Vizient Newsroom

Health care leaders frequently state their organization is on a high-reliability journey—but why? The simple explanation is the desire to have more reliable outcomes and overall performance. Achieving high reliability in health care though is a challenge due to the complexity and the dependency on human factors. The good news is that other highly complex and risk-prone industries have had success achieving high reliability and they provide great insights for health care organizations. Here are four pillars essential for high reliability.

For most of 2020, COVID-19 disrupted and significantly altered the infrastructure of the world’s industries, including health care delivery and services. But at what level can we expect health care to return to pre-pandemic levels? What are the long-term effects of the pandemic even as the virus generally abates while the new delta variant threatens? And what other drivers will factor into change? Here are several important trends along with what to expect.

American medicine is facing an identity crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to socioeconomic health disparities and turned up the heat on the question of whether health care is a right or a privilege. The financial strain on hospitals resulting from the temporary postponement of scheduled surgeries exposed a vulnerability caused by an inherently flawed payment system.

Vizient released an analysis which estimates U.S. hospitals are spending $310 million annually to manage additional work of white and brown bagging.