Vizient announces 2026 Top Performers in clinical quality, ambulatory care, and supply chain stewardship

IRVING, Texas, Sept. 24, 2026—Vizient® announced its 2026 Top Performers for quality in hospital and ambulatory care and supply chain stewardship. The awards recognize hospitals and healthcare organizations nationwide for their achievements in improving patient care, advancing performance and demonstrating leadership in responsible sourcing and sustainability. The awards were announced Sept. 23 at the Vizient Connections Summit in Las Vegas.

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.

Over the past year, Vizient has enhanced the CDB with year-to-date reporting and a ‘What-If’ calculator tool to easily track performance as soon as new data is added. These tools enable hospitals to monitor results throughout the year, identify opportunities for improvement, estimate how potential changes could affect their performance before acting, and timely measure the impact of improvement initiatives.

This year’s Top Performers demonstrate how healthcare organizations 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 David Levine, MD, FACEP, senior vice president and chief medical officer, Vizient. “These Top Performers understand improvement requires putting insights into action and staying committed to advancing the future of healthcare.”

The Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award recognizes participating healthcare organizations in seven cohorts through the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study, which measures performance on the quality of patient care in six domains: safety, mortality, effectiveness, efficiency, patient centeredness and variation in care. The study factors in measures from the Vizient Clinical Data Base and includes performance data from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey and the CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network.

Top performers in the comprehensive academic medical center cohort are:

Top performers in the large, specialized complex care medical center cohort are:

Top performers in the complex care medical center cohort are:

Top performers in the community hospital cohort are:

Top performers in the small community hospital cohort are:

Top performers in the critical access care hospital cohort are:

Top performers in the pediatric hospital cohort are:

The Rising Star Award recognizes 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 Rising Star is:

The Vizient Ambulatory Quality and Accountability Award measures the quality of outpatient care in five domains: access to care, continuum of care, quality, efficiency, and variation in care. The composite scoring system uses patient-level data from the AAMC-Vizient Clinical Practice Solutions Center®, Vizient Access and Throughput Data, as well as data from the Vizient Clinical Data Base. Top performers are:

The Stewardship Award recognizes healthcare organizations that demonstrate leadership and measurable achievements in sustainability and responsible sourcing through program maturity, preferred purchasing and strong executive commitment. Stewardship recognizes healthcare organizations that create greater value from purchasing decisions by integrating sustainability and responsible sourcing into their supply chains. These efforts balance cost savings with resilience and community impact while enhancing transparency, improving performance and advancing measurable financial, operational and environmental outcomes. Top performers are:

About Vizient
Vizient® enables healthcare providers to deliver better, more affordable care by improving financial sustainability, enhancing system performance, and accelerating strategic growth. More than two-thirds of the nation's acute care providers and more than one-third of ambulatory providers rely on Vizient solutions and services. By combining the nation’s most influential healthcare leader networks with industry-leading data and analytics, comprehensive solutions, and advisory services through Kaufman Hall, Vizient helps providers achieve financial, clinical, and operational excellence. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Vizient has offices throughout the United States. Learn more at vizient.com.