Q&A: Can intelligent orchestration close the gap between insight and action?

The ability to identify the right signal at the right time to inform the right decisions has long been at the top of healthcare leaders’ wish lists. But as the industry faces an unprecedented confluence of pressures, that capability has shifted from a nice-to-have to a necessity. After all, a rapidly evolving healthcare ecosystem demands equally fast-moving, data-informed strategic decisions.

Enter “intelligent orchestration,” a concept that integrates data, insights, and expertise to help leaders understand what’s driving an outcome, determine what to do next, and act on the opportunity. For Vizient, that vision is taking shape through Vizient Edge, a connected platform unveiled during this week’s Vizient Connections Summit that brings together intelligence across clinical, operational, strategic, reimbursement, and supply chain domains.

“We want to deliver persona-tailored insights at the right time in the right place,” said Vizient Chief Product Officer Dr. Shannon Sims. “The goal is to help leaders spend less time searching for answers and more time deciding what to do about them.”

Here, Dr. Sims and Vizient Senior Vice President of Research and Development Dr. Robert Lord discuss what intelligent orchestration means for healthcare, why it matters now, and how it helps health systems move from signal to action.

The term “intelligent orchestration” is becoming more widely adopted across industries, particularly related to enterprise AI and digital automation. How would you define intelligent orchestration in a healthcare context, and how can it help health systems improve clinical quality, financial sustainability, and strategic growth?

Dr. Lord: Intelligent orchestration is the bedrock concept that drives how Vizient thinks about translating data to action. Data in and of itself doesn’t allow you to improve an outcome. You can use it to make a report or to see a pattern, but it's not going to tell you where an actual opportunity is. The power of intelligent orchestration is that it leverages advances in AI and automation to take that underlying data, separate the signal from the noise, and identify what’s driving a particular outcome.

A signal might be that you have a length-of-stay increase in your neurology unit, but there's still insight that's needed as to why that’s happening. Is it related to challenges with discharge? A clinical pathway? Escalations to a different level of care? Getting to that root cause is essential, as is figuring out how to address it. You can have that insight, but if you can’t translate it into a specific intervention, it doesn’t lead to action. That intervention could address an outcome, support your enterprise strategy, or apply to your supply chain. It’s a universal concept for understanding what’s driving unwanted variation and determining how to address it.

Dr. Sims: One client said to me, “Somebody’s got to bring it all together.” That’s how I think about intelligent orchestration: connecting information, insights, and expertise in ways that enable actions that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. We believe Vizient is uniquely positioned to do all the things Robert described through that level of integration.

Healthcare has long needed a way to “bring it all together.” What’s making that possible now?

Dr. Sims: Certainly, new generative AI tools and related digital technologies have allowed us to parse information and extract it to create libraries and repositories of best practices and successful interventions at a scale that wasn’t previously possible. They also enable probabilistic approaches to automating the development of materials and research and development tasks.

These tools allow us to do a better job of capturing and categorizing evidence, best practices, and successful interventions. With the right hands and the right tools, they allow human workers to practice at the top of their license by eliminating lower-level tasks and letting them focus on reviewing the evidence base to determine which interventions make the most sense.

Dr. Lord: One of the powerful things about large language model-based AI is that we historically had an enormous amount of information locked in unstructured data that was difficult to interpret, particularly clinical notes and similar types of media throughout a health system. A lot of the operational work required to discern what was important and what wasn’t was embedded in that data. Now, we’ve essentially 100x’d the data that’s readily available to us to solve everyday problems for health systems. That’s one big unlock.

The other major unlock is the convergence of artificial intelligence and automation. AI has evolved from rules-based systems to machine learning and large language models, while automation has progressed from robotic process automation to agents. Now, agents can combine both capabilities to take on entire roles or functions. They can reason, make decisions, and act within those functions, giving health systems much more leverage.

How can these capabilities help leaders identify and prioritize the highest-impact opportunities? What might that look like based on different roles, such as a CQO vs. a CFO?

Dr. Lord: To Shannon’s earlier point, an enormously important part of intelligent orchestration is integrating different data sources, capabilities, and insights. Managing a modern health system requires insights from historically siloed data, regardless of your role. A CQO can’t improve quality without understanding elements of the budget; they don’t have infinite resources. A CFO can’t simply cut staff without considering the impact on outcomes if those savings come from needed clinical services. Those are very stark trade-offs.

If we can’t make decisions in silos, then how do we personalize insights for a particular user? Intelligent orchestration doesn’t work at the data-silo level; it works at the decision and action level. All the information needed to make a decision and drive action should be presented to you, wherever that decision sits in the enterprise. A functioning intelligent orchestration system helps you focus on the decision immediately relevant to your role instead of pulling reports or dashboards from across the health system.

Dr. Sims: If you’re a CQO, as Robert said, you certainly have an interest in the financials, but your primary mandate is clinical quality outcomes and the patient experience. Our vision of intelligent orchestration is that an LLM can adapt, get to know you as a person, tailor its responses, and suggest additional information based on your needs.

No doctor gets trained in P&L, depreciation of assets, and all the other aspects they might need to consider. Our job is to deliver insights in a way that helps them make decisions and understand when to bring in other experts.

You officially rolled out Vizient Edge during the Data and Digital Forum at Vizient Connections Summit, with demos taking place throughout the event. What have you most enjoyed about announcing these capabilities more broadly to clients?

Dr. Sims: We’re shifting the perception of Vizient to a more tech-forward company that develops and launches AI-native solutions into the market. But the world doesn’t need more point solutions. That’s why we’re also discussing Edge and how it brings everything together into a digital experience. We also anticipate a future of what we call “headless insights,” which means that you can consume them within your own large language model or within your other workflow systems like Epic or Workday. We also recognize that people are already using LLMs in their everyday work. Intelligent orchestration needs to be available in the right places at the right time.

That’s what I’m most excited about: casting that future vision of how these new products will come together to solve problems in the way we’ve been discussing.

Dr. Lord: Since I came to Vizient, I’ve believed it’s uniquely well-situated to help solve some of the most important challenges in healthcare operations through intelligent orchestration. How can we unlock the power of the data, knowledge, and trust within the Vizient network to improve outcomes, drive down costs, and improve the patient and provider experience?

I’m now seeing that vision come to fruition through the products we’re building, and that’s enormously exciting. At a more personal level, what excites me most is seeing a client’s face light up when we present a capability or solve a problem; when they say something like, “I’ve been waiting for this product my whole life. This is the thing I’ve dreamed of for 20 years.” Those are the moments that an entrepreneur lives for, and I’ve seen more of them in the past six months than I have in years. That’s incredibly exciting to me.

Why is it so important for healthcare leaders to accelerate strategic decision-making, especially within the current healthcare ecosystem?

Dr. Sims: There are several massive shifts in healthcare happening all at once, including perpetual policy and reimbursement issues that put enormous pressure on health systems. There’s simultaneously a major shift from acute inpatient settings to ambulatory settings, in part because of that financial pressure. And there’s an access crisis. Clients tell me they can’t get patients in to see specialists, don’t have enough throughput in their procedural suites, and don’t have anywhere to send patients who need post-acute care.

That combination of tight finances, an aging population, staffing challenges, and pressures from the payer community requires a lot of data to make thoughtful decisions about which markets and services to pursue. And when you add AI and its transformative capabilities, health systems are even more overwhelmed. Leaders need someone to help them sort out this witch’s brew of factors so they can make the right decisions at the right pace.

Dr. Lord: There is no job in healthcare, from CEO to a brand-new tech, where you aren’t being asked to do more with less. That brings us to the other part of this: artificial intelligence, which may be a lifeline. The challenge is converting these remarkable capabilities into real value and more capacity on the ground so we can deliver the uniquely human, uniquely important aspects of caring for patients. To me, that is the central tension moving forward.

If intelligent orchestration works as intended, what should health system leaders be able to do three years from now that they can’t do today?

Dr. Sims: They need to be able to make big market- and client-facing decisions at a much faster pace. For example, everyone knows they need to shift orthopedic care to outpatient settings, including hips, joints, and other procedures. The challenge is that they don’t know the total cost of doing so, including overhead, nursing, billing providers, devices, medications, and other expenses. They can’t just go to one place to figure out what it costs or what good looks like in that space.

Three years from now, they should have a tool that shows them what good looks like and what margin they can achieve in their market under specific assumptions. It would help them determine whether they have the right levers to maintain quality and margin or whether they should focus on cardiac or oncology care instead.

To make those decisions, they need market data, including the size of the local orthopedic market, competition from PE, and the number of ASCs in the area. They also need quality data to ensure patients shifted to outpatient settings have the same outcomes without increased mortality or morbidity. All of that, along with reimbursement rates, labor, supplies, and capital costs, needs to be considered together.

Dr. Lord: I think the general task for leaders moving forward will be figuring out how to rewire their health system: leveraging technology where appropriate while preserving human judgment, compassion, and insight where they’re needed.

We’re in the midst of a generational challenge, and leaders will face decisions they’ve never encountered before, including how to move care to ambulatory settings, protect margins, and adopt new care and payment models. A new slate of tools may help solve these challenges, but we have to apply them thoughtfully and avoid worsening mortality or morbidity. We’re talking about real human lives, not a small financial experiment.

Navigating that tension at the right velocity will be the challenge of our decade. But based on my conversations with leaders across the country, I believe these teams are ready to tackle it.

Explore Vizient Edge and see how intelligent orchestration can help your health system move from insight to action.