At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, executives start every day on patient flow dashboards. Clinicians check capacity from their phones. Cross-functional teams coordinate from the same real-time picture — a shift from the manual, fragmented reports that shaped operations before.
Getting there took more than a software purchase. Vanderbilt built a suite of inpatient flow capabilities including real-time capacity management, predictive discharge analytics integrated with their EHR and mobile-accessible executive dashboards. The harder work was organizational. Schiara Gonzalez Parker, senior director of patient flow, led the effort through IT resistance and resistance to change itself.
This session walks through the full arc: data gathering to operational action, the cultural obstacles, the early performance indicators and the roadmap ahead for measurable impact on length of stay, discharge processing and admission throughput.
Learnings include:
- How Vanderbilt moved flow tools from pilot to operational foundation, and what made executives adopt them daily
- What real-time capacity visibility changed about coordination across units and services
- The specific forms IT and cultural resistance took — and how leaders worked through them
- Why shared, current data changed accountability conversations
- The early indicators Vanderbilt tracks as it scales the work