Watch the full panel discussion here. 

“What keeps me up at night? It’s that healthcare leaders in the IT space don’t know how important this is. They don’t know how to be successful with this. And as a result, they are still dealing with this problem today.”

Mike Prokic, Chief IT Strategy Officer at Trinity Health, used those words at ViVE 2026 to frame a challenge that still receives far too little attention in healthcare IT: application rationalization, decommissioning, and archiving.

It is not usually the kind of topic that grabs headlines. Too often, it falls to the end of the priority list and is treated as “side of desk” work. But at ViVE, it moved out of the margins and onto the main stage, where Prokic joined Trinity Health CTO Nick O’Connor and Clearsense CEO Jason Rose for a session titled “IT Cost Optimization & Enterprise Strategy.”

Together, the three shared Trinity Health’s playbook for retiring over 740 legacy applications and unlocking nearly $100 million in permanent operating expense savings.

The Catalyst Moment

Trinity’s program didn’t start as a sweeping enterprise strategy. The catalyst moment was the rollout of a new enterprise EHR across the country.

Trinity is a $26 billion health system and one of the largest in the U.S. It had accrued some 7,000 applications after years of M&A. They knew the new EHR implementation would leave behind a long tail of legacy clinical and revenue cycle systems that would need to be retired, archived, and managed thoughtfully. What leaders did not fully realize at the outset was that the discipline they were building to support that work would eventually become valuable far beyond the EHR project itself.

“At first, we didn’t know what we were creating. It was a fixed project with a beginning, middle and end. It wasn’t until years two and three when the numbers started getting to 10, 20, 30, 40 million dollars that we realized what we had.”

Building the Assembly Line

Like many large health systems, Trinity had already made earlier attempts to rationalize applications, archive data, and retire legacy systems. But those efforts moved too slowly to keep up with the scale of change underway. With 93 hospitals spread across 26 states, they knew they needed a faster, more disciplined model and capable partner to tackle a project of this scale and magnitude. That is where Clearsense entered the picture.

Working with Clearsense, Trinity built an assembly-line approach, one that could take applications from rationalization and decision-making all the way through to decommissioning and archival. They assigned a dedicated team to do the work and even gave the effort its own internal brand: Singularity.

“One of the great building blocks for us was building a coalition for the program early on, including our executive leadership team. Now every month since the inception of the program we’ve been reporting to the CEO on the number of applications and operating expenses we’ve taken out in perpetuity along with the infrastructure and licensing we’ve been able to recoup,” said Prokic.

More Than an Archive

What made the Singularity program so powerful was that Trinity was not simply turning off old systems and putting the data into storage. Instead, Trinity worked with Clearsense to build a longitudinal database, combining 20 years of patient data into a single data lake.

“This is an active archive that gives people access to data that they probably weren’t using before because it was likely in some niche system off to the side somewhere. And now, as a result, there are a lot of opportunities to use that data in new and unique ways. The corpus of data that we now have in Singularity is going to be very powerful going forward,” said O’Connor.

What’s more, the money saved created opportunities to invest in other innovations, including AI.

But the benefits don’t stop there.

The Cybersecurity Upside

As the program matured, leaders realized that retiring legacy systems also had a meaningful cybersecurity upside as well.

“Intellectually it makes sense,” said O’Connor. “But Monday morning quarterbacking—the elimination of these systems, the rundown of the infrastructure—has a real impact on cybersecurity in a positive way. You’re reducing the amount of vulnerabilities, you’re reducing the admin, you’re reducing the time to keep these systems up. There’s cost in all those things and that was a real ‘ah ha’ moment, particularly in the security space.”

That realization expanded the business case. Every application taken out of the environment did more than eliminate licensing, maintenance, and infrastructure costs. It also reduced the burden of patching, remediation, and ongoing support tied to aging systems, many of which can create unnecessary exposure over time.

As Prokic noted, even Trinity’s headline savings number does not fully reflect that value. “$100 million in opex does not include risk avoidance on the security side for patching and upgrades we avoided with legacy vendors. We’re not calculating that. Our numbers are true hard savings with contract termination or infrastructure costs.”

The Bottom Line

Trinity has already proven that Singularity delivers value. The real question now is why, at a time of such intense financial pressure, application rationalization and decommissioning remain one of the most underused levers available to health systems.

For Prokic, the answer is straightforward:

“I talk to peers in the industry regularly about app rationalization and decommissioning, and the common thread around them is that regardless of the size of your health system or hospital, you have to build a program around it,” he said. “It seems everyone is tackling this very transactionally. It’s a problem that someone is addressing off the side of their desk... You have to build a program.”

To hear how Trinity Health built Singularity into a strategic engine for savings, security, and future innovation, watch the full ViVE 2026 session, “IT Cost Optimization & Enterprise Strategy,” on demand.