Daily Dispatch, Day 3: An impactful event comes to a close

Editor’s note: This is the third of three daily recaps featuring highlights from Vizient Connections Summit (read day 1 and day 2).

If you haven’t already, check out our full coverage by following Vizient, The Leading Edge, and Vizient Supply Chain Orchestration on LinkedIn.

Let’s be honest: It takes a lot to compete with Las Vegas. Yet the 6,100 attendees at Vizient Connections Summit had plenty to keep them engaged over three jam-packed days.

Between client education sessions, major announcements, technology demonstrations, and cross-industry conversations, the event gave attendees numerous ways to explore what comes next for healthcare and how to make those ideas useful in practice. The event wrapped up on a celebratory note, with a fireside chat featuring Vizient Chief Customer Officer Rand Ballard and Baylor Scott & White CEO Pete McCanna, preceded by the presentation of the Norman Borlaug Humanitarian Award.

Before we get to those closing moments, though, it’s worth taking a look at the ideas that carried through this year’s Summit. Across the opening keynote, education sessions, and peer-to-peer discussions, five themes stood out that offer a view of what it will take to turn possibility into progress.

Theme 1: Integrated insights will make it easier to know what to do next

What surfaced: Healthcare organizations have benchmarks, dashboards, reports, alerts, consultants, and experts who understand the work. The problem is that those resources don’t always come together when a decision needs to be made.

Leaders know length of stay is too high, supply costs are rising, and access is becoming harder to manage. But the number itself doesn’t explain what’s causing the problem or what a team should change to address it. Someone still has to connect the signal to the underlying issue, bring the right people into the conversation, and determine whether the response actually worked.

That’s where intelligent orchestration comes in. The idea is practical: Help leaders move from seeing a problem to understanding it, deciding what to do, and following through. An early warning matters more when it reaches someone who can respond, and a benchmark is far more useful when it helps a team focus its improvement work.

The takeaway: It’s not that healthcare lacks data; it’s that leaders need a clearer path from knowing to deciding to doing.

Bill Selles, Vizient SVP/GM of Spend Management, speaks at the Spend Management Forum on Thursday.

Theme 2: Financial performance depends on what happens after the contract is signed

What surfaced: A better contract doesn’t guarantee better financial performance. Sure, it creates an opportunity, but the value can still disappear as products are purchased, used, invoiced, paid for, and incorporated into clinical workflows.

That was the central point behind discussions of the supply chain “Performance Gap.” Vizient leaders referenced research showing that only slightly more than 20% of negotiated savings reaches the profit-and-loss statement. The rest can be lost through off-contract spending, price discrepancies, inefficient processes, and variation in how products are selected or used.

The same issue appears in other parts of the health system. Client education sessions delved into how pharmacy leaders are examining medication utilization and formulary decisions; ambulatory leaders are looking for appointment capacity that’s technically available but difficult for patients to access; infusion services are being redesigned to support growth without losing sight of financial discipline; and sustainability efforts are being evaluated not only for their environmental benefits, but also for their potential to reduce waste and strengthen supply reliability.

The takeaway: Financial performance is ultimately shaped by everyday operating decisions. Health systems need to understand where value gets stuck, who controls the next step, and what happens between a promising strategy and a measurable result.

Theme 3: Better access requires changing the care model

What surfaced: Access has become a test of how well a health system understands demand, uses its capacity, and connects patients to the right care.

Several sessions challenged the assumption that better access always requires more staff, space, or technology. Sometimes the capacity is already there but is hidden in unused appointment slots, inconsistent provider templates, inefficient cancellation processes, or disconnected service lines. Health systems are beginning to recover that capacity by changing how they govern access and manage the work behind the front door.

Other organizations are changing where care happens. Walk-in primary care can create a more reliable entry point for vulnerable patients, and hospital-at-home programs can keep lower-acuity patients out of the hospital, preserving beds for people who need more intensive care. Centralized pharmacy services and redesigned infusion models can extend reach while supporting growth.

Community health discussions added an important reminder: Access depends on more than what happens inside the hospital. Transportation, language services, behavioral health, food insecurity, and trust all shape whether people can receive care.

The takeaway: Before assuming that the answer is to build more, health systems should look carefully at what they already have and why patients can’t always reach it.

Dr. Robert Lord, Vizient SVP of Research and Development, speaks at the Data & Digital Forum on Wednesday.

Theme 4: Technology has to earn its place in the work

What surfaced: Technology conversations were optimistic but not naïve. Leaders were interested in what AI and automation can make possible, while remaining focused on a more important question: Did the technology improve something that matters?

A tool can work exactly as designed and still fail in practice. It may create more alerts for a nurse, add another screen for a physician, or require staff to remember a workaround that was never part of the original job. That’s not transformation; it’s more work with a technology label attached to it.

The most compelling examples paired technology with a change in the way work gets done. AI-supported sepsis detection, virtual care, automated supply chain processes, and mortality interventions were presented as parts of broader efforts to improve care, reduce friction, or give time back to staff.

That standard also applies to build-versus-buy decisions. Health systems need to consider how quickly a solution can be deployed, whether it fits the workflow, how it will be maintained, and whether the organization has the people and governance needed to support it. Sometimes the best answer will come from a vendor. Sometimes it will be built internally. In some cases, the right approach will be a partnership.

The takeaway: Technology should not get a pass because it’s impressive. It has to solve a real problem, fit the work, and produce a result people can see.

Theme 5: Healthcare’s hardest problems require purposeful partnerships

What surfaced: There was a strong case for collaboration, but the point wasn’t simply that healthcare organizations should work together more often. The more useful message was that complex problems require relationships with a clear purpose.

A decision in supply chain can affect clinical care, a discharge process can shape capacity and finances, a quality signal may require action from several teams before it changes a patient’s experience, and improving community health may depend on organizations that sit outside the traditional healthcare system.

That reality makes partnership necessary, but partnership by itself doesn’t guarantee progress. To make headway, organizations must establish shared goals, work from common evidence, and decide who is responsible for moving the work forward.

Several discussions highlighted health systems working with technology companies to develop solutions, providers and suppliers aligning clinical and financial priorities, and community organizations helping address barriers to care. The peer-to-peer meetings offered another form of partnership: leaders sharing approaches that others can adapt instead of asking every organization to solve the same problem alone.

The takeaway: Progress rarely comes from one tool, one department, or one leader working in isolation. The most important goal is to create enough alignment around a problem that people can finally act on it together.

Closing out Summit with people, purpose, and community

Connections Summit concluded with the presentation of the 2026 Norman Borlaug Humanitarian Award to Café Momentum, a Dallas-based nonprofit that helps young people exiting the juvenile justice system to build brighter futures through opportunity, support, and meaningful work. Founder, CEO, and Executive Chef Chad Houser accepted the award during the closing program.

The recognition offered a fitting conclusion to a week focused on what’s possible in healthcare and our collective responsibility to turn possibility into meaningful action. Café Momentum’s story demonstrated what can happen when a community invests in people’s potential and supports them along the way.

That same spirit of service and shared responsibility was reflected throughout Summit:

• Packing meals for neighbors in need: Through Volunteer Village, attendees packed 3,000 snack bags for Three Square Food Bank during a two-day service event at Mission City.
• Reducing food waste: Food recovery efforts at group buffet meals helped divert usable food from landfills through composting, community farms, and meal donation programs. Final counts on pounds diverted and meals redirected to local organizations will be available next month.
• Planting for Nevada’s future: Vizient will plant 6,100 native trees—one for every Summit attendee—in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. The saplings will be planted across six Nevada nature preserves, creating benefits that extend well beyond Summit.

Together, these efforts reflect the idea of placemaking: investing in and strengthening the communities that make gatherings like Connections Summit possible. They also set the stage for the final conversation of the week, as Pete McCanna, president and CEO of Baylor Scott & White Health, joined Vizient Chief Customer Officer Rand Ballard to discuss how healthcare leaders can turn new possibilities into better experiences and outcomes for the people they serve.

From head to heart: Pete McCanna on putting the customer at the center

Healthcare transformation is often discussed in terms of technology, strategy, operating models, and financial performance. But during the closing session, Ballard and McCanna brought the discussion back to a more fundamental question: What should healthcare feel like for the people who depend on it?

For McCanna, that question became personal while helping his father navigate Parkinson’s disease. During one visit, he watched as his father—whose medication caused severe tremors—was handed a clipboard and asked to complete a form when he was unable to write.

The moment forced McCanna to reconsider the organizations he had spent his career building and improving. He’d assumed that strong organizations would naturally benefit the people they served, but his father’s experience showed him how easily the system could overlook the person at its center.

“Organizations have an ego,” McCanna said. “What must drive healthcare is the heart.”

That shift—from head to heart—now informs McCanna’s vision of an indispensable daily health partner. He described four overlapping journeys that people experience throughout their lives: wellness, chronic illness, acute care, and end-of-life care. To become a true health partner, a health system must be credible, relevant, and effective across all four.

Supporting those journeys requires engaging people, guiding them to the right care, connecting the elements of their experience, and delivering care in a way that responds to demand. At Baylor Scott & White Health, examples include a personal wellness dashboard that integrates data from wearables and proactively nudges people to take action in their daily health journeys, as well as clinical triage tools that guide people to the right level of care and expanded mental health access through a hybrid care model.

The goal is to connect strategy to purpose.

“As leaders, we spend a lot of time on the ‘what’ in healthcare,” McCanna said. “Your purpose, your mission, your vision, your strategies—they’re important. They set the destination. But the real power is understanding the ‘why.’”

That means connecting organizational decisions to the people they are intended to serve and continuing to act when the system falls short.

It also requires leaders to transform themselves. McCanna asked his senior team to identify their personal “why,” helping them connect their individual experiences to a broader purpose. The process created deeper trust and stronger collaboration and helped move the transformation beyond a CEO-led strategy.

Ultimately, transformation must be measured by more than traditional financial and operational indicators. Leaders must ask whether they have built credible solutions across all four journeys, whether people are using and benefiting from them, whether the system is meeting demand, and whether customers feel the organization is truly paying attention.

McCanna offered a direct challenge to health system leaders: manage the ego—both the organization’s and their own—and put the customer at the center of decision-making.

“There’s a real freedom and liberation in making decisions around the customer,” McCanna said.

Spend Management Forum: Turning $46B in negotiated value into realized performance

What could health systems do if they captured more of the estimated $46 billion in negotiated value lost across the healthcare supply chain each year?

That was the opportunity at the center of Thursday’s Spend Management Forum. Simrit Sandhu, Vizient president of Spend Management, challenged attendees to consider the impact of recovering even a portion of that value—while making clear that the goal is to help health systems address the full opportunity.

“Recovering just 10% would return $4.6 billion to health systems every year,” Sandhu said.

That 10% isn’t a ceiling or an endpoint but an illustration of what an initial step toward closing the Performance Gap could make possible: more capacity for patient care, greater investment in the workforce, expanded access, stronger infrastructure, and improved financial sustainability.

“This isn’t new funding. It’s not additional reimbursement,” Sandhu said. “It’s value that has already been negotiated but isn’t being fully captured.”

That distinction shaped the rest of the Forum. As coverage changes, the Medicare population grows, and non-labor expenses continue to increase, health systems are being asked to serve more patients, strengthen resilience, and improve outcomes with less room for error. While many of these pressures are outside their control, non-labor spend remains an area where organizations can take meaningful action.

Sandhu framed this challenge as the “Performance Gap”—the difference between the value health systems negotiate and the value they ultimately realize. Closing that gap requires going beyond the contract and building an operating model that connects data, expertise, workflows, and decisions across the supply chain lifecycle.

Bill Selles, Vizient SVP/GM, spend management services, then explored how health systems can improve supply chain performance by addressing the three gaps that prevent negotiated value from reaching the bottom line: contracting, operations, and utilization gaps.

The contracting gap occurs when spend remains outside managed pathways, including fragmented supplier and category spend that may be difficult for procurement teams to see or pursue. The operations gap emerges when value erodes between contract, purchase order, invoice, and payment through pricing discrepancies, manual processes, or disconnected workflows. The utilization gap develops when product and practice decisions change the expected value of a purchase, particularly when cost, utilization, clinical evidence, and outcomes data are not connected.

“Simply put, it’s the difference between the value supply chain leaders see themselves producing and unlocking every day and what finance teams are realizing in the P&L,” Selles said. “We’ve got to close that gap because our margins are too tight.”

The Forum then moved from the challenge to solutions. During an expert-led deep dive, Andy Novotny, Vizient VP, product strategy, discussed how Vizient is helping health systems identify opportunities, prioritize action, and sustain results across the supply chain lifecycle.

That conversation continued with a panel of healthcare leaders who shared their perspectives on the practical challenges of improving supply chain performance, including fragmented data, competing priorities, operational complexity, and the need to align supply chain decisions with broader organizational goals.

The panel also highlighted the importance of solutions that support action, not simply insight. Identifying an opportunity is only the beginning. Health systems also need the expertise, workflows, and accountability required to pursue the opportunity, implement change, and measure whether value is sustained.

In her closing remarks, Sandhu returned to the broader impact of closing the Performance Gap.

“Savings on paper don’t create impact,” Sandhu said. “Impact happens when that value reaches your P&L and gives your organization greater capacity to act.”

Top performers took center stage

The Venetian Ballroom was packed Wednesday evening with hospital and health system leaders cheering for their (and their peers’) recognition as Vizient 2026 Top Performers. The annual ceremony honors healthcare organizations cross the U.S. for their outstanding achievements in improving patient care, advancing performance, and demonstrating leadership in responsible sourcing and sustainability.

Vizient measures hospital performance using data from the Vizient Clinical Data Base (CDB), the largest clinical comparative database of its kind, which serves more than 1,600 hospitals across more than 250 health systems in 49 states. The CDB tracks quality measures including mortality, length of stay, readmission rates, complications, and resource utilization, enabling hospitals to benchmark performance, identify improvement opportunities, and streamline data collection.

This year’s Top Performers demonstrate how hospitals and health systems are turning data-driven insights into meaningful improvements in patient care and operations.

“We are seeing hospitals experience higher acuity patients with better outcomes including lower expected mortality, length of stay, and complications year over year,” said Vizient Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer David Levine, MD, FACEP. “These Top Performers understand improvement requires putting insights into action and staying committed to advancing the future of healthcare.”

Several hospitals and health systems earned the Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award, which recognizes participating healthcare organizations in seven cohorts through the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study. The study measures performance on the quality of patient care in six domains: safety, mortality, effectiveness, efficiency, patient centeredness, and variation in care.

Additional awards include the Rising Star Award, recognizing healthcare organizations that made significant improvements in care quality, measured by a rise in at least 20 positions in the annual Vizient Quality and Accountability Study from the prior year and scoring in the top 25; the Vizient Ambulatory Quality and Accountability Award, which measures the quality of outpatient care in five domains: access to care, continuum of care, quality, efficiency, and variation in care; and the Stewardship Award, recognizing healthcare organizations that demonstrate leadership and measurable achievements in sustainability and responsible sourcing through program maturity, preferred purchasing, and strong executive commitment.

To see photos from the event, check out the gallery at the bottom of the page.

Final-day sessions put practical progress in focus

The final day wrapped with education sessions on several top-of-mind topics including how health systems can respond to financial pressure, preserve access, and sustain performance through periods of change. The examples varied but the underlying question was consistent: How can organizations make better use of the resources, relationships, and expertise they already have?

At “Road Map to Success for Academic Medical Centers: Rural Health Rebirth,” University of Rochester Medicine leaders described a regional model that connects academic and community hospitals through digital coordination, transfer load balancing, and investment in local human capital. The approach allows patients to receive more care closer to home while preserving tertiary capacity for those with the most complex needs. It also gives rural hospitals a more defined role within an integrated system.

The takeaway: Regionalization works best when it’s designed around the needs of the entire system, not simply the largest hospital.

Mass General Brigham leaders presented “Cost Management-Driven Facilities: Sourcing to Control Costs and Preserve Mission,” a session focused on facilities and real estate spending. Through its Sustain Program, Mass General Brigham is applying a data-based sourcing framework to categories such as task chairs, elevator maintenance, construction, and outsourced services. The goal is to slow expense growth, standardize purchasing, and optimize supplier use without compromising patient care, research, education, or community service.

The takeaway: Cost management is most effective when it protects the mission rather than treating the mission and financial performance as competing priorities.

“Sustaining Quality Through Leadership Transition: Insights From Two Contrasting Health Systems” examined how organizations can protect quality and safety during executive and operational transitions. Although the two health systems started from different positions, both emphasized the importance of multidisciplinary quality teams, executive-led safety huddles, clear governance, and consistent attention to performance data. Those structures can provide continuity while new leaders establish their direction.

The takeaway: Leadership transitions don’t have to interrupt quality improvement, but stability requires clear ownership and routines that keep performance visible.

Supplier sessions added an important perspective. In “The Future Is Already Here: How Leading Health Systems Are Redefining Supplier Performance,” supply chain leaders described how expectations are expanding beyond price, quality, and service to include transparency, resilience, risk mitigation, manufacturing strategy, and continuity of care. “From Evidence to Enterprise Value” made a related point from the supplier perspective: Real-world evidence is most useful when it helps providers make decisions about outcomes, resource use, cost, capacity, or service line strategy.

The takeaway: The strongest supplier partnerships will be built around measurable value and shared problems, not transactions alone.

Making the mission real

From the opening drumline to the final award, this year’s event kept returning to the same question: How can healthcare organizations turn big ideas into meaningful impact for patients, caregivers, and communities?

The answer will look different in every organization. But the path forward is becoming clearer: connect the right people and information, focus resources where they matter most, and make sure every new idea leads to better work and better care.

Thank you to the many sponsors who make Vizient Connections Summit possible.