Amid rising costs and patient complexity, technology vendors are increasingly critical partners in hospital leaders’ pursuit to optimize acute care operations.

A common hurdle vendors face is not “speaking the language” of a potential health system partner. Effective communication is particularly critical in negotiations with clinical and operations executives, as they have an active role in greenlighting system spending decisions, according to recent Advisory Board financial planner surveys.

Most vendors lack a robust library that defines and itemizes use cases for system metrics.

This metric picklist not only defines over 75 popular clinical operations metrics used in hospital operations globally, but also crosswalks them to three critical improvement objectives that vendors may seek to improve: expanding access, improving efficiency, and optimizing utilization. Technology vendors should use this picklist to understand health systems on a deeper level and potentially align their product and service offerings with hospital leaders’ focus areas.