Turn insight into action

Think about the last meaningful performance opportunity your health system identified. Maybe it involved length of stay, quality, supply expense, or capacity. You could see where improvement was needed, but understanding what was driving the issue, deciding on the right response and putting that decision into practice required extraordinary effort and time. Improvement also requires decisions and actions that span multiple departments and healthcare leaders – there’s not a “Chief Performance Officer” in any healthcare system.

At our Connections Summit in September, we discussed these challenges (and even more importantly, the right solutions) with health system leaders. Our clients affirmed that the real work often begins after an opportunity is identified. And the distance between seeing that opportunity and realizing measurable improvement is where health systems have the most to gain.

The true cost of fragmented insights

Forecasting and benchmarking remain essential. They help leaders anticipate change, understand how they compare with peers, and identify where performance may need attention. But knowing where a problem exists is not the same as knowing how to solve it.

One client shared with us at Summit: "You have all my data. Just tell me what to do." Understanding that data requires information and expertise from multiple teams. And when those teams work from different systems or incomplete views of the problem, it takes much longer to reach the right decision and to act. These costs compound across an organization, and more reports and dashboards alone will not lessen them. As that client put it so well, they needed a more connected approach that helped leaders move from understanding performance to improving it.

Connecting intelligence, expertise and execution

Our answer is intelligent orchestration, or catalyzing trusted data's insights and signals to enable the right actions and outcomes. You start by identifying the opportunities that matter most and understanding what's driving them. From there, leaders can decide on the best action, backed by evidence and expert guidance. Next, act by bringing the right people, processes, and technology together to execute that decision. Finally, you measure what changed, and then repeat so the improvement lasts.

That last step is critical, since improvement doesn't end after teams act. Leaders need to know what changed, whether it worked and whether the improvement can be sustained.

From knowing the problem to acting on it

At Summit, we shared how this approach has taken shape through Vizient Edge and a new family of intelligent orchestration products solutions.

One example is Project Orion, which builds on the trusted performance intelligence of Vizient's Clinical Data Base. The goal is to help quality teams move beyond identifying performance gaps by using AI to investigate potential root causes and bring forward evidence that can guide decisions.

At one academic medical center, Orion helped identify cardiology length of stay as an area for improvement and surfaced likely drivers behind the issue. That evidence brought nursing, cardiology and operations leaders together to design and test an intervention.

The important shift is not simply that the analysis happened faster. Teams had a more focused starting point and could bring their expertise together around a specific opportunity to improve care. When intelligence is connected to expertise and execution, teams are freed up to focus on the decisions that matter and to work together to deliver measurable improvement.

The next step is action

Healthcare leaders will continue to rely on forecasting and benchmarking to navigate an increasingly complex environment. But the organizations best positioned for what comes next will be those that can use those insights to make decisions and coordinate action across the enterprise.

That is the promise of intelligent orchestration: helping leaders focus on the right opportunities, making decisions with greater confidence, and bringing teams together to act and measure the results. Measurement of impact isn't an afterthought – it's built in from the start, so teams can show what changed, for which patients, and whether the change will hold.

The real value of intelligence is not just understanding what needs to change. It's making that change happen, and producing the improvement for the patients and communities we serve.