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Shared strategy and cultural alignment are top priorities as health systems continue to expand due to mergers and acquisitions
As the University of Texas System team took their seats to share the story of the system’s successful journey to improved alignment during a panel at the 2024 Vizient Connections Summit, they were greeted with a room overflowing with attendees.
By the end of the session — during which the team discussed the key factors that led to better collaboration and communication among all eight of the system’s healthcare institutions — the audience was abuzz with questions, especially as health systems continue to expand and evolve due to mergers and acquisitions. Kaufman Hall’s recent M&A activity report showed there were 72 announced transactions in 2024, making alignment among growing institutions an increasingly important priority.
While the UT System’s commitment to building better alignment wasn’t driven by M&A, the benefits of orienting around shared improvements were obvious no matter the motivating factor.
“We’re always listening and looking for opportunities to align, whether it’s removing redundancy, looking at unnecessary variation or building economies of scale and scope,” said Zain Kazmi, chief digital and analytics officer, associate vice chancellor, health affairs for the UT System.
The UT System provides a particularly potent success story, both in the strides it’s made and the aspirations it continues to work toward. At the heart of its gains lie two foundational elements: data integration and culture.
Here’s a look at how the system developed and implemented strategies around those key areas to drive performance improvements.
Like most large Academic Medical Centers, the UT System has a three-pronged mission: education, research — in fact, the system spends more on research than all but one university in the world — and healthcare. But the system knew it needed a framework to elevate that mission and create a cohesive, collaborative and innovative experience for employees, patients and students.
“Our vision,” Kazmi said, “is to transform healthcare in Texas.”
Enter “One UT Health,” a strategic framework that contains four initiatives:
The framework kicked into high-gear roughly three years ago, when 92 executive leaders from across UT System’s eight healthcare institutions joined with Vizient in Dallas to discuss the intersection of cost and quality and how strategic partnerships fuel progress. It was one of the first large-scale meetings that involved key stakeholders from across the system and has since become an annual staple of the One UT Health strategy.
“It’s important for systems to see there are things they can collectively move the needle on while still maintaining their respective market autonomy,” said Deborah Nelson, Vizient SVP, spend management sales. “It’s about being willing to participate, lean in and identify where value can be unlocked — and using data to help you get there.”
Speaking of data — just as the UT System realized its institutions shouldn’t operate in siloes, so too did its leaders understand the power of truly integrated insights.
That’s what inspired the system to develop its UT Health Intelligence Platform (HIP), which combines data from Vizient tools — including the Clinical Data Base, Operational Data Base, Strategy Intelligence and Clinical Practice Solutions Center — that enables curation, analysis, visualization and rapid understanding of the metrics that support performance improvement in patient care. The system also feeds sources including SDOH and Society of Thoracic Surgeons data into the platform and currently is working to incorporate EHR data.
Data scientists and quality leaders from across the system meet for 30 minutes biweekly — 20 minutes for presentations, 10 for questions — to discuss challenges, solutions and opportunities revealed through benchmarking. Each meeting features a different UT institution detailing its findings.
“That’s where the collaboration happens,” said Dr. Bela Patel, regional chief medical officer at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center and vice dean of healthcare quality at UT. “Institutions connect and start learning from each other very rapidly.”
Initially, the team used HIP to specifically focus on patient safety, developing and analyzing programs around each of Vizient’s patient safety measures. This year, HIP is foundational to the system’s sepsis strategy.
Additionally, the HIP program houses the system’s AI Collaborative, which supports cross-campus executive alignment on AI use cases, regulatory compliance and the scaling of safe, tested solutions.
Another big win is the culture that has buttressed the UT System’s more cohesive approach across its locations. In fact, its pharmacy division is a powerful example of what true synergy looks like when you move from competition to collaboration.
During COVID, UT System pharmacy stakeholders decided to form a steering council, which led to an all-day strategy session that also included Kazmi and Vizient. The group conducted a SWOT analysis that guided their key initiatives over the next three years (the graphic above was developed during the session).
Out of that session, six subcommittees were launched that focused on major priorities such as pharmacy, supply chain, workforce, investigational drugs, EPIC optimization and ambulatory. Also key was the development of a communication plan to convey the work happening in the subcommittees.
“We thought, ‘If people can’t learn about the subcommittees’ successes and failures, then that’s a miss,’” said Ryan Roux, vice president, division of pharmacy, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
The pharmacy steering council now meets four times a year, while the subcommittees meet monthly.
None of these strides would be possible, Kazmi said, without champions across the institution who emphasize collaboration over centralized mandates. No matter how large or complex the system, you need leaders who focus on small victories that snowball into big changes for your institution.
“To me, it’s simple,” he said. “Work with champions, get those wins — and keep building off that.”
The UT System’s journey offers several actionable insights for organizations seeking better alignment:
Thought Leadership Director
Erin Cristales is a thought leadership director for Vizient. In her role, she creates articles and reports that feature the perspectives of Vizient subject matter experts and other leaders across healthcare. Cristales earned a B.A. in English from the University of Texas and an M.S. in library and information science from the University of North Texas.
