This piece was informed by “How AdventHealth Improved Care Transitions and Drove $48.6M in Operational Value,” a recent AHA webinar in which AdventHealth leaders Jeannine Nylaan, Corporate Executive Director of Care Management, and Rob Dixon, Executive Director of Clinical & Revenue Systems, Information Technology, detailed how their organization transformed care transitions at scale. Watch the virtual session on demand here.
This might sound surprising coming from a tech founder and 14-year veteran in healthcare software, but I’ve learned that technology doesn’t fix anything. Without the people and processes aligned with it, technology is just another headache.
But with that alignment, tech can drive scalable, lasting, measurable results. I was reminded of this while listening to Jeannine Nylaan and Rob Dixon present how AdventHealth reduced system-wide length of stay (LOS) from 4.7 days to 4.4 days across 57 hospitals in nine states – in just 9 months.
They brought in new technology to drive patient transition workflows and intentionally paired it with a process and team that were maximally prepared to take advantage of their new tooling.
The outcome is remarkable: a conservative $48 million in value unlocked in just one year.
The Problem We Keep Getting Wrong
Oftentimes, health systems treat new tools as the answer: Buy the software. Deploy it. Announce the win.
Without leadership and vision, technology is purchased and implemented, but then it isn’t used. Or it gets used, but it doesn’t drive outcomes. And quietly, people slowly revert to the way things were before.
The problem isn’t the technology. It’s that technology dropped into a broken process, onto a misaligned team, or onto a team without the right structures in place, simply inherits all the friction it was supposed to eliminate.
What AdventHealth figured out, and what I’d encourage every C-suite leader to use as a lesson learned, is that people, process, and technology are not sequential steps. They are simultaneous and interdependent, and if you don’t invest in all three, you’re not transforming anything.
What “Co-Design” Actually Looks Like
What AdventHealth built wasn’t a traditional model where operations defines requirements, and IT builds a solution. Care management, IT, and operational leaders were at the table together from day one, vetting ideas, making decisions, and owning outcomes. The insight that stuck with me: most organizations move too quickly into execution, skipping the harder work of building shared understanding first. It’s the old adage of slowing down to speed up, working in action to drive meaningful outcomes for patients and care teams.
What the Data Told Them Before They Bought Anything
One of the most instructive moments of the webinar came before any discussion of outcomes.
Before AdventHealth purchased or implemented anything, they surveyed their frontline care managers. What they heard included the expected workflow preferences and feature requests. However, the number-one pain point, above all else, was downtime and connectivity issues, a shared cost hiding in plain sight.
That’s what upfront alignment produces: the ability to see problems that siloed teams can’t see on their own.
They also surfaced what I’d describe as the “yes that became a no”—post-acute facilities accepting referrals, only to decline on the day of discharge due to staffing issues, insurance mismatches, or bed availability. Care managers would restart the process as stays extended and satisfaction eroded. As one leader put it, “Hope is not a discharge plan.”
With Aidin’s platform, patients now choose from a list of post-acute providers that can actually accept them based on insurance, clinical needs, and bed or staff availability. A yes means yes. That one operational change cascaded into LOS improvements felt across every market.
Why This Is Now a C-Suite Imperative
If you’re a CEO, CFO, COO, or CNO reading this and thinking this is a care management story, I’d encourage you to take another look.
How patients move through and out of your hospitals is not an operational detail. It is a margin lever, a quality metric, and increasingly a public-facing scorecard item.
For a typical 300-bed hospital, even modest improvements in patient experience scores under the new CMS HCAHPS framework could translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional annual Value-Based Purchasing earnings, before even accounting for capacity unlocked, readmissions avoided, or reduced LOS variance.
Your Best Strategic Partner Is Already in the Building
Something else that resonated in the conversation is how care management sits at a unique intersection of clinical and financial performance. They see the system at both the micro- and macro-levels simultaneously. They understand what physicians need, what patients fear, what post-acute partners struggle with, and what the numbers are hiding.
My message to health system executives across the country: you have an ally and an opportunity in care management to advance some of the most strategic elements of your mission. The AdventHealth story is proof.
What they demonstrated wasn’t just a technology success. It was leadership alignment from the boardroom to the frontline. It’s a story about IT and care management learning each other’s worlds deeply enough to anticipate problems before they occur.
I founded Aidin because my uncle was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and I watched the people trying to care for him struggle with the tools that were supposed to help. The care managers who serve patients like my uncle are doing some of the hardest, most consequential work in American healthcare. They deserve technology that works the way they do, and organizations that are structured to support them.
That’s the real lesson from AdventHealth. When technology is introduced into the right environment with aligned teams, redesigned processes, and cross-departmental collaboration, it doesn’t just improve workflows. It transforms outcomes for patients, for staff, and for the organizations responsible for both.
Aidin is proud to sponsor the upcoming Becker’s Annual Conference in Chicago, April 13–16, at Booth #543.
[H2] About the Author
Russell Graney is the Founder and CEO of Aidin, a platform dedicated to simplifying care management and improving care transitions. He began his career at Bain & Company, advising Fortune 50 companies, and later co-founded a charter school in Brooklyn that now serves over 600 students annually. Motivated by his uncle’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, Russell left private equity to create Aidin.
The post The Hospitals Winning on LOS Have Better Technology – and They Know How to Use It. appeared first on Becker's Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
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