, Citrix ensures you don’t have to re-teach clinicians how to work every time a system changes. You can migrate at the pace clinical operations can tolerate, not the pace the hardware dictates.
By utilizing clinician-centric tools like badge tap-and-go access and Zero Trust security protocols, we remove the friction of M&A for the person who matters most: the caregiver.
A more sustainable way forward
Leadership will always want speed. Boards will always want timelines. Finance will always want synergies. But the organizations that truly succeed are the ones that design for sustainability by minimizing the impact on their most valuable assets. That means leaders don’t crush their teams in the name of integration. They don’t burn out their best people to hit an arbitrary date. They don’t sacrifice security or clinician experience to meet a target. Instead, they use platforms and partners that allow them to move intelligently, not just quickly. Citrix provides the stability that makes this kind of rapid M&A integration possible, ensuring that scale never comes at the expense of the people driving it.
Mergers and acquisitions are emotional. They affect communities, caregivers, clinicians, and staff. They’re rarely clean. They’re often necessary. And they’re almost always hard. IT sits in the middle of it all. My commitment is to help organizations navigate growth in a way that protects their people, supports their mission, and gives them the flexibility to adapt without breaking. Because in the end, successful M&A is not measured by how fast systems come together. It’s measured by the experiences of the people who support those systems, and the quality of care delivered to the communities they serve.